From the excellent student newspaper at benighted Southern Illinois University:
… Reports from The Associated Press this week link trustee Frank William Bonan II to $30,000 his father and uncle donated to Blagojevich in November, a month after he was appointed to the board.
Those donations came during a one-day fundraising trip by Blagojevich to Mount Vernon, which netted him $42,000. Of that money, $30,000 came from Market Street Bancshares Inc. and its managers, J. Hunt Bonan and F.William Bonan I.
Records from the State Board of Elections show Blagojevich was the beneficiary of about $25,000 in donations from at least two other trustees between 2005 and 2008.
[The chairman of the board], who was appointed in 2004, contributed $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2005 and 2006. Tedrick also contributed another $10,000 through two separate donations of $5,000 in 2002 and 2003.
Trustee John Simmons, a 2004 appointee who is an attorney from Alton, and his wife, Jayne, contributed three $5,000 donations between 2006 and 2008 for a total of $15,000….
The comments on the article suggest that, uh, everybody’s pretty disgusted with this disgusting board.
SIU had better watch it. Corruption levels like these … I mean… look at what’s going on in Greece. People can get really angry after enough of this.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:30AM
When all the members of a university’s board are appointees of the governor or the legislature these problems seem to be almost inevitable, as the trusteeships become political patronage positions. I would be interested to hear from governance experts who might know what could be done.
One partial solution is to have some of the members of the board elected by the alumni. This is sometimes (often?) the case at private universities, and it can have the effect of shaking things up. At the moment, noted civil libertarian and FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate is trying to get on the ballot to run for a position on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, one of the university’s two governing boards. (Alumni readers are invited to request a nomination form from his website and send it in. Barack Obama tried to get nominated this way once himself, and failed.)
January 23rd, 2009 at 7:54PM
I’ve been a proponent of this at SIU for years… I think it’s a change that must be made. I’d love to hear from the trustees who didn’t pay to play and didn’t get reappointed by Gov. Blagojevich.