What’s next for Evan Dobelle? He has spent his way through the University of Hawaii, and through obscure and now much-impoverished Westfield State. Like Patricia Slade at Texas Southern University and Peter Diamandopoulos at Adelphi University, Dobelle arrives at obscure schools with his chest thrust out and starts talking about his important connections and how unless your school gives the president wads of cash for luxury goods no one will respect you.

Dobelle spent more on [a] 2008 Asia trip alone than the $92,000 that Governor Deval Patrick spent to take two dozen officials on a trade mission to Britain and Israel in 2011. But Dobelle said the only unusually expensive item was the luxury hotel bill in Bangkok, and there was a reason for it: The consultant who helped plan the trip said that Thai officials wouldn’t take Westfield State seriously if they didn’t put on a good show.

“She would say, ‘Who the f— will come and listen to Westfield State when they only have time for Cornell? You better set yourself up in a way to show a certain degree of prominence and respect to them,” recalled Dobelle. “So fine, that’s what we did.”

Verbatim out of the Slade/Diamandopoulos book of you gotta spend money on me to make money. They all peddled this line, as did way-high-living American University president Benjamin Ladner.

Todd Wallack, Lesley Cohen Berlowitz’s nemesis at the Boston Globe, contributed to its detailed account of Dobelle’s doings. Wallack seems to be making a specialty of swinish academic administrators. He’ll always be able to find work. Just in the eastern seaboard area.

It’s the hydra-head problem again. When the head of the group that assembled the upcoming report on the impoverished state of the humanities in America is herself way over-compensated (plus – reportedly – the daily user of a chauffeured limo) it makes it easy for enemies of funding to say Hey well humanists seem to be doing right well for themselves. When the person responsible for the report is alleged to have been an inhumane boss, it makes it easy for enemies of funding to ask In what way do the humanities as presently carried out make you more humane?

The problem has things in common with university presidents who have chauffeured limos and private jets and first-class travel – American University’s Benjamin Ladner being the highest profile example of this in the last few years. The problem is also related to university presidents who use up a good deal of their time and make hundreds of thousands of extra dollars sitting on the boards of places like Goldman Sachs; shady hedge fund guys on boards of trustees; and schools with multi-billion-dollar endowments. It’s just hard to keep aloft the Beautiful Suffering Misunderstood Humanities banner when high-profile people very publicly making the case for them are making out like bandits.

It’s a very similar hypocrisy to the over-compensated law professor at the public interest law school.

Everyone gets hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is one of the easiest things to understand.

… begins, with its hastily appointed new president, Zeithaml (the name translates roughly into Time + Castrated Ram).

In the tradition of Bobby Lowder at Auburn, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld at CUNY, and Gene Powell at the University of Texas, Helen Dragas, head of Virginia’s trustees, seems to be a paternalistic anti-intellectual with power issues. These people occasionally arise in positions of authority at universities, and it is always a catastrophe.

If you want to anticipate the likely plot trajectory of this catastrophe, go back to the history of American University’s board of trustees when the now-notorious Benjamin Ladner was AU’s president. That long ugly expensive story featured clueless rich trustees pumping Ladner full of cash and privileges (keep in mind that even vast academic salaries look pathetic to real estate moguls and hedgies) until his profligacy became a national scandal. Getting out of the scandal took ages and did terrible damage to an already scandal-scarred university. Conflicts among the trustees were open, protracted and farcical, with this one and then that one leaving in a huff, etc. Expect a similar soap opera at Virginia.

… know everything, and those who know nothing and want to know nothing. Those who know everything are a small group of insiders extremely close to the president and the coach and local politicians. They do the president’s bidding. Those who know nothing and want to know nothing have a spotty attendance record at trustee meetings (why go?) but get a huge kick out of being able to say they’re a university trustee.

Auburn University’s board of trustees is instructive. For decades, ex-trustee Bobby Lowder basically ran the school – academics (intellectual inquiry at Auburn centers around figuring out how professors can help athletes cheat without the athletes getting caught) and sports. A power-obsessed, corrupt mover and shaker, Lowder typifies the broad-shouldered bullies who can intimidate and take over boards of trustees.

When the shit hits the fan at universities, unseemly blame-tossing almost always breaks out on BOTs — between members who’ve been meaningless muckety mucks, and the power boys. Recall the panic in AU Park when its president turned out to be robbing the school blind. In that case it was William Jacobs, strapping head of the BOT, who withheld information and shooed trustees away from his endless shoveling of money to Benjamin Ladner. When the American University story broke, the know-nothings moaned that they’d been blindsided.

Same thing at Pederasty State.

The trustees dislike how a few board members appeared to have been notified that charges against Curley and Schultz were imminent while the vast majority of trustees were left in the dark until Saturday.

Yes, and that’s in a big old article all about how we’re supposed to pity and admire the principled trustees… the good trustees, who got all beat up by the big boys…

No. When these things happen, the entire board of trustees has got to go. They are trustees, kids. The university is in their trust. They either didn’t do anything, or they worked as hard as all the other Paterno-tools to cover up things.

University trustees are, in UD‘s experience, either a nothingness or an embarrassment. Or both.

What is it about UD‘s imperial city that generates so many pharaonic university presidents? Presidents toppled from power by grandiosity and greed?

I suppose I’ve already answered the question… It’s the imperialistic feel of the place … There’s something about living, as the old Riggs Bank commercial had it, in “the most important city in the world” (Riggs was brought low by greed too) that takes starry-eyed ingenue university presidents and turns them into whores with eyes of steel. They’ll do anything, risk anything, to get a big seat at the front of the plane.

The most notorious name here is of course American University’s Benjamin Ladner, whose indifference to the running of his institution tracked his sense of himself as Xerxes. Eventually, to get rid of Ladner, AU students had to rent a UHaul on which they’d written something like Put your stuff in here and get out, Ladner. Something about daily news stories featuring the UHaul driving up and down the main street of the campus all day (I think a bullhorn was involved) convinced trustees Ladner had become a liability.

Unlike AU, the University of the District of Columbia is a public university, which means the already insanely put-upon taxpayers of the District are paying for the flight into Egypt described by an outraged UDC student in this post’s headline. Always a substandard school, UDC is slipping lower and lower as its latest president (in its short life it’s had many) runs off with its money.

If the UDC story plays out according to the AU script (it probably will), you’ll see Allen Sessoms regally disdain interviews. His courtiers will rush about making contradictory statements… Meanwhile, his crony-ridden, uncomprehending, fundamentally indifferent board of trustees will try to patch together a quorum to talk about the crisis… But the board’s own corruption will keep it from acting… At which point the students are going to have to rent a UHaul.

Let’s play with all this money from our students and from the government! You get some; we get some…

You remember the Karen Pletz story, the one that started with the news that an obscure osteopathy school boasted one of the nation’s highest-paid college presidents [Scroll down.]…

Well, the lies and resignations and firings and lawsuits are flying, and we’ll follow all of that on this blog, especially if people say amusing things. But here’s an inevitable feature of stories like this (See Benjamin Ladner, American University. Indeed, one of the whistle-blowers in this case “appended [to her ignored letter to the board of trustees] a lengthy article from Washingtonian magazine about extravagant spending by a former president of American University that led to a federal investigation.”) — a lengthy article about how for years tons of warnings, petitions, complaints, rumors, and letters were dumped on the board of trustees.

But – as was the case at AU – when the board of trustees is itself scummy, none of that makes any difference.

This two-year school near UD‘s house has long prepared not-quite-ready ‘thesdanians for transfer to a university, or given them an Associate’s degree (UD‘s older sister got a mental health-related degree from MC).

Its new president looks to be a Benjamin Ladner clone (background on the ex-president of American University here):

A $4,051 hotel bill in Delhi. A $780 tab for limousine service in Boston. And a growing tally of missed meetings and unexplained absences at home. Critics of Brian Keith Johnson — and they are many — say the Montgomery College president has spent the past two years running up outsize expenses while neglecting important job responsibilities.

… The report alleges that Johnson’s “frequent and noted absences at essential meetings and functions have diminished the visibility and jeopardized the reputation of Montgomery College.” The president leaves his office for days at a time without explanation, the report says, and has not deputized anyone to sign documents in his stead, leaving college administrators “unable to carry out the daily and necessary activities and business of the institution.”

As the college has frozen long-distance travel and scaled back on refreshments served at faculty, staff and student events, Johnson has spent thousands on hired cars and fine dining and thousands more on hotels and airplane flights. Expense records obtained by faculty through a public records request and shared with The Washington Post show Johnson charged $58,165 on his corporate credit card between July 2007 and April, including several hundred dollars on floral arrangements and $302 in a single charge to a Borders bookstore. The reports do not contain details beyond what is listed on a credit card statement.

Faculty members allege that Johnson has directed administrators not to talk to college trustees and that information is “routinely censored.” Several employees say they believe that listening devices have been planted in offices and meeting rooms, according to the report.

A banner hung near campus late last week drew attention to another potential embarrassment: a bench warrant issued last year against Johnson by an Arizona court for $12,000 in unpaid child support to a former spouse. Johnson has since paid the sum.

… Johnson failed to attend at least a dozen meetings with state and county representatives, including such politically potent events as a March news conference for the county operating budget, according to the faculty report. He told trustees that he had met with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) at a June 3 meeting of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges; in fact, neither he nor Mikulski had attended it, according to the report…

This Washington Post article makes it sound as though the president is on his way out. As opposed to the squalid Ladner story, in which a squalid board of trustees kept throwing MORE money at the man, and then, forced to let him go, gave him a massive golden parachute, Montgomery College will probably dismiss this guy pretty quickly.

They don’t seem to embezzle any more than employees in other settings, but it’s our job here at University Diaries to cover acts of embezzlement at universities egregious enough to make the evening news.

There are some countries – Greece comes shriekingly to mind – where being a university president seems to mean little more than taking the money the government gave you to run the place.

UD‘s not sure how corrupt Hong Kong is along these lines, but the University of Hong Kong certainly let its chief of surgery steal a lot of money before someone decided to try to make him stop. Before being found guilty of misconduct and false accounting, John Wong Kin-ling had quite a run.

Uh, let’s see… He was close to the university’s dean of medicine, from whom he apparently learned his trade:

… Lam Shiu-kum … fell heavily from grace in September 2009 when he was jailed for 25 months for pocketing HK$3.8 million in donations meant for medical research ….

Probably got a few pointers from that guy… Then…

Problems about accounting have dogged Wong for a while, and certainly since 2007. That was when he was accused of using donations – believed to be from James Tien Pei-Chun’s family and meant for research – to purchase a Lexus car, though he returned the vehicle to the school.

One insider told The Standard’s sister publication East Week: “Doctors would open different accounts to manage income, but there was no monitoring.”

Another source claims Wong once admitted that he had traveled first class to meetings overseas.

… [T]he four charges he faces – and has denied – in District Court are a tangle that involve a former assistant jailed for embezzlement, a private surgical training center, his driver-cum- helper, taxation authorities and others.

The former executive officer is June Chan Sau-hung, jailed for 22 months in 2010 for embezzling HK$3 million from the training center. She has been testifying for the prosecution against Wong.

… [Charges] include not notifying the police of Chan’s embezzlement. Wong said he had felt sorry for Chan as she was struggling with family responsibilities and wanted to help her repay the money she had taken.

It’s also alleged Wong directed HK$730,000 from the account of the training center – Unisurgical, in which he’s a director and shareholder – to pay his own helper-cum-driver for five years.

Wong said that although his driver was hired as a domestic helper he also picked up guests the university had invited to forums from the airport and their hotels. So he had the [training center] pay half of the salary.

And travel expenses incurred by Wong, it’s alleged, were handled in a way to deprive the Inland Revenue Department of some HK$120,000. But Wong said secretaries and other staff had handled such matters.

Funny money stuff at universities is usually some sad assistant to some sad assistant grabbing ten thou from the kitty and blowing it at Walmart’s. You’ve got to get to the higher managerial levels (see American University president Benjamin Ladner) for the good stories.

…as Mel Brooks said; and one perennial danger for long-serving university presidents is indeed a slide toward the regal. The trustees and the alumni organization love the big guy and do his bidding … He makes far more money than the governor of his state… the president of his country… It goes to his head.

The creepingly kinglike president of North Dakota State has just resigned, announcing that it’s “not fun” to have his expensive travel and house and everything criticized all the time. If he wants his wife on the booster club payroll and if he wants a personal bodyguard who’s captain of the campus police force, it’s his business.

NDSU’s president has been pressured out just in time. You want to keep an eye on the regal slide and interrupt it, as they have in Fargo, at mid-slide. Otherwise you’re on your way here.