From The Southern:

Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich has been ousted from office, but concerns regarding his appointments to the Southern Illinois University Board of Trustees remain prevalent.

Gov. Pat Quinn, who replaced Blagojevich after the state Senate removed him from office, said Friday his administration would take a serious look at all appointments to state boards made by his predecessor.

“We are going to look at everything,” Quinn said. “We are taking it one day at a time and one issue at a time, but we’re definitely going to take a look at that.”

Members of the Southern Illinois community continue to ask questions about board members and the campaign contributions they made to the legally embattled Blagojevich, as demonstrated by a letter from Laraine Wright of Carbondale on today’s Opinion page.

“These people are chosen to do the best they can do for the public university,” said Wright, who’s attempting to rally residents to Thursday’s board meeting. “That’s a lot of money, a lot of responsibility, and they need to take it seriously.”

An Associated Press article in January linked Frank William Bonan II, the board’s newest and youngest member, to $30,000 in campaign contributions his father and uncle netted for Blagojevich at a fundraiser in November, less than a month after his appointment to the board.

Bonan declined to comment when approached by a reporter for The Southern on Wednesday.

Other board members – including Chairman Roger Tedrick and trustee John Simmons – donated a total of at least $25,000.

None of the contributors are accused of wrongdoing.

An internal review conducted by the university’s general counsel determined all the board appointments were clean and not connected to contributions. SIU President Glenn Poshard said Thursday he understood where concerns would come from but said the university completed its duty in the investigation.

“I recognize the environment we’re in where everybody’s under suspicion if they gave anything,” Poshard said. “We did the due diligence that we could do in talking to our board members and asking the questions.”

Poshard said he and the board members have no say in new appointments and that responsibility rests in the hands of the governor. All the members of the board have professional qualities and excel in their respective industries, which could be a basis for appointment, he added…

Poshard. If due diligence existed at his university, his plagiarism would have disqualified him from SIU’s presidency.

Best friends from way back with Blago, Poshard is just the man to oversee this dumping ground for political hacks.

… President-for-Life (scroll down), Penn State’s God-for-Life-and-Afterlife, or any number of the world’s tinpot Dictators-for-Life, daily existence always eventually devolves into farce under the Beloved Leader.

Quickly, it became clear that Mr. Paterno … had failed to go to the authorities or even to confront Mr. Sandusky after he had been told in person of the episode. The prospect that Mr. Paterno, a revered figure, might be fired by the board of trustees was suddenly real.

Mr. Paterno quickly issued a statement saying, in effect, that the board need not act, that he would resign at the end of the season. Neither he nor the university revealed that he had effectively agreed to do so already, in return for an expensive financial package.

The board fired him anyway, a decision that caused rioting and led to an angry and often very personal backlash against the trustees, but it agreed to honor his contract. It was then that the full board came to find out what the university was obligated to pay Mr. Paterno.

You see all the familiar elements. The pathetic ignorant violent mob (“During a conference call, one board member worried aloud that failure to make good on what was owed to the Paterno estate could lead to another “reign of terror” by Mr. Paterno’s supporters …”); the pathetic, useless, out of it, trustees; the snarling Leader and his snarling family, brandishing lawsuits and demanding entitlements and pots of cash.

Think of the on-field violence of football as the ceremonial violence of this country’s Happy Valleys; behind the headbutts and quarterback sacks lie boosters, coaches, and fans ready to riot and issue fatwas.

La vie est une farce à mener par tous said Rimbaud. Take a comfy seat. This particular farce has only just begun.

… when someone running a secondary school or a university turns out to be a plagiarist. These people spend a lot of time pontificating to their students about honesty, academic integrity and hard work, and when they are found out, it makes their students – and their students’ families – look like dupes.

As Karen Francisco reports in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette:

Gwendolyn Griffith Adell is a member of the Indiana State Board of Education and administrator of a Gary charter school singled out for distinction by Gov. Mitch Daniels. She also stands accused of plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation.

Purdue University officials have confirmed they are reviewing the allegations.

Adell’s response so far is the classic I’ve just been hit with this response: Bullshit! I’m getting me a lawyer!

Once she calms down and realizes she’s been caught, she will probably go through many of the same stages most people – from the high and mighty German defense minister on down – go through:

She’ll admit there might have been one or two inadvertent lapses on her part.

She’ll ask her university for permission to correct the dissertation. This will be denied.

She’ll say she was busy having five children, running for political office, caring for her sick aunt.

She’ll say there’s a political conspiracy to get rid of her because she’s an outspoken critic of the establishment.

She’ll say her plagiarism occurred long ago and has nothing to do with what a great job she does. Judge her by her current work.

In her resignation speech, she will portray herself as a religious martyr.

Here you’ve got an article in the Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University, and it’s all about how their school of education is so fantastic that …

The College of Education and Human Services is not part of the national call to significantly change teacher training, university officials say.

According to the New York Times, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a speech Thursday at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York that all universities needed a revolutionary change in the way they prepare teachers. Duncan said many, if not most, colleges and universities are doing a “mediocre job” of preparing teachers for the realities of the classroom.

Jan Waggoner, director of teacher education, said she believes SIUC’s program is not one that needs changes. Waggoner said the college was cited as one of the top 100 colleges of teacher education programs and works to ensure the students are as prepared as possible for the classrooms.

“I don’t know that we would fall into the mediocre category that (Duncan) is naming or needing for the revolutionary change…”

UD looked at the US News rankings, about which Waggoner’s school indeed boasts in its publicity material, and she finds that Southern Illinois is not ranked at all. It’s listed along with all the other schools surveyed, but given no ranking.

To see a ranked school, look at the University of Illinois – Urbana. They’re ranked 24. See?

The thing SIUC’s education school’s best known for — giving SIUC’s current president a PhD in education even though he plagiarized much of the document — probably didn’t help much in this whole process.

But anyway. Kind of cute to see the campus paper playing along.

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UPDATE: This page, on the SIUC school of education website, deepens the pathos.

The director of teacher education tells the school newspaper reporter that the school was “cited as one of the top 100 colleges of teacher education programs.” It wasn’t. Why not?

Last year our Education programs together were ranked in the Top 100. Unfortunately, the data we provide for this year’s ranking was in advertently incomplete and so we could not be included. We have no doubt, however, that if we had been appropriately considered, we would have achieved that lofty (Top 100) ranking again.

So they’re a Top 100 school… in principle… but they can’t appropriately fill out a questionnaire from US News and World Report. Would you want to go there?