… has died – probably by suicide.

Pletz was facing immensities of litigation.

The school filed a civil suit against Pletz in March 2010 alleging that she used more than $2 million in university assets for her personal benefit. Pletz counter-sued, claiming that she had been wrongfully terminated.

In April, a federal grand jury in Kansas City returned a 24-count indictment against Pletz, alleging that she had embezzled more than $1.5 million from the school, engaged in money laundering and falsified tax returns.

University Diaries wrote about this chick years ago. She’s finally – minutes ago – been hauled into court. I guess it takes awhile to pull together a 24-count federal indictment.

Karen Pletz is apparently one of those rare university presidents who steals from her university. And when you’re prez, you can really steal. There are documents to be forged, vouchers to be fiddled, charitable contributions to be falsified… Pletz was a bank executive before she became president (salary: $1.2 million) of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences and she knows how to do all this shit.

Yes. Of course I’ll follow the testimony in this case. The details will be amusing.

Why is this post’s title The Taking of Pletz’s Lexus?

The U.S. attorney’s office is seeking forfeiture of Pletz’s Lexus convertible.

Why is this post’s category TRUSTEES TRASHING THE PLACE?

Because she couldn’t have it done it without them.

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.

When it comes to university presidents looting their schools, America lags well behind Greece, where the chancellor of Pandio University set the standard by leading (he was only found guilty of failing to note the illegal removal of ten million dollars of university funds, but he seems to have personally benefited from said removal) an extensive conspiracy of robber-administrators. The Greek state gave the school money; the school’s leadership took the money – that seems to have been the straightforward approach – and bought the stuff listed in this post’s headline.

Here in the States, the business of leaders draining millions and billions of university funds is more subtle, more complicated. President Lawrence Summers’ mad insane interest rate speculation cost Harvard one billion dollars but I mean … you know … he meant well. Yeshiva University’s trustees no doubt thought they were enriching the school as much as themselves by their extensive conflicts of interest coupled with avid investments in pieces of work like fellow trustee Bernie Madoff. In the event, they cost the school $1.3 billion.

Not that we don’t boast a few Greek-style university presidents. Karen Pletz, while president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, allegedly paid for her Lexus convertible and a series of amazing foreign trips by the simple expedient of removing what these things cost from the university’s reserves and placing those sums in her private account.

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James Ramsey, now routinely described as the disgraced ex-president of the University of Louisville, stands somewhere between high-minded removalists like Summers and flat-out Ferrari larcenists. UL let him, over the years, grow to a big strapping tyrant with his fingers all over every money source available at this public institution in one of America’s poorest states.

I say let him, but as Pandio and other examples suggest, it takes a village to pillage. Ramsey surrounded himself with what one retired UL professor, reviewing the school’s sordid history, calls fellow pirates – people who took as much pleasure in pillaging as he, and who of course had no cause to expose his piratical deeds.

Dennis Menezes, who spent almost forty years at the U of Smell, takes a sentimental journey through some highlights:

Robert Felner, the former education who ended up doing jail time for misappropriating millions of dollars; Alisha Ward siphoning of hundreds of thousands of dollars from U of L’s Equine Industry Program; “Sweetheart contracts” at the College of Business, where administrators continued to receive their significantly higher salaries even after stepping down from their administrative positions, a practice rarely seen at other universities; the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen by Perry Chadwyck Vaughn at the School of Medicine…

At some point the leadership of a university gets so notoriously filthy that career criminals like Felner make a point of applying to work there, thus amplifying the pirate-load. I mean to say that when Menezes tries to puzzle out what makes a university a criminal enterprise, he fails to land on the obvious: Once your university is known to tolerate – nay, encourage – piracy, pirates from all over the world get on board.

The journey to just awful is smoothed by other campus assets, in particular — natch — sports. Let me suggest how this probably works at places like U of L, where, you recall, an entire sports dorm was transformed into a whorehouse for the use of recruits and their fathers. The pattern at sex-crime-crazed places like Penn State, Baylor, and Louisville is for the president to be invisible while the AD, the actual president of the school, does whatever the fuck he and his massive program like. At criminal enterprises like U of L, a president like Ramsey actively takes advantage, let’s say, of all the big scandalous sports noise in the foreground to quietly do his removalist thing.

More than that, enormous sports programs tend to bring quite a few truly scummy and twisted people to a campus and reward those people with enormous salaries and enormous respect (if they win games). Over time the powerful and often scummy sports contingent defines the ethos of the whole university, as in: Jerry Sandusky was EMERITUS PROFESSOR Sandusky at Penn State, I’ll have you know. UD attended a Knight Commission meeting in DC where a coach at a local university stood up and insisted that athletic staff at American universities should have professor status. “They’re educators as much as anyone else. It’s elitist to think otherwise.” So athletics, at many universities including Louisville, certainly does its bit to vulgarize and corrupt everyone, making it much easier for already sketchy people like Ramsey to assume they’re living in a sleaze-friendly world.

UD ain’t saying you must have a big sports program for endemic corruption, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyway. This post is long enough. We’ll be following U of L as they try to decide whether it’s worth suing Ramsey and his pirate crew to get back some of the many millions they removed. We’ll also follow U of L’s difficult effort to find a new president. Would you want to preside over a school suing your predecessor for millions of dollars? Hell, the thing could even end up in criminal court.

… Cecilia Chang, the former dean at St. John’s University who has been on trial in New York (background here), has hanged herself.

The judge who questioned her yesterday calls her death “a Shakespearean tragedy.”

For UD, who thinks here of the very similar suicide of Karen Pletz, Shakespearean is not quite right. These two suicides are the type UD calls boxed-in. People have gotten themselves into a tighter and tighter place, and it now looks very clear indeed that they’re not going to get out. That they’re headed for just two boxes – a cell and a coffin – and that’s the end of the story. To decide to check out at this point seems not surprising.

Bernie Madoff and his wife reportedly tried to kill themselves before he went to prison.

These would be Shakespearean tragedies if these people had tried to lead good lives and been undone by unbidden catastrophe. If, tormented by those catastrophes, they had, to the last, struggled to go on leading valuable lives.

It is sad, but not tragic, when a criminal, outwitted, must reckon with terrible humiliation and punishment. You could say, in the case of Chang, that someone should have noticed that she was out of control (UD called her out of control in the last post she wrote about her) and put her on suicide watch. But you cannot, I think, say that her death was tragic.

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You should really always try to speak directly. Especially in cases like this one.

“Mrs. Chang is no longer with us,” [the trial judge] announced to jurors, according to panelists.

For several seconds, jurors said they had no idea what Johnson was trying to tell them, before he went into the grim details.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm suggests doing it this way in order not to look ridiculous, and not to confuse people:

Jurors, I’m deeply sorry to announce that this morning police found Cecilia Chang dead by her own hand.