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Tuesday, December 28, 2004

PAY-TO-PLAY


Restless with a four-year imposed ban on corruption in its basketball program, the indefatigably corrupt University of Georgia has turned to that other mainstay of academic malfeasance, corporate stuffing of the chancellor's salary.

UD's readers may recall the long farce of UG's basketball program (see UD posts dated 11/16/04, 8/7/04, and 3/7/04), temporarily halted by the NCAA, which, after inventing a new category to cover the breadth of UG's "recruiting inducements, unethical conduct, academic fraud and extra benefits" ("Because the violations found in this case occurred within five years of the starting date of penalties associated with the 1997 Georgia football infractions case, the institution is a repeat-violator and subject to repeat-violator penalties."), shut down the program for four years.



Now, with the help of the Attorney General, who recently overruled the university's eagerness to keep secret the financial relationship between corporate donors and corporate vendors (they are often the same people, with donations tending to appear days after the awarding of contracts), the University of Georgia is in trouble again: REGENTS' FUND FATTENED BY FIRMS THAT DEAL WITH COLLEGES headlines the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which points out that nearly half of the chancellor's compensation comes from a very private, very exclusive university foundation ...

"This has all the appearance of a pay-to-play thing," says Bill Bozarth, a director of Common Cause, who attempts to clarify the problem with a couple of analogies: "If the head of the Department of Natural Resources was getting a supplement to his salary from Waste Management, what signal would that send?" And: "This is just as disturbing as it would be if Governor Perdue were getting money from state contractors."

The university insists it hasn't got the slightest idea who the people giving the money are...