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Friday, January 28, 2005
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WINE EMERGENCY
Campus alcohol abuse, corrupt sports programs, conflicts of interest among university trustees, political corruption in the appointment of members of governing boards: one University of Georgia trustee has managed to pack all of these elements of the badly run American university system into one news item. No doubt, as Donald M. Leebern Jr. complains in the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, it’s merely the “warped liberal agenda” of that newspaper which accounts for the attention he’s been getting -- but if only ten or twenty percent of what the AJ-C is reporting about him is true, it does seem newsworthy. Where shall we start? With a public university system whose Board of Regents is stuffed with “well-heeled political appointees” and “millionaire political contributors” like Mr. Leebern? With Mr. Leebern’s recent decision to “provide his private plane to fly six members of the University of Georgia girls’ gymnastics team and coach Suzanne Yoculan to New York, a clear violation of NCAA rules”? (Yoculan lives with Leebern; they are going to be married. “A personal relationship with an employee of the University System ought to be reason enough for a regent to resign,” suggests the paper.) And then there’s the wine Leebern’s company, Georgia Crown, marketed with the university alumni association logo on the label, “in violation of a regents policy” which prohibits University of Georgia trademarks on alcohol. Plus, “the attorney general ruled last summer that members of the Board could not do business with the University System except in special circumstances.” Wine Emergency! *************************************** Immediate Update: Despite all of this, the governor just reappointed Leebern to the Board of Regents, which he's been on for over a decade. In the words of the governor's press secretary, "Mr. Leebern is imminently qualified to serve on the Board of Regents." Okay -- we're willing to wait. But give us a ballpark figure. Another ten years? ------------------------------------------ Slightly Later Update (January 31): "You are correct. It's our typo," writes an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to UD. This lets the governor's press secretary off the hook. [UD wouldn't call a confusion between two words ("imminent" and "eminent") a typo. She'd call it a "mistake."] |