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Thursday, September 29, 2005
LADNER, ACT V: Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition! It’s everybody’s-hands-out-of-the-cookie-jar-pronto time at American University, Washington, DC., with the latest revelation that, as the Post headline has it, LADNER MEMO IN 2004 SOUGHT $5 MILLION BOOST. No wonder the lads and lasses at Ladner’s demesne are “still mad, still yelling,” after their rally yesterday -- it’s worse than they thought. Ladner’s memo to the board - a memo that in its gross compensation demands set off the furor - was, we all originally thought, asking for a couple of million on top of the president’s already unconscionably inflated salary. It turns out to have been for another five million: A 2004 confidential memo from American University President Benjamin Ladner asks the school's governing trustees to do their best to pay him an additional $5 million in pretax compensation over five years that he felt he needed to "maintain my current living level" at retirement. The disclosure apparently contradicts recent statements Ladner made that he had never asked for more compensation. Only in this way could Ladner “close the gaps,” in his words, between the opulence to which he had become accustomed at AU and the penury he obviously feared once he retired. And after all, says Ladner in his defense, his memo was in response to a request from the board chair that he prepare a compensation wish list for the university. But the board chair told the Post “he was not expecting what Ladner delivered.” That's an understatement. In fact, “he thought Ladner's proposals were so high that he never distributed the memo to the full board ‘to protect Ben.’” The board’s compensation committee, though, did see the thing, and that was enough: The compensation committee and Ladner wrangled for months over the subject, with one member, Pete Smith, quitting over Ladner's demands, according to Smith's resignation letter. Amid rising concern nationally over executive compensation, a board meeting was held in February 2005, and a majority of trustees agreed to lower Ladner's overall compensation from more than $850,000 to $800,000, according to three trustees at the meeting. Ladner told trustees at the time that he was very disappointed. |