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Thursday, October 13, 2005
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LADNER’S SEVERANCE A Modest Proposal As American University trustees bicker and, one by one, quit over the question of Ladner’s severance (whether he should get anything at all; how much he should get), UD would like to make a suggestion. There’s no real possibility, she would argue, of AU giving Ladner nothing by way of settlement. The real question is how much he should get -- as a settlement now, and as salary in the future (he will almost certainly be given a tenured position on the faculty). The specific problem in Ladner’s case is that he and his family have become accustomed over more than a decade to an extremely luxurious standard of living. It would be an obvious injustice for the university, having familiarized the Ladners with the life of the very rich, to demote them to the life of the merely rich. AU therefore needs to find precedents that will allow the institution to arrive at a reasonable accommodation for the Ladners; and the most pertinent precedent can be found, I think, in the notorious “severance” of Ronald Perelman and Patricia Duff a few years ago. Here, you will recall, the issue was how much child support Ms. Duff, who retained primary custody of their then-four-year-old daughter, would receive. Although she had a personal fortune of roughly twenty five million dollars when she met Perelman, Duff assumed billionaire status when they wed. At the dissolution of their brief marriage, she was understandably anxious that their daughter continue to live not Duff’s multi-millionaire, but Perelman’s billionaire, existence: Patricia Duff knows what a 4-year-old girl needs to live a ''moderately luxurious'' life on a ''rough parity with an Upper East Side family'' -- about $4,400 a day. That covers lodging in a $5 million 10-room apartment on the Upper East side and a house in the Hamptons, $2,500 worth of ''prints'' for her closet and $1,450 a month for dining out. At one of many court sessions (Duff went through thirty lawyers), Ms. Duff elaborated: On the witness stand yesterday, Ms. Duff presented a detailed budget listing Caleigh's monthly living expenses. According to Ms. Duff, she spends $9,953 each month on travel expenses for Caleigh and her nanny. A total of $3,175 a month is spent on clothing for Caleigh, and $3,585 on ''recreational'' activities, she said. The cost of Caleigh's personal domestic employees -- apparently nannies and maids -- is $30,098 a month, and the 4-year-old dines out at a cost of $1,450 a month, Ms. Duff said. Underlying Ms. Duff’s demands, she said, was anxiety about her child’s "self-image and psychological well-being," which would be harmed if the child grew up in the relative poverty which Ms. Duff, in this context, represented. “Ms. Duff, who lives in a $30,000-a-month apartment in the Waldorf Towers, had argued that Caleigh would be hurt emotionally if she realized that she was living on less than what was being provided for her half-sister…” Ms. Duff (who has a very odd blog), underwent, like President Ladner, that Cinderella experience of being swept up out of her down-market life into the glitter of hyperaffluence. Her rage at her ex-husband’s refusal to compensate her and her daughter at the level to which they had become accustomed, and her raw terror at the prospect of the child’s psychological dissolution (something all mothers can relate to), produced one of longest and most destructive divorce battles the New York courts have ever seen (indeed, if UD is reading the news reports correctly, the couple is still in court seven years later). It’s all the more important, then, assuming Ladner harbors similar rage and fear as he anticipates his own family’s relative proletarianization, that AU determine as precisely as it can how much he was living on during his tenure as president, and seek to replicate it. If AU fails to follow -- call it the Duff Doctrine -- the result will be protracted and expensive lawsuits for the university into the indefinite future. |