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Sunday, September 03, 2006
One of the Less Savory Things... ...that universities sometimes do is serve as dumping-grounds for the malsain. Corrupt lobbyists and diplomats and businesspeople who've been dumped from their real jobs due to highway robbery and other scurillous behaviors but who still crave legitimacy and a salary often find ways -- through friendships with trustees, or through giving huge gifts to this or that school -- to get faculty appointments for themselves. In an early post, UD referred to this reputation-cleansing action as the university's "Colonic Effect." Barry Munitz, the spectacularly corrupt former head of the Getty Trust, was an administrator at a California university before he rose so high and fell so low, and onaccounta tenure and all they've taken him back, with a fancy title, a huge salary, and the obligation to teach one course a year (An English department course! UD's ravaged discipline!). The New York Times wrote briefly about it awhile back: Barry Munitz, who resigned under pressure in February as president of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles amid questions about his use of the trust's money, has been hired as a professor by the California state university system. Mr. Munitz, who served as chancellor of the university system for eight years before taking over the leadership of the Getty, will teach a course in the English department at the Los Angeles campus, exercising his right as a former system executive to return to a teaching position there. His salary will be $163,000 during his first year, and then will decrease to $112,000, the top of the pay scale for a full professor, system officials said. Mr. Munitz will also help raise money for several new projects, they added. James M. Rosser, the president of Cal State, Los Angeles, said in a statement that he welcomed Mr. Munitz back. But Lillian Taiz, a history professor and president of the campus chapter of the California Faculty Association, said that she and many faculty members were unhappy with Mr. Munitz's hiring. "We were stunned," she said, "that someone of such questionable ethics will be teaching in our classrooms." Mr. Munitz could not be reached for comment. Mr. Munitz, whose travel and expense spending are under investigation by the California attorney general's office, was required to repay the Getty Trust, one of the world's richest art institutions, $250,000 when he resigned in February, and he was not given a severance package. At the Getty, Mr. Munitz was one of the nation's best-paid executives of a nonprofit institution, with salary, benefits and perks totaling more than $1 million. But there's cause for hope. Apparently the trustees knew that if they made the machinations by which they took back Barry public they'd have a faculty and maybe also student revolt on their hands, so they did the deed in private. And now, as the LA Times reports: A teachers group has won a partial victory in its challenge to the secret hiring of ousted former J. Paul Getty Trust chief Barry Munitz by California State University trustees. Go, Lillian! |