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(Tenured Radical)

Friday, April 13, 2007

Somewhat Florid...

...but basically well-written (I'm okay with the floridity, because it's the south) and quite thoughtful take on a presidential meltdown at the University of Mary Washington, from the local Fredericksburg newspaper:


The pinnacle of pomp and ceremony in Our Town may be the inauguration of its college's president.

At last fall's inauguration of William Frawley as the seventh president of the college now known as the University of Mary Washington, faculty, staff, and board of visitors members turned out in velvet robes like nobility honoring a new king. The governor was there; he and other political dignitaries headed a throng of thousands.

With magic crowning the moment, and hopes as high as the October sky, William Frawley told the happy crowd, "I hope I can live up to the sense of promise in the air. Having been offered to lead [this] institution leaves me with both excitement and a little bit of stage fright."




Six months later, Mr. Frawley has fallen off the stage in incredible fashion. In surely the blackest days of his life, he was arrested twice this week for driving while intoxicated -- on Tuesday in Fairfax County, where he totaled a college car, and on Wednesday at Brompton, the presidential estate. There, because of his erratic operation of an automobile on the streets of Fredericksburg, a city police officer briefly drew his weapon, hardly a town-gown interface to welcome. Yesterday, the board placed its president -- now recovering at Mary Washington Hospital from an ordeal with many missing details -- on paid leave.



Perhaps a full investigation of Mr. Frawley's nightmarish misadventures will substantially exonerate him. To be sure, question marks shower the case. But his ultimate removal as president is scarcely an outlandish scenario. Movie stars act out in public and see their box-office take grow. Preachers and politicians make spectacles of themselves, do penance, and often hang on to their jobs. But college presidents operate in the narrow halls of ideal-draped tradition where probity is all, and exemplary is conduct's crucial modifier. They are supposed to be like poet E.A. Robinson's ethereal Flammonde:


Flammonde, from God knows where,

With firm address and foreign air,

With news of nations in his talk

And something royal in his walk,

With glint of iron in his eyes,

But never doubt, nor yet surprise,

Appeared, and stayed, and held his head

As one by kings accredited.


Mr. Frawley, beset by secret demons, may have flagrantly failed that test. While all decent townspeople wish for his physical and psychic recovery, his behavior, if the charges against him prove out, could have put someone in the morgue. Truth and justice must rule. Meanwhile, the appropriate reaction to these bizarre events is sadness -- for him, for his family, and for his university, whose high standing he had plans to further elevate.

Take from this, too, the lesson that even the most respected among us are mortal creatures, who, however firm their tread, are all one banana peel away from a ruinous fall. Even the Flammondes.


What small satanic sort of kink

Was in his brain? What broken link

Withheld him from the destinies

That came so near to being his?