Entertaining Dr. Slade
Okay, Scathing Online Schoolmarm will admit that she opened the Houston Chronicle piece titled In Defense of Dr. Slade with her every scathing pulse afire... Some dunce is defending Slade!... Lemme at it...
Only it turns out to be satire. It's a nice enough satire, and she'll reproduce some of it here. But she can't help being disappointed.
'The $100,000 bar tab at Scott Gertner's Skybar and Grille.
That sounds like a lot of money, but keep in mind that amortized over the seven years of her presidency it is only $14,286 a year.
Her taste seems to have run to $100 bottles of wine, so that's only 143 bottles a year, or fewer than three bottles a week.
OK, about five a week if you take out for the time she was traveling to China, Rome, Costa Rica and Kennebunkport on the university's dime. Still, five bottles a week isn't that much.
...A $60,000 university-paid security system at her private home, including eight custom cameras, a $10,000 digital recorder and an office-sized "panic room" hidden behind a bedroom closet.
My first thought was that Dr. Slade should have remembered all the publicity surrounding the firing of FBI Director William Sessions, a Texan. Included in his alleged offenses was spending $10,000 of taxpayer money on a security fence at his home.
If an FBI director can't use taxpayer money to secure his house, why should a university president?
But as is so often the case, there is more to the story. Washington, it seems, is too weird to serve as a comparison. Sessions was actually faulted by Bureau brass for not spending enough on security.
His sin was that he acceded to his wife's wishes and put up an attractive $10,000 wooden fence around the backyard. FBI experts had proposed a $94,000 iron picket fence around the whole property, but Mrs. Sessions said it would make her feel imprisoned.
I'm persuaded that Dr. Slade researched the Sessions controversy and concluded that she didn't want to be criticized for not taking security seriously.
More than $176,000 in taxpayer money for landscaping at her $1.3 million custom home on Memorial Drive, including a waterfall near the pool.
Have you been to the TSU campus? Frankly, it's no garden spot.
Dr. Slade needed an idyllic retreat where she could lead Socratic discussions with her staff on how to come up with the money to improve all aspects of TSU: better salaries for its faculty, better facilities for its students and, of course, better landscaping for its quadrangles.'
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