These clever, selfless folks have overseen the vicious gutting of the faculty–earnestly saving on our wages and benefits (”$1000 a class–what great managers we are! maybe next year we can get it down to $950! oh boy!”) in order to build themselves business centers, business colleges, and sky boxes. Being such wizards of ethics, administration, and the greater good, many of these gentle, accomplished souls have already found ways to introduce themselves to wider public notice.
The inspiration for this series is John The Boot LeBoutillier, too much of a right-wing fanatic for even Reagan’s Congress, author of Harvard Hates America, now dividing his time between higher education trusteeship and his real passion, the Skyhook II Project, “dedicated to recovering living American POWs in Southeast Asia.”
In the typology of trustees, Ideological Nutters like The Boot probably make up the largest category, right after Insufferable Nabobs. But there are others worthy of scrutiny.
Take the interesting category of trustees running afoul of the criminal justice system. No shortage of candidates in this group, but here are three, just to get the ball rolling.
There’s Ralph Cioffi, pictured above, arrested last week and charged with insider trading, securities and wire fraud. A Bear, Stearns fund manager and proud 1978 graduate of St. Michael’s College in Vermont, he recently chaired the President’s Medallion Society for big donors, and served in the 1990s to “provide leadership” on the Board of Trustees on the Audit and Investment committees, the Burlington Free Press reported.
And Ignacio Pena, convicted of fraud in California for creating a shell company to provide over a million dollars’ worth of outsourced teaching, books, and sports programming to Compton College, where he served as trustee. A million bucks would have bought a lot of outsourced teaching, except Pena never delivered any.
Some of your trustees straddle multiple categories, like Peter Lewis, President and CEO of the Progressive auto insurance company, Princeton ‘55, and trustee of that institution. No question he’s an Insufferable Nabob, but he’s also a bit of an Ideological Nutter, bankrolling the movement to legalize medical marijuana (not recreational marijuana, just medicine for those who can afford the good scrips).
And like so many of us regular folks, his sincerely held values relentlessly led Lewis afoul of state power, as customs officers in New Zealand nabbed him in possession of more than quarter-pound of hash and quality doobage, not to mention “assorted smoking pipes and bongs.” That was in 2000, shortly after he made his first $50 million gift. To overcome his embarassment, he dropped another 60 mil on them the next year, and another $101 million in 2006. Now the entire campus is named after him.
And I laughed at all my Yale pals in the early 80s who, with cherubic sincerity over their bongs, kegs, and freemasonry, swore they were going into investment banking and white-shoe law firms in order to “fight the system from the inside.” None of those folks have delivered on their promise to build socialism while pulling in seven figures, but Lewis’s story gives one hope.
Good for you, trustee Lewis. They’re cheering you on in dorms, eating clubs and the crypts of secret societies up and down the Atlantic coast. You keep stickin’ it to the man like that and we’ll have a better world in our lifetime.
Recently:
- 30 Seconds From Humiliation
- Certify, Re-Tool, or Stand and Fight
- Ivory Tower Inc, Coerce U, and other Recent Reviews
- ‘Adjuncts’ to the Barricades!
- Pushback
- I’ll be Watching You
- Ballad of the Dissertators
- The Churchill Case Goes To Trial
- AAUP and the Ward Churchill case
- AP Profile of Cary Nelson
Comments
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 8:31 am and is filed under administrators, corporate university, intellectuals are workers, meet the trustees, real institutional sleaze, university-corporate partnerships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I’m not sure where you’re going with this. Is it to make the case that there is a systemic problem of universities being placed under kleptocratic rule? Is it to embarass a few selected examples of lousy trustees?
What’s impressive about How the University Works is the systematic analysis of the political economy of universities. But unless the breadth and depth of the problem of corrupt university trustees can be demonstrated - and its importance for the general well-being of higher ed-, I’m not sure what to make of this piece.
Besides, unless there’s a general argument that it’s significantly or critically important to the good of higher education, I don’t particularly want the foibles and corruptions of all faculty to be made fodder for public comment, either.
Fair point, Chris. You’re not the first to point out that the blog tends toward provocation, whereas the book is much more of a sober analysis. Not sure why that is–might be just the way I think, or my gut for blogging.
Certainly this projected series (and its projected companion, Meet the Administration) amounts to a provocation, rather than a demonstration.
On the other hand, my main goal is to provoke. The trustees bear responsibility for restructuring the faculty. They are neither benevolent nor infallible. The faculty need to be thinking of the trustees as fallible human beings with mixed motives and some really bad ideas.
So maybe I can help in that regard. Sometimes it’s best to provoke thinking rather than provide answers. Especially when one doesn’t have the answers!
I did think about your last point, btw, re the foibles of the faculty. But it seems to me that the faculty have endured tons of scrutiny that administrators and trustees have escaped, from ratings sites and nutters like Horowitz, and evaluations in every class, etc. The pro-business leanings of the trustees need to be as much of the discourse as the politics of the faculty have been, I’d think.
IMHO, anyway. Hope this helps, and I do understand your reservations. I have them a bit myself, but don’t see easy alternatives–I can’t write a book about the trustees, or do a big study. But I can point out feet of clay–not just in those who fall afoul of the law, but those with nutty beliefs, or limited understanding of what the faculty do, or the basic purposes of higher ed in a putatively once-moderately-democratic society.
Solidarity, M
“You’re not the first to point out that the blog tends toward provocation, whereas the book is much more of a sober analysis. Not sure why that is–might be just the way I think, or my gut for blogging.”
Methinks an editor at the university press has helped to “sober” your style….
It looks like that, doesn’t it? But it was actually the other way around–the press was down on theorizing, and high on controversy, within the bounds of legal review!
My preceding comment was about the style (not the content) of your blog comments as opposed to the style of your book. Two very different “voices”….
Of course, your last comment is thought-provoking as well: How is one to be controversial without theorizing? By simple muck-raking? How would that be scholarship?