Monthly Archives for November 2011

DUI*: The Karen Pletz Edition of “Where Are They Now?”

*Dying Under Indictment

It isn’t often that a column by Nicolas Kristof gets me thinking; usually his mealy-mouthed half-truths just make me mad. His Thanksgiving column, “Are We Getting Nicer?”, prompted me to return to a question about Call Me Miss that I have been pondering ever since I learned of the death of disgraced ex-college president Karen Pletz.

Devoted readers will recall that Pletz was riding high on the crime wave that swept through higher education last spring, when one embezzlement scheme after another was uncovered on campuses as elite as Vassar and as meat-and-potatoes as Pletz’s Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences. Pletz was dismissed when investigators discovered a little matter of $1.4 million she’d apparently diverted for her personal use. In addition to theft on this grand scale, Pletz also stood accused of tax evasion, money laundering, dodgy hiring practices and assorted acts of workplace favoritism. All told, she racked up a 24-count indictment and was to go to trial in March, 2012.

Nevertheless, when news of her death in Fort Lauderdale reached Kansas City, lavish condolences were expressed by those who knew her, including

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, former mayor of Kansas City, [who] said Pletz should be remembered as “first of all, a civic leader.”

I confess that my first reaction when I read Rep. Cleaver’s comment was to reflect on its dispiriting honesty.

But then it also made me think about whether, since the alleged embezzler has now met her maker, I should remove the original post I wrote about her indictment. The abrupt dismissal of a college president generally takes place when there is overwhelming, incontrovertible, compelling and public or soon-to-be-public evidence of wrong-doing on a grand scale. In other words, the smoke generated by a pink slip means there is fire. So, yes, although death cheated Ms. Pletz out of her day in court, in my view there was nothing “alleged” about the crimes for which she was to be tried. But the woman is dead, by her own hand. Should a snide blog post continue to persecute her, even after the feds and the state drop their charges?

To use Nicholas Kristof’s eloquent language, should Miss be “nice”? And if she is “nice,” and deletes the post, does that mean that other posts will go, once the academic miscreant has served his or her community service?

To me, these are real questions for which I honestly do not have answers. Do you?

Miss, trying to think--but nothing's happening.

OWS, Higher Education and Faculty Rights (Hey, Brother, Can You Spare a Parking Space?)

Breaking news from Columbus, Ohio, where a new “occupy” movement is afoot.

Faculty at Ohio State University (OSU) are steaming because the university’s chief financial officer Geoffrey Chatas, formerly managing director of the Infrastructure Investments Fund at JP Morgan Asset Management, is threatening to bring the money-grubbing tactics of Wall Street to 12th Avenue.

Listen as faculty churn waves of dissent, engulfing the OSU campus in a tsunami of righteous protest, as the 99 percent rise up against The Man. As always, the first wave speaks to time-honored principles of the academy:

One of the more vocal opponents of the plan is Gordon Aubrecht, a professor of physics and president of the American Association of University Professors chapter at Ohio State.

“I think it has to do with the idea of a university as a community,” he said.

Professor Aubrecht’s communitarian rallying cry is echoed by fuming emeritus Professor of Physics Bernie Mulligan:

“What we are really doing is selling a part of the university where we will have less ability to control our own environment,” Mulligan said. “We should have had public meetings months ago, not now as catch up.”

Even OSU President Gordon (“I Quit! I Got a Better Job!”) Gee is getting into the act, attempting to calm the waters with rhetoric straight from the script of the OWS playbook:

we must seek fundamentally new ways to fund our core purposes.

But wait a minute. The faculty and the president united in common cause against the CFO? Can it possibly be true? Of course not, silly. Let’s hear more of President Gee’s address to his faculty:

We are currently discussing whether to lease the management of parking on campus for two reasons. One, parking does not, has not, and will never define greatness in a University. And, two, removing parking from the list of our daily tasks could provide a significant, immediate source of revenue that could be used in pursuit of greatness.

What do we want? Parking! When do we want it? NOW!

Parking can be turned into new academic facilities and new academics. Parking can be transformed into a foundation of funding that furthers our mission – today, and into the future.

You got it. Parking. The storm of protest roiling Columbus is all about parking. And wouldn’t you know? Just like OWS, the origins of OOSU lie in North America’s very own heart of darkness—Canada.

Police arrive at the scene of Occupy Aisle 7.

President Gee sheepishly admits delivering a major speech about parking places is not “enobling,” but I think he is selling himself and his speech writers short. Compare the president’s stirring defense of the university’s right to outsource to its rhetorical model:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground….we here highly resolve that…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

You will never, ever lose a bet by underestimating academics’ ability to magnify the trivial and trivialize the magnificent. And the next time you are tempted to ascribe idealistic goals and motivations to an “occupy” movement, think about the faculty at Ohio State putting it all on the line for parking.

An OOSU protester maintains academic standards–pipe in one hand, weighty tome in the other–as the people’s action for convenient parking enters its fifth week.