Where Most Needed

In the rhetorical showdown between Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) of the Senate Finance Committee and the trustees of American University, the trustees continue to exercise their governance prerogatives with less regard for the Senator's views than he would like.  Yet in his letter to the trustees on May 17, the Senator says, "I’m not here to direct the management of the affairs of AU or its board" and requests their views on whether he should ask Congress to change the AU charter. 

We discussed last month that the talks between the Senate Finance staff and American University had broken down over the issue of removal of trustees responsible for letting departing president Benjamin Ladner keep his huge severace package.  At the time, the Washington Post suggested that the Senator would be following up with a letter publicly calling for the trustees to stop down.  But from the listing of press releases on the Senate Finance committee web site, that letter was not written, at least not publicly.  The Post failed to note this inconsistency, reporting on the Senator's May 17 letter as though it were more tough talk, rather than recognizing it as a retreat.

Now, the Washington Post reports that the AU trustee reforms include expansion of the board by seven members, allowing three nonvoting representatives of students and faculty, and instituting board evaluations.  More important is what the trustees did not do: there is no provision for a voting student or faculty trustee, and no trustees have left the board. 

What Sen. Grassley did was release several documents embarrassing to AU:

• The report by risk management consultants Protiviti about Mr. Ladner's personal expenses, including the body of the report (PDF 3,995Kb) and the appendices (PDF 4,801Kb).
• A series of emails by trustee David Carmen calling for immediate investigation into anonymous leaks (PDF 1,120Kb) that made their way to the Washington Post.  (The leaks are now known to have come from Mr. Ladner's driver Reginald Green after Mr. Green was fired for taking too many restroom stops on long trips, according to the report in the Washington Examiner.)

But this jawboning has its limits.  To WMN, it has never seemed that charity reform is very high on Sen. Grassley's political agenda.  It is his staffer Dean Zerbe who has been the subject of a Chronicle of Philanthropy profile.  It looks like the AU trustees have succesfully called the Senator's bluff in this case.