Higher Ed Controversy Draft

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In this week’s episode

If you follow higher education like we do, you know that the sector is ripe for controversy. From misused money, to smoking-gun emails, to the occasional sex scandal, colleges and universities routinely make news for all the wrong reasons. But what makes for a delicious higher-ed controversy? And what can be learned from the embarrassing failures of otherwise respectable institutions? To dig into those questions, Chronicle staffers gathered recently for a first-of-its-kind higher-education controversy draft. Who built the best roster? That’s for you to decide.

Related Reading:

• Uproar at Mount St. Mary’s (Chronicle)
• Is That Our Chancellor in the Porno (College Matters podcast)
• Discredited: The UNC Scandal and College Athletics’ Amatuer Ideal (Andy Thomason)
• Auburn President’s Permanent No Comment (Inside Higher Ed)

Guests:

• Sarah Brown, senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education
• Andy Thomason, assistant managing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling: It’s March Madness season, and the College Matters team is getting into the rivalry spirit. Today on the show we’ll be doing something a little bit different: A higher education fantasy draft. Like a fantasy football draft, we’ll each take turns picking team members with the goal of building an elite, unbeatable roster. In this case, we’re selecting from a fascinating pool of potential players. Over the course of four rounds, my colleagues and I will choose our favorite higher education controversies from the past 25 years. That means we’ll be looking back at the past quarter century, reliving the most memorable presidential gaffes, faculty feuds, and maybe a sex scandal or two. The stakes couldn’t be higher — or lower. Our fantasy teams won’t compete on the hardwood. And we’re not even sure how to determine a winner. But we expect our listeners, colleagues, and fellow higher ed enthusiasts to have strong opinions about who built the best team. Spoiler alert: It’s gonna be me! So, without further adieu, let me introduce my fellow draft participants: Sarah Brown, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Andy Thomason, assistant managing editor.

Jack Stripling Andy, Sarah, welcome to College Matters.

Sarah Brown Hi, Jack.

Andy Thomason Thanks for having us.

Jack Stripling Well, this is the first ever College Matters draft of any kind, and today we are doing the controversy draft. We’re gonna be drafting the top controversies of the past 25 years, a quarter century of controversy. But before we get started, let’s talk a little bit about why we care about controversy. I think people who read The Chronicle or read coverage of higher education in general are always asking us, why are you always looking at these dumpster fires? Why won’t you write about our great research breakthrough instead? What’s an affirmative case for caring about controversy, Sarah?

Sarah Brown I think colleges kind of present themselves to the world as some kind of, as like a moral actor, as like we are a good force in society and we uphold certain ideals, certain principles and, you know, in return we get a certain amount of public support; at least that’s been the historic case for higher education. So I think for us, looking at higher ed, it makes it particularly egregious when those ideals are violated in some way. So if there is some kind of hypocrisy, if there’s some kind of misconduct or some kind of misspending of public funds, it feels particularly egregious because higher ed kind of projects itself in a certain way. The other thing is that, even though The Chronicle does definitely get criticism for, you know, you focus too much on the negatives, at the end of the day, we — and frankly, everyone else — we’re just drawn to a good story, right?

Jack Stripling Yeah, and I think there’s a reason that so many novels have been set on college campuses. I mean, it is a microcosm of human society. There’s a reason that The Human Stain and Secret History and books like that are so compelling because you bring together all of these actors who are, you know, at once, as you say, holding themselves to some higher moral standard, but invariably seduced by human frailty, which is my favorite kind of controversy. I think the other way I answer this sometimes as somebody who’s written a lot of these stories, is that we’re writing about the machinery of higher education and how administrations work, how power is wielded by different constituencies, whether that’s students or professors or administrators or donors. And a controversy is usually some pivotal moment where that machinery breaks down, where those groups are not working together, where one is exerting more power than it probably is entitled to. And I think that the ones that I have in mind in terms of draft picks — and we should explain what we’re doing here, but I wanted to start with talking about controversy — if I think of the controversies that I want to have on my team, if you will, they’re ones that exemplify that. I don’t know. Andy, what do you think? How do you defend yourself? Defend yourself.

Andy Thomason As a journalist who loves controversy? Well, I’m happy to defend myself. But Jack you’re tipping your strategy a bit. I’m gonna have to look at some human frailty controversies and bump them up on my priority list. What I’m looking for in a good team is, first of all, there’s no getting around that you want memorable controversies on your list, right? Because some of these stories, they just stick in your brain. And so I think that that’s one quality that we’re really gonna look for. But beyond that what I’m really looking for is, can you have a diversity of characteristics within your controversy, within your controversy team? There are scandals about big spending, scandals set in the athletic department, scandals that are very sort of nerdy in a way and deal deeply with higher ed, right? And so I’m looking within my own team for a diversity of type, right? So that just like a good sports team that has, you know, a really good center, who gets a lot of rebounds, and a guard who can shoot. Like, I want my controversies to be doing different things.

Jack Stripling And this is probably a good moment for me to clarify for the listeners: this is a completely meaningless exercise. We have no way of determining who won this thing. I think we will have some discussion afterward. I think that our colleagues will judge us. I think the public will judge us. Sarah Brown, I think you’re gonna be judged harshly. You’re sort of known as the mother of interns. A lot of people look up to you. I think after this, there’s gonna be questions about that.

Andy Thomason Yeah, you’re done. You’re done after this.

Jack Stripling: Just given performance issues.

Sarah Brown Wow. Shots fired.

Jack Stripling: Andy, same situation with you. As somebody who came on the scene at The Chronicle and immediately really, I think, tried to seize power.

Andy Thomason: Yeah, successfully.

Jack Stripling: Low-level web writer, who just comes in and tries to take over an organization that at that point it had existed for almost 50 years. What were you, 12 years old? I think when you started The Chronicle.

Andy Thomason Well, Jack, you’re the voice of higher ed and you’re going to be fully discredited after this.

Jack Stripling Well, I think you’re gonna be exposed. I think you’re gonna be exposed. Let me lay out the ground rules here a little bit so that people aren’t familiar with this. If you haven’t heard a draft before, sometimes people do this with football teams, sometimes people do this with movies, all sorts of drafts out there. It’s March Madness season. We’re all feeling it. What we’re gonna do is four rounds of drafting. Each one of us has to pick a controversy from one of the following four categories: We have Hot Mic. Now, Hot Mic is something that someone said that got them in trouble, either on a microphone, in a meeting that was later reported out, or on an email, or even a wiretap. I’m alluding to something there. The next category is Hey, Big Spender. We often have big spending controversies, you know, a president spends too much money on this, that, or the other. This can always get a president in hot water or other people. I don’t think it happens as much to faculty because they’re having to file expense reports for their paper clips. But it does happen to presidents a lot. Speaking of presidents, Presidents Behaving Badly. It’s got its own category. I’ve built a whole career on this. There’s so much to talk about here. People in college leadership invariably doing the wrong thing and getting fired for it or resigning. And then finally, Wild Card. This is your chance to show a little personality. You can use this however you want. Round out your team in the way Andy has said. I’m going to determine the order of the picks here, by drawing our names out of — I’ve already folded them up – they’re in here. This is a standard issue Chronicle of Higher Education hat. And you can see there’s no holes in there. There’s no funny business. I’ve got your names in here. I’m gonna mix them around a little bit and we’ll figure out who’s gonna go first in the first ever College Matters draft, and really the most defining draft in the history of all drafts.

Andy Thomason: This is make or break. Draft order is make or break.

Jack Stripling: This is a big moment. This really is huge. Okay, look what just happened here: Jack. I’m holding it up. Okay, I already know.

Andy Thomason: He’s fixing it from the beginning. This is fixed.

Jack Stripling: I already know that this is gonna be controversial.

Andy Thomason: I’m logging off.

Sarah Brown Yeah, bailing.

Jack Stripling The first pick in the quarter century controversy draft is Jack Stripling, host of College Matters, senior writer, all around great guy. All right, pick two. You could argue that this is not where you wanna be. Pick three, you’re gonna get to pick twice in a row, because it’s a snake-like draft. All right, number two. Let’s see what we got here. Andy, number two. Andy Thomason. He’s ready.

Andy Thomason Good, I’m good with two, I’m very glad I got two.

Jack Stripling Okay, so the picking order is mapped out. That means Sarah is gonna be number three. You will get your first pick, and then another pick going into the second round. So there’s theoretically some advantage there.

Andy Thomason As you’re strategizing here of how to spend your first pick, I just want to mention a thing that we’ve omitted so far. It’s very important to the draft, which is that we are omitting tragedies from the controversy draft. Because this is, as you can probably tell so far, this is a fun exercise. And many scandals and controversies throughout the last 25 years of higher education are funny, are zany. And we’re going to lean into that. So if you have in your head various scandals that have a tragic, very sad element to them, we’re purposely avoiding those.

Jack Stripling I think that’s wise. That sounds like the appropriate way forward.
I’m going right into the No. 1 pick then. The No. 1 pick of the 2025 Quarter Century Higher Education Controversy Draft is: Varsity Blues.

Andy Thomason Okay.

Jack Stripling The Varsity Blues scandal, as many will recall, this was 2019, federal prosecutors charged at least 50 people for using bribery, fraud, and all manner of tawdry tactics to secure admission for their children at prestigious colleges, places like Yale, Stanford, the University for Spoiled Children. The scandal was masterminded by a college consultant, Rick Singer, and it’s chock-full of juicy details. You’ll remember this: parents passing off their children as athletes, in some cases going so far as to Photoshop their children’s faces into the bodies of athletes to make them appear as if they played sports. You know, I think it’s worth, before we move on from this controversy, just putting us back in time a little bit. This broke in March 2019. You guys will remember this in the newsroom. It was really, I might say, a fine time in the newsroom.

Andy Thomason Very fine.

Jack Stripling And this was pre-Covid. You know, we’re a year away from Covid. Donald Trump hasn’t even been impeached for the first time. It was really a perfect moment for a scandal that was all about rubbernecking the rich. The country was primed for a trivial story about the excesses and venality of wealthy people. And that’s what this really shows. One of the defining elements of a great controversy is that it affirms something in society that you already know to be true. And so people have a sense that the rich have a leg up in everything in our society, including college admissions, and this really affirms that. It’s also got star power. You’ve got celebrity involvement. You’ve got Lori Loughlin, the actress who played Aunt Becky on Full House. You’ve got Felicity Huffman. She was on Desperate Housewives and the wife of William H. Macy. And then you kind of have this Shakespearean tragedy that’s really interesting. I mean, you have that element where there’s so much hubris involved. There’s so much entitlement involved. But then you’ve got this Martin Scorsese movie underneath it. You’ve got wiretaps. You’ve got informants. It really kind of has everything. And the reason it’s my No. 1 pick is because I think it has the level of notoriety that you need to have on your team. I mean, we’ve got plenty of scandals that happen at places you’ve never heard of. Some of those are my favorites. But I think that each draft team really needs a high profile controversy, and you really just can’t get higher than this. So that’s why Varsity Blue is my No. 1 pick.

Sarah Brown One of my favorite memories of this particular scandal is the like extravagant Photoshop and kind of manufactured athletic profiles that were created for these students who were being admitted to high profile universities as “athletes,” but they were never actually going to play in any of these sports. And so there were these really great details about people being photoshopped onto crew teams or photoshopped into sailing activities. It was really, really fantastic.

Jack Stripling Literally superimposing their children’s heads onto that of athletes. A great detail, as you said.

Andy Thomason This one’s iconic. This one’s iconic. Jack, really quickly, which category are you taking this in? Because I’m already thinking about my strategy here. Which, what do you like? I’m already thinking about my strategy here. Which, what do you like?

Jack Stripling I think I’m gonna take this in, Hey, Big Spender. Because there was a lot of money involved. It’s not exactly what we think of, of a spending scandal from a college president, but I think it fits.

Andy Thomason All right. I’m strategizing from the second overall pick and I’m torn because strategically I feel like, Hey, Big Spender, it’s a small category, at least the way I’ve gamed it out. So I can be strategic and try to pick my top pick in that category or I can go with my heart, what I really, really wanna do, what I believe in. And I think I’m gonna have to go with my heart.

Sarah Brown I wonder what this is going to be.

Jack Stripling: I’ve never known you to believe in anything, yeah.

Andy Thomason Now I wanna go strategic, but I’ll just do what you guys expect me to do because I love this scandal. I can’t get enough of this scandal. This is my favorite scandal, maybe ever, probably ever. I won’t belabor this any longer. With the number two pick in the 2025 Controversy Draft, I will be picking, in Hot Mic, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill academic fraud scandal.

Jack Stripling Excellent.

Andy Thomason This is my favorite. For people who may not remember this one... Back in the 2010s, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, my alma mater, Sarah’s alma mater, entered a massive scandal that began in athletics and migrated to basically every part of the university. It lasted for several years. And the focus of the scandal ended up being these paper classes, basically fake classes that were utilized by athletes to stay eligible, where all the student had to do was write a paper and they’d basically receive a high grade. They didn’t have to go to class.

This was seized upon as a very useful tool to keep athletes eligible so they could go play on the football team, the basketball team, and win games. The public revelation of this absolutely skewered UNC’s image as this college where you could succeed academically and athletically. It’s honestly hard to pick details from this because there are so many. So I’ll start by saying the reason I’m picking in a Hot Mic is that the most memorable detail from this controversy is that there was a PowerPoint slide presented to the football coaches that basically laid out the features of these paper classes, and it was basically like in bullet point form. It was like, the students don’t have to go to class, you know, they don’t need to be awake. This is a reliable A. And when this was revealed, it was plastered all over the internet, it catalyzed all sorts of anger and schadenfreude. And the irony of the scandal revolved around institutional identity, UNC’s identity as a college that could be excellent in both athletics and academics. And the revelation of these classes pierced a hole through that identity. That’s one of the things that makes this a great controversy, is that it is a humbling of a college, right? The thing that the college puts forth -

Jack Stripling I feel like people who went to Chapel Hill need more humility and this controversy did that.

Andy Thomason Well, this controversy did that, and then there were subsequent controversies that often made it lower.

Jack Stripling Sarah is making a face.

Andy Thomason Which we love, you know, we get to cover them. But I love this controversy so much that I wrote a whole book about it. It’s called, Discredited. And if you, listener, are interested in reading it, and so you buy a copy and you find yourself reading about transfer credits, you’ve bought the wrong book. There’s another book called, Discredited. It’s about transfer credits.

Jack Stripling Andy, let’s give people the full title so they can find it. It’s called, Discredited: The UNC Scandal and College Athletics’ Amateur Ideal. So, if you get that one, you’ve got the right book.

Andy Thomason You’ve got the right one, but I love this scandal. It touched every part of the university, the fundraising office, the academic advising office, various departments, the faculty council. There’s too much to even cover here. I love this scandal. It’s my number two pick.

Jack Stripling And you know the other element that the UNC paper classes scandal has that is like, I think, synonymous with a great controversy is it went on forever. Even after it was discovered, the long arc toward getting to what became the Wainstein Report, this sort of final summation of what happened, took forever. And over that time, the university really never could get out from under itself.

Sarah Brown Full disclosure here is that this scandal definitely got Andy and I our jobs at The Chronicle because we wrote about it at UNC student newspaper. So just like full disclosure here, we made the most out of this scandal.

Andy Thomason Absolutely. We capitalized big time. I’m continuing to capitalize right now with the number two pick. And the last thing I’ll point out, Jack, that’s off of what you just said is that one of the qualities that we see repeat itself in scandals throughout the past 25 years is self-inflicted wounds, right? And that’s part of why the UNC paper classes scandal went on so long, is that the university didn’t fully investigate it to anyone’s satisfaction until finally, like, you know, seven, eight years after it started, finally it was put to bed. But it was a really prolonged black eye and part of that was self-inflicted

Jack Stripling Alright, great pick. I saw it coming, but I’m really glad you got your...

Sarah Brown Very predictable.

Jack Stripling I guess to some extent you may have stolen that from Sarah. I don’t know how she feels about it. She was probably gonna give that to you since you wrote a book about it. But you’re up. You get two picks.

Sarah Brown All right, with the number three pick in the 2025 Campus Controversy Draft, for my Hot Mic slot, I am picking Drown the Bunnies at Mount St. Mary’s University.

Andy Thomason Great pick, great pick, perfect pick.

Sarah Brown So this happened in 2015 and kind of bled over into 2016, where Simon Newman, who was the president, chief executive of Mount St. Mary’s University, small private college in Maryland, reportedly had an unusual plan to shore up the university’s student retention rate. So this is like the percentage of students who keep, who stay in college from their first year into their second year, or from their first semester into their second semester, and don’t drop out. So per campus newspaper reporting, the president told a faculty member that the university needed to encourage some of these freshmen to drop out before a particular date in September so their retention rate would look better. And reportedly, this is what Newman, the president, told this faculty member, this is according to the campus newspaper’s reporting: “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies, put a Glock to their heads.”

Jack Stripling Yeah, I do remember that.

Sarah Brown It’s so good. It’s so good. And to be clear, I asked Mr. Newman in an interview, like, did you actually say this? And he kind of said, I don’t think I quite put it that way. I might’ve said puppies, but he didn’t really deny that he said it.

Jack Stripling Oh, wow.

Sarah Brown Colorful language aside, his justification for this is that he merely wanted to give students a chance to get their money back, like their tuition money back, if they were unlikely to finish their first semester. So I love this scandal. It was one of the first scandals that I reported on as a Chronicle reporter. It sort of represents something that a lot of these scandals represent, which is the like hard-charging business leader comes into the sleepy academia and like shakes things up. He’s coming in with these corporate ideas.

Jack Stripling Yeah, his background was a financier, right? He didn’t really have a traditional higher ed background.

Sarah Brown Exactly. So this was kind of at the height of higher ed being kind of charmed by these business leaders who had big ideas and big plans for shoring up the finances at struggling universities. And he was really representative of that. But he took it a little bit too far, arguably, and did not last more than a couple of months after this came out.

Jack Stripling And, you know, Mount St. Mary’s — a Catholic institution. And as you’ve mentioned before, part of what makes a good controversy is we view universities as moral actors in this space. That’s probably doubly true for a religiously affiliated institution. So I think the contrast there was nice. It’s a good pick, it’s a good pick. You actually get another one. You’re coming back into round two.

Sarah Brown That’s right. All right. So, with my second pick, I am going to be, this is probably a little bit, a little bit unexpected. I am going to be picking The Lost Souls at Bluefield State University. So Andy’s jaw is on the floor right now.

Jack Stripling What category is this coming in?

Sarah Brown Presidents Behaving Badly.

Andy Thomason That’s your best Presidents Behaving Badly, is Bluefield State?

Jack Stripling Let’s hear about it. Let’s hear about it.

Andy Thomason Let’s hear about it first.

Sarah Brown Well, let me explain myself. Alright, this all has really come out in sort of 2022 and 2023. But this guy, Robin Capehart, the president of Bluefield State, publishes a substack newsletter bashing his own faculty for months. And so we’ve seen plenty of, as at The Chronicle, we report all the time on like, administrators feuding with the faculty. It’s one of the most common stories we write, disagreement about the way that campus decisions should be made. You know, there’s this idea in higher ed that, like, the campus community is all supposed to participate in, like, this shared governance structure. This is part of why having, like, business-minded people come in is often very offensive to people who work on college campuses. So, you know, he’s coming in and he publishes this newsletter bashing his own faculty as he’s trying to make changes at the institution. I ought to read this quote; this is the president talking about the faculty. “These are the lost souls, those individuals who are chronically miserable and aren’t happy unless they’re unhappy. We all know these kind of people. While you find lost souls everywhere, higher education is uniquely endowed with more than its share.”

Andy Thomason Fact check, true.

Sarah Brown Absolutely. The other thing that makes this controversy great is that Bluefield State is a really unusual place. I’m sure many listeners of this podcast have never even heard of it. But it’s a historically Black college in West Virginia that is now nearly 70 percent white students. This guy, Capehart comes in, the finances were really bad. A state audit right before the president came in called the finances unintelligible and unauditable. So Capehart argued that it was this cabal of influential, hard-headed, and miserable faculty members who helped run the place into the ground. And so he was like, I’m just coming in to clean up shop. I think that is why this is a great scandal. It’s flown under the radar. It’s a great example of an administrator-faculty spat. He’s kind of saying the quiet part out loud. I’m sure a lot of senior administrators in higher ed kind of think a lot of faculty are lost souls, but they’re not going to say it out loud.

Jack Stripling All right. Well, I appreciate you bringing this to light for people who may not know it. I don’t know if I agree with this strategically. I’m kind of with Andy. This is a rich category. But we’ll see where it goes. I mean, you’re fleshing out your team.

Andy Thomason You made a good case. I like it.

Sarah Brown Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Andy Thomason This is my second pick and I’m going to go to the scarce category, Hey, Big Spender. And my second pick in Hey, Big Spender is going to be the $550 olive jar. Scott’s Scarborough, University of Akron.

Sarah Brown So good.

Andy Thomason I like this one a lot. I think it’s great in Big Spender. For people who don’t remember, and it’s been a while at this point: As part of a $950,000 renovation of the President’s house at the University of Akron, one of the pieces in that renovation was a $556.40 decorative olive jar.

Sarah Brown Did you guys know what an olive jar was when you read this?

Jack Stripling No, but as somebody who does take the kitchen seriously, I immediately felt like I needed one.

Sarah Brown I thought it was just like some little thing on a counter, and then you read the details. The local paper interviewed the interior designer who helped find this olive jar, he was like…

Jack Stripling I mean, I I’m just

Sarah Brown They’re like five feet tall!

Jack Stripling I’ve got olives all over my refrigerator, just in random store-bought jars. There’s no personality to it. There’s no tapestry.

Andy Thomason I’m gonna read you a quote about the jar from the interior designer.

Jack Stripling Yeah, let’s hear more about this.

Andy Thomason “There were no olives in this one when we got it. The Greek olive jar is an antique. It was used to store either olives or olive oil. They vary in price and can cost more than that, and they’re different sizes. I’ve seen them five feet tall. They can be huge. It’s a decorative piece. Something nice to have in a corner of a room like plants. It was used to fill the spot in the northeast corner of the room, and it actually cost less than the initial plan.” The reason that this is a really good one, I think, is that it gave people who hated Scott Scarborough’s leadership at the University of Akron something to seize on and an image to project. And he was a controversial president. He presided over some layoffs and budget cuts and spending cuts. And he was also just sort of like a brash guy. I think Jack, you once wrote a story about how he, early on in his presidency, encouraged faculty to pick up trash. Is that right? Do you remember that one?

Sarah Brown Actually, he ordered them to pick up trash and said they would be fired if they didn’t.

Jack Stripling I have pulled up this story. This is actually a great lead. It must’ve been written before you were my editor, Andy. “If Scott L. Scarborough gets his way, the University of Akron will have the cleanest administration in higher education, literally.” And goes on to describe that Scarborough is the Ohio University’s newly minted president, and he has asked his senior administrators to commit to a set of leadership and management principles that he says will ensure success. The president’s big no-nos, which are outlined in 28 bullet points, this he distributed, include failing to pick up trash, being late to meetings, losing one’s cool, the inability to answer a question directly and succinctly, which I think we have failed on that front immediately.

Sarah Brown No kidding, although this is straight out of the Harvard Business Review, just to be clear.

Jack Stripling I absolutely love this controversy. And you were right about a spending scandal does not necessarily need to, it’s not the number. It’s the item. It’s always the item that gets you.

Andy Thomason One last thing I’ll say, one thing that we loved is that somebody, some upset party at the University of Akron made a game called Angry Olives in which you use the olive jar, I think, as a slingshot to cast an olive onto some beloved part of campus that is then destroyed in a kind of symbolic representation of what they believe Scarborough was doing to the campus. By the way, Scarborough, he lasted until 2016. He stepped down in 2016.

Jack Stripling Unbelievable, great pick. I like it a lot. I don’t like it as much as my next one. So in Hot Mic, which I have not picked yet, I’m gonna go with Teresa Sullivan’s firing and rehiring at the University of Virginia. And I will unpack this a little bit for the uninitiated. But this was a crazy story. So in 2012, Teresa Sullivan, who’d been president of the University of Virginia for just two years, resigned abruptly on a June weekend. I remember it well. I remember getting calls about it. What are we doing on this? The details were sparse. She cited a philosophical difference of opinion with the board. And then the reason this is Hot Mic is that as all these questions were surrounding, like how did this newish president at the University of Virginia resign suddenly, The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper, got a hold of some emails very quickly via FOIA. Someone really wanted them to have these, I feel like. Because I have waited months for things from UVa. But they very quickly got these emails via FOIA that showed that members of the board were just consumed with whether UVa was moving fast enough to develop its online course offerings at the time. People who follow higher education might remember MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. These were being developed at some prestigious universities across the country. And the idea was that this was gonna revolutionize education. It really didn’t happen, but there was a lot of panic across this board, again, filled with people who were sort of captains of industry, who were looking for a president who would exhibit, according to the emails, more strategic dynamism, I recall, in her approach to this. One of the things that I think makes this a defining controversy of the last 25 years is that it is not the sexiest controversy. It’s a sort of governance dispute. There is literally no sex in this controversy. There isn’t really money in this controversy. But it’s the origin story of a presidency that would go on to just be defined by turmoil. So, you know, 2014 is going to be the Rolling Stone article that is later discredited about a gang rape at a fraternity at UVa. This happens during Sullivan’s tenure. The Unite the Right rally, of course, in 2017. So those are still yet to come. That’s what’s crazy about Teresa Sullivan’s tenure, is this is just the beginning. And the other thing is, is that it really creates Teresa Sullivan. She’s not a naturally charismatic leader, but once she was forced out, she took on this new identity as a fighter, a sort of defender of higher education’s traditions and values. You know, we’re not gonna move too fast just because you think we should, was essentially her message. She defended and sort of adopted proudly the title of being an incrementalist. You know, I think that this was, we have a picture on the wall of our office in The Chronicle of Teresa Sullivan being surrounded by a throng of supporters who are cheering her. This never would have happened if they hadn’t fired her. This literally created her identity. The reason she became a significant figure in the history of the University of Virginia was, first and foremost, that she was the first woman president, but really secondly, that she went through this crazy turmoil. And finally, I would just say that one other element of this that I really love is that there’s a human drama at the heart of it. So Helen Dragas, who was the rector of the University of Virginia board, that’s what they call them. They have a different name for everything, including the chair of their board. And so she was the first woman rector of UVa, and she was really in this power struggle with Teresa Sullivan over the future of the university. And so it was just this interesting clash of personalities, somebody who wanted to go full bore into the shiny new object, out in the water there, which was MOOCs and online education. And somebody like Teresa Sullivan, who’s just a classic academic who was like, whoah, wait a minute, we’ll see. I think in hundred years, not in hundred seconds. So that’s why I really love this controversy.

Sarah Brown I wanted to just say that the framed photo of Terry Sullivan being surrounded by her supporters as she’s walking into the UVa Rotunda, it’s up on the wall in one of our conference rooms. When college presidents come to town, I really like to have them sit on the side where they have to stare at that photo so they feel a little bit uncomfortable as I’m interviewing them.

Jack Stripling You should not have revealed this.

Andy Thomason How funny would it be if Dragas had succeeded and today UVa was just like only a MOOCs college? Like it was just all MOOCs. Do you think this would happen today? A president who over some like pretty kind of boring but important differences with her board gets fired. Do you think she gets reinstated because one of the craziest things about this is how humongous a controversy this became, a national controversy that was in like lots of newspapers, on TV, like, I have a hard time believing that it would make the same number of waves today.

Sarah Brown Yeah, I wonder if it would cut through, right? It kind of feels like what becomes a national story for higher ed is not that. It is, it’s much more frankly scandalous.

Andy Thomason Presidents get fired all the time. They get fired all the time now for, for stuff like this. I’m being facetious.

Jack Stripling Well, I think that it goes back to what you said about Chapel Hill, Andy. You were saying that the remarkable thing about the paper classes scandal at Chapel Hill was that it seemed like it was, this is the kind of thing that can’t happen at Chapel Hill. You know, I mean, we believe in the student athlete. And I think the same thing happened at the University of Virginia. You know, this is a place founded by Thomas Jefferson. It holds itself up to a much higher standard. And you know, this sort of tawdry governance dispute where two people can’t just work it out just isn’t going to happen at UVa. I mean, I think that’s a big part of it and …

Andy Thomason That’s well said.

Jack Stripling You know, the other thing is you’re dealing with powerful alumni. You know the other thing is I mean, we’ve seen alumni fire presidents in the last year. Maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that. UVa is a place that has a lot of that. There was also, I mean, not to get too deep into the details, but there’s a lot of dissension within that board over whether forcing her out was appropriate. So it’s a many-splendored scandal, but I agree that there is something quaint about the nature of the controversy. You know, this fight over MOOCs, it really dates it. But the power struggle is real.

Andy Thomason Great pick, Jack.

Jack Stripling I think before we move on to round three, which will again be my pick, I guess, we should recap:

So Jack in Hey Big Spender has Varsity Blues and in Hot Mic has Teresa Sullivan’s Hiring and Firing. Probably shouldn’t have started there because that’s clearly the winning ticket.

Here we go, Andy in Hot Mic has the Chapel Hill Paper Classes scandal, just picked to shamelessly promote his book. No other reason. And then in Big Spender, he picked Olive Jar. I think it’s a real sexy pick. I think it’s a dark horse. I really like it.

Sarah in Hot Mic, she’s got the Simon Newman Drown the Bunnies scandal. I honestly think that was a Cinderella pick. Absolutely. That’s a sleeper in here I would have liked to have had. And then, controversial pick here, in Presidents Behaving Badly, she has Lost Souls at Bluefield State University. Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling Alright, round three, I am picking: The remaining categories that I have are Wild Card and I have Presidents Behaving Badly.

Andy ThomasonThis could sink me, this could sink me right here, depending on what you pick.

Jack Stripling I feel like I cannot, in good conscience, field a team that doesn’t have Gordon Gee on it. I just think that he’s gotta be on the team. So for listeners who don’t know Gordon Gee, he has, where has he been president? Five different places or something?

Sarah Brown Literally five.

Jack Stripling He’s retiring from West Virginia, where he’s had some controversy there. He was at Brown for a brief period of time. He was at Ohio State. But the story that I wanna focus on concerns his presidency at Vanderbilt. And, you know, Gee is somebody who’s had spending controversies. He’s said a lot of stupid things. I mean, he is known for his gaffes. But I think the urtext of the Gordon Gee personality in the story is embedded in the Vanderbilt story. So in 2006, The Wall Street Journal publishes an article that’s headlined, “Vanderbilt Reins in Lavish Spending By Star Chancellor as Schools Tighten Oversight.” A — this is a great subhead — A $6 million renovation draws trustees’ scrutiny. Marijuana at the mansion. I mean, I’m reading, I don’t know about you.

The Journal details how this $6 million in renovations was never approved by the full board to renovate this Greek revival university-owned mansion where Gee lives with his wife Constance, who’s also a professor at Vanderbilt. The most interesting part of this story in a lot of ways is reports from, I think, anonymous people in the story, that Constance Bumgarner Gee has marijuana in the mansion. She’s smoking pot, either in the mansion or is keeping it there, apparently because she has some kind of ear condition that she’s using marijuana to treat, or at least that’s the story that’s laid out in here. And the trustees learn about this. And there’s this great scene where Gordon Gee is confronted about the marijuana in the mansion. I’ll read a little bit from The Journal: “Trembling, the Chancellor replied, ‘I’ve been worried to death over this.’” I can hear Gordon Gee saying that. I don’t know if he’s ever confirmed or denied it. But it’s just a classic moment where you see a couple of different things that have flavors of a good controversy. One is, there’s like a whole subgenre of controversy about presidential spouses. I don’t envy the people in these positions. They have important roles and functions at universities, but people are mostly interested in them, or often interested in them, as objects of curiosity, as people who are there to court and woo donors and that sort of thing. But if they step out of line, even the remotest little bit, it becomes a huge scandal for the institution and for the president. You know, it’s also just kind of quaint looking back on this. This is before, you know, medical marijuana. And I think when people read that, oh, she’s using this for some kind of medical condition, you know, I think it was sort of laughed off. But of all of the scandals that Gordon Gee has endured, of which there are many, I think this was really the defining one. This is the one that followed him. I’ve talked to him about it on several occasions. And I think it really kind of solidified an image of Gordon Gee as reckless, extravagant, and just prone to sort of silliness.

Sarah Brown But despite all of this, he has spent over four decades in higher education leadership. I keep thinking, like, what gives this guy a second act, a third act, a fourth act?

Jack Stripling I think he’s charming as hell, is part of the answer to that.

Sarah Brown Is it the bow tie?

Jack Stripling So he, I mean, he wears this bow tie. He looks like Orville Redenbacher. There was another big scandal. I don’t know if you guys are gonna touch on this, but there was a scandal at Ohio State that they had spent a bunch of money on bowtie cookies and bowtie ties that were used as promotion with donors. I’ve eaten one of those bowtie cookies; I can tell you they were delicious. I don’t know if they were worth $64,000, but they were very good. But that’s my pick: Gordon Gee, Vanderbilt, Marijuana in the Mansion in Presidents Behaving Badly.

Andy Thomason Well, Jack, great pick. We even considered having a Gordon Gee category in this draft, and ultimately we decided not to, but that’s how controversial the man has been. So you’ve cleared the way for me. Thank you. With my third pick, I’m gonna pick what is my second favorite item on the board, on the whole board. It’s in Presidents Behaving Badly. This one might be a little bit off the wall. I don’t know if it was on your lists, but my pick, number three pick, Presidents Behaving Badly is Robert Caslen Plagiarism Scandal at the University of South Carolina. And I love this one so much. In fact, sometimes when I’m going to bed at night, I think about this scandal because it just puts me in such a good mood. It’s so fun. So let me paint the picture.

Sarah Brown This is your bedtime reading, Andy?

Jack Stripling I don’t think there’s anything weird about that at all, Andy.

Andy Thomason Not at all. So Robert Caslen, he’s this army officer who was named to the University of South Carolina’s president in 2019 as a result of pressure from the governor, Henry McMaster. This made a lot of people mad because he’s a nontraditional hire. It doesn’t have the sort of all the traditional academic bona fides. He led West Point at one point. So he is installed as president of the University of South Carolina and things did not go well for him. Just in general, I’ll just for the sake of time, I’ll mention one controversy that he endured before the one that I’m picking here, which is that he waited too long to send a condolence card to the university’s largest donor when her mother died. And that prompted the donor to then sever ties with the University of South Carolina. An embarrassing letter was made public in which I think she said something to the effect of like all of the money and time I’ve given this university is the biggest mistake of my life, something to that effect. And so it did not go well for this guy, but it really culminated in the, I think it was the 2021 commencement, where he makes a few gaffes. He calls the University of South Carolina, the University of California in his speech. He’s like, okay, congratulations, the newest graduates of the University of California.

Robert Caslen (Clip) It’s now my honor and privilege to officially congratulate you, congratulate you as the newest alumni from the University of California. Congratulations and please be seated. Carolina, sorry about that, I owe you for your pushups.

Andy Thomason As a homegrown resident of the Carolinas, I can tell you University of South Carolina people are a little bit sensitive about the fact that there’s a much more famous USC that people talk about.

Jack Stripling I think there have been fights over the logo, maybe.

Andy Thomason There have been, and USC won definitively.

Jack Stripling: You’re the bigger guy. You get to keep the logo.

Andy Thomason Yeah, the Gamecocks are sensitive. So when the president’s like, University of California, that’s already bad. But then after the commencement, it comes out that his speech is plagiarized from another former college leader, retired Adm. William McRaven, who had led the University of Texas system. And ultimately, Caslen has to resign over the plagiarism. But there’s an amazing coda: So a newspaper got a hold of some emails that Caslen had written during his tenure, and he says so many funny things in there. He says in an email, quote, “This place sucks so bad, I don’t know how anyone can stand it.” He says again, quote, “At some point you have to ask, why do you put up with this stuff? It is insane. I don’t know how you can stand living here.” End quote. It reminds me of this, I Think You Should Leave sketch, where as part of a prank, this guy dresses up for a TV show, and he puts on this heavy mask to mess with people in a shopping mall. And as soon as he gets in the mask and all of this makeup, he just gets so depressed and he’s like, “I don’t want to be around anymore.” This to me is like what happened with Caslen. He’s so excited to lead South Carolina, but it turns out to be this terrible experience. He later said that going to South Carolina was “the biggest regret of my life.”

Jack Stripling He didn’t say Southern California?

Andy Thomason No, no he didn’t. He got it right that time

Jack Stripling This place didn’t look anything like I thought it would.

Sarah Brown How do we think this is all gonna play in his application for future jobs at the University of California system, which is clearly where he’s desiring to go.

Andy Thomason They’re gonna be like, we love you here. We’re getting a lot of earned media. So one of the reasons that I like this is I don’t think we’ve had any plagiarism scandals yet in the draft. That’s a big genre, a classic way for academics to get in trouble.

Jack Stripling An up-and-coming genre, you might argue, yeah.

Andy Thomason That’s right. It’s been in the news lately. And the other reason I like it is that this is a presidency that began with promise and ended with just pure rubble. Like, just a man who has just been humbled. So, Caslen, Presidents Behaving Badly, that’s my pick.

Jack Stripling Absolutely, genius pick. Go ahead, Sarah.

Sarah Brown So with my next pick under Hey, Big Spender, we are gonna go with Student Recruitment Safaris at Western New Mexico University.

Andy Thomason I love it.

Sarah Brown I’m seeing another surprised look from others on this panel, but stick with me here. So in, this is a like small college, kind of in the middle of nowhere. It’s like two hours plus from the nearest major city, and New Mexico’s already a super rural state. In 2023, a nonprofit news outlet in New Mexico reported that the longtime president of this university was spending six figures and university money on trips supposedly for “international student recruitment in Zambia, Spain, and Greece.” He, on several of these trips, was accompanied by other university executives, including members of his own board, as well as his wife. Plot twist, his wife is Valerie Plame, the former CIA officer whose cover was publicly blown by the Bush administration 20 years ago. So that is part of what makes this scandal delicious. They have all traveled to these places on the university’s dime. This small school in very rural New Mexico has a total of like 60 international students. So we’re talking six-figure investments for like 60 international students, which is ridiculous.

Jack Stripling You don’t think this is a good return?

Sarah Brown I mean, and then like most of those, at least a third of those international students are just from Mexico, which makes a lot of sense. Joseph Shepard, the president of Western has also spent a lot of money on furniture for his presidential mansion. We have a lot of scandals on our list about presidential mansion refurbishments. And he was buying from like, the nicest possible shop in Santa Fe. And when asked about this, he said, well, you know, I’m trying to like entertain donors at the mansion. I can’t just buy IKEA furniture. First of all, you know, I’d have to replace that furniture every year. I don’t know about y ‘all, but I have IKEA furniture in my house and it’s been in there for like a decade. So.

Andy Thomason Yeah, it’ll last you for at least three.

Sarah Brown Another couple other details from this: $110,000 in floral arrangements. He also made out more than $123,000 in checks just to himself in the past five years. He again has defended these expenses as sort of critical to building enrollment, building fundraising, etc. He says, “We’ve always abided by university policy.” Then you know the scandal sort of gets too, it becomes too much, and so the board is like we need you to move on. They get him to agree to a $1.9 million settlement agreement for a guy who had clearly misspent university funding. And I think that this scandal is so interesting. A) Totally under the radar, y ‘all might be noticing a theme here. B) This guy had been the president for over a dozen years and like, no one had bothered to like, check on his spending, i mean it it literally took years like if this had happened at the University of Michigan for example this would never have allowed to go on for this long or for now. So the fact that this was under the radar, Valerie Plame’s husband, tiny school in the middle of nowhere is going on recruitment trips to Zambia, this is a great scandal to me. So that’s why I picked this one.

Andy Thomason It’s a good one. Do you know who Valerie Plame is? Is like one of the best questions you can ask to determine someone’s age, whether they’re above or below 30.

Sarah Brown I just barely make the cut.

Jack Stripling I remember reading our coverage of that and I was thrown by the Valerie Plame thing.

Sarah Brown So good. All right. We’re on my last pick. So, we all kind of, I think we all kind of left Wild Card to the end, kind of on purpose, see what’s left. Might say there’s slim pickings, but there are a few controversies on here that…

Andy Thomason No, there’s good stuff on here.

Sarah Brown There’s some good stuff that we have left on the cutting room floor and I’m gonna take one of them for myself and that scandal is, Is That our Chancellor in the Porno? University of wisconsin-Lacrosse. Sorry, Jack, I know that this one is near and dear to your heart but I had to take it for my own team. So this concerns Joe Gow. He was the longtime chancellor at UW-La Crosse. A few months before his retirement, he posted on the internet pornographic videos of himself and his wife. He had increasingly gotten into adult content over the previous few years, but it was the decision to share that publicly that put everyone into a tizzy. Once the Wisconsin board and the system leader found out about it, they promptly fired him as chancellor, said that his conduct was, sort of, unbecoming of the university president. It raised a lot of questions you know did he have some kind of First Amendment right do this on his own time?

Jack Stripling An ongoing subject of litigation.

Sarah Brown Indeed, indeed. And you know, I think part of what is so interesting about this scandal to me is that it raises the question of like, is the university president, the chief executive, the guy who’s like the public face of the institution, is he allowed to have a private life? As far as we know, he was not using university time or resources to pursue this adult career, this adult film career. Is he allowed to do what he wants with his own time? And Jack, when you talked with him for this very podcast, you know, he said like, you know, I would go on vacation and record adult film stuff. I’m just going on vacation. Like, what’s the big deal? It raises this question of: Is the university president allowed to have a private life? And that’s what makes it so interesting to me.

Jack Stripling Well, and is your private life no longer private when it’s on Pornhub? I mean, fair question. We’ve talked a lot about presidents being in the fishbowl and that they can never have private lives and that that is just the cost of doing business if you want to be in academic leadership. I think that Joe Gow is really testing the question by releasing this. The other thing that I asked him about on the podcast was: Why not wait? He was a few months away from stepping down as chancellor. And it seemed a provocation to me, to put it out before he left. But, you know, we’ll see what Joe has to say about that. Good pick. Absolutely jealous of it.

Sarah Brown I’ve got my full roster. I’m so excited guys.

Andy Thomason Good pick, Sarah. I believe it’s to me. And there are so many good options on the table. I’m fascinated by what you’re gonna pick, Jack, because this has been really tough for me. But I’m gonna take the controversy that really that sort of seized my heart and not my head. There maybe are smarter picks on the board, but I’m gonna zag a little bit here. And with my fourth pick in Wild Card, I’m going with Don’t Tase Me, Bro. You might be saying. Andy, this is really not a higher ed controversy. I would say it happened at a college. That’s about all I can say for it for higher ed.

Jack Stripling I would say, it happened five feet from me, Andy. I was standing there.

Andy Thomason You were there? I didn’t know that.

Jack Stripling I saw the tased bro. I was a reporter for The Gainesville Sun and I was covering John Kerry’s, then Senator John Kerry’s speech, at the University of Florida and this strapping young man walks up to the microphone, who we would later learn was named Andrew Meyer, and starts asking a series of probing questions of John Kerry about why he so readily conceded in the presidential election. And then, for the conspiracy-minded out there, asks a question about whether John Kerry was in Skull and Bones, the secret society. And then, right after that, he’s promptly ushered away by university police. Now, I mean, you can read into what you want about that. But he’s standing there flailing. I’m watching this thing. He gets pinned to the ground by these university police officers, and I’ll let you take it from there. What does he say, Andy?

Andy Thomason He says, “Don’t tase me, bro!”

Andrew Meyer (Clip) I didn’t do anything! Don’t tase me, bro! Don’t tase me! I didn’t do anything! Ow! Ow! Ow!

Andy Thomason After which he is promptly tased. You can hear the tase this in the video. It does not work. Doesn’t work. Meanwhile, John Kerry is babbling on in the background in his low baritone.

Sarah Brown Did he just like keep talking?

Jack Stripling He never stops talking.

Andy Thomason He’s like, I will answer the young man’s question about Skull and Bones. I had no idea you were there, Jack. People, especially younger people, if you haven’t seen this, pull it up on YouTube.

Sarah Brown This is one of the first like viral YouTube videos, by the way, like super viral.

Andy Thomason The reason I’m taking this, despite the fact that it is admittedly not a higher ed scandal is that, if you were a sentient person in the year 2007, you could say, “Don’t tase me, bro” to 99 percent of the population of the United States and they would know what you were talking about. People would say it all the time. It pierced through the public consciousness, right? Like this this kid was hauled up on the Today Show with his parents and his attorney. And he was forced to apologize to the university. He was hauled on the Today Show where Matt Lauer is like grilling him about his intentions. This occurred in such a different society and such a different media environment than what we know today. It is a sign of how profoundly the world has changed in just 18 years, that like the fact that this kid had somebody filming him while he was asking these questions, like everybody could like smell a like spectacle or like or like a showboat or something and like immediately he’s surrounded by security. Whereas today, if you saw somebody filming someone else on the street you’d be like I see this every day. But like back then like it was like a camcorder and nobody was used to that. It is such a time it’s a time capsule moment.

Jack Stripling It’s a time capsule, yeah, it’s a time capsule. I mean, this is 2007, so Twitter barely exists. And this is the first example of real virality that I remember as a higher ed reporter. I mean, I will literally tell you, I went and covered this thing, watched the kid get tased, went back to the newsroom at The Gainesville Sun, wrote a story, went to bed thinking, well, we’re done with that. And I get a call from my editor at the time, Jon Rabiroff, who says, can you turn on the Today Show, or Good Morning America, or whatever it was. He didn’t say, can you pull up Twitter, or YouTube, or Facebook. He said, turn on the television, and they’re talking about this. I mean, that’s how different this was. And I actually think you’re underestimating it as a higher ed scandal, because if it happened today, I think it would be a much bigger deal, not only because it would be all over social media immediately. But secondly, in the environment that we’re in around free speech right now, the idea that a student — no matter how obnoxious — was asking questions of a sitting U.S. senator and was wrestled to the ground and tased by, not outside police, university police, I think it would be a huge scandal. And while it’s a time capsule, it’s actually very different than the things we get worked up about now, which are like, oh, we’re not gonna invite this racist person to talk, or we’re gonna shout this person down. I mean this was an act of physical restraint, and frankly physical violence. And I wrote so many damn stories about this thing that I think people just, I mean It was probably the beginning of the end for The Gainesville Sun in terms of people giving up their subscriptions because I must have written, you know, 70 stories on this. There was even a cartoon that was published in The Gainesville Sun by our in-house cartoonist of someone saying, “Honey, they’ve written another story about Don’t Tase Me, Bro.” And the person is jumping out of a plate glass window. So that’s how much support I had internally. When I left The Gainesville Sun to go become a reporter at Inside Higher Ed, Don’t Tase Me, Bro was so synonymous with my tenure that I was given a cake that literally said, “Don’t leave us, bro.”

Sarah Brown Oh my god.

Jack Stripling So I have lived this story a thousand times and I’m so glad you picked it because it was going to be hard for me to justify it. But it absolutely belongs here. And I’m glad to see it.

Andy Thomason If this happened today, it would be both a bigger and a smaller story. Bigger for the reasons that you mentioned that it’s a blatant act of physical violence occurring by university police officers on a kid who was asking a question of a politician. I think it might be smaller, though, in the sense that it was a pivot point in media history, like you just laid out, where old media was still enforced, but new media was on the rise, hence the virality of the moment that kind of challenged everything. We’re flooded by like… It’s a much more fractured media environment now that I think that this controversy would have occurred against a whole volley of other controversies that people may or may not see because of how they consume the news today. So I think it’s a really interesting case study in media consumption.

Sarah Brown Andrew Meyer apparently self-published a book about this on Amazon in 2018 called Don’t Tase Me Bro: Real Questions, Fake News, and My Life as a Meme. I really want to know whatever happened to this guy.

Andy Thomason He was working on that a long time. 11 years.

Sarah Brown I mean, there’s lots to tell.

Jack Stripling Spoiler alert: he gets tased. This is a real head versus heart situation for me. I have the last pick of the draft and I have been going back and forth. Don’t Tase Me, Bro was very much in the mix, but I dropped it. And so now I am up against a real head versus heart question. There’s a story that I’m very close to that I think is like sort of the defining story of me becoming a higher ed reporter. And I want to pick it just cause it would be fun to. But I’m having a lot of trouble leaving Jerry Falwell Jr. and The Pool Boy off of the list. And I’m worried just for the integrity of the draft that the listeners will say that this is an illegitimate exercise if nobody picks the Jerry Falwell pool boy story.

Sarah Brown We already said this was an illegitimate exercise at the very top, but anyway.

Andy Thomason It’s fixed.

Jack Stripling I’m gonna allude to the Jerry Falwell Pool Boy story as an honorable mention. I’m gonna cheat here. And then I’m gonna give my real pick. But just so people know, in 2020, Reuters breaks this story that Jerry Falwell Jr., who’s president of Liberty University, had had an affair, or not him, that his wife had had an affair with a pool attendant they met in Miami. And this is sort of like the beginning of the end for Falwell, who was famous for having endorsed Trump during his first campaign in 2016, and it’s an iconic sort of fall from grace. There is a Hulu movie about it. There’s a great Vanity Fair article about it that you can read. But that’s not my pick. I just wanna lend credence to the fact that it should probably be in here. The story I’m gonna pick is a little bit different. My first higher ed reporting job was, as a beat reporter, covering Auburn University for the Opelika Auburn News. And in 2003, there was a scandal that came to be known as Jetgate. And what was interesting about this, I mean, the long story short of it is, is that Tommy Tuberville, before he was a United States senator, was coach of Auburn University, and people weren’t happy with his performance. And these good ol’ boy trustees, who were always meddling in athletics and were obsessed with it, conspired to try to hire Bobby Petrino, who was the coach at Louisville at the time, without giving Tuberville the courtesy of letting him know that they were out there interviewing for another another football coach. This gets out. And the reason that it becomes a huge higher education story is that the president of the university is on a plane. There’s two trustees with him. And the plane is registered to Colonial Bank, where Bobby Lowder, who is this svengali figure on the Auburn University Board of Trustees, was chairman, he was chairman of this bank. And so all of the elements are there. And this looks like a huge conspiracy. This is a perfect example of college trustees getting involved in the hiring and firing of football coaches and their obsessions with this. And they’re even using the Colonial Bank plane. And there’s great concern that Bobby Lowder is exerting all manner of control over members of the board because some of them are on his bank board. And there’s interlocking conspiracies about this guy and how he’s sort of the puppeteer. He has been on the board forever. He was actually appointed by George Wallace when he was governor. So that’s how far back this goes. And it’s just a huge, rich, Southern story. And what it demonstrates to me is that a great higher ed controversy combines the things that the geeks care about with the things that the general public cares about. So this is a geeky story because it’s a story about college governance and like the majority of the board being controlled by the minority and SACS rules, you know, the accreditation rules around that. And it’s very wonky. But at the end of the day, it’s also like this football story. And it ends up that when this all comes out, you know, there’s mea culpas all around. I remember interviewing William Walker, the late William Walker, who was president of Auburn at the time. And he did a car wash with just tons of different reporters coming through and gave his mea culpas about what had happened. But at the end of the day, Tuberville ends up staying. And then we know that that story takes another bizarre turn.

But I love this story because it was really where I learned the most about higher education. It really had all of the elements of the stories that we look at now. I have brought for your viewing, some of the coverage of The Opelika Auburn News.

Sarah Brown Print newspaper? What’s that?

Andy Thomason I love it, look at that.

Jack Stripling Here’s “Walker Walks.” This is a great photograph that was taken of William Walker when he resigned, sort of in disgrace. And then here’s another one about Auburn being put on probation by its accrediting agency. A young Belle Whelan, who at the time, was still running the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commissions on Colleges, was somebody I talked to a lot during that period and I still talk to now and then.

Andy Thomason The next draft that College Matters is going to hold is “Heads of Accreditors,” and Belle Whelan will be a popular No. 1 pick, so I’m going to go ahead and build my list.

Jack Stripling Absolutely number one seed, yes, absolutely number one seed.

Sarah Brown This is a deep cut that’s really going to drive audience engagement. I’m sure this is what the listeners want from us.

Jack Stripling Well, I’ll give you an interesting footnote to this story. So in the process of writing about all of these interlocking business relationships between these board members, which is exactly what the SACS accreditors were concerned about, I finally wrote something that just really pissed off the interim president of the university, himself a former trustee, which I thought was an odd turn for them to appoint a former trustee into this position. His name was Ed Richardson. And he got so fed up with me that he actually issued a press release saying that he would never speak with me again. This got covered in Inside Higher Ed before I was a reporter there. There’s a story you can find, I think we’ll link to it in the show notes. But it was an unprecedented thing for a college president to do. Over time, we kind of worked it out. We kept talking. And I remember the last time that I saw Ed Richardson, I gave him a copy of The Art of War by Sun Tzu as a present. Haven’t spoken with him since. I might’ve spoken with him once since, but anyway, so that’s kind of a little bit of a heart pick for me.

Sarah Brown I mean, and arguably this, I think that this scandal helped launch Tommy Tuberville’s second career as a U.S. senator. I mean, he became so beloved in Auburn after this happened.

Jack Stripling Yeah, I mean, Auburn likes to win, so it didn’t last forever. But yes, there was a shining moment when everybody was really into Tommy Tubberville. Okay, let’s go back over the picks and then we’ll talk a little bit about what folks have. So I have in Hey, Big Spender, I have the Varsity Blues scandal. In Hot Mic, I have Teresa Sullivan at UVa being forced out and then rehired. In Presidents Behaving Badly, I have Gordon Gee at Vanderbilt, Marijuana in the Mansion. And in Wildcard, I have Auburn’s Jetgate Controversy.

Andy Thomason And for me, my squad, in Hot Mic, I have the UNC Academic Fraud Scandal. In Hey, Big Spender, I have the $556.40 Olive Jar. In Presidents Behaving Badly, I have the Caslen Plagiarism Scandal at the University of South Carolina. And in Wild Card, I have Don’t Tase Me, Bro.

Sarah Brown I have, for my hot mic, I have Drown the Bunnies at Mount St. Mary’s University; feeling very good about that pick. I also have, under Presidents Behaving Badly, I have The Lost Souls at Bluefield State University, the president’s substack blogging about his faculty. I have Student Recruitment Safaris at Western New Mexico University under Hey, Big Spender. And then under my Wild Card, I have, Is that the Chancellor in the Porno at University of Wisconsin La Crosse.

Jack Stripling Any honorable mentions, things we didn’t hit that you really wanted to pick, I’ve already mentioned pool boy.

Sarah Brown There are so many things that we left on the cutting room floor, guys. No love for $38,000 Sushi Bill, Ben Sasse, University of Florida. How is that on nobody’s team?

Andy Thomason Or $220,000 table at Kean University, which was high on my list. Memorably, the president defended the purchase of the $220,000 table by saying, Why not? Three times in a row. He just said, why not, three times. We used to love that. The other one honorable mention that I have to put on here, that I think it just was not quite scandalous enough to make any of our lists, but the saga of Evan Dobelle, which I’ll just describe very briefly because it’s not a —

Sarah Brown Thank you for bringing this up, Andy. It’s important.

Andy Thomason It’s not a household scandal. Many years ago, somebody at The Chronicle is sitting around when they get a call from the University of Maine that says, Hey, did you just have an intern call us to conduct a salary survey about our president and what our president makes? And the person at the Chronicle says, I don’t think so. And the University of Maine says, well, here, let me give you the number that the call came from. Maybe you can call them and figure out who it was. So The Chronicle, whoever it was, takes the number, calls it, and who answers but Evan Dobelle, who was himself a college president, ostensibly hoping to find greener pastures or perhaps more money at the University of Maine. So he did impersonate a Chronicle intern in an attempt to figure out how much the president of the University of Maine makes.

Sarah Brown And when we asked him about it, he was really weird. He was like, oh funny, this same Chronicle intern called me up too and asked about this job. And I called Maine and I told them about that call. And then we checked with the University of Maine. They were like, nope, he has definitely not called us. It was really weird.

Jack Stripling Oh, my God. Okay. So who won? I mean, I think I win.

Andy Thomason I feel great about my list. First of all, it has the most important scandal of all time on it, which is criminally under-known the UNC scandal.

Jack Stripling Mine is not criminally underknown. I mean, you got Varsity Blues. There’s a Netflix movie. I mean, this is how big this thing was. Yes, and there’s a book by Melissa Korn.

Andy Thomason Yes, and there’s a book by Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz.

Sarah Brown But let me tell you all why my team is going to destroy all of you.

Jack Stripling OK.

Sarah Brown You will notice that on my list are a bunch of universities that the average person has not heard of. Mount St. Mary’s University, UW-La Crosse, Bluefield State University. These are not institutions that anybody has heard of. Mine is the Cinderella squad that is going to destroy all of you once we get to the Final Four.

Jack Stripling I’m sure all these universities are enormously grateful that you have explained to the larger public why they should be known. This is really an act of service on your part.

Andy Thomason I like your squad. I like your squad, but it’s the 16-seed that’s going to fall under the boot of either my or Jack’s team, sorry.

Sarah Brown If you don’t know my scandals very well, you can’t construct a team to fight me effectively. So that was my entire philosophy.

Jack Stripling The public will decide, there will be a ruling, there will be an airing, you’ll be judged by your colleagues, your interns, and the larger higher education community, I’m sure. What have we learned today, Andy?

Andy Thomason One thing we’ve learned, Jack, is that the world has changed a lot since the year 2000. Some of these scandals, I think, would not, they would not play out the same way today, but they might not even happen at all, which is another reason that we rely on controversy to tell us something about the world today, because the controversies of 2000 are different from the controversies of 2025. And the particular controversies of a day tell us something about the conflicting forces, the tectonic plates shifting beneath our feet, about what matters to us as a society; what matters to colleges. And when colleges don’t live up to their ideals and a controversy erupts as a result of that, it tells us something about what matters to us. And things have changed a lot, so the controversies of today are not gonna look anything like they might’ve looked 25 years ago.

Jack Stripling All right, well guys, we’ve done it. I think we’ve captured the last quarter century of controversy in higher education. I think anyone who looks at this can see the story that Andy’s telling. Thanks for doing this. Really appreciate it.

Andy Thomason Thanks, Jack.

Sarah Brown Thanks, Jack.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.