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Statehouse Story

By Swordfish - Aug 5th, 2007 at 4:59 pm EDT

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Statehouse Story Summer Storm

The selection of Gordon Gee, before, during, and after, has been a disaster for the people of Ohio and for THE Ohio State University --- in spite of the gushy pr love-fest put on by the shameless establishment in favor of strangely going backwards and picking the elfin guy from the 1990's.

I love Ohio ... but I guess going forward is out of the question --- Leslie Limited wanted his boyfriend back. First, Wexner deftly packs THE OSU Board of Trustees by easily controlling the Legislature with a suprise amendment to add new 6 trustees and also to lift the ban on previous tustees from serving, such as himself. No problem for him.

Then Hapless Karen Holbrook gets paid off with some ridiculously favorable articles in the Dispatch (given she was being canned) and a way overly generous severance payment, just short of hush money some say --- including a secret $250,000 bonus. Obnoxious squared.

The suspicious secrecy led the previously fawning daily paper to issue a mild rebuke to THE guilty guilty guilty Ohio State University for deliberately violating Ohio's Open Meeting Laws with impunity. The "tough on crime" conservative righteous lawmakers are predictably silent because the trustees will rectify this crime problem in their own minds when they act ex post facto in late September since they are all above the law --- unfortunately the money has been already spent. There is no recourse. There is no accountablity, you see because it's THE.

The final frosting cost another $175,000 with a giant wasted payment to a fancy Cleveland head-hunting firm that hardly earned its pay with a lame list of inferior candidates and a silly visit to Gee to be told "No". Later, when the trustees promised Gee Twice as much as the Woman President got, he changed his mind. Because it's THE.

And if I told you the new president actually carries around a real Mini-Gee with him to public events, matching clown-sized bowties and all, and it's not an act, it's his true-life son-in-law, you wouldn't believe me. You certainly wouldn't hire him to head the THE. But Swordfish is merely reporting what he observes. More later.

Reader Comments

Gee Whiz

By Carol Cogitating Aug 5th 2007 at 9:23 pm EDT

Thanks Swordfish for your insight. I thought I was the lone man standing with a look of bewilderment at the Gee parade down High Street. I particularly am disturbed by the amount of money Mr. Gee is being paid and the business as usual on Wexner's, I mean OSU's Board of Trustees. I would not let my children attend OSU if it were the last public university left in Ohio. Somehow I doubt that Gee reprise will change that.

Thank you, Swordfish

By Daily Outrage Aug 5th 2007 at 10:34 pm EDT

Your comments are insightful and well written. THE Ohio State University gets too much slack from the Titans of Ohio. This university has lost its mission as a land grant institution and it has lost its soul.

If Gee spends as lavishly here as he did in his previous haunts, tuition will be affordable by only the Wexners of the world.

Here's my prediction: In the next year (enough time must pass to make it look like happenstance), Wexner will make some obscenely large donation to THE to compensate for all the grief he caused by forcing THE to expand the Board of Trustees, change the law that allowed old Trustees to serve anew and bring back his over-priced pal.

The the Titans will get a warm and fuzzy and think they did the right thing.

You read it here first.

Columbus: (Sacred) Cow Town

By Tangible Results Aug 6th 2007 at 12:01 am EDT

With the return of E. (his "Excellency") Gordon Gee, Columbus demonstrates to those of us who can clearly see through the fog machine of the fast and furious that is Columbus' power structure, that it is still a cow town. But instead of the docile, bovine kind that chew their cud, give milk and mind their business, our cows are sacred. They use chump change to buy back their seats on The's board from their legislative chumps. They knowingly and obsequiously kowtow to the sugar daddy of sugar daddies who runs The's world as deftly and furtively as the Wizard runs Oz. And they chirp on cue with glee that their bow-tied, bespectacled ringmaster has come back to run the circus that is the The.

In the rarefied world of higher education's fast and furious, where fast-talking, squeaky voiced hucksters can feed a steady diet of football and basketball to legions of hungry alumni so He and his pocket-picking cohorts can turn cunning and charisma into cold cash, it should be no surprise that The has so totally morphed from its holistic, land-grant roots into an angling adjunct of corporate America.

Gee, speaking with glee to his adoring fans, warned the world that no pocket book would be safe now that He's back in town. What a difference a week and a million dollars makes.

Karl Marx was wrong on his theory of economics. But he was right in another of his famous conclusions about society. Had he lived in Columbus and seen first hand the dizzying dogma that happens on Saturday in The's Shoe, he would have realized that sports, which today is as powerful as as religion at any time, is as much of an opiate to our time as regular religion was to his.

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