Readers of this blog should not be surprised that college administrators often get caught with their hands in the cookie jar. After all, their quarter-million-dollar salaries and free housing makes it hard for them to make ends meet. Besides they can always just jack up the tuition price whenever they need some extra cash.
But Karen Pletz seems to be in a category all her own.
The former president of the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, who was fired last year under mysterious circumstances, is now being sued by the college for fraud and making millions of dollars worth of false claims on her expense account.
The college is asking Pletz to return millions of dollars of fraudulent claims, many for meals with people that she never shared with anyone. This includes $10 lunches at McDonalds all the way up to expensive eateries. About 70 percent of her claims over the past decade were found to be fraudulent.
You can read the full story in the Kansas City Star.
The reason this happens over and over again is that too many people think college administrators are essentially altruistic individuals who put their personal integrity above personal gain. Unfortunately as colleges turned themselves into businesses, the CEOs transformed themselves into Gordon Gekko. "Greed is Good" is the new college motto.
Unfortunately, no one is keeping an eye on these crooks and they get away with robbing the store year after year. States need to step in and audit the books of colleges and their administrators. But part of the blame also goes to the members of the press, who seem to have taken higher education off their lists of things to check. Instead of "keeping them honest" as Anderson Cooper likes to say, newspapers have declined to do even the most basic reporting about how much college administrators get paid and how the numbers of administrative jobs skyrocket each year.
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