Illini Trustees To Blame?

Even though University of Illinois administrators were the ones who buckled, a few former presidents and chancellors of the institution say the trustees are ultimately to blame for the culture of clout that developed around the school's admissions process.

"A letter from four former U. of I. leaders to the commission investigating admissions abuses falls just short of calling for the governor to fire the trustees, but says that some of them are more interested in personal gain than the well-being of the university," the Tribune reports.

"It is within the Governor's power to alter the composition of the board," former presidents Stanley Ikenberry and James Stukel and former chancellors Morton Weir and Michael Aiken wrote in a challenge to Gov. Pat Quinn, "[and] appoint a generation of Trustees who will create a new culture of governance."

Downstate congressman Aaron Schock, a Republican, and state Rep. Mike Boland, a Democrat, have called on the eight trustees who participated in the clout system to resign.

University administrators are not being let off the hook, though.

While chancellor Richard Herman, who has been at the center of the scandal, insisted last week that clout admissions have existed for decades, his predecessors say they never would have participated in such shenanigans.

"I would have objected strongly and hoped that would be enough," former chancellor Morton Weir told the Tribune. Weir, who said he was never pressured to admit a student, is now a trustee of Knox College. "If they said, 'Admit or else,' I would have taken 'or else.' I wouldn't have stood for it."

Likewise, "Ikenberry said 'none of us can remember an instance' in which they pressured an admissions officer to change a decision," the Tribune reports.

So it turns out that not everyone does it - even at the University of Illinois.

Steve Rhodes is the proprietor of The Beachwood Reporter, a Chicago-centric news and culture review.

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