-- University of Illinois trustee Lawrence Eppley, explaining his role in the back-door admissions process for politically connected applicants, in testimony before the Illinois Admissions Review Commission.
"Back then," of course, was before we all learned that the university quietly maintained a separate system for candidates with friends in high places. Hundreds of applications -- marked with a big red stripe -- were routed through the "Category I" track, greased by lawmakers, lobbyists, trustees and others who have no business deciding who gets into the U. of I.
There was nothing benign about it, then or now, and university trustees were among the worst offenders, referring nearly 100 names in the last three years alone. That's why correcting this problem needs to begin with a clean sweep of the board.
First in line is Eppley, ex- Gov. Rod Blagojevich's go-to guy on the board of trustees. Under questioning by the review panel last week, he estimated that he forwarded up to four names a year on behalf of the now-indicted governor and his inner-circle-turned-co-defendants Chris Kelly, Lon Monk and John Harris.
All of the trustees -- except for Edward McMillan, who joined the board in May -- forwarded "inquiries" that ended up in Category I, a Tribune investigation found.
Some of them seemed to regard such interventions as a job perk, sort of like the friends-and-family discount enjoyed by retail employees. One as-yet unidentified trustee twice used his position to make sure a relative got into the classes he wanted, jumping ahead of hundreds of other students.
Board Chairman Niranjan Shah lobbied for nine applicants in the last three years. In a January 2006 e-mail to Chancellor Richard Herman, he inquired about "the son of a key employee of mine. ... I wonder if you might be able to see if anything can be done here." In a 2007 e-mail, he asked Herman to "take a second look" at two applicants who had been denied admission.
Eppley helped reverse the university's rejection of a relative of convicted influence-peddler Antoin "Tony" Rezko. Herman forced the law school to admit a relative of Blagojevich donor Kerry Peck -- over the dean's bitter protest -- because Eppley told him the governor ordered it, according to Herman's testimony to the commission.
Eppley said he can't recall a discussion about the applicant, perhaps because the pertinent e-mail exchange occurred the same weekend the university lost its final appeal in the Chief Illiniwek case. He told the commission he has scant memory of any of the applicants he pushed -- 19 of them in the last three years alone. The sun gets in his eyes a lot, we suppose.
Eppley said he doesn't know how or why the Blagojevich team clouted him into the board chairman's seat -- even though he was the newest member of the board and it was, by long-standing tradition, trustee Kenneth Schmidt's turn -- or why Eppley was still chairman six years later, when the normal term is two.
(At their January meeting, which occurred after Blagojevich was impeached but before he was removed from office, the trustees elected Shah as chairman.)Testifying before the admissions review panel last week, Eppley acknowledged no link between the good things that happened to him during the Blagojevich era and the bad things that were happening in the admissions office. All he was doing was passing on names, he said. It seemed benign back then.
"You didn't see anything wrong with it at the time, before the Tribune told you it was wrong?" commission chair Abner Mikva asked.
Nope.
Apparently, none of the trustees did. They were just passing along "inquiries" or asking for "status reports," they say, completely unaware that their involvement carried any weight. Even now, Schmidt just doesn't get that a trustee shouldn't intervene in his son's law school application.
Pressure is growing from political leaders and respected educators for a sweep of the board. "It is within the Governor's power to alter the composition of the board and ... appoint a generation of Trustees who will create a new culture of governance," former Presidents Stanley Ikenberry and James Stukel and former Chancellors Morton Weir and Michael Aiken wrote in a letter last week to the commission.
The most charitable reading of the situation is that some of the trustees were hopelessly naive, but if Gov. Pat Quinn wants to restore public confidence in the integrity of the state's flagship university, he can't afford to be charitable.
McMillan, the newest member, should get a pass. But the rest of the trustees were either complicit, compliant or clueless. The university needs a fresh start without them.