The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Another Reminder That the Academic Elite Are Your Moral Superiors

Posted on | May 28, 2011 | 44 Comments

Michael Schultz is associate vice president for development and alumni affairs at the University of Vermont, and wrote his 2009 Ph.D. thesis on a very interesting subject: “Elucidating the Role of the Presidential Spouse in Development and Alumni Relations.”

The role of the university president’s spouse in alumni relations is a subject Schultz knows intimately, as it turns out that he spent several years (allegedly) boinking Rachel Kahn-Fogel, the wife of University of Vermont president Daniel Fogel. The president’s wife worked as a volunteer events planner for the university’s development office, where Schultz also worked.

Schultz, whose salary is more than $150,000 a year, has denied boinking the university president’s wife. He made those denials during divorce proceedings after Schultz’s wife, Pauline Manning found a packet of letters addressed to Schultz in care of a post office box that she didn’t know her husband had. Schultz admitted that he took out the P.O. box specifically so that he could receive love letters from Kahn-Fogel.

In the letters, Kahn-Fogel addressed Schultz as “my darling” and expressed such sentiments as, “I love you so, so much. I’m yours. . . . I’m feeling all of you with all of me right now. Kiss me, my sweetheart . . . Taste me, take me, make love with me forever.”

Kahn-Fogel also sent Schultz long e-mails, including one in which she described a November 2004 romantic dinner followed by hugs and kissed. However, Schultz insisted under oath:  “I was very clear . . . no sexual, no anything . . . was going to happen here.”

His wife evidently did not believe Schultz’s sworn denial of having boinked Kahn-Fogel, whose husband the university president declared in an official statement: “Rachel has asked me to let it be known that she has long been in treatment for serious mental health issues with which she has struggled throughout her life.”

So Kahn-Fogel has always been crazy, according to her husband, and maybe these letters to Schultz were all some kind of crazy fantasy, symptoms of her persistent derangement. Perhaps no actual boinking occurred. Yet Kahn-Fogel’s letters were enough to cause Schultz’s wife to file for divorce after she found the letters in March 2010.

It is perhaps worth noting that both the university president and his crazy love-letter-writing wife are second-generation academics. President Fogel’s father was an English professor at Cornell University, where Kahn-Fogel’s father was an economics professor, and the couple first dated while in high school in Ithaca, N.Y.

Whether Rachel Kahn-Fogel was crazy or adulterous, whether Daniel Fogel was cuckolded by Michael Schultz or not, is incidental to the larger point. These people are all part of the academic elite, which makes them better than you, because you’ve never gotten a Ph.D. or written a dissertation on “Elucidating the Role of the Presidential Spouse in Development and Alumni Relations.” And you don’t have a taxpayer-funded salary of more than $150,000.

SOURCES:

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


Category: Education, Intellectuals, Scandal, Sex, Vermont

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