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!


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Category: Education, Intellectuals, Scandal, Sex, Vermont

Comments

  • Joe

    I assume “boinking” is a term of art. 

  • http://twitter.com/DaTechGuyblog Peter Ingemi

    What is it with people named Kahn?

  • http://www.redstateeclectic.typepad.com AngelaTC

    I’m somewhat baffled about why this is receiving the attention that it is.   A bunch of pompous self important twits boinking each other hardly seems newsworthy.

  • Anonymous

    If you’ve ever seen Throw Mama From the Train, you remember the student in Billy Crystal’s creative writing class who wanted to do a coffee-table book called, Women I’d Like to Boink.

  • Anonymous

    Only if their surnames are hyphenated.

  • Anonymous

    Who does he think he is, a retro 1980s Don Johnson?  I know he’s only making $150K, but I’m optimistic that he’ll soon save up enough to buy himself a razor.

  • http://twitter.com/PracticalState Practical State

    My Run in with the academic Elites…

    http://wp.me/p1xg68-1RH

    Cheers

  • Anonymous

    So Genghis Khan is still acceptable as a role model.
    “If my body dies, let my body die, but do not let my country die.”
    Not one of his most famous quotes. Good ole Genghis like Vlad III is a most unfairly maligned individual.

  • Brett

    The nation has no problems that could not be solved by withholding from progressives the public trough.

  • Bruce

    Now why can’t Philip Roth write hliarious spoofs like this? 

  • Bruce

    Now why can’t Philip Roth write hliarious spoofs like this? 

  • Bruce

    Fell free to use ‘hliarious’. It just stumbled off my keyboard but I left it in. 

  • JeffS

    People named Khan can be annoying, can’t they?

  • Nospam

    Also, the great postpunk heavy-meadow band Billy and the Boinkers.

  • Anonymous

    “academic elite”

    BWHAHAHAHAHA!

    I had three years of college and met exactly two professors who were even remotely close to “elite”.  Use that kind of ass kissing nonsense to describe them and they’d have flunked your bonehead ass straight out of their courses.

    The rest were purely mediocre intellects.  I wouldn’t have trusted the lot to run a lemonade stand with instructions and adult supervision.

  • Lee Reynolds

    I work with Ph.Ds and I can tell you first hand that there is nothing special about them.  There is no aristocracy in America, whether based upon hereditary title or academic title.  If someone holds themselves forth as superior by virtue of their academic credentials, then they’ve got a serious inferiority complex and I feel sorry for them.

  • Pingback: Teeing it Up: A Round at the LINKs | SENTRY JOURNAL

  • givemeabreak

    Why is no one mentioning that Schultz is gay??? Most of the articles on this subject imply that Kahn-Fogel’s letters were THE reason for the breakup of his marriage—what about the fact that when Schultz’s wife confronted him with the letter, he told her that the truth was that he had been, as you so crudely and rudely put it, “boinking” men for years. Furthermore, Kahn-Fogel was a victim of sexual abuse, and to satirize or downplay the effects of that is low, even for this blog.

  • ThomasD

    So boinking men gearns him a pass for boinking (or playing at boinking) married women?  Or are you saying that he doesn’t boink women because he’s gay?  Anyone verified that with his wife?

    Gay (or not) has nothing to do with it.

  • givemeabreak

    I do not mean to imply it somehow excuses the deception between Schultz and his ex or between the Kahn-Fogels. I am just saying that his homosexuality is part of the story and a major reason for his divorce. So it is only giving a half truth to imply that the letters between Schultz and Kahn-Fogel are the reason his marriage ended.  Granted, this is just a blog (not real news), but most of the papers are giving the story the same slant. I guess you sell more papers by implying that two married people were having sex than by saying that a married, homosexual man and a sexually abused woman with a history of depression were involved in writing love letters that sometimes bordered on indecent. Honestly, I don’t think it is newsworthy at all.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    I hear Ed Schultz is doing a book, now that he’s suspended’ Women I’d Like To Bork.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Conservatives should really embrace Vlad The Impaler.

  • Anonymous

    I’ve always admired Genghis. Based on that quote above I’d have to say he was a Tea Partier. This is not to take anything away from good ole Vlad, who knew how to find “common ground” with his opponents.

  • Anonymous

    I’ve always admired Genghis. Based on that quote above I’d have to say he was a Tea Partier. This is not to take anything away from good ole Vlad, who knew how to find “common ground” with his opponents.

  • Anonymous

    One should never pass up the chance to kick an elitist, of course it’s easier and more fun when they are vulnerable.

  • Anonymous

    One should never pass up the chance to kick an elitist, of course it’s easier and more fun when they are vulnerable.

  • ThomasD

    Well, here’s a clue.  The story is not -about- Schultz’s divorce.  It is about his relationship with the wife of another man, how that relationship ties in to his own doctoral thesis, and the downright sleazy goings on in -what passes for- modern academia . 

    His own The divorce is merely a single element of the larger story.  One of irony, and inconstancy( if not outright infidelity. )

    Nobody gives a rat’s ass about the gender of who he was schtupping (or playing at schtupping) outside of his own marriage.   The genders of the Fogels could be reversed and it would still be a story (assuming the thesis was altered to match those particulars.)

     The point is:  He’ is creep who lives, works (and plays!) among a vast array of creepies.

    Forget the gay angle, it is not germane.

  • ThomasD

    Well, here’s a clue.  The story is not -about- Schultz’s divorce.  It is about his relationship with the wife of another man, how that relationship ties in to his own doctoral thesis, and the downright sleazy goings on in -what passes for- modern academia . 

    His own The divorce is merely a single element of the larger story.  One of irony, and inconstancy( if not outright infidelity. )

    Nobody gives a rat’s ass about the gender of who he was schtupping (or playing at schtupping) outside of his own marriage.   The genders of the Fogels could be reversed and it would still be a story (assuming the thesis was altered to match those particulars.)

     The point is:  He’ is creep who lives, works (and plays!) among a vast array of creepies.

    Forget the gay angle, it is not germane.

  • ThomasD

    Well, here’s a clue.  The story is not -about- Schultz’s divorce.  It is about his relationship with the wife of another man, how that relationship ties in to his own doctoral thesis, and the downright sleazy goings on in -what passes for- modern academia . 

    His own The divorce is merely a single element of the larger story.  One of irony, and inconstancy( if not outright infidelity. )

    Nobody gives a rat’s ass about the gender of who he was schtupping (or playing at schtupping) outside of his own marriage.   The genders of the Fogels could be reversed and it would still be a story (assuming the thesis was altered to match those particulars.)

     The point is:  He’ is creep who lives, works (and plays!) among a vast array of creepies.

    Forget the gay angle, it is not germane.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/QRQMROOGNYBHQE5MCACUEBRBFQ Wretched

    Well, if your only purpose in life is to smear people with whose politics  you disagree, or who occupy a position you wanted but couldn’t attain, anything will do.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/QRQMROOGNYBHQE5MCACUEBRBFQ Wretched

    Well, if your only purpose in life is to smear people with whose politics  you disagree, or who occupy a position you wanted but couldn’t attain, anything will do.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/QRQMROOGNYBHQE5MCACUEBRBFQ Wretched

    Well, if your only purpose in life is to smear people with whose politics  you disagree, or who occupy a position you wanted but couldn’t attain, anything will do.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/QRQMROOGNYBHQE5MCACUEBRBFQ Wretched

    Well, if your only purpose in life is to smear people with whose politics  you disagree, or who occupy a position you wanted but couldn’t attain, anything will do.

  • Nospam

    …with the Liberals palying the part of the Sultan’s men.
    Hell, I’m green with that.

  • Nospam

    Which explains Daily Kos and in fact most of the rest of the Democrats’ worldview…

  • M. Thompson

    Sleeping your way to the top doesn’t work when you’re sleeping with the boss’s wife, not the boss.

  • http://profiles.google.com/prestopundit Greg Ransom

    I studied with a moral philosopher who stole things from his neighbors, faked illnesses to finish work necessary to advance his career, and who betrayed his “best friend” in the department …

  • Grey_whiskers

    Clue me in here.

    How does a University President go along with allowing someone who has love letters from the University President’s wife, and whose own wife is divorcing him, to go from finishing a PhD to becoming a University V.P. in two short years?

    One could almost make this a case of Mr. — err, Dr. — Love-Letter-Holder having some power over the University President.  Could it be that he said, “Let me become academic VP or I’ll publish the proof I’ve been doing your wife?”   But that doesn’t make sense either, since
    a) the letters have already been published, *after* the guy became VP
    b) the University President is throwing his wife under the bus rather than going all Amy Bishop on the VP

    The only other possibility that occurs to *me* is that the University President has another, deeper scandal (say, as a hypothetical, that he likes sheep) and needs his wife as cover for that; and even being thought a loser enough to be either a cuckold or married to a nutcase, is preferable to the *real* truth coming out.

    All merely guesses.  But I know now where I WON’T be allowing my children to go to college…

  • Anonymous

    Would you like to come to my carrel, bouncy, bouncy?  The lonely lives of academics.

  • Anonymous

    It’s a middle-aged guy thing. You use the whiskers to blur softening under the chin. About the time you buy stock in Grecian Formula, start driving a red sports car and date a 25-year-old airhead. Or, if you’re an academic, start an affair with your bosses’ crazy wife.

    It’s all of a piece.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Ol’Vlad was a problem solver and kicked serious Mohammedin arse.

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    Sounds good to me, Nospam.

  • http://twitter.com/RobertTalbert Robert Talbert

    A gentle reminder from a conservative in academia: Beware of over-generalizing. Just because we have one instance of a really egregious moral failing from somebody high up in academia doesn’t mean that “the academic elite” are uniformly morally corrupt. In fact if you look closely you will find a lot of really good people doing really good work in higher education and are earning every bit of their salaries. 

    I know that’s not the narrative, but let’s not paint with too large of a brush. 

  • Aljancan

    “Elucidating” – so that’s what they call “boinking”  in academia!

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