I don’t know what to think about this story from today’s Des Moines Register:

Regent Michael Gartner of Des Moines proposed studying the potential sale of the U of I’s “Mural” as a way to pay for $16 million in damage from June’s record floodwaters that entrenched the arts campus next to the Iowa River. The entire campus has an estimated $232 million in flood damage.

The Iowa Board of Regents decided at its meeting Thursday to research how much the 8-by-20-foot abstract painting would fetch if sold to a museum.

The piece is a prized painting for the university’s museum, acquired nearly 60 years ago when it was not nearly worth its estimated $100 million in value today. The idea of selling it brought strong sentiments from the U of I president, the art community and a state leader about the value of art and why it matters for universities to hold onto such treasures.

Iowa Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, who heads the Rebuild Iowa Office to recover from the flood, said there are options for paying for recovery besides selling artwork.

“I think selling off our assets that we probably could never purchase again would not be something I would like to see happen,” Judge said Thursday. “I would like to think we would rebuild that art center, that that painting along with the other great paintings will be hanging there for my grandkids to see, just like I did and just like my children did.”

The rest of the article goes through a lot of the pros and cons of selling this painting. My instinctive reaction is that it would be wrong to get rid of this irreplaceable piece.

On the other hand, the flood damage to the University of Iowa campus and the arts area in particular was so extensive that maybe this sale is justified. I don’t know how much of the reconstruction will be covered by insurance.

What do you think?

I have to believe that a few people at the University of Iowa will lose their jobs when the St. Louis law firm hired to examine the university’s handling of an alleged sexual assault turns in its report:

The Iowa Board of Regents hired the firm Monday to assure Iowans of an independent investigation after it was revealed the U of I failed to turn over key documents in a previous probe conducted by the regents.

[…]

Two former U of I football players have been charged with sexually assaulting a former female student-athlete in an unoccupied room in Hillcrest Residence Hall. Abe Satterfield and Cedric Everson, both 19, have pleaded not guilty of second-degree sex abuse. Satterfield has also pleaded not guilty of third-degree sex abuse. Both are scheduled for trial Nov. 3 in Johnson County.

[…]

The jumping-off point for the investigation will be two letters written by the alleged victim’s mother that criticized the U of I’s handling of the complaint, Mersman said. The mother alleges that the athletic department tried to keep the report in-house and that university officials did not support the alleged victim.

The revelation this month that the U of I did not disclose these letters during a previous regents investigation of the incident led to the new probe.

[…]

U of I President Sally Mason apologized and said the letters weren’t turned over because of an incorrect interpretation of a federal student privacy law. The firm will also review how state and federal laws may have played into the handling of the case, Mersman said.

The University’s president, Sally Mason, doesn’t need any extra headaches this summer, when flooding caused unprecedented devastation on campus. At least 20 major buildings connected to the university were damaged.

But if alleged crimes committed by athletes are not thoroughly investigated and prosecuted, there will be long-term damage to the university’s reputation.

Rekha Basu’s recent column about this incident goes over some of the more outrageous facts already known about this case, such as:

The mother wrote that her daughter reported the rape allegation within three days to university officials, but they told her she’d get quicker action if she didn’t make a formal complaint.

Not only did that not happen, but she was harassed, followed, and taunted every day by athletes, including the two accused men, Cedric Everson and Abe Satterfield, according to her mother. She even found Everson living three doors down the hall from her. The federal Jeanne Clery Act requires universities to have policies to warn the whole campus about accused rapists.

No one seemed to be leading the probe and no advocate was assigned to her daughter, the mother wrote, leading her daughter to go to police three weeks after the incident. Only after that was evidence collected from dorm rooms.

State Senator Matt McCoy is furious:

It’s baffling that Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness is quick to dismiss the possibility of obstruction-of-justice charges against university officials. As McCoy puts it, “She’s ignoring the fact that there may be criminal liability for covering this up.”

McCoy will meet with his caucus Tuesday, and hopes to send a strong message to Mason and the regents that legislators are not happy. He says they have a role as funders of state universities, who also confirm regents.

The unspoken piece of this is the exalted status the university gives its athletes. “It all comes down to money,” says McCoy. “… A lot of their reputation as a university is built around them.”

On a related note, Marc Hansen raises important questions about the role of alcohol in crimes committed on the U of I campus:

The university police department filed 535 charges against students in 2007. Four hundred sixty-seven — 87 percent — were alcohol- or drug-related.

Let’s break it down: 236 were for public intoxication, 86 were liquor-law violations, 38 were for drunken driving.

When you’re talking about alcohol-related “incidents” on campus, the number topped 1,000 for the fifth year in a row in 2007. While that might not seem like an epidemic at a school with 30,000 students, these are the incidents we know about.

If you look at the 18 football players arrested since April 2007, nine of the 23 charges were directly related to alcohol. How many others were indirectly related?

How many across campus? How many disorderly conducts? How many interferences with official acts, assaults, thefts?

Going by campus police interviews, it now looks as if alcohol played a part in the high-profile alleged sexual assault of a female student last fall.

Alcohol can be involved in sexual assault in many ways, according to a report published by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 2001.

While underage drinking and sexual assault take place on every college campus, the University of Iowa should be taking steps to reduce binge drinking and obviously cannot condone any special treatment for athletes accused of committing crimes.

I shook my head when I read this story in Tuesday’s Register about the fraternity that shut down its U of I chapter because several members were arrested for dealing marijuana:

Four Delta Upsilon members were charged in December with drug violations after police raided the fraternity house and found 650 grams of marijuana, cash, packing materials, scales and drug-deal ledgers, court records state.

Hey, college students: you may think pot should be legal, and I may think pot should be legal, but pot is not legal, and selling pot is definitely not legal. Keeping detailed ledgers of your transactions is not a good idea.

These students who were arrested should know that it could have been worse, however. The year after I graduated from college, two guys who lived in my dorm were arrested for selling drugs to a fellow student who had named them when he got caught with possession. They also had detailed business ledgers on their computers, which the police confiscated.

What they didn’t realize, and probably no one in my dorm realized, was that an elementary school was up the street a few blocks. Most people living in the dorm would never have a reason to walk in that direction, because the rest of campus was the other way. But the state where I went to college had one of those laws doubling prison terms for drug offenses committed within X feet of a school.

The guys were not selling to grade school kids. They were just making some extra cash selling to other college students. But they went away for a long, long time.