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By Vladimir Posted in $90000 | Congress | IN HIS FREEZER!! | William Jefferson — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

In the New Orleans Gambit Weekly, a lengthy cover article on the Jefferson family of New Orleans, who have turned Nursing at the Public Teat into an art form. The story is worth telling and retelling as long as this embarrassment retains his Congressional seat.

The Rise and Fall of Bill Jefferson

Jefferson is scheduled to stand trial in northern Virginia on Jan. 16, despite a slew of pre-trial motions and a mountain of evidence to review before then "172,000 pages and roughly 2,000 secretly recorded conversations" although a last-minute delay is always possible. As the case moves toward a showdown, Jefferson has seen his iron grip on New Orleans politics, which extends back as long as his 17 years in the U.S. House, loosen to the point where his own daughter couldn't even get 30 percent of the vote in a runoff [on Nov. 17] for the state Senate seat that launched his political career in 1979.

No matter what the outcome of his criminal case, Bill Jefferson's political star has fallen.

Much of the article's content has been previously covered in these pages. Below the fold, however, is the story of Andrea Jefferson, the Congressman's wife, and the mess she made at Southern University in New Orleans.

SUNO is part of the Southern University system, the historically black state college system of Louisiana. SUNO's performance is particularly troubling, sporting a six year graduation rate that is in the single digits.

In late 1998, Andrea resigned her position on the Southern Board of Supervisors and early the next year was appointed vice chancellor for academic affairs at Southern University in New Orleans with a $75,000 salary. SUNO had been plagued by financial difficulties under chancellors who got their jobs in what amounted to patronage hires. The chancellor who hired Andrea was later sacked for mismanagement.

'Even though she had a Ph.D., Andrea had barely taught at the college level," says Bill Stewart, a professor of social work at SUNO. 'She had taught in secondary schools. You want someone who has some understanding of what it means to be a faculty member. Would you want your editor being someone who had never worked as a journalist?"

Stewart and some 20 other faculty members protested that the congressman's wife was unqualified. 'Andrea is into delegation, to put it politely," says Stewart. 'She delegates to committees and task forces or just ignores things she didn't want to deal with. The school calendar got screwed up. They had a terrible time dealing with this through the year because it was put together wrong. That's almost impossible to do because you do the same thing year after year."

In 2001, a new SUNO chancellor, Joseph Bouie, who had come from the social work department, ordered Andrea Jefferson's dismissal. She accused him of fiscal mismanagement, sexual harassment of a female colleague, and filed for whistle-blower status to protect her job.

It bothered certain SUNO colleagues that Andrea Jefferson approved New Orleans Police Chief Richard Pennington as an adjunct professor in criminal justice at $18,000 a year. Ad hoc teachers earned $3,000 per course at the time. Pennington taught one course a semester, effectively earning $9,000 per course. Pennington became Bill Jefferson's candidate for mayor in the 2002 election. He lost to Ray Nagin.

In 2003, the Southern board awarded Andrea Jefferson a $50,000 settlement and moved her to a $70,000 job as assistant vice-president for development in the Southern University system. Bouie lost his job as chancellor, with a pay cut from $120,000 to $63,000, his old faculty salary. The board cited financial mismanagement, a continuing crisis he had inherited. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cleared him of sexual harassment. Bouie said he was fired for refusing to 'participate in political nepotism."

'This smells," Lea Polk, a dissenting member of the Southern board, complained at the time. 'It reeks of politics."

[emphasis added]