Job fair season has come and passing with it is the seasonal array of black suits, lame neckties and freshly bought portfolio folders surely containing resumés and a collection of business cards. In this world big fish eat little fish and little fish eat leftovers. Though students with cloudy futures may fret over their fates, many avenues are available for University alumni to reach lifestyles of luxury and privilege. For those students who do lust for this favorable future, I suggest a plushy, sweet gig – University of Illinois trustee.

According to Sunday’s Champaign News-Gazette, a member of the UI’s Board of Trustees experiences perks that are surely unexpected by the taxpayers who fund them. On the occasion of Chief Illiniwek’s ratified death, March 13, trustees Frances Carroll, James Montgomery, Niranjan Shah and Robert Sperling and traveled in style from Chicago to Champaign via luxury sedans provided by Premier Limo to cover for Chairman Larry Eppley’s violation of the Open Meetings Act.

While this mode of transportation is excessive enough, the four trustees didn’t even have the decency to carpool, hiring four separate private drivers for the haul to Champaign.

The cars, paid on the University’s dime, ran the toll of about $1,000 apiece, perhaps establishing a starting point for University President B. Joseph White’s search for campus waste.

The University also shelled out $3,200 to drive trustees around campus for the March 13 meeting. While it is reasonable for trustees to be reimbursed for travel expenses in their unpaid service to the school, certainly fiscal restraint would be leading by example in the midst of the university system’s budget crisis.

The troubling issue with this mess is that many members of the Board of Trustees have shown a complete lack of leadership and integrity over the past years, drawing criticism from the greater Illini community and rendering the politically appointed trustee position to a joke.

While financial indulgence could be expected of politically appointed cronies, complete abdication of leadership and responsibility has plagued the Board of Trustees, which now appears to be out of touch with the students and faculty whom its decisions influence.

If Chief Illiniwek was a martyr for any cause, it was for exposing the complete cowardly underhandedness of the Board of Trustees, save David Dorris of LeRoy. The Illiniwek decision, announced as authorized via illegal straw poll (later ratified), left no soul in the UI community contented and warranted the Illinois Press Association’s 2007 “Worsty Award.” The “Worsty” is granted annually to the institution that best tramples the state’s Illinois Open Meetings Act.

With “Worsty” worries, luxurious Lincoln town cars and copious criticisms, is it any wonder that the Illinois General Assembly’s House voted 113-1 to change UI trustees back to an elected office? Perhaps the sponsor of the elected trustee bill, State Rep. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, has summed up the scenario best, “Who do these people think they are?”

The University of Illinois Board of Trustees should be a place of leadership, reflective of the high standards of our beloved institution. Unfortunately, given the mishaps of the past few years, not only is the UI paying desperately needed funds to pamper our top decision makers, but the decisions coming back seem to be anything but top notch.

As we travel down our ‘progressive’ road to development, striving to become “the nation’s premier public institution” by accepting fewer students from the state of Illinois, lowering the affordability of tuition, granting get-out-of-jail-free cards to intercollegiate athletes, bowing to the political correctness police and mimicking the prestigious University of Phoenix Online, may we hope and pray for solid leadership from above.

Of course, looking at the current board, we might be in for a long, though thankfully chauffeured, ride.

Editor’s note: Paul Schmitt is the interim president of Students for Chief Illiniwek