Palladium-Item slams the attorney general on earlham dispute

The Pal-Item reveals today in an editorial that AG Steve Carter went behind Earlham’s back while pretending to negotiate with the college in his recent press release of his plan for Conner Prairie:

Attorney General Steve Carter has been fundamentally dishonest with Earlham College.

The college and Carter’s office were in negotiations trying resolve the dispute over Conner Prairie and its massive endowment when Carter contacted three newspapers and asked them to attend a meeting on Saturday, Jan. 22.

A representative of Carter’s office asked at least the Palladium-Item, if not the other two publications, not to notify Earlham of the meeting. Normally, when journalists are asked to embargo information, they comply unless the information is of a compelling public interest. But we only comply when the source is believed to be trustworthy. So, this newspaper complied with that request. It’s the attorney general after all.

Carter then released his proposal to end the situation, where he called for splitting the $174 million endowment, divvying up the land and appointing a fully independent board to oversee the living history museum.

When our reporter called Earlham to get its reaction to the proposal, public relations officials were dumbfounded — not by the proposal itself, but by the very release of information.

Earlham officials thought they were negotiating in good faith with someone trustworthy.

They were wrong.

A spokeswoman for Carter said the attorney general announced the proposal to let the public know where he stands. But that’s disingenuous at best. He announced his proposal because he wants to one-up the college. He’s not interested in negotiating; he’s waging a public relations battle.

Link.

Earlham was founded by the Quakers in 1847, and has been consistently well operated and managed by these quiet and peace loving people. Eli Lilly was impressed enough with the folks at Earlham to trust them with the Lilly homestead (present location of Conner Prairie) and millions of dollars in Lilly stock.  The fact that the state’s highest law enforcer has chosen to take such an aggressive stance with the college has got to start making more of us (at least in Eastern Indiana) upset.  Here is a link to my coverage of this issue to-date.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2005 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Earlham. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.