LeMenager's new post

With last Friday's announcement that Janet Rapelye will serve as Princeton's new dean of admission, positive attention has been focused on the office's future. Over spring break, though, the University quietly closed a more embarrassing chapter in the office's past.

When the University announced Steven LeMenager's reappointment to the office of the vice-president for campus life, we were surprised and confused. In the fall, we were led to believe that LeMenager was to blame for a serious ethical lapse in the admission office over the summer and that he was removed from his position there as punishment.

However, in the University's announcement of the new appointment — posted during break and displayed on the homepage for only a day or two — there is no mention of why LeMenager was removed from the admission office. Rather, there is a bland statement that he "has spent most of his 20 years at Princeton in the admission office" and has most recently "served as senior director of special projects" in the communications office.

Without reading carefully between these lines, it is easy to miss the fact that this LeMenager is the very same who the University faulted for breaching Yale University's admissions website last summer. Perhaps administrators intended it so — it would hardly reflect well on them to admit employing someone whose ethical judgment they deemed questionable only months earlier.

The student body is left confused about what to think, because the University actions regarding LeMenager are so inconsistent as to be indecipherable. There seem to be two possible explanations: Either LeMenager was responsible for one of the most noteworthy University embarrassments in recent memory and should not remain here, or he was simply the chosen scapegoat, and is now being repaid for his discretion, quietly, with a new post.

Either possibility provides the students here with a less-than-savory morality lesson.