Barrows Gets More Taxpayer Cash

This is the kind of stuff that makes my head explode. 

The University of Wisconsin System has agreed to pay $135,000 and withdraw a critical letter to settle a long-running dispute with a former top administrator.

In return, Paul Barrows, who was a vice-chancellor at UW-Madison, will drop all pending claims against the university.

[...]

Chancellor John Wiley removed Barrows in November 2004 from his job as vice chancellor of student affairs and let him take a seven-month leave, collecting his $191,000 annual salary while looking for another job.

That action came after Wiley learned of a consensual relationship between Barrows and a female graduate student.

Later, however, allegations arose that Barrows had harassed two women on campus. He was moved to a $150,000-a-year consultant’s job, then demoted within a few days to a campus job paying about $73,000 a year.

Investigations led the Board of Regents to tighten rules on sick leave and policies on back-up jobs, a once-common benefit providing lesser jobs for administrators who resigned or were fired.

In April 2006, the case landed in front of an academic staff appeals committee, which held its two-day hearing in public at Barrows’ request. It concluded unanimously that the university failed to prove Barrows harassed women.

That committee also recommended that a reprimand letter be expunged from Barrows’ file. In response, Provost Patrick Farrell substituted a non-disciplinary “letter of counsel’’ warning Barrows to be aware of how his behavior affects others.

That letter will be removed from his file as part of the settlement announced Friday.

He had a backup job provided by the taxpayers, received tens of thousands of dollars while he looked for another job, and now the taxpayers have to pay him another $135k.  The bureaucratic rules that make this crap possible are one of the reasons that our government costs too dang much.