Help yourself to the cookie jar while you secretly wish for Negroes to succeed. It's no big deal....

Shumaker's touch
The house that John redid could very well be the biggest mark the ousted president leaves on the University of Tennessee

By INA HUGHS, [email protected]
October 7, 2003

Almost two months after John Shumaker resigned as president of the University of Tennessee, the house that sat in the midst of the controversy was opened for a media tour Monday.

Evident at Sequoyah Place, the 70-year-old Georgian brick home owned by the University of Tennessee in which five of its chancellors and presidents have lived, was Shumaker's stamp. During his 14 months on the job, he authorized about $500,000 to be spent on the house. This was after private donors in 2001 had spent $787,000 refurbishing the house when President J. Wade Gilley was in office.

Shumaker, who stepped down Aug. 8, was given two months to get out. He did so last week.

On Monday, Shumaker's lavish touches were there for the media to see first hand.

The additions included a $7,000 Persian rug that now stretches across the entranceway; a $4,822 gas grill tucked under the back steps leading out onto the patio; a $7,431 entertainment center in the downstairs den; and a 12-by-30 foot sunroom off the master bedroom - an addition Shumaker decided to go ahead and make while workers were enlarging his closet and adding a heating system to warm his clothes.

The sunroom cost $7,175, and its TV-stereo set-up (with a Bose speaker system) added up to more than $5,000. He also spent $1,361 for an invisible fence for dogs that he planned to bring with him from Louisville, Ky., although a state audit doesn't indicate if the dogs ever joined him in Knoxville.

If not the most controversial spending, certainly the one most visible now is the $64,429 that he spent on telecommunications. The telephone equipment installed totaled $30,116.

The house's telephone system included five separate lines, paging, intercom, call holding, cordless, voice mail and a phone in every possible corner, room and hallway. The switch to coordinate it all cost more than $15,000.

A visual count of phones now in the residence added up to 21, including one in the butler's pantry, and, just a few steps away, three more in the kitchen.

"I think the house needed to be upgraded," said Interim President Joe Johnson. "It is good because it has been with us all these years, and it will be with us for many, many more years in the future. It needs to be well maintained and something we can be proud of."

Johnson has never lived in the house, even when he was permanent UT president in the 1990s.

"I just think some of the expenditures for the extra added attractions, two or three entertainment centers and those kinds of things, we could have done without," he said.

Shumaker personally paid for one entertainment system that included a plasma television. He took it with him, university officials said. Remaining are two other $7,000 systems, one of which was improperly purchased with the UT credit cards of two staffers.

There's little in the house to identify it as having anything to do with the University of Tennessee. Paintings in the living areas are Dutch. Lithographs in the den are of oriental architecture. Bird prints and scenes of Venice and the English countryside adorn walls in various rooms.

Other than a 3-inch UT lampshade tucked away in an upstairs bookshelf, and a small 1800s original oil by A.H. Wyant at the foot of the stairway depicting cows in a field (from the veranda, the view across the river is UT Agriculture campus pasturelands), the house seems disconnected to its alma mater.

Mike Sherrell, who oversees the house as administrator of UT's physical plant, said the tennis court is cracking and needs to be resurfaced. Otherwise, "I really don't think there is anything left to change."

The people who actually work for a living will have the last laugh, eh, runny? CQB? Pirkle? AllReich? Oh yeah, to add insult to your injury, your boy Georgie will be kicked out of office in '04...heh heh heh...