Thread by @JewhadiTM

Prof. Biden and His Ambassadors

The University of Pennsylvania paid the future president more than $900,000. wsj.com/articles/prof-…

Pres­i­dents of­ten re­ward big po­lit­i­cal donors with plum am­bas­sador­ships, but Joe Biden and the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia ap­pear to have come up with an in­no­va­tion on the prac­tice.

Amy Gut­mann, Penn’s pres­i­dent, awaits Sen­ate con­fir­ma­tion as U.S. en­voy to Ger­many, and David L. Co­hen, un­til July chair­man of the uni­ver­si-ty’s Board of Trustees, as am­bassador to Canada.

Ms. Gut­mann isn’t a donor. Mr. Co­hen and his wife, Rhonda, gave more than half a mil­lion dol­lars to De­mo­c­ra­tic cam­paigns and po­lit­i­cal or­ga­ni­za­tions be­tween 2017 and 2020, ac­cord­ing to Open Secrets.

That in­cludes the max­i­mum $11,200 to the Biden cam­paign and $50,000 to the Biden Vic­tory Fund, ac­cord­ing to the Fed­eral Elec­tion Com­mis­sion data­base. (Mr. Co­hen also do­nated a smaller amount to Re­pub­li­can can­di­dates and or­ga­ni­za­tions.)

Here’s the in­no­va­tion: Af­ter Mr. Biden left the vice pres­i­dency in 2017, Penn cre­ated the Biden Cen­ter for Diplo­macy and Global En­gage­ment and ap­pointed Mr. Biden to the be­spoke po­si­tion of Ben­jamin Frank­lin Pres­i­den­tial Prac­tice Pro­fes­sor.

Mr. Biden was paid per­son­ally for this job—$371,159 in 2017 and $540,484 in 2018 and early 2019 be­fore launch­ing his cam­paign.

The Phil­adelphia In­quirer re­ported on the arrange­ment in July 2019.

The pa­per noted that the av­er­age salary for a Penn pro­fes­sor was $217,411 in 2017-18 and de­scribed Mr. Biden’s po­si­tion as “a vaguely de­fined role that in­volved no reg­u­lar classes and around a dozen pub­lic ap­pear­ances on cam­pus, mostly in big, tick­eted events.”

It added that ac­cord­ing to “higher-ed­u­ca­tion ex­perts,” the uni­ver­sity “was likely pay­ing for . . . the pres­tige of as­so­ci­at­ing with a for­mer vice pres­i­dent and sen­a­tor who had bur­nished his rep­u­ta­tion as a global fig­ure.”