From The Dispatch:

E. Gordon Gee will be the next president of Ohio State University.

Sources say Gee has agreed to return as Ohio State’s president and informed the Vanderbilt University board of trustees of his decision this morning.

The Ohio State board is expected to vote on the choice on Thursday.

Gee, 63, has been chancellor of Vanderbilt since 2000 and was Ohio State’s president from 1990 through ‘97.

Ohio State’s board of trustees have been trying to lure him back for months.

Dan Williamson of The Other Paper thinks it is entirely possible for Gee to run against Gov. Strickland in 2010. Dan noted that Celeste and Riffe wanted him to run in 1998 against Boob Taft, but couldn’t because Gee isn’t a Democrat.

I hope Gee can make bow-ties popular in Ohio, and I’m sure that The Dispatch’s John Wolfe is thrilled about Gee’s return.

OSU could use some major reforms, and here is my list of my cost-saving suggestions for them, in no particular order:

* privatize the campus dorms

* get rid of the campus employee unions

* lease out the space used be food services to private companies which would prepare and sell food

* eliminate the prevailing wage requirements, which almost always guarantee that OSU will grossly overpay for all of their non-stop construction projects. (There are examples of OSU telling construction firms to increase their low bid by more than 9% before they could accept the contract, because of prevailing wage requirements. And 9 or 10 percent of hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts is not chump change.)

* And I know grad students at OSU are organizing and trying to unionize- So if they wanted to be treated like employees instead of students, OSU should treat them as such… and fire them all.

* In in the overall scheme of things, it wouldn’t save much money- But I remember how OSU was less than frugal with giving money to any student organization. And groups would sprout up- such Students for Planned Parenthood, Student ACLU, Students Against Chief Wahoo (seriously, that exists)- And OSU would gladly give them thousands of dollars to use in anyway they saw fit, as long as they weren’t buying alcohol with it. I know of more than five clubs- such as the Students for Pizza club- which were formed simply to get thousands of dollars from OSU to buy pizza. When I was a student there, I even filled out paperwork for the Burt Reynolds fan club and found a faculty sponsor for the club just to prove a point- and I later wrote a column about how easy it was for students to form clubs and almost instantly receive checks for thousands of dollars to waste.

And if Gee is something of a Republican or a traditionalist, I wonder what he thinks about David Horowitz’s proposed Academic Bill of Rights? College campuses are very concerned about every form of diversity EXCEPT the diversity of thought, and its time for that to change.

Anyway, I am curious to see what Gee will do at OSU. But I always remember to expect very little from bureaucrats.