Glasser calls Romero a compulsive liar:

Romero didn’t mention the scandal to Glasser until August. To prepare for his next round of grilling by the board, he took the train to Glasser’s summer home in Connecticut. Glasser says they strolled the beach at sunset as Romero laid out the narrative of events. Glasser had heard some of it already. Delince, after sending her memo, called him to ask if she had any obligation to tell board members herself, and he told her no. But one part of Romero’s chronology diverged from the history as Glasser understood it. He told Glasser that Delince wrote her memo because he asked her to.

“I remember stepping on a clump of sand, trying not to stumble in astonishment, because I realized in that moment that he’s lying to me,” says Glasser, gripping a hand to his chest, Redd Foxx style. “He lied when it wasn’t even necessary. He lied the way you breathe, which is to say, unconsciously, and without being aware of it. I just remember being shocked. Here was my guy!”

He later added, “It was a shocking, pivotal point in my view of him. But if that had been the last thing he did, I would have brushed it off as something he was embarrassed about. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. I began to see that incident on the beach as a characterological pattern and not an aberration.”

Soon, another scandal of sorts arrived, from even further afield. A May 2004 article in The Wall Street Journal reported on a protest by nine elite universities against the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, which had inserted vague anti-terrorism language in grant contracts. To accept the funds, read the Ford contract, a recipient must abstain from anything that might be construed as promoting “violence, terrorism, bigotry, or the destruction of any state,” measures the universities considered overbroad and potentially censorious. Defending Ford in the article was an ACLU spokesperson who said that free-speech rights weren’t at risk because Ford was a private foundation and not a government office. The ACLU had accepted $136,000 from Ford under these conditions. “When I read that, I was appalled,” Kaminer remembers. “Of course there are free-speech issues—this specifically says what you can’t advocate.”