Gordon Gee and the Polish joke

YOU WOULD THINK that the highest paid public university president in America would know better than to crack a Polish joke before a live audience. But then, you don't know Gordon Gee, the Ohio State University president who is enriched by about $1.3 million annually to gracefully tend to the campus and not crack Polish jokes.

But as reported by the Associated Press, Gee told a Columbus audience that running a mega-university isn't as easy as you might think, even for a guy with his soaring skills. Let him explain:

"When we had these 18 colleges all kind of floating around [OSU], they were kind of like PT Boats, they were shooting each other. It was kind of like the Polish army or something. I have no idea what it was."

Sensing that he might have stepped into it, Gee breezily blew off his remark, saying: "Oh, never mind, who did I embarrass now....I'll have to raise money for Poland now."

He later apologized (always the escape hatch for an untoward moment). But it might be better if he spent a few minutes considering the cemetery at Monte Cassino, the burial site of more than a thousand Polish troops whose corps had bravely stormed the German army holdouts in the monastery atop Monte Cassino. It tells a different story.