Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee is the highest-paid college president in the country. He also has one hell of an expense account. Gee has earned $8.6 million in salary since arriving at Ohio State in 2007. In that time he has charged nearly as much, $7.7 million, in expenses. All of them were entirely necessary.

Gee’s bow-tie budget is ample.

Since 2007, Ohio State has spent more than $64,000 on bow ties, bow tie cookies and O-H and bow tie pins for Gee and others to distribute, the newspaper found.

He’s not exactly slumming it in university-provided accommodations.

Gee, divorced from his second wife and widowed from his first, lives alone in the university-owned Pizzuti House in Bexley, a 9,600-square-foot mansion that the university remodeled for $1.3 million and then stocked with $673,000 in artwork, decorations and furnishings. European antiques, Persian rugs and a $532 shower curtain for the guest bath were among the amenities purchased for the house.

Yes, that is a $532 shower curtain for THE GUEST BATHROOM. We’d hate to know how much the master one costs. His lavish tastes did not begin at Ohio State. In fact, he toned things down for the state institution.

At Brown University, where he served as president from 1998 to 2000, he was criticized after the university spent $3 million renovating a home for Gee, including $400,000 that paid for a conservatory that was built in Great Britain and shipped to Providence. At Vanderbilt University, where he served as chancellor from 2000 to 2007, he was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article that documented $6 million in renovations of the president’s residence and a $700,000 annual tab for parties.

[Dayton Daily News]