Here comes another president for the University of Connecticut, Thomas Katsouleas, so the university is purchasing another presidential mansion, quite apart from the two mansions already in use — one called Oak Hill on the Storrs campus and another in Hartford, which the president can use if he or she is too tired be driven the 30 miles home to Storrs after a hard day of cocktails with state legislators and other bigshots.

But the $740,000 expense of the new mansion, a 5,000-square-footer on 5 acres near the Storrs campus, is not the most objectionable thing here.

What's most objectionable is that the university is pretending that public money is not being used to buy the property and that Governor Lamont is going along with the pretense.

The university's Board of Trustees sensed that a third presidential mansion might raise questions. So the board proclaimed that no tax dollars or student tuition or fee money would be used. Instead, the board said it would purchase the mansion with "self-generated revenue from its employee housing rental program and real estate holdings," including rental of its telecommunications towers.

Not tax money? But UConn is a public university and every cent it receives and spends is public money, whether it arises from taxes or any other source. Rents earned by UConn don't belong to the Board of Trustees particularly. Those payments are public money too, and of course if the university wasn't spending that $740,000 to buy a third mansion, it could be spent on reducing tuition and fees. Indeed, to buy the new mansion that rental income will be diverted from something else, but the trustees didn't say where.

That is, UConn's explanation for the expense of the new mansion is a sham, a distinction without a difference. It's worse because the governor's office says the trustees cleared their explanation with him. So apparently the governor also believes that the public has no interest in how UConn spends its money.

The new mansion raises other serious concerns. While there's nothing wrong with a university providing housing for its president, what is so compelling about acquiring a third mansion when the new president will receive a salary of $650,000 and great fringe benefits? At that rate of pay he might buy or rent a home and carry mortgage or rent expenses of $100,000 a year and still live regally anywhere near the Storrs campus.

And what has happened to the Oak Hill mansion? Fourteen years ago it was renovated by the university at a cost of more than $1 million. But soon afterward the president at that time moved out of it, saying it had mold problems.

Even so, the university's current president, Susan Herbst, has been living there lately, and now the university says Oak Hill needs another million dollars in repairs.

There is as yet no explanation from the trustees about Oak Hill's repeated deterioration, but maybe they will take care of it with money from the imperial university's slush fund, the UConn Foundation, which paid for the Hartford mansion a few years ago, and congratulate themselves again for not spending public money.

"Change starts now," the governor said in a campaign commercial last year. But endorsing UConn's third presidential palace and the sham explanation for it, the governor is continuing the policy of his predecessor, Dannel P. Malloy, who for eight years let the university get away with anything. Maybe that's what qualified Malloy for appointment a few weeks ago as chancellor of the University of Maine.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.