An unwise appointment introduced an Iago into the museum, who fed information to the press on various deeds and trusts that he knew to be dangerous; Rothenstein had not paid sufficient attention to the terms on which they had been set up and had consequently allowed them to be
maladministered. In demonstrating this and other failings, Clark shows us much else besides--about how the English establishment operates in the face of crisis, as well as the sometimes vituperative nature of the art world.
The money is there, you would say; it is just a question of redirecting it from
maladministered projects and ministerial Mercedes abroad to nice, clean, value-for-money schemes here.
Maladministered and overwhelmed by applications, such ad hoc agencies competed with corrupt private employment enterprises and managed, for the most part, only to secure temporary work, in limited amounts, for the growing army of the unemployed.
In addition, it could plausibly be argued that internal displacement is, in fact, a "symptom of state dysfunction" undermining the claim of full sovereignty over a
maladministered territory and population.
By analogy to civil law structures, it would be something like the distinction between a state superintendent of schools who can establish uniform rules for the administration of schools in his state that apply equally to all schools of the same kind, and who can intervene if a school is being
maladministered, but who does not have the authority to interfere in the day-to-day administrative decisions of the principal and other officials who actually operate schools on a day-to-day basis.
This book is worth reading, not just for the biographies of the commissioners, but to get a taste of how the Indians were administered and
maladministered during their first half century on reserves.
In Syria, for instance, rapid democratization would be counterproductive, increasing divisive competition between groups that the state's corrupted and
maladministered governing structures would find hard to accommodate.
