U.S. Rep. Erik Paulsen confessed to a fondness for water pranks during a recent commencement address at his alma mater, St. Olaf College. That puts a new light on the horizontal geyser that spurted from the wall of his Capitol Hill office soon after the freshman Republican arrived in Washington, D.C. Video after the jump. 

Here’s what happened when Paulsen was a freshman in college:

My freshman year, my friends and I explored the laws of physics with bottles of shampoo and several hundred gallons of water, we turned the south first floor of Hoyme [Hall] into a pretty amazing water slide. I think the rugs on that floor are probably still drying out. In Kildahl [Hall] my junior year, when I was an authority figure as a junior counselor, we decided we needed to expand our cultural horizons. Using plywood and duct tape, we managed to turn the boys’ shower room into a Turkish bath. We actually engineered it so we had three feet of water and that full steambath thing going. Now it was no Rube Goldberg champion, but I have to tell you that we were pretty proud of it. For a dry campus, we sure had a lot of fun with water. 

And here’s what happened when Paulsen was a freshman in Congress:

Finally, here’s the St. Olaf motto that Paulsen told his commencement audience he lives by:

Do, then think, then do some more. 

Postscript: Paulsen has already made several social visits to the White House — a stunning start for a Republican. He told the St. Olaf crowd that he had mentioned the upcoming commencement speech to President Obama, who gave several graduation talks of his own this spring, and got this advice: “Keep it short.”

Paulsen clocked in at about 14 minutes (video, Paulsen starts at 47:30).

SaveWCAL wants the court to return the money to WCAL’s charitable trust, along with the fund’s $3 million endowment and the building the trust constructed on the St. Olaf College campus in Northfield, Minn. The group also wants St. Olaf removed as trustee for liquidating the station’s charitable trust without judicial approval.

In pointing out an error in the original version of this post (see below), a Minnesota Public Radio representative wrote that MPR “is confident that there is no legal reason for a judge to void the sale of WCAL. As for St. Olaf and the sale proceeds, we are not involved in that portion of the hearing.”

CORRECTION: This article, as originally posted on Sept. 25, misattributed a quoted phrase as coming from a June 9 order by Rice County District Court Judge Gerald J. Wolf (pdf). The quoted words were not Judge Wolf’s but instead came from a June 12 letter written by SaveWCAL to the state attorney general. The Minnesota Independent regrets the error.

Further clarification after the jump.

The quoted words did not, however, originate with SaveWCAL. They originated in American Jurisprudence, a legal encyclopedia, as quoted by SaveWCAL in its letter — a letter which in other places also quotes from Judge Wolf’s order.

Here is the sentence from American Jurisprudence as quoted in SaveWCAL’s letter: “Where the trustees of a charitable trust have no power under the trust instrument or under an order of a court of equity to convey such property, a deed made of such property is void and subject to cancellation upon application of proper parties.” (The last 10 words of the sentence are those mistakenly attributed to Judge Wolf’s order regarding MPR and WCAL in the original version of this post.)

As MPR pointed out in its request for a correction to this post (see below, in comments section), Judge Wolf’s June 9 order actually states, in the first sentence of the introduction: “The Court recognizes that the sale of WCAL is neither before the Court at this time nor has it ever been before the court.”

Indeed, Judge Wolf reserved his criticism not for MPR but for St. Olaf and especially the state attorney general’s office. He concluded his order’s introduction with this:

The only watchdog looking out for the interests of the trust in this case was Respondent, the non-profit organization SaveWCAL. SaveWCAL raised the alarm when they first learned of the sale of WCAL by St. Olaf, but neither St. Olaf nor the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office paid any heed to SaveWCAL’s warning.

Now, the Court is faced with a plethora of issues to unravel in the aftermath of St. Olaf’s unapproved sale of WCAL and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office’s breach of its duties in this case.

Here are links to MnIndy’s earlier posts related to the MPR/St. Olaf deal for WCAL/The Current, which themselves contain links to original documents as well as to news coverage elsewhere:

Donors’ group demands AG act to void deal that created MPR’s The Current (June 13, 2008)

Judge finds WCAL-FM, station now ‘The Current,’ was St. Olaf trust (June 11, 2008)

Hatch’s lack of concern for charitable trusts predated WCAL dustup (May 29, 2008)

‘Screwed’ again: Piper Jaffray fined for violating ban after improper T-Paw donations (May 16, 2008)

Kick a Man When He’s Down (For the Count) (July 6, 2007, third item)

Alternating Current? Lawsuit Aims to Void WCAL Sale (June 14, 2007)