Wrong Number

In ten years as president of American University, Richard Berendzen won acclaim for transforming the sleepy campus in Washington into a “Harvard on the Potomac.” Under his leadership, the average of Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of entering freshmen rose 200 points, and millions of dollars were donated by prominent new contributors that included Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. Berendzen’s name is back in the headlines, but for a shocking reason. He abruptly resigned from his post April 10, explaining that he was suffering from exhaustion. Law-enforcement officials confirmed last week that Berendzen had been identified as the man who made a string of obscene phone calls to a woman in suburban Virginia.

The revelation stunned A.U.’s faculty and 11,600 students. Berendzen, a 51- year-old Harvard-trained astronomer, had earned a reputation as an effective albeit self-promoting administrator with a gift for fund raising. In 1984, for example, he persuaded Khashoggi to donate $5 million toward a sports center and convocation hall.

According to law-enforcement authorities in Fairfax County, Va., a 33-year- old woman who had placed ads in a local newspaper offering to care for ! children complained that a man had responded with an obscene phone call. Police used a “trap” on the woman’s telephone to record other conversations. Ultimately the calls were traced to Berendzen’s private line at A.U.

The woman says that in 30 to 40 subsequent calls, the man not only discussed “in gross, graphic detail” having sex with children but also “offered children to me and my husband as sex slaves.” In the last conversation, an angry complaint replaced lewd proposals. The victim says the caller carped that “my whole life has just been destroyed, and you’re the one who did it.”

Berendzen has not been arrested or charged with any crime. Since his resignation, he has been undergoing treatment for an undisclosed illness at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Md., site of the well- known Sexual Disorders Clinic. In a written statement read late Thursday by his lawyer Gerard Treanor, Berendzen said, “I cannot begin to convey my embarrassment, or my torment.”