If you’re a student at the University of Iowa, this post is about how your new president, J. Bruce Harreld, is costing you money now, and may cost you a lot more in the future. If you find it useful, please share it with your friends on campus. (There are share buttons at the bottom, or you can drop this shortlink: http://goo.gl/RwrSjS.)
As an alum, my interest in Harreld’s election has grown over the past two months, because each time I try to find a silver lining in what is otherwise a colossal cluster, I come up empty. Whatever you’ve heard about your new president, and however you feel about the various frauds that were perpetrated in order to elect him, one thing you probably haven’t heard is that he’s decreasing the value of your education, but that’s objectively true. It may seem incongruous given that Harreld’s claim to fame is saving IBM from bankruptcy, and that his supporters are enthralled by his Harvard MBA, but behind that sales facade is a man who — as of the date of this post — has exactly the same amount of experience in academic administration that you do.
By hiring J. Bruce Harreld against the wishes of the vast majority of faculty and staff, the Board of Regents foisted a president on the university who has, even before taking office, cost you money for two separate but related reasons. We’ll get into those reasons in a moment, but the big-picture takeaway is that unlike everyone else in this debacle, you, the students of the University of Iowa, are paying for this bureaucratic abuse. Everybody else is getting a paycheck and will probably continue to do so no matter how bad things get. You, on the other hand, are paying for the privilege of being an unwitting test subject in an experiment authorized by five corrupt members of the Board of Regents.