A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
03/29/17 — The End of the End for ISU President Steven Leath.
03/19/17 — J. Bruce Harreld Sheds His Skin. Part 1. Part 2.
03/09/17 — Iowa State President Steven Leath and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. Part 1. Part 2.
02/27/17 — Waste and Delay at the Stead Family Children’s Hospital of Iowa.
2/18/17 — Unraveling the Mysteries of the ISU Flight Services Supplemental Cirrus Log.
02/12/17 — In Demonstrating His Superior Judgment J. Bruce Harreld Proves He Is a Fraud. Part 1. Part 2. Updated 02/14/17.
02/10/17 — Regents President Bruce Rastetter will not seek a second-six year term on the board. His current term ends April 30th. Initial reports here, here and here.
02/02/17 — Steven Leath’s Rochester Trip That Violated ISU Travel Policy and State Law. Part 1. Part 2.
01/23/17 — Catching Up on the Last Six Weeks of J. Bruce Harreld’s Lies, With Bonus Steven Leath. Part 1. Part 2.
01/15/17 — Steven and Janet Leath’s $6,800 King Air 350 Round Trip to N.C. on 07/03/14.
01/10/17 — An Apples-to-Apples Comparison of Student Interviews With Sally Mason and Steven Leath. Part 1. Part 2.
12/31/16 — Why the Iowa Board of Regents Cannot Fire ISU President Steven Leath. Part 1. Part 2.
12/24/16 — Why Did Both of Iowa State’s Airplanes Fly to Northeast Illinois on the Same March Dates?
12/22/16 — The Problem with Using ISU Pilot Joe Crandall to Justify the Cirrus Round Trip on 03/12/16.
12/20/16 — ISU Flight Services Billed $3K in Per-Mile Charges for Leath and Wife on Empty Plane.
12/17/16 — The Regents Audit Did Not Exonerate ISU President Steven Leath of Criminal Acts. Updated 12/17/16. Updated 12/18/16 [1]. Updated 12/18/16 [2].
12/15/16 — Bleeding Heartland posted a tour de force on the failings of the regents audit, and why law enforcement must investigate Steven Leath.
12/10/16 — Say It Ain’t So, Joe: The 2016 UNI Presidential Search in Context.
12/01/16 — Engines of Anxiety and J. Bruce Harreld: A Book Review in Context.
11/20/16 — The Missing Piece of Iowa’s Tuition and Student Debt Conversation.
11/13/16 — There is No Iowa Board of Regents.
Having veered uncomfortably close to respectability in several recent information-intensive posts, it is once again time to careen back into the ditch and go meta. Not surprisingly — and certainly not coincidentally — the impetus for this dotty act is the continuing desire to comprehend the insanity emanating from the Iowa Board of Regents. (Insanity which is not wholly separate from the corruption percolating within.)
A little over three and a half weeks ago, on the second day of the regents’ two-day meetings on the campus at the University of Northern Iowa, Regents President Bruce Rastetter came down hard on Iowa State President Steven Leath for his use and abuse of ISU’s two aircraft. Were you, the knowledgeable Ditchwalk reader, not well-informed about the crony corruption, ethical hypocrisy and administrative exploitation that is the perpetual work product of the current board leadership, Rastetter’s berating of Leath might well have seemed sincere. However, anyone with a passing awareness of recent events at the board immediately knew that Rastetter’s rage was a pretense designed to preserve credibility, while also preventing tough questions from being asked.
As reported by the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 10/20/16:
Stern words, obviously, but what did they actually mean? Was Rastetter truly “extremely disappointed” in Leath? Was Rastetter shocked — shocked! — to learn that Leath was running amok with $4M in state property? Does the board itself — which derives much of its own budget from appropriations to the universities — “take the use of university resources very seriously”? That would be no, no, and a very big no.
The story of Leath’s airplane accident in July of 2015 broke on 09/23/16, as reported by Associated Press reporter Ryan Foley. The regents meeting in question took place on 10/20/16, meaning almost a month later, during which time disclosures about Leath’s flying habits ran rampant. As to how concerned Rastetter initially was with Leath’s use and abuse of state property, we have that from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 10/18/16:
So three weeks before Rastetter said he was “extremely disappointed” in Leath, and following a full week in which published reports about Leath’s use of ISU Flight Services gathered steam in the media — to say nothing of any back-channel conversations which took place between Rastetter and Leath — the primary concern of the president of the Iowa Board of Regents was not Leath’s actual conduct, but launching a public relations counter-offensive to blunt the effect that reports about Leath’s conduct were having on the public consciousness. And yet, at the regents’ meetings at UNI only three short weeks later, what the public got was not behind-the-scenes Machiavellian Rastetter, but pretending-to-be-suitably-outraged Rastetter. So what gives?
As noted by a number of observers and reporters, Rastetter’s public rebuke of Leath was indeed uncommon, but only to the extent that his fake rage was directed at Leath, who has always been Rastetter’s pet. In years past, Rastetter and President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland, serving as Rastetter’s pitbull, showed no reluctance (and more than a little glee) in genuinely ripping Iowa President Sally Mason for considerably less administrative or ethical failings. In fact, Rastetter even has a habit of making fun of other regents, including particularly Regent Subhash Sahai, whom Rastetter, Mullholland, and three other board members deceived about the secret and potentially illegal regent meetings which Rastetter arranged for J. Bruce Harreld on 07/30/15. (It is telling that even in that instance, Rastetter’s response to Sahai’s legitimate outrage was to massage the press coverage by purporting to speak to a reporter on Sahai’s behalf.)
So was Regents President Rottweiler really “extremely disappointed” in Iowa State President Leath? No. What Rastetter was “extremely disappointed” in was all of the journalistic sewage that Leath spattered on Rastetter’s shiny imperial shoes. Because if there’s one thing Bruce Rastetter likes more than anything, it’s fastidiously clean and meticulously neat board meetings, yet here one of his favorite crony pals — a man Rastetter had personally fronted $1.15M to in the past year, so Leath could buy land that he could not otherwise afford — was making a public mockery of Rastetter’s private mockery of the board.
Having put up with close to a month of damaging revelations in the press, and particularly after failing to put a lid on the story, by the time the board meetings actually rolled around Rastetter had to say something . And it’s a good thing he did say something, because if he had not hogged the spotlight himself, Regent Sahai may very well have made headlines by taking Leath to task. Although as it turns out, by that time both Rastetter and the board’s Executive Director slash Chief Executive Officer slash Loyal Tool Bob Donley had already spent weeks heading Sahai off at the pass, while doing nothing to get to the truth about Leath’s flyboy excesses at ISU.
From Miller’s report on 10/18/16:
So how many of those questions were actually addressed at the board meeting? None of those questions were addressed at the board meeting, because Bruce Rastetter replaced any substantive inquiry with a fake fit, then threw the whole mess at the board’s internal auditor so he (Rastetter) could claim that the board was investigating. (That’s as opposed to, you know, asking the dude with the airplane fetish, who was sitting right in front of him, actual questions.)
Did Bruce Rastetter order Steven Leath to turn over his log book? No. Did Bruce Rastetter order Iowa State to make the ISU staff pilots available to the press? No. What Bruce Rastetter, president of the Iowa Board of Regents, did instead, was make fart noises with his armpit in order to give both Leath and himself cover until they can figure out how to wriggle free from the damning facts already in evidence.
That’s the way the Iowa Board of Regents functions under Boss Rastetter. There is no duty to anyone or anything except Rastetter’s rule, and no, I’m not kidding, In fact, as we’ll see in a moment, there is no Iowa Board of Regents, there is only Bruce Rastetter and the flunkies he’s assembled to do his bureaucratic bidding. That Rastetter actually came right out at the board meeting and said as much — to the press — should have been big news in itself, but the bigger news was that nobody cared.
It’s Not Just Boss Rastetter
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if we could just get someone with a really long shepherd’s crook to yank Rastetter off the governmental stage, everything would be right with the board of regents. Unfortunately, no. While Bruce Rastetter is admittedly the crony ringleader, he has a number of willing crony accomplices on the board — four of whom showed no reluctance to meeting in secret with J. Bruce Harreld on July 30th, 2015, at Rastetter’s private place of business in Ames. Not only were those meetings blatantly unethical and potentially illegal, and not only did those same four regents fail to meet with any other undeclared or declared candidates during the search, but along with Rastetter none of those regents felt compelled to tell all of the other regents about those meetings prior to the final vote on the next president at the University of Iowa.
As to any substantive fallout following public disclosure of those unethical and potentially illegal meetings, all you need to know is that one of the regents who eagerly attended — President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland — is currently co-chair of the UNI presidential search committee. Prior to Harreld’s fraudulent hire, Rastetter had also given Mulholland the role of head ankle biter of former Iowa President Sally Mason, and Mulholland pursued her charge with gusto. Because of Mulholland’s willingness to deceive other board members during the Harreld hire, and the key role she played in betraying shared governance during the search, Mulholland also bears responsibility for the subsequent sanction of Iowa by the AAUP. Since that time, however, other than pretending to champion a fair search process at UNI, she has largely kept her head down over the past year, and certainly had absolutely nothing to say about ISU President Leath — including the fact that his abuses of power far outweigh any of the issues she took Mason to task for in the most public of ways.
One of Rastetter’s minions on the board who hasn’t been shy about shooting his mouth off is resident buffoon Larry McKibben, who — as an attorney no less — not only routinely lies to the public about action taken by the board, but believes he has the amazing legal capacity to exonerate anyone of any allegations based on absolutely no facts whatsoever. For example, after the Rastetter-Leath land deal was revealed in the press, McKibben simply announced that it was all on the up-and-up, despite not having been privy to the deal itself. As it turns out, however, after Boss Rastetter gave the press, the people of Iowa and the other members of the board clear assurances — through the president of his company, which brokered the deal — that he was not involved in the transaction, only a little over a month ago ISU President Steven Leath revealed that Rastetter was lying about that to everyone — meaning including McKibben.
Did Regent McKibben take offense at that revelation? Heck no! What kind of crony stooge would Larry McKibben be if he let a little deception among cronies get in the way of being a crony? Instead, Larry McKibben stayed mute on Rastetter’s clear abuse of power with regard to the land deal, while at the same time following Rastetter’s lead when Leath’s flying circus exploded all over the reportorial landscape. Like a good little McKibben, he did his darnedest to pooh-pooh the story and exonerate Leath without any investigation whatsoever. (It’s only the press and the public that have to wait for the board audit to be completed — the board itself already knows the outcome.)
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 10/17/16, meaning the Monday prior to the Wednesday-Thursday regent meetings at UNI:
As you can see, Regent McKibben was exceedingly well-versed on the points of pride that everyone at ISU and the board scrambled to identify and articulate, rather than scrambling to identify and articulate the abuses of power that Leath committed with both of Iowa State’s airplanes. Three days later, however, on Thursday, just before Bruce Rastetter said he was “extremely disappointed” in Leath’s wing dinging, Larry McKibben also gave new meaning to the word ‘chutzpah’. From Dean Borg, reporting for the regents’ wholly-owned propaganda ministry, Iowa Public Radio, on 10/20/16:
Consider the ironies. Not only did Leath actually do something very wrong following his accident — meaning not tell anyone at the Iowa Board of Regents until after his new contract was approved — but Larry McKibben was one of the five regents who never told Sahai that he secretly met with Harreld on July 30th, 2015. Both Leath and McKibben lied to Sahai about issues of critical importance regarding the multi-million-dollar contracts of the two siting regents’ presidents, and yet McKibben felt no hypocrisy in admonishing Sahai for using a term that was manifestly apt. Even today, despite the slick and misleading Flight Services FAQ that was posted to purportedly answer questions about Leath’s use of Iowa State aircraft, Leath himself has failed to “come clean” on basic points including everything from the flight hours memorialized in his pilot’s log to the business justification for specific trips.
Now, as easy as it would be to fly off the handle about all of that, as regular readers know we here at Ditchwalk try to maintain a level head at all times. To that end, before leaping to conclusions I took the time to list not only all forms of animal and vegetable life on planet earth, but also forms of life which are theoretically possible but have not yet been discovered. To that I also tasked the crack Ditchwalk staff with adding all fictional creatures as portrayed in fantasy literature, graphic novels and the like, even if they could never actually exist. Finally, from that encyclopedic totality I selected all of the living organisms — real or imagined — which Larry McKibben would, in any conceivable scenario, have the right to admonish:
[THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK]
Did Larry McKibben admonish ISU President Leath for failing to notify the board about his accident prior to the board’s vote on Leath’s fat new contract? No. Did Larry McKibben admonish Rastetter for lying to him (and the people of Iowa) about his land deal with Leath? No. Did Larry McKibben — the leader of the board’s TIER review process, and a constant faux proponent of controlling costs, admonish Leath for the millions of dollars he’s blown on airplanes at Iowa State? No. The only person Larry McKibben admonished was the one regent who actually stands up to crony rule at the board.
Revisiting the Performance Based Funding Play
The idea that Rastetter was ever in the dark about Leath’s use of Iowa State Flight Services is a joke because Rastetter hangars his plane at the same small municipal airport that Iowa State uses. An airport, by the way, which both Leath and Rastetter, through their offices, have been conspiring to upgrade for their own mutual benefit, even as doing so puts the city of Ames at financial risk. Add in the state relations officers that the board imposes on all of the state schools (at least until Rastetter tells them to work somewhere else in his crony empire), and the idea that Steven Leath was doing anything that Rastetter did not know about, if not fully support and abet, is simply not credible.
Compared to the airport scam, however, and the land deal scam, and the scams used to funnel dark money through the ISU Foundation so Leath could buy himself two snazzy new airplanes, the single biggest con put forward by Rastetter and Leath over the past five years — by orders of magnitude — was the performance-based funding plan they threw their shoulders behind in 2014 and early 2015. While there was a slick marketing campaign attached to that effort, it was falsely premised on the idea that the plan somehow put Iowa students first, when it simply redistributed legislative appropriations depending on where Iowa students were enrolled the most.
The reality of the performance-based funding plan was that it monetized a specific class of student precisely because doing so would shift tens of millions of dollars in legislative allocations from the University of Iowa to Iowa State. If in-state students would not have gotten the job done, Rastetter and Leath would have come up with some other metric which accomplished the same goal.
If that sounds crazy to you — and it should — what you’re probably missing is the fact that Bruce Rastetter is a commodities guy. That’s how he made his millions, that’s how he thinks about everything from ethanol to hogs, and that’s how how he governs as president of the Board of Regents. The problem with that cynical mindset, of course, is that students — whether in-state or out-of-state — are human beings, and if you start thinking of them as a commodity play you could put them at risk.
To put it plainly, what these two geniuses did was go long on in-state undergraduate students by stockpiling them at Iowa State, in anticipation of eventual passage of the performance-based funding plan. In 2011, when Leath was hired in the middle of that academic year, total enrollment at ISU was already closing in on 30,000, of which 18,500+ were residents. This year ISU hit 36,000 students, of which 21,000+ were residents.
(Interestingly, although Iowa State sells itself as resident-first, the rate of growth in resident enrollment has actually slowed over the past five years, while total enrollment — meaning also necessarily non-resident enrollment — has accelerated. Not that anyone at ISU would ever cop to that, of course, because it goes against their pro-Iowa messaging. As a related aside, when Rastetter and Leath talk endlessly about Iowa State being more welcoming to in-state students, or about Iowa State having the most resident students on campus of any of the state schools, they are implicitly selling a ‘white heritage’ message despite any belated protestations to the contrary, because everyone knows the vast majority of Iowans — over 90% — are white. So feel free to factor that into your reaction the next time there’s a racist incident at pro-white-heritage Iowa State.)
With their performance-based funding scam, what Rastetter and Leath anticipated was a huge windfall in appropriations which would then allow them to catch up on the facilities, programs, staff and faculty that ISU couldn’t afford to offer as enrollment exploded. Which means that the President of the Iowa Board of Regents and the President of Iowa State University gambled on being able to meet the needs of all of those students — resident and non-resident alike — and they lost.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 10/19/16:
True to Rastetter’s menace, and despite the fact that the performance-based funding plan was specifically designed to cripple the University of Iowa, he twisted UI President Sally Mason’s arm and forced her to sign on to the plan. (Rastetter is an Iowa grad, but not only does his heart belong to Iowa State, he is openly hostile to UI and Iowa City.) As a result, in the past few years Iowa also had a spike in resident enrollment, purely as a defensive play to keep funding from being transferred to ISU — which is of course not the best way to go about managing a university, although it did increase the number of white students on campus. (Iowa’s illegitimate president, J. Bruce Harreld, is also trying — and so far failing — to slow the growth spurred by Rastetter’s plan.)
Now that Rastetter’s political cronies control the entire state political system, might Rastetter dust off the performance-based funding plan? I don’t know if Rastetter has the votes, but that would be a hilarious one-year anniversary present from Rastetter to Harreld, who dodged a big metaphorical bullet when the plan failed early last year. On the other hand, with Harreld having shown no reluctance to screw students with egregious tuition hikes premised on the flimsiest of pretexts, and with having already set his sights on selling off chunks of the school to private industry — much as ISU has been co-opted to its roots by the agricultural corporations — such a legislative threat might actually give Harreld the excuse he needs to kill off Iowa as a Liberal Arts college.
Bruce Rastetter: Boss of Bosses
After Rastetter pretended to be angry at Leath at the last board meeting, and after McKibben upbraided Sahai for demanding that Leath “come clean”, and after the board CEO/XD did everything possible to keep Sahai from asking uncomfortable questions in public, the press coverage of the two-day regent meetings was exactly as Rastetter and Leath hoped. The headlines focused on Rastetter’s apparently stern words to Leath, the reporting focused on the board’s apparently hard-nosed decision to audit all flights at Iowa State since Leath was hired, and almost no attention was paid to the jaw-dropping moment when Rastetter betrayed the sham that is the Board of Regents itself.
Here’s the setup to that moment, from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 10/20/16:
True to form, and as he did almost a year ago to the day when Sahai lambasted the board for the secret meetings Rastetter arranged for J. Bruce Harreld, Rastetter immediately sought out the press after Sahai’s comments and set about reshaping the narrative.
Now, if you’re not up on all things regents, that may not be as shocking to you as it was to me, but allow me to fill in the blanks. There are indeed nine regents, as established by Iowa Code. Those regents are, in fact, co-equal, including the ‘student regent’, who has full voting powers and authority. And yet that is clearly not what what Bruce Rastetter believes.
Instead of acknowledging that the nine board members are indeed the “bosses” of the university presidents in the regents’ system, as was correctly asserted by Sahai, Rastetter revealed the heretofore unknown existence of a system of administration in which each university is given a president and pro tem, who effectively serve as the boss and underboss of that school. And if you think I’m making that up, read Rastetter’s quote again:
Having read everything I can get my hands on about the regents over the past year, I can tell you that I have never run across a list of regents who are serving as unofficial presidents and presidents pro tem of each of the state’s three universities. Which two regents are overseeing, minding — even dictating policy to — which presidents? And if all of that only involves six of the members of the board, what are the other three non-equal members doing with their time? Is the ‘student regent’ one of those who has been marginalized, even though Iowa Code specifically states that the ‘student regent’ is a full regent?
Nowhere in anything I have read over the past year is there any mention of an “assigned” administrative structure superseding the co-equal membership of the nine members of the board. In terms of day-to-day functionality it does make sense that there would be an initial point of contact, but for the most part that would inevitably be the board CEO/XC, or the board COO, of whichever of Rastetter’s staff cronies was on crisis watch that day. But that’s not what Rastetter is talking about — he’s talking about an actual system of administrative which was imposed “over time” by a person or persons unknown.
I cannot find any discussion of this critical change being proposed or taking place. It also seems likely that when Rastetter says “we” he means he, but the real scandal is that this is actually Rastetter’s conception of how the board functions. In his mind there are no co-equal members, as proscribed by law, and as such he had no obligation to transmit information to other members of the board:
Two things here. First, I don’t know if Rastetter misspoke or if his statement was garbled in transcription, but as a factual matter Leath was not “already flying the plane again by that time.” Leath bashed the Cirrus SR22 senseless in Bloomington, IL on 07/14/15. The meeting when Leath’s sweet new five-year contract was unanimously approved occurred on 08/05/15. Not only did it take over two more moths, until early October, to repair the damage to the Cirrus and return the plane to service, but according to the Cirrus flight logs, Leath himself did not fly that plane again until 02/10/16 — almost seven months later.
As to Rastetter’s unilateral decision not to notify other members of the board after Leath finally divulged his “hard landing”, Rastetter’s offhand response once again ignores the truly self-serving timing of Leath’s disclosure. Leath had his accident in the Cirrus three weeks before his new five-year contract was slated to be approved. Instead of “coming clean” to the board Leath kept quiet about the wreck — and indeed tried to hush the accident up by paying off the airport using a personal email account and personal funds. Yet when Rastetter finally found out that Leath hid that information from the board, Rastetter’s response was not that Leath betrayed him or the board, but to keep quiet about it himself.
And of course that’s perfectly in keeping with everything we know about Bruce Rastetter, and how he views the other eight members of the board as subordinates. Only two weeks after Leath’s “hard landing”, Rastetter himself had no problem arranging for the secret meetings between Harreld and four other regents on 07/30/15. Two of the regents who attended weren’t even on the search committee, but Rastetter and his four covert operatives kept those meetings to themselves, leaving at least one and possibly all four of the other regents in the dark.
The only conclusion we can reach from Rastetter’s own conduct and his response to Leath’s belated disclosure is that Bruce Rastetter thinks of himself as the Board of Regents. And yet nowhere in state code will you see that status granted. In fact, here’s what the Iowa Code does say about the powers of the regents’ president:
[THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK]
The only comments about the board president which are written into law refer to procedural issues, not questions of authority, because of course the code is specific — there are nine members, and they are co-equal. Now here’s what the Board of Regents policy manual has to say about the president of the board (p. 1):
Regent Sahai was right, but he didn’t go far enough. Not only did Rastetter not treat Leath’s accident with the seriousness it deserved, but after Leath finally disclosed his accident to Rastetter, the response from the president of the board was to conspire with Leath to keep the accident from the other members. The fact that the accident was not reported in the press until late September of this year, meaning more than a year after the fact, clearly indicates that Rastetter and Leath were largely successful in that regard.
Rastetter’s hypocrisy is also self-evident because on more than one occasion he savaged UI President Mason for less, and on no occasion was Mason ever accused of keeping quiet because “coming clean” might have negatively affected her paycheck. But of course when it comes to Steven Leath, he’s been Rastetter’s go-to toad from day one, so the whole calculus is different. Anything that hurts Leath at ISU hurts Rastetter, so instead of doing the right thing, Rastetter did the Rastetter thing and left the rest of the board in the dark for over a year, until press reports forced his hand. At which point he flipped on the faux indignation and pretended to be “extremely disappointed” in the same man he had been covering for all that time.
In a two-part post last summer, titled Bruce Rastetter’s Long Game at the Iowa Board of Regents, I came to the following conclusion:
I now realize that I was once again woefully behind the curve. This is not something Rasetter intends to do, this is something he’s already done. Steven Leath and J. Bruce Harreld may be presidents in name, but they function as chancellors, feudal lords, capos to Boss Rastetter’s rule. They may have discretionary authority to piss away foundation money on new airplanes or trips to London to see the kids, but when it comes to policy — including particularly last summer’s synchronized tuition hikes — they do what Rastetter tells them. (Which means that’s also the kind of president Katie Mulholland is looking for right this minute at the University of Northern Iowa, and why I still think Interim UNI President Wohlpart has the inside track.)
As for Rastetter’s claim that Leath’s accident disclosure did not warrant communication to the other regents, try to imagine the following. First, imagine that Leath discloses his accident to Sahai or some regent other than Rastetter, and that regent also sits on Leath’s news. Second, imagine that the story breaks just as it did over a year later, and Rastetter only learns about the accident as the story rapidly builds momentum in the press. Third, try to imagine Rastetter not blowing his perpetually repressed stack at having been left out of the loop as a result of the very same judgment call he insists he was justified in making.
You can’t do it. And that means the only reason Rastetter did not pass the news of Leath’s accident on to the other eight regents was because he did not want them to know about Leath’s accident — just as he did not want four of the regents to know about the secret meetings he arranged for Harreld before the final vote on the next president at Iowa. That’s Boss Rastetter, making exceptions for himself that he would never grant to anyone else.
There is No Iowa Board of Regents
So what’s going on here? How is it possible that the entire Board of Regents has been subverted to the will of a mid-level political crony with autocratic leanings? Has nobody noticed? Is the entire apparatus of state government blind to the abuses of power which have taken place in full view at the board, including the fraudulent hire of J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa? And what about this unhinged assertion by Rastetter, in which he made it abundantly clear that he does not believe the nine members of the board are co-equal? Has anyone ever heard of this extra-legal hierarchy of administrative presidents and presidents pro tem at the state’s three universities?
The fact that this jaw-dropping moment of insight into Rastetter’s twisted perception of reality elicited absolutely no commentary from the press, state legislators, or other board members, is obviously a concern — just as it would be if one of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court made a similar pronouncement and no one objected. In trying to comprehend that deafening silence, I have come to two related conclusions which hinge on the fact that there is never going to be a day on this earth when Bruce Rastetter is moved to change his mind by sheer force of argument. From everything I’ve read, Rastetter came roaring out of his youth determined to be a success, which he narrowly defines in the traditional sense as making money and wielding power. You can see his single-minded pursuit of those goals in everything he does, and to his credit he genuinely is a master at detecting and exploiting weakness in both administrative systems and human beings.
In your own walk through life you’ve probably comes across someone like Bruce Rastetter, and you know from personal experience that it literally does not matter what you say to them. Words, concepts, ideas — they all bounce off a toxic force-field of unbridled will and obliviousness that allows such people to persist in single-minded pursuit of their self-appointed objectives. Which is why, at some point, you do your best to ignore that person and stay out of their way, because there is no upside to interacting with them.
The problem with Rastetter specifically is that he traded a big bag of money in exchange for becoming the boss of bosses at the Iowa Board of Regents, which is a $5B enterprise that has a direct impact on 75,000+ students lives, and on the lives of tens of thousands of faculty, staff and vendors at the state’s schools. And yet the collective governmental and cultural response to Rastetter’s recent deranged proclamation was exactly the same: a complete disinterest in engaging the man on his abuses of power, as if it simply isn’t worth it.
One explanation for the silence following Rastetter’s power-mad revelation is that there is a general belief that it’s better to let the clock run out on Rastetter than to go to war with him — particularly given Governor Branstad’s unflinching support. (That’s one of the things Rastetter bought with his big bag of money.) To that point, the current six-year terms for both Rastetter and President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland (and Regent Sherry Bates) expire on 04/30/17, which is a little less than seven months away. Because Rastetter and Mulholland would once again have to be approved by the state senate — which is snow a foregone conclusion given the results of the election, but could still end up being messy — there may be a sense that if a war is going to break out over Rastetter’s leadership, that’s the best time to fire the first salvo.
Maybe Rastetter has let it be known that he’s gong to retire to Alden, or maybe he’s got the inside track on a job in the nation’s capital and won’t even serve out the remainder of his current term. (That may be why Mike Richards was appointed when Mary Andringa resigned, as a back-bench presidential replacement in the event that Rastetter departed.) Or perhaps Rastetter will simply move on when his term expires, comforted by the knowledge that he has corrupted the regents system so completely that it will take a decade to dislodge the burrowed cronies he will be leaving behind.
In any event, when people look back and wonder what happened to higher education in a state that used to think of education as a public trust, the answer will be Bruce Rastetter. He took a good, well-intentioned system, exploited it for all it was worth, and turned it into a patronage system for political cronies. In terms of educating students, the priority now is on cranking out worker bees instead of citizens who can think for themselves, which of course furthers his political ends as well.
There are several bizarre situations that make no sense, hold no water, support no logical conclusion:
1. What is this ‘President-Pro Tem? Pro-Tempore. or ‘ for the present time but not permanently’. Why even have that particular designation on the Iowa Board of Regents? In the past the leader of the BOR was the ‘Chairman” however recently that was changed in law to ‘President’.
Nothing in the law says ‘President Pro-Tem’; nothing in law defines the bizarre politburo that the BOR has developed to run Iowa’s public universities. https://coolice.legis.iowa.gov/Cool-ICE/default.asp?category=billinfo&service=IowaCode&ga=83&input=262#262.1
Why?
2. Although I agree that the current Oberfuhrer of the BOR, Rastetter — a power-hungry, manipulative control freak — is trying to compose an empire run out of Des Moines and administered by his puppet Donley, there is nothing in Iowa law to mandate such a central structure. This must be a newish plot hatched by Rastetter and furthered by ‘Ed.D. by night-school’ Donley.
Why?
3. And why does everyone in any way responsible for the BOR being essentially run by the red party chairman, overlook the power grab, manipulation, and exploitation of Regents programs, personnel, and assets by Rastetter and cronies?
Why?
Is everyone scared of Rastetter?
In the next few years as the President of the USA is nothing more than a salesman/businessman who will say anything to sell himself, and siphon any property or funds necessary to enrich himself, I would expect the privatization of Regents property and programs to accelerate at a rapid speed. Although Trump is a bit of an unknown, Branstad is a pro at selling off Govt assets to his cronies. Rastetter will likely benefit from this environment either by buying plum aspects of public property or programs, for financial gain, or benefit ideologically as the property, monies, faculty, and students are simply existing for private profiteering or domination or exploitation..
When something first attracts your attention, whether movement in the corner of your eye or an event in the news, you initially focus your attention on the object of your awareness. As you learn more about that object, however, you may also notice that things which should be attendant are missing. If what you first notice is a dog bounding through your yard, you will quite quickly determine whether the dog is leashed or running free. On longer inspection, if the dog is running free you may also notice that it is behaving erratically or aggressively. You may spot a collar, or the absence of a collar, or a broken tether or chain. In a moment of quiet you may hear someone calling for the dog in the distance. Or perhaps, after a moment of reflection, you may recognize the dog from the neighborhood, and return the dog to the owner.
Comprehending an item in the news — an event, an issue — likewise depends on your familiarity. If you’re already up to speed you’ll process new information differently than if you never encountered the subject before. Even with some familiarity, however, it may take a while to notice that something which should be part of the conversation is missing, and to ask why that might be. Two examples may help.
A few weeks ago, Vanessa Miller published an extensive profile of J. Bruce Harreld in the Gazette, covering the first year of his presidency at the University of Iowa. In that report, and in a companion piece, Miller noted that Harreld “rebuffed” requests for an interview, even though Miller is one of the main beat reporters covering higher-ed in Iowa, for one of the state’s biggest papers. Given that Harreld will show up anywhere, for any reason, and put on his state-funded dog and pony show — including spending five hours this summer giving a free seminar to employees at his boss’s private company — it is odd that the president of the University of Iowa was not eager to talk to the press and get his message out.
From Miller’s sidebar report, on 11/06/16:
Now, if you were around for Harreld’s candidate forum last year, you know that Harreld has no problem taking the stage and commanding attention. In fact, as a former marketing weasel, salesman and lecturer, talking to crowds which respond with grateful admiration is one of his favorite things. Where Harreld has repeatedly fallen down at Iowa, however, is in talking with crowds that are rightly suspicious of his motives, competence and pugnacious temperament.
As Miller also noted, shortly after J. Bruce Harreld was appointed president he promised to hold three town halls each year, to build bridges and maintain open lines of communication with a community that rightly considered him illegitimate. When his first town hall was an unmitigated disaster, however, in large part because Harreld used the event to troll the very people he should have been reaching out to, Harreld bailed on that commitment.
What at first seems to be an incomprehensible incapacity for leadership is revealed to be completely comprehensible in the context of Harreld’s prior corporate experience with organizational change. Despite working for a number of recognizable brands, Harreld never was the leader of the organizations he professed to reorient, if not single-handedly save — not at Kraft, not at Boston Market, not at IBM — just as he is not now the leader at Iowa. In matters of any consequence, leadership at UI comes from the board of regents, and specifically Regents President Bruce Rastetter, who is of course the man who implemented and ran the sham search which jammed Harreld into office.
Instead, J Bruce Harreld is the consummate inside man, the Dick-Cheney bureaucrat, dividing and conquering from the belly of the beast by co-opting others, then using them to shift alliances and resources. As such, the last thing Harreld wants is for anyone to see the big picture, because that would tip them off to what he’s doing. Instead, by staying in the background, meeting with individuals and small groups, Harreld keeps the big picture a secret, which is why he rebuffed a sit-down interview from a paper with a large circulation. Reporters ask questions, and there are questions Harreld does not want to answer.
The second example of how hard it can be to notice what’s missing in a news story concerns campus fallout from the recent presidential election. As you’ve probably heard or read, both ISU’s President Leath and UI’s Harreld recently attached their names to statements which pledged all sorts of good things, except for actually standing in the way of the federal government if it decides to show its monstrous side, as it has been wont to do from time to time.
What’s interesting about those statements, and about prior statements by Leath in which he gave administrative sanction to the term ‘white heritage’ on the ISU campus, is that they show absolutely no coordination with the Iowa Board of Regents, which otherwise maintains almost authoritarian control of the messaging at those two schools. The reason for the absence of the board on the current cultural stage, however, has nothing to do with the usual incompetence or crony politics, and everything to do with the fact that the president of the regents, Bruce Rastetter, openly campaigned for the winning candidate, and unabashedly did so in order to personally gain from that advocacy.
In every other instance, the Iowa Board of Regents under Rastetter has stifled the independence of the state schools, injecting administrative minders into the highest echelons on each campus, insisting on centralized messaging control, and hiring toady presidents to act as chancellors, feudal lords or capos to Rastetter’s president, emperor or boss of bosses. And yet now, because any commentary from the board would reflect on Rastetter, and potentially compromise his standing with the new administration in D.C., the control freak of all control freaks at the pinnacle of higher education in Iowa is mute. (And the same goes for Rastetter’s sidekick, Regent Larry McKibben, who would normally be exonerating or admonishing someone right now. As for Leath and Harreld, they couldn’t even muster the will to affix their names to this.)
At a critical historical moment, when the regent universities should be steeped in experienced academic leadership that has maintained the highest degree of ethical standards and credibility, they are instead a tattered patchwork of crony decision making. At the University of Iowa, as a result of a sham search implemented by Rastetter, J. Bruce Harreld is weak, illegitimate, and incapable of credible leadership. At Iowa State, as a result of Rastetter allowing Leath to run amok with $5M in discretionary foundation dollars, Leath has been discredited because of his flyboy antics. At the University of Northern Iowa, Jim Wohlpart is the interim president, if not also president-in-waiting, because Rastetter drove the former president out by passive-aggressive neglect. And now, as a result of his political aspirations commingling with his responsibilities as board president, Rastetter has discredited himself and the board at a moment when credible leadership is most needed.
This is what happens when you believe everything has to be corrupted. You weaken the things that matter most in a crisis, you mortgage your credibility, you discount the consequences of power vacuums, and you end up holding a grenade in your hand, in the dark, while feeling around for the missing pin. If the actual point of the board was simply to be corrupt this would not be an issue, but despite the intent of the current leadership, there really are things that need doing, which means those conversations are less likely to take place.
College Tuition and Student Debt
Given his mania for control, it makes sense that Rastetter’s corrupting influence would leach into and cripple the regents as an enterprise, but what has surprised me is the degree to which even basic competence has gone wanting. Time and again what seemed at first blush to be wholly considered turned out to be little more than a glossy press release fronting for a bad idea. Case in point, the TIER consulting contracts which were awarded to Deloitte and others, without any requirement that receipts be submitted for reimbursement.
What more basic provision should there be in a consulting contract? And yet, somehow, despite having ace attorney Larry McKibben both on the board and in charge of the TIER review process, that little detail was overlooked. Perhaps because Larry was too busy exonerating and admonishing people to actually read any fine print. (A year later, those same consultants turned around and sued the board to protect trade secrets from being disclosed)
The real eye-opener for me, however, concerned the degree to which legislative and gubernatorial conversations with the regents perpetually overlooked a key factor related to tuition and student debt. On the tuition side there was no end of references to resident versus nonresident tuition, almost to a jingoistic degree, yet on the debt side — which is an inevitable consequence of tuition — there seemed to be no attempt to leverage accrued debt to the state’s advantage. (I do not say that this conversation has never happened in Iowa, or never happened elsewhere, but time and again I waited for someone to connect the obvious dots and no one did.)
Which brings us now to the most recent example of that omission, from a story by the Gazette’s Miller on 11/14/16:
Yes, that should be a natural goal of the regents, instead of, say, wasting years trying to legislate the heist of tens of millions of dollars from UI to the other state schools through a cockamamie performance-based funding plan. But that’s Bruce Rastetter — always thinking about the con instead of just doing the job he paid Governor Branstad to appoint him to do. If you read the rest of Miller’s article you’ll find references to resident and nonresident tuition, to enrollment and debt, but no attempt to use the debt side of the equation to help decrease the total cost of an education at the one of the state schools. Which of course also means that no conversation is taking place about how the debt side of the equation could be used to improve the state economy as well.
On the front end the key factor affecting both total tuition and debt is obvious. If you are a resident student your tuition is a fraction of what nonresidents pay, with a consequent impact on total debt accrued. Simply by being from the state of Iowa, or taking the time to establish residency before enrolling in one of the state universities, you save an unbelievable amount relative to the cost incurred by nonresident students. For example, for the 2016-2017 academic year, resident undergrads at the University of Iowa will pay approximately $9K for tuition and fees, while nonresidents will pay almost $30K. Over four years that translates to $28K versus $120K, and over what is a more realistic five-year degree pace for many students, $35K versus $150K.
Clearly the first thing a cost-conscious nonresident student should do to cut down the cost of attending college is move to Iowa and work for a year, because that will save over $100K. Unfortunately, despite the considerable relative discount afforded to resident students, most of whom are from families in Iowa, there is no similar fix. Although the total cost of a four-year degree will be around $28K-$35K, that cost can’t be lowered unless scholarships or grants figure in.
The real total cost for both resident and nonresident students, however — just like the total cost of a mortgage — includes the cost of interest on any debt, but most of the time that interest doesn’t seem to be reported. And although tuition and debt are clearly linked, it’s almost as if they’re treated as two separate problems — one concurrent with getting a college education (tuition), and the other having to do with the student’s work life (debt), as if a student somehow becomes a different legal entity when they graduate. (I think that happens because it’s understood that graduation confers a significant bump in earning power, which supposedly changes the whole equation, but it doesn’t. The total cost of school is still the total cost of school, whatever a grad’s first-year salary might be.)
For any graduate, being able to make more money working the same hours when compared with not having a degree will obviously be seen as a positive. But earning power is not the only advantage conferred on students who complete their degrees. While the Iowa Board of Regents is determined to dumb college down to the point that it becomes a white-collar job-training program for corporate America, it is still possible that students will not only learn to think in new ways, but that genuine knowledge will be passed along in the process. As such, after four (or five, or six) years of education, graduates represent not only a brighter economic future themselves, but they are a valuable asset to whatever economy they join.
College Graduates as Economic Assets
From time to time over the past year I have encountered comments in the press about how advantageous it is to Iowa to keep college graduates in-state, because their higher earning power and advanced skill set bodes well for the economy. Certainly employers need to be in a position to make hires, and capital must be available for students who want to start their own businesses, but overall, it does seem advantageous to retain recent graduates, as opposed to watching them take their new-found status elsewhere. The more often graduates choose to stay in Iowa, the more likely it is that they themselves will become economic engines which spur future job opportunities.
While the tuition-debt calculus remains the same in all states, from the point of view of each individual state the value of a college graduate is not the same. Some states naturally retain their own grads while also attracting grads from other states, increasing the value of their economies, while others lose or even hemorrhage college graduates because there simply aren’t enough jobs in a given field. As you might imagine, states like California and New York are in the former category, while Iowa is in the latter.
If you had asked me what the state population of Iowa was when I was a kid, I would have said about three million. If you had asked me what the state population was when I was in college at UI, I would have said about three million. If you asked me what Iowa’s population is today, I would say about three million.
Keeping the population of Iowa at or near three million for decades means you either need to maintain zero population growth over that time, or any excess population must be shed by relocation to other states. If you look at this graph you’ll see that Iowa’s population has grown slowly but steadily for close to a century, although between 1980 and 2000 there was an outflow that was only recently surpassed.
On that same graph you will also see that the neighboring Midwestern states of Kansas and Nebraska show remarkably similar growth, deceptively implying some sort of national trend. To the left of the graph, however, you’ll see that you can add other states to the display, and if you click Colorado — which impinges on the southwestern corner of Nebraska, and forms the western border with Kansas — you will see the scale of the graph change considerably. Add California and you’ll not only see Iowa’s population growth turn into a flat line, you’ll see why California is now the sixth-largest economy in the world
Even adjusted for scale, it should be clear that a college graduate in Iowa — including one from any of the three marginally state-funded universities — is of greater proportional value to the Iowa economy than a college graduate from California is to that state. And yet, because it’s often the case that grads from Iowa schools move to a state like California to find employment in their field, Iowa as an economy loses that important asset for nothing.
On the nonresident side it makes sense that students who come to Iowa from other states or countries will return to those locales, or at the very least move elsewhere in order to put their degrees to work. For resident grads, unfortunately, there is also clearly an incentive to leave even if those grads would prefer to remain in Iowa, meaning what should be an asset pipeline for the state — educating its population — is little more than a service industry. As alluded to above, however, in either case, if not more so for the culturally diverse nonresident graduates, a powerful incentive on the debt side is ignored in preference of solutions which only address the economics of higher education on the tuition side. (To be fair, I should note that not all Iowans are in favor of diversity, or even education.)
As a matter of policy if not economic survival, the state of Iowa should not only be doing everything possible to keep its own resident college grads, but whatever it can to encourage nonresident graduates from other states and countries to make a life in Iowa. As to how to incentivize that kind of retention, those grads who choose to live and work in Iowa after graduation should receive a financial benefit for doing so, which could easily be accommodated on the debt side of the higher-ed equation. Often described as debt forgiveness, this is clearly not a new idea, but one that does seem to be perpetually overlooked by those individuals who are most responsible for managing and promoting Iowa’s state’s economy.
Everyone knows that college has been getting more and more expensive for decades, at times out of all proportion to any increase in the cost of living. Everyone also knows — as with the cost of housing — that most students (and their families) can no longer save sufficiently before embarking on college, so the assumption of debt is inevitable. If the debt load is small, the cost of servicing that debt may be minimal. Quite often, however, the debt load proves crushing, meaning not only that the lives of graduates are directly affected, but the ability of students to contribute to the local or state economy is also curtailed. Graduates who should be buying products and moving up in society — even if only from lower-middle-class to middle-class over decades — instead end up servicing debt over that time frame.
Having read a fair amount about tuition and student debt over the past year, and having recently watched Governor Branstad, Regents President Bruce Rastetter, Iowa State President Steven Leath and Illegitimate University of Iowa President J. Bruce Harreld force egregious tuition hikes on students premised on the flimsiest of excuses (a cynically engineered shortfall of $1.7M in legislative funding), it’s clear that the powers that be in the state do not really care about shifting more and more financial burden onto students, which is particularly instructive because it is so clearly shortsighted. Yes, everyone talks about debt load, but only in a cynical political context designed to give them cover for whatever abuse they’re about to visit on the citizens of the state. In a very real way, the actual incentives in Iowa make clear that the state is perfectly happy to load students up with debt, because when those graduates move somewhere else they take the burden of that debt load with them.
Returning now to the question of stabilizing the cost of an education at the regent universities over a given four-year term, there are clearly obstacles which make it difficult to offer a guarantee. Because many students take longer than four years, it’s also not clear what would happen in the fifth year or later. As an inducement, however, it should be possible to offer graduates a specific, reliable break on any debt they have incurred if they work in the state, which would be another way of helping to defray the total cost of a college education.
At this historical moment, with the Iowa Board of Regents taking active control of all of the state’s schools — often to their detriment, but still — and with many of the surrounding states doing serious damage to their own systems of higher education, the idea of using Iowa’s universities not only to recruit students for tuition purposes, but to increase the state population and economy, should be a priority. For example, the neighboring state of Illinois, which has always had a large number of students enroll in Iowa colleges, including regent schools, seems to be doing everything possible to turn its higher-ed ecosystem into a wasteland. By virtue of its proximity, however, that should also make Illinois a rich source of graduates who might see little difference between living in Iowa or moving back home. (In the Quad Cities, it’s even possible that graduates who originally lived on the Illinois side of the Mississippi could live and work on the Iowa side without disrupting their social and familial ties.)
Because of its predatory business practices, the Iowa Board of Regents continues to take market share away from other schools in Iowa, giving it more and more leverage in the state, and more and more leverage relative to neighboring states that are struggling. By incentivizing post-graduation residency through debt reduction, Iowa would prime an economic pump that is currently dry. Over time, if successful, such a program could conceivably start an arms race with neighboring states, but that wouldn’t negate any gains to that point. Graduates who would have put roots down elsewhere, contributed to an economy elsewhere, started a family elsewhere, would instead have contributed to Iowa’s economy and culture.
Specifically with regard to the board’s corrupt machinations at the University of Iowa, you might think the consistent omission of solutions on the debt side would be the kind of thing that a business genius would notice and pursue. Instead, however, the current sham president at Iowa, who was hired precisely because he had private-sector executive experience, has so far pursued only the classic heavy-handed agenda of raising prices on customers (students) and cutting labor costs (grad students). That this former business executive is sticking it to both students and grad employees, while also burning through precious resources in order to game Iowa’s college rank, not only betrays the cynicism of his actions, but reflects the impoverished crony agenda of the Iowa Board of Regents.
Good post.
So many issues…
1. Leadership. Terry Branstad is just not the governor to lead Iowa (or any state) into the future. He is way too invested in crony politics or helping his friends cash in at taxpayer expense. I also think his cognitive powers are ebbing. He cares little about quality of life.
Rastetter is not all that interested in anything not Rastetter. If the entire state turns into agribusiness or one big nasty hog-lot he is fine.
Sen Grassley is one for obfuscating, no leadership there. Joni Ernst? Does she have the plague? Has anyone noted that when she gets involved with something pretty soon she is ignored. Has she single-handedly cleaned up Washington by castrating pigs yet?
The House Reps (outside of Loebsack) are pathetic. Steve King flaunts a confederate flag….nuff said about that intellectual midget.
And as you point out the Univ presidents are dilettante carpetbaggers with not much interest other than themselves or cronies. Not to mention mendacious and back-stabbing too.
This is the type of leadership to lead Iowa into the Dark Ages or into another Plague. Any new initiatives?
2. The population. Outside of Linn, Johnson, Black Hawk, Scott, Polk and story, Iowa was markedly RED in 2016. Ninety-three red counties.
And what is remarkable about the Trump voters: anti-elite, anti-education, anti-progress, anti-thinking, anti-future. They want to go back to 1950 when the USA ruled the world, coal was mined, women shut up, and alternative lifestyle people didn’t exist. The world was white and not brown or black.
If anything, Iowa citizens in 2016 want segregation, no progress, high school education, no professionals, and certainly no elite professors. If Trump has his way with protectionism, Iowa’s international trading partners will respond as in the 1930s protectionism and the farm economy will fall off the map.
Does this sound like a state that will implement an innovative debt-forgiveness program to attract college-educated people to stay on-board? Sounds like a state who wants duck-dynasty, and Ted Nugent concerts.
Iowa ranks around 34 in college educated people and 43 or 44 in graduate degree citizens…with a bullet lower.
Most kids who graduate college get the heck out for California, Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin, the West Coast, or Minnesota. Outside of CR-Iowa City and Des Moines, there is little to recommend staying in state.
Sad because as the climate changes, Iowa actually delivers mild winters now. There are some recreational opportunities. Some cities like Dubuque are revitalizing their historic areas. But there is not community support for someone say who wants to develop interests around more cultural and intellectual subjects.
The majority of the voters (outside the above-mentioned areas) despise anyone with a college degree. They despise anyone raised outside of their immediate community. They are anti-progress CAVE (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) people. Does this sound like an environment college educated folks want to raise a family?
Not until the leadership of this changes, could anything as progressive as incentives for college educated people to stay home, be implemented. Not until there are actual committed university administrators with liberal values who prize academic achievement and promote the state (rather than fly out of it), will college educated students remain in Iowa. And not until the population in general prizes things beyond the confederate flag, Sarah Palin, and hog confinement operations will more educated families decide to make roots here.
A good example is driving down I-80 near Davenport. Suddenly one notes the trees are devastated, the I-80 ditches are rutted up, and heavy equipment is working. Yes, the pipeline is going through.
So not only will Iowa be fly-over country, it will be oil-pipe-line-environmentally-disaster-country. Young college graduates are not likely to choose to live a state which serves merely as a conduit for dirty oily tar sands, eventually destined for China. Young college graduates will not be impressed with the sewers called rivers carrying toxins and carcinogens into the drinking water. No way. Choose Colorado, or California or Oregon, or Washington, or a place with relatively clean water and progressive communities.
From the moment J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of the University of Iowa in September of 2015, he has been obsessed with Iowa’s national collegiate rank, particularly as determined by U.S. News and World Report. By spring of 2016, less than six months into his first year, Harreld had already institutionalized rankings as the dominant factor in resource allocations throughout the UI budgeting process, while not-so-cleverly concealing his intent behind a fog of euphemistic rhetoric. Until recently it seemed that Harreld’s rankings obsession was auto-generated, but in early September of this year — almost a year to the day after Harreld’s sham appointment — we belatedly learned that Harreld’s ranking obsession originated with the architect of the conspiracy that jammed Harreld into office. Specifically, in late 2014, Bruce Rastetter, then and now the president of the Iowa Board of Regents, charged the University of Iowa Faculty Senate with figuring out how to raise Iowa’s rank to “top-ten” or “top-tier” status in some equally nebulous, undefined category. (We also subsequently learned that Rastetter’s charge was an old and discredited gambit which had failed spectacularly at a number of other schools.)
The work product of Rastetter’s top-something goal turned out to be a “white paper” produced by a Faculty Senate Working Group (FSWG) — and by “white paper” I mean a propaganda document so embarrassing in its naked disregard for scholarship as to constitute academic malpractice. Still, whoever put the final touches on that white paper did a good job of subverting and exploiting the members of the working group, including particularly Michael Sauder, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, who has extensively studied the impact that rankings have on institutions of higher learning. In fact, just as the FSWG white paper was coming to diseased fruition, and Sauder’s expertise was being used to give the white paper an imprimatur it did not deserve, Sauder and co-author Wendy Nelson Espeland were publishing a book on rankings titled Engines of Anxiety.
Having paid close attention to the goings-on at UI over the past year or so, and having read up on various academic issues in the news at other schools, I’ve noticed an odd but consistent irony in higher education, which is that the very people that you would assume were studying critical issues in higher-ed, and bringing their considerable experience to bear upon said issues, are often the last people to do so. When I first noticed this tendency I thought maybe I was simply missing the geeky hive of academic activity that was devoted to serious self-study. Everywhere I turned businesspersons and politicians were prognosticating about higher education, while the academics — who should have known their subject cold — seemed perpetually mute. Yet after a year or more of looking into such issues, I think I can say with some confidence that when it comes to knowing what they’re talking about, far too many academics are willing to skip the research and simply debate theory, and that’s particularly true if they sense even a momentary professional or personal advantage in doing so.
Such an attitude is of course embarrassing and hypocritical, and only serves to undermines the premise of education as a search for truth, but then again, when there are lusty pulses in play, you pretty much know how things are going to turn out. Instead of what’s right or real, people spend their time calculating what they can get away with or what’s to their advantage. And as Rastetter, Harreld and their co-conspirators showed during the 2015 UI presidential search, as long as you’re in a position of power you can get away with almost any abuse in higher-ed.
All of which brings us back to Espeland and Sauder’s book, because they actually did the research and have the goods — and I can say that because I read it, as opposed to simply grabbing a cocktail off a passing tray in anticipation of shooting my mouth off in this post. I can also report that Engines of Anxiety is clear, accessible, and, surprisingly free of the mind-numbing academic terminology that all too often cedes ownership of issues in higher education to businesspersons and politicians, particularly in the mainstream press. So whether you’re in the faculty or administrative ranks at UI, or on staff at another college or university, or even if you’re just a precocious student who wants to understand how deranged and destructive the entire rankings process has become, you should read Engines of Anxiety. Which is of course why it is also the last book J. Bruce Harreld will ever read.
Engines of Anxiety
Espeland and Sauder limited the variables involved in their exploration of college rankings by studying law schools, which are both universally and exclusively ranked by U.S. News and World Report (USN). As we will see, however, conclusions drawn from that closed rankings system are applicable to other aspects of higher education, including the national USN rankings of U.S. colleges and universities. In the abstract, it is also clear that rankings can indeed serve a useful purpose. By compressing key pieces of information into a quantitative shorthand, comparisons can be made without requiring a great deal of research. For example, instead of buying and testing four (or forty) different automobiles yourself, you can turn to one of the consumer testing services that already does that work for you.
In reality, of course, all rankings are heavily dependent on the criteria used to generate them, and therein lies the potential for confusion, inaccuracy and outright deceit. As computer programmers learn almost immediately, you can devise any program or algorithm to give you the answers you want, or to exclude answers you don’t want, and only by drilling into the source code would anyone ever know how an answer was truly determined. Unfortunately, the same holds true for rankings, but because the whole point of rankings is to provide information in shorthand almost no one will look past a ranking to see how that ranking was determined.
Just as automobile manufacturers were probably not happy when independent groups started buying, testing and ranking their vehicles, many colleges and universities are not happy that they are subject to rankings by outside parties. Perhaps not surprisingly, that is particularly the case with the USN rankings, which are dominant in the United States and deeply entrenched in American academic culture. What is important to note, however, is that the USN rankings are not objective because USN does not actually test colleges and universities by sending students to school or otherwise purchasing academic products for sale. Instead, USN coerces colleges and universities into supplying the data necessary to compile its for-profit rankings, and that in turn leaves open the possibility — if not the likelihood — that the data USN receives may have been corrupted by that process. From p. 3 of Engines of Anxiety:
As regular readers know, the question of whether Regents President Rastetter or illegitimate UI President Harreld would ever lie or cheat has already been asked and answered. The only reason Harreld has the job he now holds is because a small cabal of co-conspirators rigged the search process to allow Harreld to reach the final vote at the Board of Regents, which was also rigged in advance by Rastetter. So if you’re wondering just how far down the road Harreld is willing to go to game Iowa’s national college rank, the answer is as far as the road goes, if not farther.
Unfortunately, such ethical failings are not rare in academia, particularly among people who are installed as presidents after shady and secretive searches. For example, Engines of Anxiety includes an interesting anecdote about the woman (and fellow Boston Consulting operative) who was named president of the UNC System only a few months after Harreld took office at UI. From p. 11:
Now, obviously that’s not the kind of thinking you would hope to find in someone who went on to become the president of a respected academic system like UNC, so clearly there were other factors in play with Spellings’ hire. And yes, it’s more than a little nauseating that any woman would tout the idea of a “Swimsuit Edition”, which inherently objectifies women for profit, to say nothing of equating that kind of base, low-brow marketing with the objectives of higher education. On the other hand, if Spellings was hired to pimp out UNC in the same way that Harreld was hired to pimp out UI, she is certainly qualified.
Because USN establishes the criteria by which it ranks colleges and universities, it has a direct effect on how rankings afflict those institutions. Were USN truly objective then such effects might be useful or positive, but at every step USN warps the rankings process in its own favor, despite the fact that doing so provides no commensurate benefit to the institutions being ranked. Like the parasitic hosts they are, colleges and universities are tormented and sickened by the USN rankings, not strengthened. That in turn makes it all the more remarkable that J. Bruce Harreld has not only allied himself with the parasites, but is determined that USN‘s rankings methodology will infest the University of Iowa to its very core.
As an example of how USN manipulates the ranking process in ways that benefit its own sales and standing, consider the following, from p. 31:
On the 2017 USN ranking page for the University of Iowa you will find UI ranked #82 among national universities. You will also see that UI’s “overall score” is 52/100. In rank, Iowa is tied at #82 with three other schools: Colorado Schools of Mines, Michigan State University, and Texas Christian University, all of which have an overall score of 52/100.
Tied above Iowa at #79 are three schools — Miami University-Oxford, University of California-Santa Cruz, and University of Delaware — all with overall scores of 53/100. Tied below Iowa at #86 are six schools — Binghampton University-SUNY, Indiana University-Bloomington, Marquette University, University of Denver, University of San Diego, University of Tulsa — all with overall scores of 51/100. (The next-lowest ranked schools are four universities tied at #92.)
Comparing the USN rankings with the overall USN scores, then, we see how the rankings distort the relative position of the thirteen schools just mentioned. While the rankings span #79 to #91, or thirteen places, the difference in the scores for those thirteen national universities is only three — from 51/100 to 53/100. Because the overall scores directly reflect the criteria and methodology USN uses, they are clearly the best descriptors of how those thirteen schools relate to each other, yet USN takes the extra step of translating those scores into a ranking that necessarily distorts that relationship. Why?
The answer is that USN doesn’t care about the integrity of its rankings, it cares about the popularity and success of its rankings, and absolute rankings are a lot sexier than squishy scores. Instead of saying that all thirteen of the above schools are basically the same, USN implies that there are marked differences between them, which, by USN’s own methodology, is clearly false. And these are the people J. Bruce Harreld has decided to suck up to, as hard as he can suck in his role as the fraudulent president of the University of Iowa. From p. 33:
As already noted, J. Bruce Harreld made gaming Iowa’s rank the bureaucratic focus of his administration from day one. Every aspect of the budgeting and resource-allocation process was warped to help improve Iowa’s rank, because that’s what Harreld’s minders at the board wanted him to do, and Harreld is nothing if not obedient. Interestingly, however, despite the fact that Harreld whines about the UI budget at every conceivable opportunity, and recently showed no hesitation in jamming egregious tuition hikes down the collective throats of the student body, not once has he ever hinted at the cost of converting the University of Iowa from an institution of higher learning into a wholly owned subsidiary of USN’s rankings monopoly.
From p. 34 of Engines of Anxiety:
As flawed as the process would necessarily have been, I wish Espeland and Sauder had attempted to put a price tag on the cost of repurposing administrative assets to the cause of managing or gaming a school’s rank. The authors do a great job of making clear that satisfying the annual statistical shakedown by USN takes considerable time and effort, and that other aspects of higher education go wanting as a result, yet missing from every rankings conversation is the first metric that people like J. Bruce Harreld tout when it suits their interests: the cost. What is the dollar cost to gather the information that USN demands? What is the cost for schools that go above and beyond, and actually try to improve their rank, as Harreld has set out to do?
USN does publish the methodologies for its rankings, and from them we know that the various criteria are weighted differently. For example, under the Selectivity criteria for Law Schools, which represents 25% of the overall score, student LSAT scores are 12.5%, student GPA is 10%, and the college’s acceptance rate is 2.5%. Because LSAT scores and GPA come from third parties relative to USN and the colleges being ranked, it might seem as if those numbers would be hard to manipulate to any advantage, but that’s not the case. In fact, USN’s weighting of those two factors can have serious real-world consequences that almost no one wold support. From p. 75:
If you asked a thousand people who should be admitted — the student with the 3.5 GPA or the student with the 2.2 GPA, exclusive or inclusive of their LSAT scores — the vast majority would pick student with the 3.5 GPA. Showing excellence over the long haul compared to having a good or bad day during a one-off testing session should obviously count for much more, which is why it’s indefensible that the USN methodology weights the scores as it does.
Just as clearly, however, the decision in the above example — even as it would materially affect the lives of two students in exactly the wrong way relative to their demonstrated abilities — is logically compelled by the sensible desire of any college to be ranked higher rather than lower. Fortunately, if there’s one thing Espeland and Sauder do an excellent job of in Engines of Anxiety, it’s showing how such injustices happen over and over throughout the rankings process. Arbitrary choices by USN, which are then imposed on the skittish herd of higher-education administrators, produce real-world effects that almost everyone would oppose, yet no one does anything about it.
And of course the same slavish devotion to ranking metrics affects schools themselves. From p. 76:
Extrapolate from one law school to an entire university campus and you can imagine the damage that J. Bruce Harreld is already doing. And for what? The University of Iowa is tied with three other universities at #82 in the U.S. Where exactly is UI going after Harreld finishes corrupting the entire administrative apparatus of the school to game Iowa’s rank? #1? #8? #16? #27? #42? #63? Nowhere? Down more?
As noted in prior posts, it’s not like schools haven’t tried this before and almost universally failed. And yet instead of learning from history, Rastetter, Harreld and the suck-ups on the UI campus who have allied themselves with their cause are pouring untold resources into a process which will inevitably produce ills throughout the university. Even more incredibly, neither Harreld nor the board has ever formalized a specific rankings goal or any metrics by which success or failure will be determined.
To show how exhaustive the bureaucratic corruption can be, consider the measly 2.5% of the Selectivity score that schools get for their acceptance rate. In the abstract it stands to reason that the more exclusive and in-demand a college is the lower its acceptance rate will be, but because that criterion is only a tiny part of a school’s overall score you might assume it gets little attention. Not so. From p. 88:
This is, apparently, what transformational change looks like Harreld-style. You take a school with good intentions, you slave it to a for-profit third-party ranking system that functions more like a protection racket than anything else, and in so doing mortgage your ethics, values, principles and ideals in order to make the magazine mafiosi happy. But that only scratches the surface of the disease that the USN rankings propagate throughout the entire system of higher-education. Because LSAT’s factor highly in law school rankings, and because people who have the time and money to take prep courses generally do better than those who don’t, and because the people who have that time and money tend to be white, focusing on LSAT scores also institutionalizes economic and racial bias in the admissions process.
So how does all of that ranking and testing and bias correlate with success after school? It doesn’t. From p. 91:
So rankings pervert the organizations that chase them, rankings do nothing to improve outcomes for students, rankings reinforce bias if not injustice, and J. Bruce Harreld’s number one goal as the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa is raising Iowa’s rank by any and every means possible. Which brings us back to the pernicious cost of doing so. From p. 99:
Because of its focus on law schools, Engines of Anxiety understandably caps administrative inquiry at the dean level, but parallels to university presidents are obvious. At the University of Iowa, which has more than ten colleges and deans, Harreld’s mania for gaming Iowa’s college rank is being delegated to people who would rather spend their time and limited resources educating students and supporting faculty. Instead, because of J. Bruce Harreld’s transformational idiocy, they will be worrying about things like this, from p. 101:
And of course the more J. Bruce “World Class” Harreld spouts off about the importance of rankings, the more people will expect to see improvement, and demand swift action (if not retribution) when the rankings falter — particularly if they don’t know what the hell they are talking about. From p. 109:
Despite the fact that chasing rankings, or just playing defense against rankings, corrupts the entire fabric of an institution of higher learning, the idea that USN‘s methodology — or any other rankings algorithm — actually provides useful insight into the key dynamics of higher education at a particular school, also turns out to be crap. While more complicated than other means of gauging value, that only means USN‘s methodology necessarily fails Occam’s Razor if a simpler explanation for the same rankings can be perceived. And it can, from p. 118:
What do Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other top schools have in common? They’re loaded — and USN itself will tell you that. At the top of the heap, Harvard has an endowment of over $37B, but the rest of the list is consistent. The more money you have on hand the higher your ranking will be whether you’re gaming the rankings or not. Likewise, as state appropriations to the University of Iowa, Iowa State and the University of Northern Iowa have fallen off, the rankings for those schools have fallen.
If you’re already a rich school then spending to protect your rankings won’t affect the educational services you provide. If you’re not a rich school, however, then the more you buy into rankings — and J. Bruce Harreld is all-in at UI — the more you obligate yourself to expenditures that you would otherwise not incur, which could be put to better educational use. Yes, you might suffer in the rankings if you refuse to spend money managing or manipulated your school rank, and that might have some effect on your bottom line depending on what type of school you were, but you would bank all of those otherwise wasted resources. From p. 120:
And from p. 121:
At any college, and particularly at any large university, there are always multiple constituencies vying for available resources. Despite purportedly being produced by an objective third party in the same way that product reviews are produced by Consumer Reports, college rankings — and particularly the college rankings generated by USN — have become not only another constituency inside colleges and universities, but the most highly prioritized constituency. Concern about a school’s rank distorts the entire administrative decision making process, and that’s true even if the only objective is managing the data which is passed to USN. If a school goes all-in on gaming that data, as J. Bruce Harreld is doing at Iowa, the cost and the damage done explodes.
By analogy, it’s the difference between being healthy and being beautiful. Yes, you can go under the knife, you can slather on make-up, you can pay for better hair and clothes and posture and skin tone — but to what end? While you’re making the outside look good by any means, what’s happening on the inside? And what deep-seated damage is being done to your psyche by giving yourself over to someone else’s estimation of your worth? Yet all across the country colleges and universities not only allow this corruption of their mission to take place, some of them — as Margaret Spellings exhorted — go all in on beauty at the expense of health.
J. Bruce Harreld’s determination to prioritize Iowa’s school ranking above all is nothing more than a commitment to winning a popularity contest. It has nothing to do with higher education, nothing to do with values or ethics or decency, and everything to do with being an insufferable, small-minded East Coast snob with a Harvard MBA. Hence Harreld’s perpetual “world class” tic in every utterance, despite the fact that he is the illegitimate president of the #82 university in the country. From p. 124:
Perhaps not surprisingly, J. Bruce Harreld actually does believe that if you’re not “world class” you’re failing, and has said so multiple times, on the record. From Harreld’s candidate forum on 09/01/15 [10:37]:
In J. Bruce Harreld’s world there are only winners and losers, and if you’re the #82 ranked university in the U.S., you’re a loser. The real irony, however, is that attempting to rise in the rankings by any means other than truly organic change requires calcifying a school’s bureaucracy. Instead of remaining agile to new developments in higher education or being opportunistic about developing cutting-edge programs, USN‘s rankings, and all other rankings, reward past successes. From p. 127 of Engines of Anxiety:
On more occasions than anyone could count, J. Bruce Harreld has talked about stripping resources from programs or departments that are not demonstrating “excellence”, and redirecting those resources to programs that are prominent or “world class”. Yet even Harreld would agree, as a businessman, that such practices are folly because they’re defensive. That is in fact exactly how IBM positioned itself to fail at the dawn of the information age, by focusing on the past and ignoring low-cost opportunities to build new programs for the future. And yet at UI Harreld is now leading his own band of blindness, freezing evolution at the program and faculty level in preference of gaming a demonstrably flawed third-party metric, which effectively guarantees that the next big thing will never happen at Iowa.
For students at any school which gives in to rankings pressure, that kind of administrative mania leaves them open not only to abuses while they’re working toward their degrees, but to advice that may not be in their best interest when they’re looking for a job. To see why, consider the importance of the “Placement success” category — which is 20% of the overall score — in the USN ranking methodology. From p. 140:
Like many of the criteria in the USN methodology, what looks like a fight over a large range of numbers or percentages is in fact a concentrated battle over tiny differences. If you can nudge or fudge a few more student hires you may make a marked leap in that particular metric even if the change is proportionally small. And if the only thing that counts is employment, who’s to say which jobs are relevant to which degrees? From p. 143:
Leave it to law schools to recognize a loophole when they see one. Because the USN survey did not specifically request employment figures for only those grads working as lawyers, law schools counted a grad with any job as employed. Not surprisingly, employment numbers shot up and stayed there even during the Great Recession and the consequent crash in employment for attorneys. All because of internal pressure to protect a school’s ranking, and because of awareness that other schools were using the same deceitful tactic. From p. 144:
Instead of hiring someone to fight that tendency, the Iowa Board of Regents hired someone to pursue a similar agenda in every possible way. And again, that doesn’t just put the University of Iowa at risk, it puts students at risk, even after they graduate. From p. 145:
In the past, because schools weren’t wholly corrupted by USN‘s rankings, students could get objective advice about their futures from people who knew the ropes. Now, students may be told to accept a job offer not because the offer is good for the student, but because any offer is good for a school’s USN ranking. From p. 145:
While it is clearly a failure of leadership when a school makes decisions based on a ranking methodology, and there is no excuse for the professional and personal failings of individuals who would throw a student under the bus in order to keep their numbers up, these problems arise not because colleges and universities want to be doing any of this stuff, but because USN has figured out how to impose its will. Again, this is not a sign of health but disease, and the rot is systemic. From p. 146:
Another common gaming strategy is for the school itself to hire unemployed graduates on a temporary basis to bolster employment numbers. Students are typically hired for one or two months at a modest rate of pay to work as research or teaching assistants, library aides, or mail clerks at the law school so they can be counted as “employed” on the USN survey.
Clearly no one believes any of this is good for higher education, yet such decisions have become the norm, not the exception. Once one school figures out how to get an edge without actually improving the quality of the education it delivers, and perhaps even decreasing that quality by wasting resources on such ploys, then all schools have to do likewise or they will be punished by USN‘s brain-dead methodology. As for USN, after imposing this shakedown on the entire higher education ecosystem, it now has the audacity to decry such ploys as cheating when USN itself goes out of its way to coerce schools into engaging in that behavior.
One of the key points Espeland and Sauder make with regard to law schools concerns the homogenizing effect that USN‘s methodology has on schools with vastly different charters. Where colleges and university rankings are divided into different classifications by USN, all law schools are treated the same even though they are manifestly not the same. As a result, what purports to be a leveling effect is instead inherently biased by USN‘s criteria.
More importantly, USN‘s inherent bias — which equates to snobbishness, which in turn explains the appeal of USN‘s rankings to J. Bruce Harreld — obscures the fact that rankings are often only important in a national context, and may have nothing to do with the realities facing a given student. While J. Bruce Harreld is perpetually trying to elevate the University of Iowa to “world class” status because he can’t imagine not being world-class himself, the great majority of students at Iowa are and will always be regional, and will live their post-academic lives in Iowa or neighboring states. In that case attending Iowa may be an advantage in their lives over attending a much-higher-ranked school. From p. 167:
The University of Iowa is prominent in a number of fields, including at the national and world level. As a university, however, it is a regional force and always will be. J. Bruce Harreld’s nauseating insistence on seeing Iowa only through a “world-class” lens not only diminishes those students, staff and faculty who are comfortable with their regional leanings, it slaves Iowa to exactly the kind of snobbish attitudes that dominate the USN rankings. Instead of doing everything possible to strengthen Iowa in its core functions, Harreld’s own ego needs, and the ego needs of the corrupt members of the Board of Regents who hired him, have obligated Iowa to play ball with USN. From p. 177:
The message could not be clearer. If you do not do what USN tells you to do, USN will destroy your reputation. Call it coercion, call it blackmail, call it extortion, it has nothing to do with providing good information to prospective students and everything to do with forcing colleges and universities to undertake costly administrative chores which serve USN‘s business plan.
Again, compare that approach to Consumer Reports, which purchases products and tests them, then reports on its findings. By contrast, USN forces its victims to do the majority of the work of gathering data, it knows full well that its coercive tactics pervert the data it receives, and the entire process involves untold costs which could otherwise be devoted to education, but that’s all perfectly fine because USN‘s only real goal is preserving its rankings monopoly.
Even though Engines of Anxiety does not quantify the costs which are directly attributable to USN‘s coercion, it makes clear that coercion is taking place. For that reason alone it is an important book, and required reading for anyone who wants to debate the merits of college rankings. Focusing on law schools was a particularly good decision because it gave Espeland and Sauder a clear view of exactly how USN warps and undermines the very qualities it purports to rank., but the lessons of Engines of Anxiety apply to all schools.
College Rankings and Leadership
At the close of Engines of Anxiety there is a discussion about how institutions of higher learning might push back against the damage being done by USN specifically, and by rankings more generally, but the prognosis is bleak. In closing this post I would like to present an alternative view both generally and with specific regard to the University of Iowa. Because when I look at the question of college rankings I don’t see an intractable problem, I see a glaring, embarrassing, endemic failure of leadership.
As regular readers know, I don’t believe there is anything more important in human society, at any level, than leadership. If the person in charge, whatever they’re in charge of, is principled and fair, those qualities will permeate an organization whether that organization is a family, a small team or an entire nation. By the same token, if a leader turns out to be a intemperate degenerate, no matter how duly appointed or elected, you pretty much know what you’re in for regardless of the ideology, politics, religion or philosophy that person embraces.
It’s understood that USN has no vested interest in tallying the dollar cost of the damage its rankings do to higher education each year. When you purport to put forward objective information, but what you’re actually doing is passing along extorted data that is dubious in its integrity, you probably don’t want to draw too much attention to your corrupt business practices. What is a bit more surprising — but only just — is the degree to which the herd mentality and lack of courage in higher education abets USN‘s goals. Quite literally cowed by the threat of a drop in rank, schools fall all over themselves trying to please and appease their tormentor.
What is missing from the greater discussion of the rankings dilemma is an awareness that whatever the actual cost of complying with USN‘s demand for information, that cost must necessarily be recouped in some way if that decision is to make sense. Yet currently schools which capitulate to USN assume those costs with no guarantee that doing so will improve their rank. Conversely, schools which refuse to be extorted will almost certainly drop in rank, yet retain all of the resources that would have been wasted by complying with USN‘s demands. Unfortunately, because no one has ever done the necessary accounting, schools don’t know which choice is most profitable.
If you’re a snob or a marketing weasel and you really do care about things like prestige, then yes, you’re going to play ball with the bully so you can be part of the in-crowd. On the other hand, if playing ball with the bully gets you nothing tangible in return, or results in a net loss, what’s the incentive to do so other than fear? For schools at the top of the pecking order their rank may be of importance for reasons that have little or nothing to do with education, but once you pass the top-ten or top-twenty schools the value of any ranking prestige may well be zero dollars.
In 2001, fifteen years ago, Iowa’s national college rank, as determined by USN, was #41, and its rank among public universities was #20. In 2016, those numbers were #82 and #34, respectively. (For 2017, the numbers were #82 and #33, but that widely-report uptick of one place among public universities was due to being tied with other schools at that spot, not because anything actually changed for the better at Iowa.)
While Iowa’s national college rank doubled over that fifteen year span, suggesting a precipitous decline in…something…Iowa’s enrollment continued to increase, and this year set another record. Look at Iowa State over in Ames and you see the same story. Plummeting rankings yet record enrollment, meaning also record tuition even before the presidents at both schools forced trumped-up tuition hikes on students this past summer. So what’s going on here?
From Engines of Anxiety we can point to two factors. First, Iowa and Iowa State) are state schools, with all that entails. Although funding has been badly curtailed relative to prior years, the state does supply millions of dollars that other colleges and universities have to scrap for. Second, Iowa and Iowa State are regional schools, and represent the two dominant universities in Iowa for kids who either want to go in-state or have to go in-state for economic reasons. Combine those two factors — state funding and state prominence — and it’s going to be very hard for any drop in rank to negatively affect either school’s bottom line. Even after plummeting from #41 to #82 in less than the lifespan of an incoming freshman, it’s hard to imagine a significant population of students suddenly discounting Iowa on that ranking basis alone.
For any school, and particularly for that school’s leader, I see four possible options in responding to the rankings dilemma. Knowing the actual cost of providing data to USN would help clarify any school’s choices, but in general I think we can make some basic assumptions that will help us gauge the merits of each approach.
1) Play Along
This is by far the most common response, which is depressing for two reasons. First, you would think there would be more mavericks in higher education, but instead there seem to be a lot of doormats. Second, even a doormat should wonder about things like the cost-benefit of dancing to USN‘s drum, yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. Schools all over the country simply cave in to USN‘s demands in order to protect their USN ranking, when they don’t have any idea what a particular ranking is worth. What’s the actual dollar value of being #82 as against #81 or #83? And how does that compare to the cost of collecting, distilling and managing the requisite ranking data?
2) Maximize Value
Rankings are clearly a reality in higher education. They may be a farce, they may be a quasi-criminal enterprise, but people pay attention to them. For that reason it may make sense to play along to some degree, but where’s the line? Even if we don’t know the actual valuation of a ranking spot or how much it costs to play along, it should be obvious that there are diminishing returns from doing more rather than less.
If schools could spend a quarter of the time and resources putting data together for USN, and that only led to a three-spot drop in the rankings, why wouldn’t schools do that? Yes, those schools would probably take heat from disinterested snobs and panicky types, but if their leaders had the big picture in mind, and were intent on putting the health and welfare of their institution ahead of their own petty professional or personal needs, who wouldn’t make that trade?
3) Game Your Rank
The gung-ho alternative to playing along or getting the best bang for your buck is of course going all-in on protecting and improving your rank, whatever the cost and/or damage. One point in favor of that approach is that there will simply never be any accounting of either of those negatives, despite the fact that numbers will be flying fast and furious in every other regard. At a larger school you could probably blow ten million dollars in equivalent time and resources on gaming your school’s rank, yet never be held accountable for that cost.
As previously noted this is of course the approach embraced by J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa. It is, as also implied by the preceding discussion of Engines of Anxiety, a complete capitulation of leadership in every regard, and in particular wholesale capitulation to the nefarious motives of USN. Then again, if the only thing you ever talk about is keeping up appearances — being “excellent” or “world class”, or “greater” as opposed to only “great” — then it’s a given that you’re going to spare no expense making yourself beautiful for others, even if doing so rots you to the core.
4) Fight the Power
Engines of Anxiety references instances where schools or entire academic disciplines have resisted rankings, but that’s obviously much harder to do when most schools have already bought in. Even if you stick to your principles, you’re going to get pounded in the rankings for two reasons. First, because everyone else is either managing, massaging or manipulating their numbers in order to rank higher, and second because USN itself will actively punish you for your insolence. And yet…if we posit an actual leader instead of a crony tool or timid toad in the president’s office, it’s not hard to reach the conclusion that the right response to rankings extortion is to go to war over that issue.
Before reading Engines of Anxiety I had my doubts about the efficacy and validity of USN‘s rankings. After reading Espeland and Sauder’s book, I’m baffled that there has not been one person in a position of power at a prominent college or university who has decided to take the fight to USN on multiple fronts. Yes, doing so would almost certainly result in a considerable drop in rank, but even that outcome could be used to make the case that USN is not an objective judge of merit, but an extortion racket in the legal sense. And that in turn strikes me as something USN would certainly like to avoid.
Because the cost of, and damage from, kowtowing to USN is largely internal and unaccounted for, because it is distributed, and because it can be hard to trace back to USN‘s methodology, I think people assume USN can’t be stopped, but I think that assumption is wrong. Given the right leader at the right school, and as Engines of Anxiety itself attests, a compelling case could be made — publicly, loudly — that USN is doing systemic damage to higher education, which would in turn damage USN‘s beloved brand and market monopoly. Meaning there might, at the very least, be changes at USN that would make life better for every school in the country.
There is also the prestige and prominence that a school and its noble leader might generate by waging such a fight. Do you want to raise your school’s national profile? Do you want to stand apart in the consumer’s eyes, and in the eyes of prospective faculty and staff? Well, why not take on the biggest bully on the block and take that bully down a peg or two? At the very least, in doing so you would recover considerable resources that were being wasted on pacifying and pleasing that bully, allowing you to devote those resources to education or research.
So how would a school take on USN and either win that fight, or do enough damage to make USN back off? Well, because almost every school decides to play ball one way or the other, there’s an effective code of silence that benefits USN. The antidote, obviously, would be shining a light on the ways in which USN‘s methodology does corrupt higher education, and Engines of Anxiety is a beacon in that regard. All someone needs to do is amplify and expand on Espeland and Sauder’s research, then put that information in play in a way that allows it to be widely disseminated.
As noted early in this post, one of the truly disappointing aspects of higher education is the lack of research being done on higher-ed itself. You have scholars out the wazoo, you have issues of pressing concern, yet time and again people with little or no actual knowledge come to dominate the higher-ed conversation. (For example, when J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed the justification for his hire was that he would lead the school through a critical period of transformational change, which was not and still has not been defined. In fact, over a year later the closest Harreld himself has ever come to specifics was the guru-blather he burped about going from “great to greater” during his candidate forum.)
Along with already possessing academic professionals and resources that would be helpful in fighting USN, many schools — including the #82-ranked University of Iowa — come with attorneys and public relations and marketing departments, to say nothing of having deep institutional, professional and personal ties to other schools and powerful players in the higher-ed industry. If a college or university really wanted to pull out all the stops and put USN under hot lights for its predatory business practices, not only do I think that would be relatively easy, I don’t think it would be long before there was a groundswell of support.
So, what arguments might be used to shame if not injure USN? I see the following possible lines of attack:
* If you look at USN‘s methodology for best colleges, you find that 22.5% of a school’s score is Undergraduate Academic Reputation — meaning what other people think of that school. Because some schools are more well-known than others, name recognition clearly plays a part in the responses, meaning there is built-in bias Bias which, as Espeland and Sauder point out in Engines of Anxiety, may be self-perpetuating. (The more well-known a school is the more highly ranked it will be, which means it will become more well-known, etc.)
The obvious question is whether that bias could be proven empirically, and I think the answer is yes. Take the USN rankings, check the names of each school against searches on Google or in databases like Lexis/Nexis, and it shouldn’t be too hard to determine how important name recognition is to rank, apart from any other factors. In fact, that might make for a good paper, or perhaps even a thesis.
* In the same vein, research could be done on the degree to which endowments correlate with rankings — as previously quoted is Engines of Anxiety. If the only thing that really matters is how much money a school has on hand, then you don’t need to collect and crunch a bunch of other numbers. Each school could just send an ATM slip with its current balance to USN and be done with it. (Again, that might make for an interesting paper at almost any level.)
* Whether USN‘s ranking are inherently discriminatory is probably something USN does not want to talk about, so of course that should be heavily investigated as well. If students from more affluent families have more time and resources to devote to test prep, and those students tend to be white, and better test scores are a positive influence on rank, then USN effectively compels schools to enroll rich white kids if it wants to do well in the rankings. If that could be shown in a scholarly work, said scholarly work might also get a lot play, particularly if it was released just before the annual USN rankings.
* Asking people to fill out questionnaires about reputation is like asking people to fill out a poll — there is necessarily some margin of error, but USN does not acknowledge any such imprecision. That imprecision may be yet another reason why USN converts its scores into rankings, to give the appearance of being calculated when in fact there is considerable unacknowledged noise in the results.
How much noise? Well, I don’t know, but I’m guessing that someone armed with the requisite statistical background could hack the USN methodology to pieces in a relatively short amount of time. Perhaps for extra credit.
* Upping the ante considerably, it would also be interesting to explore the possible justifications for a lawsuit against USN, premised on its coercive business tactics. Where Consumer Reports simply poses as a consumer and purchases products it wants to test, USN must rely on colleges and universities to provide data that those schools might otherwise prefer to keep private. USN‘s argument is that compelling disclosure of that information aids students and their families in making costly decisions, but at the same time it also seems to do a world of good for USN‘s bottom line.
What you might expect if a school refused to knuckle under to USN‘s abusive and costly demands is that such a school would be listed as ‘Not Rated’ or some equivalent. Instead, USN gives such schools placeholder data and ranks them anyway, even though the data being substituted has nothing to do with reality. That USN‘s substitute data seems to tank each recalcitrant school’s rankings further lends credence to the idea that USN actively punishes schools that do not ‘volunteer’ to spend valuable time and resources gathering the data USN wants, which sounds like a textbook definition of extortion. Give USN what it wants, or else.
What’s particularly interesting about USN‘s practice of inserting its own numbers when data is not supplied is that it should not result in every school experiencing a drop in rank, yet in Engines of Anxiety and other reports I’ve read that always seems to be the case. Flaunt USN‘s demands and you take a rankings hit. Again, from p. 177 of Engines of Anxiety:
Leaving aside USN‘s agenda, if USN always inserts the average for a given missing number, then for some schools that average should be an improvement. In fact, if the absolute worst schools in the USN rankings — say, the bottom 100 of all colleges — simply refused to supply any data, they should see a significant increase in rank because of the average data supplied by USN. And yet somehow that never seems to happen, suggesting that USN itself may be gaming its methodology to punish schools no matter where they rank.
Whether it would be possible to win a suit against USN based on extortion or reputational harm, or any other charge, I have no idea. What I do know is that it would make one hell of a stink, particularly if the school filing the suit(s) was committed for the long haul, and committed its resources to that objective instead of to playing ball with the USN bully. Nothing generates press coverage like legal action, and depending on any corroborating research that was also conducted USN might end up with a badly bloodied nose even if it ultimately prevailed.
What’s truly amazing about the idea of waging such a fight is that the only possible downside — literally, the only conceivable negative outcome — would be a drop in USN‘s ranking. No other rankings would be affected, and at a bare minimum all of the costs normally devoted to satisfying USN‘s desire for heavily massaged if not manipulated data would be recouped. If the scholars at the plaintiff school conducted corroborating research, that would also benefit those individuals and that institution. Finally, because legal action could be waged by that school’s Office of the General Counsel instead of incurring costly outside legal fees, there would be minimal cost to the litigation itself. (Students, staff and faculty from that university’s college of law might also pitch in.)
Had the Iowa Board of Regents appointed a real president at the University of Iowa, instead of a fraud, UI would be a good candidate for such an undertaking, because it has both the mass and assets needed to wage such a battle. More importantly, having already plummeted from #41 to #82 over the past fifteen years, yet at the same time having shown no demonstrable negative effect from that drop, it seems that Iowa’s status as the flagship university in the state, and as one of the best schools in the region, provides it with some immunity to USN‘s rankings.
Unfortunately, at the exact historical moment when someone somewhere should be taking a stand against USN‘s coercive tactics and the damage USN is doing to schools across the country, the Iowa Board of Regents hired a man who is determined to go all-in on gaming Iowa’s rank. To that end, this summer Harreld pushed through egregious tuition hikes which banked $11M in a discretionary slush fund, and prior to that Harreld reconfigured the entire resource allocation process to serve that goal. Yet this same man — who considers himself a data-driven guy, and a business savant, and a transformative visionary — either does not know, or will not disclose, the cost of implementing his plan.
Any academic leader who truly cared about the students at their school and the health of their institution would take one look at the protection racket that is the USN national college rankings and declare open war against U.S. News and World Report. Even if the battle was ultimately lost in the courts it would almost certainly loosen the toxic stranglehold that USN has on every school in the nation. Unfortunately, most colleges and universities are run by people who are afraid to act for fear that they themselves will suffer negative consequences, and I guess that’s understandable. At the University of Iowa, however, that’s not the problem. The problem at Iowa is that J. Bruce Harreld is not simply a coward, he is a collaborator.
Here are the latest rankings:
https://apps.its.uiowa.edu/dispatch/messages/view/41b0ad7c-490b-4bb0-b25c-7de7a4fadd1a
On this past Tuesday the Iowa Board of Regents selected Mark Nook as the new president of the University of Northern Iowa, from among three finalists for the position. Nook’s appointment concluded a five-month search process, which was belatedly implemented four months after former UNI president William Ruud was effectively driven out of office. During the nine-month span between Ruud’s ouster and Nook’s appointment, UNI provost James Wohlpart served as the interim UNI president, and Wohlpart himself was one of the finalists for the job.
I was genuinely surprised by the appointment of Mark Nook, for several reasons. The most obvious was that after paying close attention to the corrupt machinations at the board for more than a year, it was impossible for me to read the UNI search as anything other than a crony attempt to exploit or pervert yet another decision making process. To that end, it seemed likely that Wohlpart would be given the appointment as part of a ‘done deal’ reaching back to Ruud’s unexplained resignation.
Given the board’s perpetual penchant for secrecy and obfuscation, there is a lot that is not and never will be known about this particular hiring decision. What we can do in the absence of genuine transparency, however, is look at various facets of the hire, and none stands out more than the fact that the Board of Regents appears — and I use the word ‘appears’ advisedly — to have done its job. Among the three finalists, I too believed that Nook was the most qualified, which to my jaded mind immediately disqualified him in the eyes of the corrupt regents leadership.
Interim UNI president Jim Wohlpart, who will now return to his former role as provost, seems like a nice guy, and down the road will make a good university president at another school, but he was thin on academic administrative experience at the provost or president level. The other finalist, Neil Theobald, resigned as president of Temple University just ahead of a move to fire him, and as such was damaged goods despite his considerable presidential experience. On the other hand, given that the board went out of its way to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa in 2015, despite the fact that Harreld had no experience in academic administration and falsified aspects of his resume, it should be clear that the board was capable of choosing any of the three finalist in the UNI search.
One of the most interesting dynamics surrounding the UNI search was the persistent refrain from various stakeholders that they were going to get the search ‘right’, alluding to how ‘wrong’ the 2015 search was at UI. In parallel with that sentiment, however, was the entirely wrong-headed assertion that by actually doing its job honestly and fairly, the Iowa Board of Regents would have somehow atoned for the abuses that were committed during the 2015 UI search. As I noted on Twitter last Tuesday, after Nook’s appointment was announced:
If anything, the apparent fairness and sincerity of the 2016 UNI search only serves to underscore the bureaucratic mendacity of the 2015 UI search. And of course UI is still saddled with its illegitimate and increasingly delirious president, regardless of the outcome at UNI. Whether Nook proves to be a good or bad choice over time, Nook’s appointment does nothing to grant UI relief from the serial and often inexplicably trivial lies that J. Bruce Harreld simply cannot stop peddling. (And of course it’s the big, behind-the-scenes lie that are of real concern.)
Devoid of context, it does look as if the Iowa Board of Regents, both with regard to its final vote and its initiation of the search process, did what it was supposed to do. While we will never know who any of the other candidates were, the committee and the board seem to have made reasonable choices for and among the finalists, despite a regrettable recurrent lack of diversity. Given UNI’s size and mission, Nook also seems eminently qualified, particularly given his recent experience as a senior VP in the rapidly disintegrating University of Wisconsin System.
(As an aside, the UW System Board of Regents just hit out-of-state students with a $4,000 tuition increase over the next two years. It should be clear to anyone who follows higher-ed that this increase is a desperate attempt to soak nonresident students as a result of legislative funding shortfalls, and as such is a sign of ill health. That the Iowa Board of Regents has been more measured in its abuse of nonresident students should not distract observers from the fact that the widening gap between resident and nonresident tuition in the state of Iowa — about which student leaders at the state universities have been increasingly vocal — is likewise a clear sign of distress.)
Unlike the 2015 UI search, during which the search committee identified and passed along three qualified candidates, plus one utterly unqualified stealth candidate who was repeatedly given preferential treatment by the corrupt leadership at the board, the 2016 UNI search produced the appointment of a qualified candidate to lead the University of Northern Iowa. Even better, in the recently concluded UNI search the board seems to have respected the input and will of the UNI community, which was decidedly not the case during the 2015 UI search. While the three fully qualified candidates at UI received high levels of community support in 2015, the candidate that the board appointed was vehemently opposed:
Because of the layers of secrecy present during even the most open of presidential searches by the Iowa Board of Regents, we never know what the internal sentiment was for a given candidate, and that is the case with the 2016 UNI search. By convention, the board’s final vote is always reported as unanimous even if the actual vote was a contentious 5-4 split, meaning we have no visibility to what the board felt about the three finalists. Likewise, while the UNI search committee submitted its own findings to the board prior to the vote, we don’t know what information was communicated about each candidate. In fact, unlike the 2015 UI search, we don’t even know the results of a concurrent faculty survey, because those results have also not been released. (People often claim they want the regents to conduct open and transparent presidential searches, yet when it comes to being open and transparent about their own attempts to influence a search, those same people invariably follow the board’s lead and invoke confidentiality.)
Still, despite all of those attempts to freeze out interested stakeholders, we do have this, from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 12/06/16:
Again, in the absence of any context, it seems like the 2016 UNI presidential search went according to plan. A wide net was cast, at least three qualified candidates applied and made it to the final round, and the best of the lot was chosen. The problem, of course, is that context matters, and it’s in looking at the context surrounding the 2016 UNI search that we confront a number of problems.
If you’re hired to do a job — whether at a high salary or minimum wage — then it’s generally expected that in exchange for that compensation you will do your job. Meaning you shouldn’t expect, nor would you be entitled to, any additional compensation or credit for doing what you were hired to do. Although the nine members of the Iowa Board of Regents do not draw a salary, they likewise accept the statutory responsibilities of that job when they accept their appointment, and none of those responsibilities is greater than the obligation to conduct fair and ethical presidential searches at the state’s three universities. Meaning the board members — individually and collectively — should expect no additional credit for doing what they are supposed to do.
With regard to the 2016 UNI presidential search, the default assumption is that the regents met their obligations because that’s their job, yet when it comes to the current Board of Regents, and particularly the leadership at the board, that’s exactly the kind of assumption that perpetually turns out to be a mistake. The key question regarding the UNI search is not whether the regents ran a fair search, but why the regents suddenly decided to meet their statutory obligations instead of perpetrating another fraud. And as it turns out, there’s a very good reason why the corrupt leadership at the board may have decided to play the UNI search straight, and that’s because doing so may get them something they want very much — just for doing what they were supposed to do anyway.
As regular readers know, in the aftermath of J. Bruce Harreld’s fraudulent appointment at Iowa in 2015, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sanctioned the University of Iowa, and, by overt association, the Iowa Board of Regents, for abuses of shared governance during that sham search. While virtually unprecedented for a school of Iowa’s standing, the AAUP sanction was more than deserved, and serves as a warning to prospective hires that the school and governing board violated longstanding guidelines in higher education.
In response, however, rather than acknowledge any wrongdoing or express even the slightest hint of contrition, the crony trash who engineered Harreld’s sham hire — including Regents President Bruce Rastetter and J. Bruce Harreld himself — have done everything possible to shift blame and escape accountability for the AAUP sanction. Not only did corrupt administrators at the University of Iowa portray the sanction as only technically applicable to the school, when in fact the highest-ranking administrator on campus during the 2015 UI search was integral to the fraud, they also enlisted the former and current heads of the UI Faculty Senate in perpetuating that lie. In reality, the fraud perpetrated during the 2015 UI presidential search included the Iowa Board of Regents and the University of Iowa, and by rights they should both have been sanctioned. (The AAUP currently has no provision in its bylaws for sanctioning governing boards, but that may change.)
In that context, then, there are two obvious explanations as to why the regents may have felt compelled to run a legitimate presidential search at UNI in 2016, and neither has anything to do with meeting their statutory obligations. First and most obviously, the regents may have run a fair search at UNI in order to claim that they learned their lesson following the AAUP sanction. The problem with such a claim, of course, is that the regents are effectively asking for relief for simply doing what they should have done in 2015. Again, however, the regents have shown no contrition, they have offered no apology, and the crony trash that ran the sham search has never been held to account in any way. And of course worst of all, J. Bruce Harreld — the object of and abettor of that sham search — is still the president of the University of Iowa.
The second and related reason why the regents may have decided to conduct a fair search at UNI is that they have already cut a deal in exchange for doing so, meaning they have also successfully bartered their statutory obligation for actual gain. Granted, if that were the case you might expect that the board would tip its hand in that regard, yet as just noted there seems to be no end to individuals who are eager to shred their personal credibility in exchange for ingratiating themselves with the crony trash who engineered Harreld’s fraudulent hire. And in fact, in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 UNI presidential search, someone promptly stepped front and center not only to put the idea of a quid pro quo in play, but did so in a manner which undercut the AAUP’s standing as a watchdog in the higher-ed community.
Continuing, from Miller’s piece:
Now, I don’t know who Joe Gorton is. I don’t know whether offering to let UI and the regents off the hook for the 2015 UI search was his own idea, I don’t know whether he cut some sort of deal with the regents, or whether he hopes, in proposing such a deal, that he can get something in return. What I do know is that you don’t absolve people of past abuses because they refrain from perpetrating those same abuses, or because they do something they should have done anyway. (That’s particularly true in this case, given the relative size and standing of UI and UNI, and the fact that hijacking the UI presidency was a longstanding crony goal of the board’s corrupt leadership.)
Running a fair search at UNI was not only obligatory, it does nothing to repair the damage that has been done and continues to be done by J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa. The leadership of the Iowa Board of Regents and the highest-ranking administrators at the University of Iowa committed fraud in hiring J. Bruce Harreld, yet those individuals have never accepted responsibility for their actions, nor have they been punished for their abuses. Yet every time I turn around someone is standing up and saying that either UI or the Board or Regents or both got a raw deal. No, what they got was a whole lot less than they deserved, because as it turns out there is no legal, regulatory or legislative authority with the guts to hold anyone at the board accountable for anything.
But it gets worse. Joe Gorton is the president of United Faculty at UNI, which is a union that engages in collective bargaining with the Board of Regents. As such, in proposing that the regents be forgiven for saddling Iowa with an incompetent president, Gorton is linking the AAUP’s watchdog role with the arm of the AAUP that engages in union activities in higher education. So why is that a problem?
It’s a problem because the last idiot to make that linkage was J. Bruce Harreld himself, in his sputtering, incoherent response to the AAUP sanction back in June. From the Corridor Business Journal, on 06/21/16:
At the time Harreld was rightly criticized not only for failing to respond to the AAUP sanction as president, but for trying to discredit the AAUP’s role as a standard-bearer by implying that the AAUP was somehow sanctioning UI for leverage at the bargaining table. And yet now here we have Joe Gorton doing exactly the same thing, and I can’t think of anything worse for the AAUP. Why? Because the moment those two issues are linked, every governing board is going to tell the AAUP that they can choose between getting what they want at the bargaining table or getting what they want in terms of shared governance, but not both.
If anything, the 2016 UNI search not only shows that the Iowa Board of Regents knows how to do its job when it is motivated to do so, it underscores just how egregious the abuses of power were during the 2015 UI search. As noted in a number of posts, Rastetter’s conduct was so transparently unethical that he had to invent a new fake rule for presidential searches after the fact, in order to explain the meetings he arranged between Harreld and four other regents at his private place of business in Ames. A rule which was subsequently never articulated or implemented during the 2016 UNI search, proving conclusively that Rastetter’s claim was a lie.
Regarding the overall context of the 2016 UNI search, it’s also important to remember that the appointment of Mark Nook follows not from a routine or even tragic vacancy, but as a result of the board’s calculated decision to leave former president William Ruud hanging without a contract. To the extent that Nook may turn out to be an excellent president, not only was there confusion if not consternation about the way the board treated Ruud prior to his resignation, in showing Ruud the door the board forfeited three years of experience that Ruud had at UNI, which came with a cost. Nook will now have to build relationships and learn the ropes in a way that Ruud would not have if he had simply been retained, plus there’s the $100K+ that was spent on the search, and all of the projects and plans that had to be tabled until a new president was appointed. (As to the key differences between Ruud and Nook, see here and here.)
That the only people who know why the 2016 UNI presidential search even took place are the same people who conducted the fraudulent 2015 UI search — meaning they once again manipulated events from the shadows — should give everyone pause before they pat themselves on the back about forcing the board to run a fair search, or claim that the board has somehow proven it should no longer be under sanction for its prior abuses. In fact, given that the same people who compelled the 2016 UNI search and engineered the corrupt 2015 UI search are now angling — by proxy — to have the AAUP sanction removed, it should be glaringly obvious why the 2016 UNI search was conducted as it was. These are not people who do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.
It may be that professionals inside the Board of Regents, or on the staff actually possess a conscience, and that they realize what a disaster the Harreld presidency is shaping up to be. It is hard to ignore the AAUP sanctions, the gridlock by a President who has no idea what he is to do (other than take sweet vacations abroad), the massive cost overruns in Iowa City, the flight of top UIowa talent, and the obvious criminal activity of the Iowa State president.
Even without a conscience, the Board could pragmatically look at the mess Iowa State finds itself in. President Leath has committed atrocious fiscal malfeasance that should really be investigated for criminal intent. Any other lessor employee would be terminated, and forced to pay back with penalty and with interest the amount he has fleeced ISU, their foundation, the faculty and students of ISU, and the people of Iowa. The various groups named above financed a playboy billionaire lifestyle for some carpet-bagging dilettante who shows no real remorse for his malfeasance.
Considering the malfeasance and criminal neglect committed at the two major universities in Iowa, the BOR may have determined to play by the rules to install the best candidate of a rather limited field at UNI.
Really, the Board can slap itself on the back for this. The amounts of money and the importance to Iowa that UNI offers is overall less than the Iowa+ISU juggernauts (not to derogate the value of the school). The Board can select a qualified president, pay him much less than the overpaid shills at the other two institutions. and feel good all around.
However this should not allow the Board to absolve itself of the responsibility of a criminal malfeasance at Iowa State, and of the criminal failure to carry out responsibilities to students, faculty and people at Iowa. The corruption of those two schools is thick and it is indictable, and it is important.
If only Iowa had an Attorney General with enough balls to investigate and indict the corrupt organizations foisting this malfeasance on Iowa.
For most of the past year I was where you’re at — thinking some or most of the people at the Iowa Board of Regents were probably not corrupt down to their DNA like Rastetter. Then again, it wasn’t too long ago that there was a massive purge of institutional knowledge at the board, with many long-time and reliable professionals in the board offices being moved aside to make way for Rastetter’s personally groomed cronies.
I’ve said before that Rastetter’s gift is knowing how to exploit situations, but I think it goes deeper than that. I think his real gift — black as it is — is being able to spot people who are willing or even eager to be corrupted. If you pass that low bar then you’re fit to work for Rastetter, but if not then you either don’t get hired, or if you’re already on staff you have to go.
Case in point, ISU President Steven Leath, who has proven himself over the past year to be as corrupt as Rastetter, yet even more contemptible in his bluster and belittling of anyone who dares to actually point out that he is devoid of personal integrity. With the crony Rastetter-Leath land deal he came out guns blazing, got his ass handed to him, then fell back to contrition. With the airplane misuse and abuse, same thing: Leath initially went on the offensive, but as of Monday has now managed the rather neat trick of playing the contrition card twice with regard to the same issue. Throw in the fraudulently appointed J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa and it’s a real murderer’s row of corruption:
All of which is to say that I was of course pleasantly surprised that Chief Auditor Todd Stewart and his team did a very good job with their audit and report, which guts Leath like the bloated fish he is. Sure, that’s not the way the board is playing it — or Leath, who once again exonerated himself from any wrongdoing even though no legal entity has even looked at the case — but this is a long game, and that audit is going to hang around his neck like a lead anchor.
Unfortunately, the blithe way in which Rastetter simply proclaimed that Leath was an honest man and the issue was resolved makes clear that the board is corrupt to its very core, and that includes most of the other nine members. Between Donley and Braun in the board office, and Mulholland and McKibben on the board, there’s no possible way that the truth will ever see any daylight, even as millions of dollars in salaries are funneled to two men who quite literally would not have their jobs if there was any legal or regulatory oversight at the board.
So no — unfortunately, the board has no conscience, and I don’t see it getting one any time soon. These people have all made a deal with Boss Rastetter, and they’re committed to him. They don’t care about the students, faculty or staff, or the taxpayers, they only care about a man who has made a mockery of what it means to serve on and lead to board.
The fact that Leath is going back to work simply confirms that all of those people, individually and collectively, are dead inside.
On this past Monday, the thoroughly corrupt Iowa Board of Regents revealed the findings of an internal audit of Iowa State President Steven Leath and his use of ISU Flight Services. As Bleeding Heartland noted Thursday in a tour-de-force post, there are serious concerns about the accuracy and completeness of the audit. Despite the audit’s shortcomings, however, it still stands as a damning indictment not only of serial lies that Leath has been telling for months, but of the lies Leath told at Monday’s board meeting.
In typically corrupt fashion, the board mischaracterized and downplayed the findings of its own audit, then allowed ISU President Leath to falsely claim that the audit exonerated him as to violations of both board policy and state law. Leath then immediately contradicted his lies by acknowledging that he did in fact use state property for personal reasons, which does constitute both a violation of board policy and state law. To underscore the bald nature of Leath’s lies to the board, and the board’s complicity in allowing Leath to lie without consequence, it is important to note that the audit made no policy determination outside of questions pertaining to ISU Flight Services policy, nor did it reach any conclusions about whether Leath broke the law. From the board audit, p. 4:
While the audit was a complex undertaking, in part because ISU Flight Services maintained slipshod records when it kept records at all, the scope of the audit was narrowly focused on financial questions related to ISU Flight Services and Leath’s use of same. As such, whether Leath violated other aspects of board policy was never under the purview of the audit, and was never determined by the auditors. Likewise, the audit did not address questions of legality.
From Iowa Radio’s Dar Danielson, on 12/13/16:
Not only did the board’s Chief Auditor explicitly state that the audit did not attempt to determine whether Leath’s conduct was legal, as of this late date no law enforcement or judicial entity has ever considered, let alone determined, whether Leath broke any laws. And yet there was Leath himself, on Monday, making a statement to the board that was provably false from the audit itself:
When Leath stated that the “comprehensive audit has now confirmed” that “[he] did not violate any policies or break any laws”, not only did Leath know he was lying, but the entire corrupt board knew that Leath was lying, yet no one on the board said anything. From the board’s own audit, revealed only moments earlier, everyone in attendance knew that no legal determination had been made about the legality of Leath’s use of ISU Flight Services, yet Leath flatly claimed that the audit exonerated him, and the board tacitly accepted that false claim.
Following a nauseating interlude in which Leath professed his love for Iowa State, which he alone has personally befouled, Leath then admitted, with intentionally tortured phrasing, that he had in fact used state property for purely personal reasons:
As president of Iowa State, Steven Leath was entitled to use the school’s two airplanes — which are state property — for business purposes only. Translating that into Leath-speak, that means Leath was allowed to use ISU’s airplanes only as much as he absolutely had to in order to do his job. Under no circumstance was Leath allowed to use either plane for personal reasons, yet in stating that he “used the university planes more frequently than was absolutely necessary”, by definition Leath admitted that on more than one occasion he used ISU’s airplanes for personal reasons. Again then, only moments after falsely stating that the audit exonerated him as to any possible violations of board policy or state law, Leath’s mealy-mouthed and intentionally deceptive admission that he did use state property for personal reasons confirmed those very violations.
As to whether Leath committed violations of board policy beyond the narrow scope of the audit, here is section 1.3.A of the Iowa Board of Regents’ policy manual, which concerns Leath’s persistent ‘duty of loyalty‘:
As the second sentence clearly states, all “institutional officials” — of which Leath is undeniably one — are required to “promote at all times the best interests of the board and its institutions”. Just as obviously, turning state property to personal use is a violation of that policy, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Between the damage Leath has done to the reputation of Iowa State, and the costs he has foisted on the board — including the need to pull multiple full-time auditors from their work at Iowa and Iowa State in order to complete the board’s expedited internal audit — Leaths’ conduct as president of Iowa State has been a perpetual violation of his policy-mandated duty of loyalty for months if not years.
The next question, obviously, is whether Leath’s acknowledged personal use of state property was also a violation of state law. From Iowa Code Section 721.2.5:
As president of Iowa State, Steven Leath is a “public officer or employee” of the state of Iowa. In stating on Monday that he used ISU’s airplanes “more than [he] absolutely had to”, Leath himself acknowledged that he “knowingly” used state property for a “private purpose and for personal gain”, meaning each time he did so he committed a serious misdemeanor. That no law enforcement or judicial entity has ever considered whether such charges should be investigated or filed does not leave Leath or the board free to declare that Leath has been absolved of such charges. Because the board is irredeemably corrupt, however, it allowed Leath to do so anyway, despite the fact that the board’s own audit clearly states that no legal determinations were made.
The ISU Flight Services Audit
The Iowa Board of Regents’ internal audit of ISU Flight Services included a review of all flights after Steven Leath took office in February of 2012. At that time Iowa State owned two airplanes: a Beechcraft King Air 200 and a Piper Warrior. Today, Iowa State owns two different planes: a pressurized eleven-seat, twin-engine turboprop King Air 350, which was purchased in April of 2014; and a four-seat, single-engine Cirrus SR-22, which was purchased at Leath’s sole discretion in July of 2014.
Regarding Leath’s use of the Cirrus, we find this on p. 3:
The first thing to note about the board’s internal audit is that nowhere are the terms ‘flight’ and ‘trip’ defined. We do not know if a trip equals a single flight — defined in this post as a takeoff followed by a landing — or if a trip means a multi-flight journey spanning days or even weeks. From the audit itself there is some evidence that the terms are at times used interchangeably, yet nowhere is that specified. From p. 5:
Here the word ‘flight’ and ‘trip’ seem to be used interchangeably, implying that a flight equals a trip, but that’s clearly not the case elsewhere in the audit. For example, from p. 6:
Following that introduction the four referenced North Carolina trips are listed in some detail, and all four span multiple dates, indicating that each trip was comprised of multiple flights. Across the full audit the term ‘trip’ is used more often than ‘flight’ to describe the movement of ISU’s planes from place to place, but the terms themselves are used inconsistently and ambiguously. Unfortunately, then, despite the number of auditors who worked on the audit (seven), and the purported completeness of the audit, we are left to guess as to the most basic units of measure in the audit.
By happenstance, however, we are not flying totally blind. In a prior post we compiled a list of all known Cirrus flights from logs available on the ISU Flight Services FAQ [see #15]. Fortuitously, the timeline for those logs also matches the timeline of the audited Cirrus flights almost exactly, beginning in August of 2014 and ending in September of 2016. In that prior count we identified 22 trips — meaning multi-flight journeys, usually departing from and returning to Ames, Iowa — which included 53 individual flights as defined above.
By comparison, for that same time period the board’s auditors determined that the “University President was the pilot or a passenger on 72 of [76] trips”, and that the “business purpose as reported by the University President for 52 of the 72 trips was proficiency/training or certification in the Cirrus”. If we assume that the audit does generally equate a ‘trip’ to a single ‘flight’, then the number of individual Cirrus flights in the audit and the number of Cirrus flights in the earlier post are not too far apart — 72 in the audit and 53 in the prior post.
As to how we might explain that 19-flight gap, the auditors had access to zealously guarded information which has never been disclosed by either Iowa State, or by the disingenuously-professed “open, honest and forthcoming” President Steven Leath. That information includes, particularly, Leath’s private pilot’s log, which all pilots are required to accurately maintain. Given the disparity in access to that information, the fact that the audit’s total for Cirrus trips/flights is 19 greater than can be determined from publicly available logs seems consistent with what we would expect to see, for two reasons.
First, because a 19-flight increase is not in itself considerable, but seems to reflect the generally sedate pace of flights as previously known. Second, because that variance shows an increase in the total number of flights, rather than a decrease. (Had the audit’s total for trips/flights been lower than the total determined by publicly available logs, that would obviously have been a red flag.)
On the other hand, if we assume that the audit’s use of the term ‘trip’ equates to the use of the term ‘trip’ in the earlier post, or to the “four trips” to North Carolina referenced in the audit — meaning a multi-flight journey — then the total number of Cirrus flights in the audit would increase considerably. 72 audited Cirrus ‘trips’ in that case would equal a minimum of 144 separate flights (72 x 2 flights per trip minimum), of which a whopping 104 flights (52 trips x 2 flights per trip minimum) would have been solely devoted to “proficiency/training”. Based on the pattern of usage in the publicly available flight logs, however — including the six-month, post-accident gap after Leath’s 07/14/15 “hard landing” in Bloomington, IL, during which the Cirrus appears not to have been flown at all — it seems unlikely that Leath’s actual usage of the Cirrus was that high.
(If Leath really did take 2.7 times as many flights as can be determined by the publicly available flight logs, then the majority of those additional flights were flown under VFR conditions, and were likely only ever recorded in Leath’s pilot’s log. As a related footnote, while the Chief Auditor for the board did review Leath’s log, he “didn’t take possession of it“, and the audit contains no specific information regarding the contents of Leath’s log.)
For the purposes of this post we are going to assume, in the following passage from p. 3 of the audit, that the term “trip” means a single flight:
The second thing to note about Leath’s Cirrus flights is that there is considerable potential for confusion about which “proficiency/training” flights are included in the 72 trips/flights reported in audit. The vast majority of the “proficiency/training” flights that Leath took in order to certify in-type for the school-owned Cirrus SR22, as well as to fly under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), took place between October of 2012 and mid-January of 2015. Because the audit concerns only those flights that Leath took in the school-owned Cirrus SR22, however, and that plane was not purchased until July of 2014, any flight instruction that Leath took in other airplanes is not accounted for in the audit. (For more, see items #8 and #9 on the ISU Flight Services FAQ.)
Regarding the overlap between Leath’s training and his purchase of Iowa State’s Cirrus SR22, we can reach several conclusions. Most of the training Leath required to attain certification in-type and for IFR flight — meaning also including his private pilot’s license, which he acquired over a decade earlier — was completed prior to the purchase of Iowa State’s Cirrus in July of 2014. We know that in part because the publicly available Cirrus logs show only incidental use (six flights) between August of 2014 and mid-January of 2015, when Leath completed all of his mandated training. After that, Leath was fully certified from mid-January of 2015 until the end of the audit period in September of 2016.
The third thing to note about the p. 3 quote above is that the audit makes no determination as to the legitimacy of Leath’s claim of business use on the basis of “proficiency/training or certification”. Rather, the audit simply reports what Leath said, which is that out of 72 total trips/flights in the Cirrus, a whopping 52 of those trips/flights were business-related solely because they involved “proficiency/training or certification in the Cirrus”.
Is that possible? Was ISU President Leath obligated to make 52 trips/flights in the Cirrus simply to be legally qualified, and/or in compliance with the school’s insurance policy, so he could then fly another 20 trips/flights that might have been of some potential benefit to the school? (If true, that would mean that for every flight of potential benefit to ISU, Leath was obligated to make 2.6 “proficiency/training” flights in the $500K Cirrus, which Leath had the school purchase at his sole discretion expressly for the purpose of making better use of his precious presidential time.)
From all of the above we know that the great majority of Leath’s required “proficiency/training” flights were completed by mid-January of 2015, yet from the publicly available flights logs — starting with “Trip #4” in the previously discussed post — we also know the Cirrus flew an additional 47 flights through September of 2016, which coincides with the end of the audit period. As noted in the audit, however, by Leath’s own assertion there were only ever 20 trips/flights which had a business basis other than “proficiency/training”, meaning that even if all 20 of those trips/flights occurred after mid-January of 2015 — which is itself unlikely — then the only possible business use for the other 27 flights was “proficiency/training”. And yet by that time any mandatory “proficiency/training” requirements had long been completed.
The answer, then, is no: ISU President Leath was not obligated to make 52 “proficiency/training” flights in the Cirrus, regardless of the time frame of those flights, in order to be qualified and in compliance for the other 20 flights that he took. In fact, after both acquiring his type certification for the Cirrus and completing his IFR training by or before mid-January of 2015, Leath would have only been required to make routine flights to maintain the currency of those ratings. For example, in order to fly passengers in VFR conditions, Leath was required to make three landings and takeoffs in the prior 90 days, all of which he could have performed on a touch-and-go basis at the same airport, during a single relatively short flight dedicated solely to that purpose. In order to remain current with his IFR certification the requirements are more involved, but could still be accomplished in a single flight or two. (Even after a long layoff — say, due to a mysterious injury — recertification would likely involve, at most, a single check ride with a qualified instructor.)
Even if we are charitable in making allowances for Leath’s recertification or currency flights — say, 7 of the 47 Cirrus flights which took place after mid-January of 2015 — then Leath is still claiming that of the 40 remaining flights, fully half were also required for “proficiency/training”. And yet, as just detailed, at that time there would have been no conceivable “proficiency/training” requirement in force. All of which means, mathematically, that at a bare minimum 20 of the Cirrus flights which occurred after mid-January of 2015 had no business justification whatsoever, and instead necessarily represent personal use by ISU President Leath.
Perhaps sensing their own exposure to that irreducible logic, on p. 8 the auditors again emphasize that no determination was made as to the validity of Leath’s claim:
In keeping with the other blatant contradictions at Monday’s board meeting, Leath’s claim that his almost constant “proficiency/training” flights represented business use was once again voided by none other than Leath himself. From Jeff Charis-Carlson, writing for the Des Moines Register, on 12/13/16:
What is amazing about Leath’s acknowledgment that “training may be viewed as a personal benefit”, is that in the above quote Leath is specifically referring to mandated training which occurred before mid-January of 2015. If Leath is reimbursing the school for costs associated with that training — without which he literally would not have been allowed to fly the Cirrus — and he is doing so on the basis that such mandatory training conferred a personal benefit, then it follows that any of the 72 known Cirrus trips that Leath justified on the basis of “proficiency/training” also conferred a personal benefit, and should also be reimbursed. In fact, even if Leath is compelled by legal jeopardy to stick to his absurd claim that 52 of his 72 Cirrus flights were business related for “proficiency/training” reasons, then he should still reimburse Iowa State for all Cirrus flights that he claims were justified on that basis.
As to the 20 Cirrus trips/flights that were not purportedly related to “proficiency/training”, as noted earlier the audit takes a particularly close look at “four trips” that Leath took to his home in North Carolina, where his family runs a business and Leath has deep personal and professional ties. As previously discussed, in that instance the audit uses the word ‘trip’ to describe multi-flight journeys, and from the publicly available flight logs we know that those “four trips” alone comprised, at minimum, eleven separate flights. From p. 6:
If you know nothing about Leath’s flying history, and in particular nothing about Leath’s trips to North Carolina in the Cirrus, and you read the audit details about those four N.C. trips, the above sentence will seem straightforward if perhaps oddly conditional. If you do have prior knowledge of Leath’s Cirrus trips to North Carolina, however, you will almost immediately realize that one particularly notorious round-trip is not accounted for among the four trips detailed in the audit. While that omission is itself obviously cause for concern regarding the completeness of the audit, there are two interesting aspects to the omission of that trip.
On 03/12/16 the ISU Cirrus SR22 flew from Ames, Iowa to Jefferson, N.C., where it spent less than 40 minutes on the ground before flying back to Ames, with a fuel stop along the way. (See Trip #12 here.) Prior to that flight, and following a six-month post-accident layoff from flying, the Cirrus was flown on several short flights on two separate dates, which look very much like the kind of flights a rusty pilot might undertake in order to regain currency. Until recently, however, the purpose of that 03/12/16 flight — let alone any business justification that required hanging out at the Jefferson, N.C. airport for 37 minutes — has been missing from the record.
The first conclusion we can draw is that the 03/12/16 trip to Jefferson was not a mixed-use trip involving “a combination of university and personal business”, because if that was the case it would have been included in the audit with the other four N.C. trips that were included on that basis. The only possible alternatives, of course, are that either the entire trip was business-related, or the entire trip was personal use, the latter being an obvious violation of Section 721.2.5 of the Iowa Code.
The second conclusion we can draw follows from DesMoinesDem’s exhaustive Bleeding Heartland post on Thursday, which added new information about that trip (see point 1):
The plain reading of the events of that flight, as related by Megan Landolt, are that ISU President Leath had one of the ISU staff pilots fly him and his wife to North Carolina. The reason Leath might prefer a different reading, of course, is that ordering a subordinate to fly him and his wife home in state property would obviously not qualify as a business use of the Cirrus. For that reason, after stalling until the audit was released, Leath is now asserting through proxies that an ISU staff pilot, of his own volition, just happened to have planned a training flight to Jefferson, N.C., which then allowed Leath and his wife to hitch a ride to the one place on the surface of the planet that they wanted to go on that day. (As we will see, Leath’s invocation of such happy coincidences is not unique to that N.C. trip.)
As for Josh Lehman, if you don’t already know, he’s the board’s professional dissembler, and about as slippery as you can get. Like the good, well-paid spokesperson he is, Lehman happily tells whatever lies Regents President Bruce Rastetter wants told, but in this case Lehman is playing with fire. If you read the entire audit not only do you find repeated disclaimers that no determinations were made about Leath’s claims of business use for his Cirrus flights, but that specific N.C. trip is not even mentioned in the audit. So what was Lehman talking about, when he flatly stated (emphasis mine) that, “Internal audit determined this trip was for business purposes”?
Well, if you turn to p. 8 of the audit you will find a sentence very close to what Lehman said in this block of text:
The obvious problem with Lehman’s weaselly version is that nowhere in the above quote does the word “determined” appear. In itself, however, that blatant attempt to mislead a member of the press is not particularly noteworthy because Josh Lehman lies like that all the time. The real problem with that particular sentence — and it is potentially a career-ending problem for the seven auditors who signed their names to the audit — is that nowhere in the audit is this assertion of fact substantiated:
In fact, as previously noted on p. 3, the audit takes pains to make clear that no such determination was ever made:
Note the qualifier: “….as reported by the University….”
Then there’s this, from p. 5:
Again, note the qualifiers: “…was obtained….”
Nowhere in the audit do the auditors assert that the business-use claims of “proficiency/training” by ISU President Leath were substantiated or determined, yet there on p. 8 we find that claim flatly asserted as fact:
Had that sentence read, “The stated business purpose for 52 of the 72 trips was proficiency/training or certification in the Cirrus”, then there wouldn’t be any problem, but that’s not what the sworn sentence says. What the sworn sentence says, as attested to by seven auditors in the employ of the state of Iowa, is that the business purpose “was proficiency/training”.
As to how that false assertion managed to find its way into an audit signed by seven certified auditors, there are of course only two possibilities. Either the auditors themselves approved that false statement, or someone monkeyed with the audit after the auditors signed off on it.
While I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to who actually falsified the board’s audit, it is nonetheless clear from the quote perverted by Josh Lehman that the audit was falsified. Making that serious breach of fiduciary duty all the more ironic is that Leath himself has already undermined that falsified claim by reimbursing Iowa State for some of his “proficiency/training flights”. (Leath’s initial reimbursement will almost certainty come to include all 52 of his purported “proficiency/training flights” in the Cirrus, as Leath continues to backpedal from the onrushing reality that he did repeatedly use the Cirrus for personal reasons.)
What makes the 03/12/16 trip to North Carolina doubly dangerous for Leath is that it was already the basis of a complaint to law enforcement regarding Leath’s use of state property. While multiple law enforcement agencies initially refused to investigate that complaint because the audit was ongoing, the audit is now over. As such, it is entirely possible that the lies Leath and the board are telling — to say nothing of the veracity of the audit itself — will now be subject to actual investigative scrutiny, and legal determinations will finally be made.
To further highlight the incoherence of the official responses to the audit, and to draw attention to the glimmer of daylight that just opened between Leath as president of Iowa State and Iowa State as a legal entity, we can compare Leath’s lies to the board on Monday with the following quote from an official statement released by Iowa State on Thursday:
First, the audit concluded only that Leath did not violate any university or board policy having to do with ISU Flight Services — for which, it turns out, there were almost no policies in place. The audit is entirely silent as to whether Leath violated board policy having to do with the duty of loyalty, which Leath clearly did violate. As to whether Leath violated university policy, the answer is yes for all of the same reasons. From the Iowa State website:
Second, note that Thursday’s statement from Iowa State does not claim that Leath was deemed innocent of any violation of the law, which Leath himself asserted before the board. In fact, the word “may” seems to appear in the ISU statement not because there is ambiguity about whether Leath used state property for personal use, but because no such determination has ever been made by any law enforcement or judicial entity. As to why there is any variance between the statement issued by Iowa State and Leath’s own statements before the board, my guess would be that one of those statements was vetted by ISU’s legal department, while the other was vetted by a man with a pucker.
Unfortunately, one persistent problem with using any of the Cirrus flights to determine whether Leath violated university or board policy, or state law, is that Leath himself is qualified to fly the Cirrus. Because he is a pilot and not simply a passenger in that plane, Leath can plausibly assert that any flight was for “proficiency/training” purposes, even if that assertion is ultimately provably false. That is decidedly not the case, however, with the flights Leath took in the King Air 200 or 350, neither of which Leath was or is qualified to fly.
For that reason it is perhaps also not a coincidence that the audit is most blunt about whether Leath used state property for personal reasons when commenting on a particularly notorious King Air trip. From p. 6:
Although the sentences in that paragraph intentionally omit critical information that the auditors were necessarily aware of when writing their report, and the wording in that paragraph is intentionally mushy, the meaning could not be clearer. When the state-owned plane carrying Steven Leath and his relatives landed at Elmira on the return flight from NYC, the only reason for landing the plane at that time was Leath’s intent to drop his relatives off at the airport. There was no business basis, no proficiency or training basis, no valid reason whatsoever under Iowa Code Section 721.2.5 for making that stop, which means Leath used $3.5M in state property to do his relatives a favor.
That single finding in the audit not only proves that Leath used state property for personal use — meaning he violated Section 721.2.5 of the Iowa Code — but it refutes multiple prior claims by Leath to the contrary, including claims that both of the Elmira fuel stops were forced on him by ISU’s pilots for safety reasons. (Leath’s claims in that regard were also previously demolished by DesMoinesDem in another tour-de-force post.)
Despite the audit’s clear, unambiguous statement that the second Elmira fuel stop was for personal benefit only, however, at Monday’s board meeting Leath once again falsely asserted that the second fuel stop was not a personal benefit. From Dar Danielson’s piece for Radio Iowa, on 12/13/16:
As noted in a prior post, Leath’s claim that the second fuel stop at Elmira conferred no additional cost to the school is provably false, and as a pilot himself Leath knew he was lying when he made that assertion to the board. Had the King Air 200 maintained level cruise out of NYC instead of stopping at Elmira to drop off Leath’s relatives, it would have necessarily burned less fuel compared with landing and taking off. Whatever the cost difference was between those two flight plans there is no question that landing to drop off his relatives cost the school some amount of money, which means Leath’s persistent claims to the contrary — including his restatement of that claim at Monday’s board meeting — are intentional lies.
As regards the totality of Leath’s round-trip to NYC in order to attend a basketball game, however, as dubious as the business basis for that trip may seem, everything but the second fuel stop did qualify as university business for Leath in his role as a glad-handing fundraiser and deeply flawed ambassador of the school. Despite Leath’s lies about the trip, and despite unanswered questions that should be investigated by law enforcement — including the happy coincidence that Leath’s staff pilots, of their own magical volition, chose the one airport closest to Leath’s relatives to fuel up at on the way to NYC — Leath did not simply order two ISU pilots to take him on a personal trip in one of the school’s state-owned planes.
On other occasions, however, the audit makes clear that that is exactly what Leath did. Again, from p. 6:
In order to justify multiple flights to Minnesota, in which he was repeatedly the only passenger in the King Air 350’s nine-seat cabin, Leath asserts that his private doctor’s appointments necessitated the use of that $3.5M airplane and two staff pilots, so he could make sure he was back on campus in time for…something. Nowhere, however, does Leath explain why he had to fly out of state for a doctor’s appointment, or why he couldn’t have scheduled an appointment on his own time. Instead, as ever, Leath simply asserts a business basis for those flights, and the audit dutifully reports that justification without confirming it or subjecting it to any inquiry.
Perhaps not surprisingly, however, once again Leath undercut that flimsy defense on Monday, when he announced that he had reimbursed Iowa State for two of his trips to Rochester, which he then continued to assert did not violate board policy despite the fact that he was retroactively paying for them out of his own pocket:
Leaving aside questions of university or board policy, as to whether ISU President Steven Leath ordered two staff pilots to fly him to Rochester, MN on multiple occasions in the school’s $3.5M King Air 350, for purely personal reasons, the answer is almost certainly yes. Because in order for that not to be the case, all of the following unstated premises in Leath’s argument to the contrary would have to be true:
1) Leath was forced to seek treatment at Mayo because it was impossible for him to be treated anywhere closer, including at UIHC in Iowa City, or at any of the fine medical establishments in Des Moines.
2) Leath could not schedule his medical appointments on his own time, or take vacation or sick time to accommodate his need to travel out of state..
3) Leath could not schedule his medical appointments at the end of a business day.
4) Leath could not reschedule his “important university commitments”.
5) Leath could, however, guarantee how long his medical appointments would take, thereby ensuring that he would return in time for his “important university commitments”.
Not only would all of those conditions have to be true for Leath to claim even a weak case of business use of the King Air 350 on a single trip to Rochester, but Leath is asserting that all of those factors were in play for all of the trips he took for medical appointments in Minnesota. Every single time, Leath could not have been treated closer to Ames, he could not have scheduled his appointment on his own time, he could not have taken sick time of vacation time, he could not have scheduled his appointment at the end of the day, he could not have rescheduled his “important university commitments”, and yet unlike every other person who has ever been to the doctor in the entire history of medicine throughout the known universe, Leath was somehow always able to determine in advance exactly how long his appointments would take.
Here, at last, we can see the career-ending problem Leath faces. Were anyone in law enforcement to investigate those Rochester flights under Iowa Code Section 721.2.5 — to say nothing of dozens of other flights in either airplane — those investigators would also want to know why Leath had to go out of state for medical care, what medical care he was seeking, and even whether that medical care had anything to do with his accident in Bloomington, IL on 07/14/15. And that’s just the start of the interrogation Leath would be in for.
Even the eleven-day vacation that Leath was returning from when he had his “hard landing” would be subject to inquiry. Why? Because the premise of that vacation was that Leath flew the Cirrus to North Carolina and parked it there the entire time before flying back to Ames, only to then wreck the plane at a fuel stop in Illinois. As discussed in prior posts, however, and as the audit itself notes (p.4), flights conducted under VFR rules are not logged by tracking services, meaning Leath could have flown the Cirrus to other locations while he was in N.C. for those eleven days, raising the possibility that those undocumented flights may have been for personal use as well. (Because the auditors were granted guarded access to Leath’s pilots’ log they actually know whether Leath flew the Cirrus while in N.C., but clearly they’re not talking.)
Another reason why law enforcement might be particularly interested in Leath using state property to fly himself out of state for medical care is that some of those appointments occurred just after Leath’s “hard landing” in Illinois, and just before approval of his new and exceedingly generous contract with the Board of Regents. While clearly not in the purview of the audit, the premise that a substantial financial self-interest may have motivated Leath to refrain from notifying school and board officials of his 07/14/15 accident is substantiated by the audit’s revelation that Leath also failed to report that accident to the ISU Office of Risk Management, as detailed on p. 8:
From the board’s own internal audit it is clear that Iowa State President Steven Leath broke state law on at least one occasion (the second Elmira fuel stop), and almost certainly broke state law on other occasions, including multiple King Air 350 flights to Rochester, and at least 20 claimed “proficiency/training” flights in the Cirrus SR22. Fortunately for Leath and the dark hearts at the Board of Regents, all of the key law enforcement players so far — including Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, Story County Attorney Jessica Reynolds, and even State Auditor Mary Mosiman (whom DesMoinesDem points out spent a decade as the Story County Auditor) — have all been quite content to look the other way while a serial liar and violator of board policy and state law serves as president of Iowa State University. Were there any members of law enforcement in Iowa who actually cared about the law, however, there are obviously any number of investigative angles worth pursuing, including, now, talking to the auditors about who falsified the audit.
Update 12/17/16: In a block quote under point 4 of Bleeding Heartland’s exhaustive Thursday post on the board audit, Megan Landolt states the following:
As confusing as that is — and I had to read it more than once — when counting ‘trips’ the relevant factor seems to be what the passenger is doing, not what the plane is doing. While Landolt counts two trips and three occasions for Leath, in terms of the actual cost to the school those two trips and three occasions required six separate flights: three up to Rochester and three back. (And it’s still not clear to me that Leath actually paid for all six flights, which he prompted.)
If it is the case that the audit uses the term ‘trip’ to mean two or more ‘flights’, and there actually are 144 Cirrus flights documented somewhere (72 trips x 2 flights per trip minimum) — meaning, most likely, in Leath’s private pilot’s log — then the math breaks down as follows. Doubling the claimed 20 non-“proficiency/training” business-use trips (20 trips x 2 flights per trip minimum) gives us 40 flights. Subtracting those 40 flights from 144 leaves us with 104 flights (instead of 52 in the post above) for which Leath claims a “proficiency/training” business use.
If we assume that at least half of those flights — 52 — occurred after mid-January of 2015, then we still only need to deduct 7 additional flights to account for all possible currency or certification flights that Leath would have had to fly in order to remain qualified through the remainder of the audit period. 52 minus 7 equals 45 flights (instead of only 20 in the post above), none of which could have had any conceivable “proficiency/training” basis even as Leath has asserted that all of those flights would be justified on that basis. (And of course if more than half of the 104 flights occurred after mid-January of 2015, that only increases the number of flights that have no valid business-use basis.)
Whether the audit counts trips as one flight or two (or more), it should be self-evident at this point that someone in law enforcement needs to look at Leath’s private pilot’s log. Then, when they know what it contains, they need to go to Chief Audit Executive Todd Stewart and get him to confirm that what they’re seeing is what he saw when he looked at the log, because there is always the possibility that Steven Leath could doctor that damning document in order to avoid prosecution.
Update 12/18/16 [1]: I can’t really think of anything more basic to an audit than being able to count. If an individual has allowable meal receipts totaling $52.61, and an accountant performing an audit totals those receipts as $45.24, then by definition the accountant performing the audit is incompetent.
On p. 5 of the Board of Regents Audit we find this:
As sworn by the seven accountants who signed their name to the board audit, there were a total of 26 trips (9 + 17) in the King Air 350 in which ISU President Steven Leath either flew by himself, or only with his wife. And yet from a prior post which looked at the exact same flights for the exact same individuals, we know that the audit’s total is flatly wrong, and under-counts the number of “trips” that Leath and/or his wife took in that plane.
Even if we define a “trip” as being a round-trip from and back to the same location (usually Ames, Iowa), and include trips with multi-leg, multi-day components, by simple count of the publicly available flight logs for the King Air 350 (see #14 here), we find 64 individual flights on 40 invoices, totaling a minimum of 30 trips as defined above. Yet not only is the audit’s count off by 13% when making that simple calculation, but it’s off to the low side, despite the fact that the accountants performing the audit not only had access to all of the publicly posted flight logs, but access to information that ISU Flights Services has never publicly disclosed.
On the basis of that simple failing, as well as other failings noted here and at Bleeding Heartland, the board’s audit must be considered incompetent, and its contents and conclusions rejected. As for the accountants who participated in the audit, they should not only all be put under review, but, ideally, should also be interviewed by law enforcement as part of a broad investigation into ISU President Steven Leath’s use and abuse of ISU Flight Services. When seven certified accountants in the employ of the Iowa Board of Regents can’t even add correctly, something is seriously wrong.
Update 12/18/16 [2]: As quoted above, under section 1 of Bleeding Heartland’s Thursday post, we find this:
On March 12, 2016, both Steven Leath and his wife were in North Carolina, having been flown there in the school-owned Cirrus SR22.
In the invoices for the King Air 350 which are posted online, on pages 75 and 76 of the .pdf for 2016, there is an invoice dated March 15, 2016, which shows Steven Leath and his wife being flown from Ames to North Carolina on that date, at a cost of $3,150.44.
At the time of that flight, the Leaths had already been in North Carolina for three days.
Not only does that invoice provide administrative cover for the Cirrus flight on 03/12/16, leaving the impression that Leath traveled on 03/15/16, but instead of simply paying to fly home out of pocket on a commercial carrier, Leath ends up using BOTH of ISU’s airplanes and sticking Iowa State with the costs for each.
It occurred to me as I read about Leath’s Mayo visits:
1. These visits were related to Leath’s accident in the Cirrus. Could be concussion or orthopedic, or even spleen.
2. Or Leath’s accident was the result of a medical condition:
– maybe he has something like Parkinson Disease which affects performance
– or there was something else going on, something affecting performance that no one in Iowa should know about…….could be alcohol or some other substance affecting performance (narcotics)
Either condition fits some circumstances:
– go out of state, so records are very confidential
– Mayo Clinic suggests physical problem, however they also deal with other problems
– The evasive statements from ISU suggest a cover-up (for protection)
– If a substance impaired his performance that would have serious consequences for a pilot; may require retraining (or other conditions to retain flying privileges)
– It would be hard to hide from regulators, but confidential to ISU
– May affect judgment and memory
I can offhand think of two conditions which may present problems: – diabetes (which when uncontrolled restricts licenses; which can affect memory and performance)
– overuse of alcohol (same)
Comments?
I’ve covered a lot of the same territory, and ended up in the same places. I don’t think Leath’s medical issues are any of my business, even if he is a public figure. I’m down with HIPPA and privacy, and I don’t believe that being a public figure means you have to endure a perpetual colonoscopy by the public.
Unless…every other word out of your mouth is a lie. Because at that point questions of health (or sanity, or drug or alcohol use) aren’t intrusions, they’re an attempt to make sense of what would otherwise be grounds for immediate dismissal if you were a bun warmer at McDonald’s.
The key factor in questions about Leath’s health is not his health per se, but about the validity of his state-funded trips to Rochester, regardless of the medical reason. And the truth is — as attested to by the fact that Leath once again paid for two of those trips out of pocket — that at least two of those trips constituted a willful violation of Iowa Code Section 721.2.5.
Steven Leath is guilty of repeatedly breaking the law. The only reason he hasn’t been charged is because it turns out that Iowa has all of the legal credibility and integrity of a carnival midway. Everyone is corrupt, everything is corrupt, there is no lie that the Board of Regents won’t tell, and there is no lie that Leath cannot tell to the board. (“I am open, honest and forthcoming.”)
If you didn’t see it happening with your own eyes, every day in the press, you wouldn’t believe it was possible. But it’s happening.
Press appears to be quite frightened, too. Gannett Reg doesn’t seem to be doing much with all the presents you keep bringing them. Ever talk with them about why?
Incidentally: interesting thing in the Trump strategy to gag the press, which, if Maddow is right, is a variant of the Thiel strategy: it’s not about corruption. It’s about sex scandal. My guess actually is that they’re not going to be all that hot to go after corruption stories, because that amplifies the corruption story, but will be very very quick to go after the how-dare-you my-modesty offenses.
Anyway. What from ISU Foundation is FOIA-able? Because I’m starting to wonder, if the Foundation is actually hush slush, how long that’s been going on. I bet Gartner knows something about that, too.
Thanks to Bleeding Heartland last Thursday, we now have — from Iowa State President Steven Leath, via his assistant to the president for communications, Megan Landolt — the following belated business-use explanation for the single-day, round-trip flight of the school’s Cirrus SR22 from Ames, IA to Jefferson, NC on 03/12/16, which included only a 37-minute stop at the Jefferson airport:
As noted in the final update to the prior post, buried among the 2016 King Air 350 invoices is a flight on 03/15/16 (p. 75 and 76), from Ames to Jefferson, on which Steven and Janet Leath are listed as passengers — despite the fact that the Leaths were in already in North Carolina at the time. The justification ISU has put forward for that patently false invoice is that it was necessary to add Leath and his wife in order to properly assign the costs of the flight via the billing codes associated with their names. As to the validity of that sketchy practice, the recently concluded internal audit once again choked on its own mandate and refused to render an opinion. From p. 10 of the board audit of ISU Flight Services:
Leaving aside the lack of any accounting of this practice, including either the number of times it occurred or the names of the fake passengers, what the 03/15/16 invoice means, at minimum, is that the names listed on any invoice mean nothing. You can look right at an invoice that clearly says Steven and Janet Leath were flown from Ames to North Carolina on 03/15/16 in the King Air 350, when in reality the Leaths arrived in N.C. three days earlier via the school’s other state-owned airplane. In fact, even if we allow that the empty King Air flight needed to be properly invoiced to the president’s office, the manner in which that 03/15/16 invoice was filled out still makes no sense.
There was necessarily some cost to the school for ferrying the King Air 350, empty, from Ames to Jefferson. How that actual cost would have been determined is not clear, but in other King Air invoices from 2014, 2105 and 2016 there are any number of flights billed to department 2020045, which is Flight Services itself. While those invoices do not show the cost of those flights, they do show a purpose (e.g. “training” or “maintenance ferry”), and they do show the distance flown. So it can reasonably be assumed that there was some way of determining the actual cost to the school of using that plane in those instances, which means it should also have been possible to affix a price to the empty ferry flight from Ames to Jefferson.
Despite what the 03/15/16 invoice shows, that particular King Air flight included two staff pilots and no passengers. At most, in order to bill the correct department for the cost of ferrying the plane to North Carolina, the invoice would have needed one name, not two, and it would not have mattered whose name was used as long as the departmental “charge to” number was correct. While the obvious choice of a single name would have been Steven Leath, the passenger could also have been listed as “Ferry Flight” for accuracy’s sake, or anything else as long as the correct number was used to assign that invoice to the proper department. And yet somehow, both of the Leath’s names were used when doing so afforded no benefit, except insofar as it created a false paper trail that obscured the Cirrus flight the Leaths had taken three days before.
ISU Flight Services bills passengers per-mile for each King Air 350 flight (p. 10). In the case of the King Air flight from Ames to Jefferson on 03/15/16, while there were no passengers, and Steven and Janet Leath’s names were purportedly added only to allow the ferry flight to be properly billed, the president’s office was still charged $1,575.22, each, for Steven and Janet Leath, even though the Leaths had been at their N.C. cabin for three days. The obvious question, of course, is on what basis did ISU Flight Services bill the president’s office over $3K for flying no one from Ames to Jefferson? Again, there was certainly some cost to the school for that flight, but on that particular flight there were no passengers.
The answer — which still makes no sense — is that the billing of per-mile charges for Steven and Janet Leath on the 03/15/16 invoice seems to have been premised on the fact that the King Air 350 was summoned to Jefferson to pick the Leaths up for a multi-leg journey over the following few days. And yet all we have to do to see the absurdity of that premise is imagine the King Air 350 being flown to Jefferson on 03/15/16 to pick up nine passengers instead of only the two Leaths. In that case it would clearly make no sense for ISU Flight Services to charge nine phantom passengers more than $14K when the King Air was flying empty.
Because of the panic and secrecy that has enveloped Iowa State for months, including the wiping of some of its Flight Service records from publicly available websites, it’s easy to forget that when the 03/15/16 invoice was prepared it would have looked to anyone as if the Leaths had flown from Ames to Jefferson on that date, when in fact they had been flown to Jefferson three days before, in the school’s other state-owned plane, by one of ISU’s staff pilots. Whether that means the 03/15/16 invoice is fraudulent, or the $3K in charges to the president’s office were fraudulent, or both, I don’t know, but clearly that invoice is false, and it was falsified in way that was not necessary to ensure that the cost of that particular flight was accurately borne by the proper department. Instead, both Steven and Janet Leath’s names were included, and the president’s office was invoiced for the per-mile cost of delivering both of those phantom passengers.
The 03/12/16 Cirrus Flight in Context
By the very nature of the King Air 350, it is almost certainly the case that all ISU flights in that airplane involved the filing of an IFR flight plan, including filling out box #15, “Number Aboard” (see also p. 288 here). Because ISU Flight Services is also a commercial carrier (p. 2), however, it is subject to more stringent operating requirements than a private pilot would be. Those FAA requirements may include maintaining an accurate passenger manifest for each flight, which can be particularly important in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic accident. Without knowing how many people are on a flight, and better yet, who was on board, it can be impossible to determine who was lost with any measure of expediency and accuracy. While flight plans, passenger manifests and invoices are all different, if each exists for the 03/15/16 King Air flight from Ames to Jefferson, it would obviously be interesting to compare all three.
For the 03/12/16 Cirrus flight from Ames to Jefferson, we know that ISU Flight Services never invoiced for Cirrus flights, which means there would also be no passenger manifest for that flight. In effect, although ISU Flight Services owned and maintained the Cirrus SR22 at school expense, and billed for that plane at an hourly rate, it was treated as President Leath’s private aircraft and only minimal records were kept. (Whether ISU Flight Services was exempted from any FAA record requirements for commercial use of the Cirrus is an open question.) We also know it would have been left to the discretion of the pilot-in-command as to whether to even file an IFR flight plan, meaning there may be no paper trail for that flight other than the log book(s) of the pilot(s) who flew the plane on that trip.
Instead — and so far according only to ISU presidential spokesperson Megan Landolt — on 03/12/16 the Leaths were flown to North Carolina in the Cirrus SR22 by ISU Pilot Joe Crandall, who apparently decided of his own volition to take a long training flight to the one city that Leath and his wife wanted to go to on that day. As it turns out, however, that happy coincidence actually marks the second time (at least) that fortune smiled on Leath because of a completely independent decision by his staff pilots at Iowa State. The first occurred when Leath’s pilots forced him to stop for fuel in Elmira, N.Y., where Leath’s relatives just happened to live, at which point Leath begrudgingly allowed his relatives to join him on his flight to NYC, where they had all previously planned on attending the same basketball tournament anyway. (Calling this amazing coincidence into question, however, it was noted on p. 6 of the board’s internal audit that the only reason for stopping at Elmira on the way back was Leath’s decision to return his relatives from whence they came. That stop was thus a violation of Iowa Code 721.2.5.)
On 07/14/15, in a “hard landing” at the Bloomington, IL airport, Steven Leath came close to killing himself and his wife while returning from what was officially described as an eleven-day mixed-use trip to North Carolina. As to the critical business-use component of that trip, which allowed Leath to stick Iowa State with all of his travel costs, that consisted of a single meeting with a prospective donor who may or may not have actually existed. As regards the business-use justification for the 03/12/16 flight to Jefferson, however, there are two critical differences.
First, Leath himself has made no claim of business use of the Cirrus SR22 for the 03/12/16 trip. Instead, Leath cleverly stuck one of his staff pilots with that responsibility — belatedly, after refusing to explain the trip for months — by claiming, through Landolt, that once again one of the people who worked for him just happened to be going where he wanted to go. Second, note that even in explaining Leath’s 03/12/16 trip to North Carolina, Landolt has not asserted a business basis for Leath’s trip. Again, from Bleeding Heartland:
Unless Landolt can produce records which show that Leath had business reasons for being in North Carolina between 03/12/16 and 03/16/16, then it doesn’t matter whether Leath “conducted university business over the long weekend” any more than it would if he conducted university business anywhere else. As Leath himself has noted, and anyone would agree, being the super-slick, belligerent president of a major university is a full-time job no matter where you are. The question is not whether Leath did work after he traveled, but whether the travel was necessary for Leath to do that work, and neither Leath nor Landolt has made that claim regarding the long weekend from 03/12/16 to 03/15/16. (The very fact that Landolt has asserted a business use of the Cirrus for Leath and a business use of the Cirrus for Crandall should make it clear that something is wrong.)
Three days after the president of Iowa State University, Steven Leath, had a subordinate on his staff fly him and his wife, in property belonging to the state of Iowa, to North Carolina for a personal vacation, the King Air 350 ostensibly arrived in Jefferson on 03/15/16. For providing exemplary service in moving two non-existent passengers a combined 1,394 miles on that trip, ISU Flight Services billed the ISU president’s office more than $3K on a per-mile basis. On 03/16/16, the Leaths — at least according to an ISU invoice with that date — were then flown from Jefferson to Pittsburgh, PA., on to Omana, NE, and finally to Denver, CO, where the Leaths and the King Air remained until 03/19/16, at which point the ISU pilots flew the Leaths back to Ames, probably.
What is particularly interesting about that trip is that Leath had not one but two lower-cost options for the business-use portion beginning on 03/16/16 — assuming of course that there was any real business purpose to the stops in PA, CO, and perhaps even NE. First, Leath could have flown commercial the entire trip, including making his way to N.C. three days in advance of his business trip. Yes, he may have had to spend more time in airports than he wanted to, and may have had to leave N.C. on the 15th instead of the 16th to keep to his schedule in Pittsburgh, but those are the accommodations one makes as an ethical person who is not trying to screw his employer at every possible opportunity.
The second option — which will be blatantly obvious to everyone who read the board’s internal audit — is that Leath himself could have flown the whole trip in the Cirrus, what with not only being an IFR-rated pilot in that plane, but also having spent a whopping 52 of his 72 “trips” in the Cirrus on “proficiency/training”. In fact, given all of that training, and given Leath’s passion for flying, and given how terribly, terribly sad Leath was when he realized that abusing his powers as president might cost him the very plane that he personally purchased with $500K in discretionary ISU Foundation dollars — precisely to make such efficient and cost-effective trips possible in the first place — it is amazing that Leath did not fly the wings off the Cirrus every chance he got. Unless………………..
From prior posts we know that after Leath damaged the Cirrus in Illinois on 07/14/15, that plane was not flown for six months, except for two ferry flights following repairs at different locations. Even after it was returned to service in the middle of September, however, the Cirrus sat idle for more than four months. Only on 02/10/16 did the Cirrus take to the air again, for a short trip, followed by another short trip on 02/23/16. Then, after a few more idle weeks, the Cirrus suddenly bolted cross-country for Jefferson on 03/12/16, turned right around after staying on the ground only long enough to pick up fuel (and, as we now know, disgorge the Leaths), and returned to Ames.
Previously I assumed that Leath himself flew all of those flights, but as regular readers know the publicly available Cirrus logs do not contain any pilot or passenger information. Which means it is also possible that Leath flew none of those flights, and that perhaps Joe Crandall flew those February flights for familiarization, in anticipation of transporting the Leaths on the long haul to N.C. for their three-day vacation. Why would Crandall do that — or, more accurately, why would Leath order Crandall to do that?
Well, from other posts we know that after his accident in Illinois, Leath made frequent trips in 2015 to Rochester, MN — home of the Mayo Clinic — but always as a passenger in the King Air 350. From the time of his accident on, for more than six months, Leath was not at the controls of the Cirrus, meaning it is possible that whatever sidelined him had still not resolved by the time he and his wife were flown to N.C. on 03/12/16. All of which would mean that Joe Crandall — a former military pilot who was qualified in both fixed-wing and rotary aircraft — wasn’t actually doing any training in the Cirrus on that flight (though of course he would get credit for the hours logged in-type), but working as Leath’s charter pilot on the state dole.
Because Leath stopped flying the Cirrus for six months or more after his “hard landing”, and because he almost immediately started making frequent trip to Rochester after that accident, Iowa State has been asked more than once whether Leath was injured during the accident. The answer, each time has been that no one was injured in the “hard landing”. Given the lies that Leath has already told, however, and the obligation of everyone on the Iowa State payroll to perpetuate those lies, at this point those assertions don’t mean anything. Leath could have been hurt, he could have hidden his injury from everyone except (or even including) his wife, and in fact had every corrupt reason to do so given that his new contract was set to be approved only weeks later. Now, facing the possibility of everything from termination for cause to criminal charges, Leath would have no option but to keep telling the same lie.
Then again, it may be that no one has ever asked whether Leath was precluded from flying during that six-month period for any medical reason, meaning it might be worth asking that broader question. Because if Leath was medically cleared to fly that entire time, and still did not fly his beloved Cirrus for six months, we’re missing a big piece of the story.
Speaking of which…although we don’t know who flew the Cirrus during those short February flights in 2016, other than the pilot(s) of those flights there is someone who does know. During the internal audit, Chief Audit Executive Todd Stewart got a look at Leath’s pilot’s log, and the logs of the ISU staff pilots, which means he not only knows who flew the Cirrus after it sat idle for six months, he knows who was logged as pilot-in-command on the 03/12/16 flight from Ames to Jefferson. What with working for the likes of Rastetter, Harreld and Leath, Stewart won’t be talking out of school, but if anyone in law enforcement ever decides that the 03/12/16 and 03/15/16 flights from Ames to Jefferson, N.C. deserve a closer look, Todd Stewart is one of the first people they should talk to.
Six months is an interesting period of time. That is the length of time a Class 1 pilot holds a license (if over 40)
https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/medical-resources/airman-medical-certification
You can so see disqualifying medical conditions at that site.
A pilot suspended may need to sit 6 months….
If it turns out that Leath had a medical issue that grounded him apart from any damage he did to himself during his attack on the Bloomington, IL airport, and if he never actually returned to flying as a result of that medical issue, yet still went on his sadness tour when he was outed for that accident in the press, I am going to be a new level of loathing for Leath.
[Note to myself: trademark “Loathing for Leath”.]
What was that, 6 or 7 visits to Mayo? You don’t go to the Mayo Clinic for a cold.
Something happened that was related to that accident (wasn’t it Leath’s second in a year). Perhaps that is why the Iowa BOR is hiding something….which I can understand if it is medical.
What no one should understand is is lying, cowardly, finger-pointing.
There are two ways to come at the Rochester/Mayo trips. The first is that Leath was hurt in the 07/14/15 “hard landing” at Bloomington, IL, then sought treatment for whatever he did to himself. On that point, however, ISU has been uncharacteristically consistent in stating that no one was injured in the accident.
The other possibility, which I raised in passing a while back on Twitter —
https://twitter.com/Ditchwalk/status/798288896844959744
— is that Leath had a preexisting condition that contributed to the accident. For example, if he had an inner-ear or vestibular-ocular problem that he was ignoring, you might expect a problem like that to rear its ugly head during landings because of the dynamics involved. (And particularly so during the gusty condition in Bloomington on that day.)
So in that case what we would expect to find after the accident, perhaps at the behest of Ms. Leath — who may not have been too happy that her husband almost killed her — is that Leath would seek treatment at a facility that specializes in, and has world-class standing in, Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT), and/or balance disorders.
Now, as it happens. UIHC is ranked #5 by USNews for ENT, but that would mean going in-state, and Leath clearly didn’t want to go in-state for his medical visits. Fortunately, the Mayo Clinic is #2 for ENT —
http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/rankings/ear-nose-and-throat
— meaning not only could Leath justify stiffing one of his own regent institutions in terms of his post-crash care, but he could get himself across the border. (Albeit by using state property to conduct personal business, which is of course a violation of Iowa Code Section 721.2.5.)
I don’t know if anyone has ever asked ISU if Leath was seeking treatment at Mayo for a condition which contributed to Leath’s accident in Illinois, instead of a condition which was caused by the accident, but that might be worth doing. There is clearly a correlation between that accident and the spike in personal visits that Leath made to Mayo, at state expense.
You know, here’s the trouble with stealing and telling a bunch of lies when you’re a high-up public official and the people under you have to cover for you: you have to keep on paying them off. It’ll be interesting to chart the paths of these people discussed here over the next few years.
As I recall, the person who brought down Buddy Cianci in Providence was a soda-vending-machine guy, a Portuguese immigrant who put in a bid or something on a city contract and probably got the usual instruction about what to put in the envelope and where to leave it, and he just didn’t want anything to do with that, especially after busting his ass to get where he was. Sometime after that the feds showed up with RICO charges. What kind of interest, I wonder, does a citizen have to have to make a complaint like that? And how long after the event might the feds be interested in hearing?
If you would have ever told me that I would be thinking of Iowa in Rhode Island terms — and I lived in RI for years — I would have laughed. As it turns out, the laugh is on me. Iowa is just bigger.
As is the case with Harreld at UI, I keep thinking of the people that Leath is burning through or having to pay off, and at some point he’s going to come to the end of that road. Whatever the board thinks they’re getting for keeping him around, they now actually look like the corrupt idiots they are. And has there ever been a better circus poodle than Larry McKibben…?
Oh, duh. That’s the nest, isn’t it. That’s why Gartner was pointing at the Foundation. You have to keep paying people off, but it has to be money you’ve got discretion over. So there you go. And you get rid of the Foundation officers who aren’t happy about the game.
If you can track where the Foundation money went after it left the Foundation, then you get a much better picture of what’s been going on and the scale of it.
And then I guess the only question is: who stuck the knife in Gartner, and over what?
The thing is, if you can see the pattern in where the Foundation money goes, you probably also get a pretty good sense of how Rastetter will operate as Ag Secy.
Would the last corrupt person raiding the foundation flip a quarter to the maid.
(This all shows you how important a president is….he/she can romp around almost immune to law and ethics)
In the previous post we talked extensively about the single-day, round trip flown by Iowa State’s Cirrus SR22, from Ames, IA to Jefferson, NC, on 03/12/16. During that trip, the state-owned Cirrus spent a mere 37 minutes on the ground at the Jefferson airport before heading back to Ames, thus providing no valid business rationale for that journey. Absent such a rationale, and proof of its validity, the round trip between Ames and Jefferson would constitute personal use of state property by whoever ordered the Cirrus into the air, and thus a violation of Iowa Code Section 721.2.5.
We now know, thanks to reporting from Bleeding Heartland last week, that not only were ISU President Steven Leath and his wife in the Cirrus on that date, but so was ISU staff pilot Joe Crandall, who dropped the Leaths off in N.C. before flying the Cirrus back to Ames:
As you can see, Landolt offered not one but two business-use justifications for the 03/12/16 trip. As to the latter, unless the purported business that Leath conducted required that he be in North Carolina, and Leath can prove that he substantiated that business basis back in March, then there was no business-use basis for Steven Leath taking that trip. As to the former justification — that the flight involved “Cirrus training” for Joe Crandall, who, as an ISU staff pilot, already was and is fully qualified to fly the school’s pressurized, multi-engine, turboprop King Air 350 — that surprising rationale presents Leath with a significant problem that will not disappear even if he belatedly cobbles together a business-use justification for his travel to N.C. on that date.
In this post we will take a look at one very specific and, potentially, lethally boring aspect of Landolt’s assertion that the 03/12/16 Cirrus round trip constituted business use because of any “Cirrus training” Joe Crandall received. In doing so we will ultimately arrive at a very simple question that will help us understand just how brazen and reckless ISU President Leath’s misuse and abuse of state property has been even during this year, and how little regard he has for the careers and reputations of his subordinates at Iowa State. Unfortunately, between now and that satisfying conclusion, your eyes may glaze over and drool may spill from the corner of your mouth, because the specific aspect of the 03/12/16 round trip that we are going to explore in detail concerns the insurance coverage that Iowa State had in force at the time.
At the beginning of 2014, Iowa State University owned two airplanes: a small, single-engine Piper Warrior, and a twin-engine King Air 200 (p. 2). The policy period for ISU’s insurance coverage on those airplanes, which was provided by State National Insurance Company (p. 5), ran from 02/15/14 to 02/15/15.
When ISU’s 2014 airplane coverage went into effect on 02/15/14, this was the full extent of the criteria by which coverage for individual pilots was determined (p. 5):
As long as “all pilots operating N991SU” — meaning ISU’s twin-engine King Air 200 — completed the necessary annual training for that complex and aggressive plane, any pilot designated by the “Named Insured’s Chief Pilot” would be covered while flying that plane. As for the Piper Warrior — a sedate, single-engine, four-seat aircraft– no specific criteria were set out, meaning any pilot designated by the “Named Insured’s Chief Pilot” would be covered by the State National policy while flying that plane. (The working assumption was that ISU’s Chief Pilot would vet each pilot to make sure they were legally qualified to fly a given aircraft according to FAA regulations, while any pilot deemed contractually qualified to fly the King Air 200 under the terms of the State National policy would inevitably be qualified to fly the Piper Warrior.)
In the Iowa Board of Regents’ recently concluded internal audit of ISU Flight Services, which seems to be falling apart more and more by the day, the purchase date of Iowa State’s King Air 350 is listed as April of 2014 (p. 2). On the extensive ISU Flight Services FAQ on the Iowa State University website, however, the purchase date of the King Air 350 is correctly listed as February of 2014 (#2). We know that February date is correct because of a Change Endorsement that was added to the 2014 State National insurance policy on 02/27/14 (p. 4), shortly after that policy went into effect:
In late February of 2014, then, two changes took place regarding the insurance coverage for Iowa State’s air fleet. First, the King Air 350 was added to the State National policy, and second, Steven Leath was included in the coverage for the single-engine Piper Warrior only. In every other respect, however, and as specifically noted on the Change Endorsement itself, “All other provisions of this policy remain the same”.
On 07/10/14 another Change Endorsement to the State National policy went into effect, this one deleting the Piper Warrior from coverage and adding the Cirrus SR22 (p. 1-2). In that Change Endorsement, the following contractual language appears with respect to piloting the Cirrus:
As with the Piper Warrior, the only pilot specifically named in State National’s policy coverage for the Cirrus was Steven Leath, who was obligated to meet specific requirements in order to be covered while flying the Cirrus. Importantly, not only are no other pilots mentioned by name, but there are no additional criteria for other pilots to be able to fly the Cirrus. Instead, Cirrus coverage of other pilots was again left to the sole discretion of ISU’s Chief Pilot, the assumption being that any pilots hired by ISU would have already met the contractual obligations to which Leath was being held. (Although Leath had his private pilot’s license at the time, he did not yet have his IFR rating, which any commercial pilot qualified to fly the King Air 200 or 350 would have necessarily acquired.)
On 07/15/14 a final Change Endorsement was added to the 2014 insurance policy, deleting the King Air 200 from coverage (p. 3).
Throughout the remainder of 2014 and into early 2015, ISU President Steven Leath diligently pursued his IFR certification by accepting free lessons from a man to whom he had just granted a high-paying administrative job, albeit only after cunningly voiding what would otherwise have been a mandatory search process to fill that position. Having fully qualified in-type, meaning in the Cirrus SR22, and with his IFR rating secure, when the new policy period for ISU’s State National coverage began on 02/15/15 (p. 1), Steven Leath met the criteria for being able to fly the Cirrus by himself, as pilot-in-command.
The only change to “Item 4: Pilots” in the 2015-2016 State National policy involved swapping out the N-number of the King Air 200 and replacing it with the N-number of the King Air 350 (p. 1). In all other respects, throughout the remainder of 2015 and into early 2016 — including Leath’s 07/14/15 “hard landing” in Bloomington, IL, when he put the Cirrus out of service for two months — the provisions of ISU’s aircraft insurance remained unchanged, as amended in the 2014-2015 policy.
On 02/15/16, however, when Iowa State moved its aircraft coverage from State National to Catlin Insurance for the 2016-2017 policy period (see #11A), a great deal changed. Where the State National policy specified minimal contractual obligations for pilot coverage, and left the remainder of the decision making to the sole discretion of the “Named Insured’s Chief Pilot”, the criteria for determining which pilots would be covered under the new Catlin policy were spelled out in significantly greater detail (p. 5):
As you can see, what was, under the prior policy, two terse sentences of largely discretionary criteria followed by a paragraph of boilerplate exclusions, suddenly became a multi-clausal, multi-plane section bristling with specifics. In fact, to understand the magnitude of the difference between the old policy coverage for pilots when compared to the new coverage, we’re going to step through the above criteria in detail, so we understand what was required in order for a given pilot to be covered while flying either of the planes in the ISU stable.
The most imposing text in “PART 6” above is actually the least complicated:
Turning to the CFR we find the following applicable definitions for “category” and “class”:
— and —
In order to be covered by the Catlin policy while flying the King Air 350, then, at minimum a pilot would need to have a multi-engine airplane rating. In order to be covered while flying the Cirrus SR22, at minimum a pilot would need to have a single-engine airplane rating. Additionally, all hours designated as meeting the criteria for those ratings would need to be in the same category and class as those respective planes.
As regards the new policy specifics for coverage while piloting either the King Air or Cirrus, the most obvious change relative to the previous State National policy is that individual pilots are named in the new Catlin policy. Under the old policy any FAA-qualified pilot who met the minimal contractual criteria would be covered “at the discretion of the Named Insured’s Chief Pilot”. Under the new policy there are two sets of criteria listed for coverage under each plane: criteria that applies to pilots named in the policy, and criteria that applies to pilots not named in the policy.
The second paragraph under both the King Air 350 and Cirrus sections lays out the criteria by which pilots who are not named in the first paragraph will also be covered while flying those respective planes. In the first paragraph under the King Air 350 section, five pilots are listed, followed by currency requirements that “each” of those pilots must meet in order to be covered. In the first paragraph of the Cirrus section the same five pilots are listed, along with a sixth in ISU President Steven Leath. Interestingly, however, in detailing the currency requirements for the Cirrus, the word “each” is missing from that first paragraph, leaving open the possibility — because of a missing semi-colon or sloppy use of a comma — that the specific criteria for currency in the Cirrus may only apply to Leath, and not to the other pilots:
Either that sentence says the first five listed pilots — who are also listed under the King Air 350 section — are assumed to be qualified and covered while flying the Cirrus, and only Steven Leath is obligated to meet the stated criteria, or, all six of the named pilots are obligated to meet the stated criteria. Assuming the more stringent of the two interpretations, then for any of the six named pilots to be covered by ISU’s insurance policy while flying the Cirrus, they must “successfully complete Cirrus School or an Instrument Proficiency check ride in the make and model within 12 months preceding the intended flight”.
Now, as to why all of this mind-numbing insurance business is important relative to the 03/12/16 Cirrus round trip from Ames to Jefferson, N.C., here again is what ISU presidential spokesperson Megan Landolt told Bleeding Heartland last week, about Iowa State pilot Joe Crandall’s role in that trip:
So on 03/12/16, ISU President Steven Leath, his wife, and ISU pilot Joe Crandall flew from Ames to Jefferson, N.C., at which point the Leaths disembarked and Joe Crandall flew the Cirrus back to Ames by himself. The stated business purpose for that flight, at least in the first paragraph, is that the trip had absolutely nothing to do with using state property and a state employee to transport Leath and his wife to N.C. for a three-day vacation, but was instead devoted to “Cirrus training for Crandall”, which of course raises an obvious questions. Training for what?
If Joe Crandall – a former military pilot with a multi-engine airplane rating, a rotary rating, IFR certification and a commercial license — was indeed training to fly the Cirrus SR22 during the 03/12/16 round trip, then in terms of the insurance coverage in force at the time, Crandall would not have been covered under the school’s policy for the solo flight from Jefferson back to Ames. On the other hand, if Crandall was already qualified in-type, then there was no possible training rationale for that trip.
As regular readers know, and as the past two months of rolling disclosures about Leath’s abuse of ISU Flight Services have made clear, the most likely explanation for this conundrum is that ISU Steven Leath is lying — to Megan Landolt, to the ISU community and to the people of Iowa — about ISU pilot Joe Crandall doing any “Cirrus training” during the 03/12/16 round-trip from Ames to Jefferson. The reason Leath would lie about that, of course, is that without that flimsy lie his trip to Jefferson would be revealed for what it was, which was a violation of Iowa Code Section 721.2.5, which precludes the personal use of state property.
(If you’re wondering if Steven Leath, as craven and corrupt as he is, really would throw a subordinate — let alone a military veteran — under the bus to save his own ass, the answer, unequivocally, is yes. And we know that beyond any doubt because Leath did the exact same thing several months ago, when he repeatedly blamed his own elective stops at Horseheads, N.Y. in 2014 on the pilots flying his plane at the time. A claim that the recently concluded internal audit not only disputed, but proved false [p. 6].)
Assuming for the moment that Joe Crandall was not qualified to fly the Cirrus by himself under the Catlin policy during the 03/12/16 round trip, it’s interesting to consider how he nonetheless ended up flying that plane back to Ames by himself. The obvious answer, from all of the above, is that super-busy ISU President Leath — who was not only in the midst of an orgiastic series of abuses of ISU Flight Services at the time, but also bringing his diabolical plan to consolidate all financial controls at ISU under the auspices of his pizza-pal from North Carolina, Chief of Staff and soon-to-be Chief Financial Officer Miles Lackey — simply forgot or overlooked a critical change between the State National policies and the Catlin policy that took effect only 27 days before the 03/12/16 round trip.
Here, again, under the old State National policies, is the only criteria for determining coverage for any pilot not named Steven Leath in any of the planes owned by ISU between 02/15/14 and 02/15/16:
For two years or more, while Leath slogged through his in-type and IFR certifications, there was never any stated criteria for insurance coverage while flying either the Piper Warrior or the Cirrus SR22, except for the specific additional requirements Leath himself had to meet. Between the “discretion of the Named Insured’s Chief Pilot”, and the fact that anyone qualified to fly the multi-engine King Air 200 or 350 would inevitably be legally qualified to fly the single-engine Piper Warrior or Cirrus SR212, the old policy simply assumed that insurance coverage for those smaller planes would flow from the considerably higher ratings and certifications held by the ISU staff pilots, or by any relief pilots that ISU might hire to fly either of the King Air models. Only in Leath’s case was additional contractual criteria added to make up for the fact that Leath did not have the training and experience that inevitably occurs while attaining multi-engine or commercial FAA airplane ratings.
All of that changed, however, with the new insurance policy from Catlin Insurance, which went into effect on 02/15/16 — only 27 days before the 03/12/16, single-day Cirrus round trip from Ames to Jefferson. Unlike the old policy, in the new policy there were specific make-and-model requirements for all of the named pilots (and any other pilots, as detailed in the second paragraph of that section), in order to be covered while flying the Cirrus.
Again, from the new Catlin policy, which is still in force today:
As previously discussed, the loosest possible reading of that sentence is that the first five named pilots were already qualified to fly the Cirrus under the current insurance policy, which would mean Joe Crandall could not have been engaged in “Cirrus training” during the 03/12/16 round-trip from Ames to Jefferson. The more stringent reading is that all six named pilots, including Crandall, were required, at minimum, to have an “Instrument Proficiency check ride in the make and model within 12 months preceding the intended flight”, which would mean Joe Crandall was not covered by insurance when he flew the Cirrus back to Ames by himself. (If you’re wondering, Leath could not have administered the mandated “Instrument Proficiency check ride” on the flight to Jefferson because Leath is not a Certificated Flight Instructor.)
On 03/12/16, then, either Joe Crandall was already qualified to fly the Cirrus under the Catlin policy, and thus needed no training, or Crandall really did need additional Cirrus training in order to be covered by the Catlin policy, which would mean he was not covered on the solo leg back to Ames. So which is it? Is Leath lying about any training basis for the 03/12/16 round-trip, and in so doing hanging Megan Landolt and Joe Crandall out to dry? Or did Leath have Joe Crandall, a subordinate state employee, fly a state-owned plane on a “training” flight, during which that employee — who is also an alumnus of Iowa State and a military veteran — was in violation of the school’s insurance coverage on the return flight?
If ISU President Steven Leath knew at the time that Crandall needed training in the Cirrus, that would mean Leath was aware of the recent change in the insurance policy. Even if Crandall did need additional training, however, Leath would also have known at the time that he was not qualified to give Crandall any relevant training, which would mean that during the solo flight back to Ames, Crandall would have been in violation of the very insurance requirements Crandall was training to meet.
While Leath is a miserable human being who will throw anyone under the bus to save his own skin, knowingly having Crandall fly a solo trip without insurance coverage — no less because Leath wanted to be chauffeured to his home in North Carolina for a personal three-day vacation — would have been monstrous. The simpler explanation is that at the time, Leath assumed that Crandall was covered for the entire trip under the terms of the school’s insurance, as Crandall would have been under the terms of the prior policy, which lapsed less than a month before. If that is the case, however, it also means Leath only recently came up with the “Cirrus training” justification for the 03/12/16 trip, which would in turn suggest that Leath invented that rationale to avoid being criminally charged with a violation of Section 721.2.5 of the Iowa Code.
If Joe Crandall really was training in some capacity during the 03/12/16 round trip from Ames to Jefferson, then he was not covered by Iowa State’s insurance policy during the solo return leg. If Joe Crandall was not training in some capacity during the 03/12/16 round trip from Ames to Jefferson, then ISU President Steven Leath is now making Joe Crandall complicit in his lie. In either case, Joe Crandall — loyal ISU alum and Army veteran — deserves better from Leath, and from the Iowa Board of Regents.
Unfortunately, this is what happens when a thoroughly corrupt board not only enables a thoroughly corrupt university president, but does everything in its power to prop up that thoroughly corrupt president. As a result of Leath’s arrogance, entitlement and lies, two otherwise innocent Iowa State employees — Megan Landolt and Joe Crandall — are now implicated in a controversy that has no conceivable explanation. There is no answer that resolves all of these issues, yet that won’t stop Leath from trying — perhaps by making Landolt a scapegoat, or by shutting down ISU Flight Services altogether, thus getting rid of Crandall and covering Leath’s tracks in one cowardly administrative stroke.
Leath, like Trump, pulls his adult kids into things. They run stuff in Iowa and N Carolina. Wonder if the kids were on-board?
If law enforcement ever does take a close look at Iowa State President Steven Leath’s routine misappropriation of ISU Flight Services, I have no doubt that the peak of Leath’s abuses will be found to have taken place in a veritable sixteen-day binge in March of this year. On 03/10/16 the Leaths, Lackeys, and 2 redacted passengers were flown in Iowa State’s $3.5M King Air 350 from Ames, IA to Kansas City, MO, then back to Ames (p. 69-72) after watching the Cyclone men’s basketball team play in the Big 12 tournament. Despite the fact that the Cyclones lost that game, the next day, on 03/11/16, the Leaths, Lackeys and 2 redacted passengers were again flown from Ames to Kansas City for the second day of the tournament, before again being flown home (p. 73-74). Whether attending the second day of the Big 12 tournament at taxpayer expense was appropriate or not, the fact that Leath took four flights in the span of thirty hours or so, instead of simply staying overnight in Kansas City, raises more questions about Leath’s use of the state-owned King Air 350. (And that’s particularly true if Leath’s business-use justification for attending the second day of the tournament involved conference business or donor outreach, which would obviously have been better facilitated during hours when games were not being played.)
The very next day, on 03/12/16 — as detailed in recent posts here and here, as well as earlier posts — Iowa State’s $500K Cirrus SR22 flew from Ames, IA to Jefferson, N.C., spent 37 minutes on the ground at the Jefferson airport, then returned to Ames. As we now know, thanks to recent reporting from DesMoinesDem at Bleeding Heartland, ISU staff pilot Joe Crandall flew Leath and his wife to Jefferson on 03/12/16, then flew the plane home, leaving the Leaths to enjoy a three day vacation.
On 03/15/16 — as detailed in the post before last — the empty ISU King Air flew from Ames to Jefferson to pick up the Leaths for a three-day trip out west, starting the next day. Though the Leaths were already in North Carolina, however, not only does the official invoice for that 03/15/16 flight list both Steven Leath and Janet Leath as passengers on that empty ferry flight (p. 75-76), but ISU Flight Services billed the president’s account accordingly for more than $3K in per-mile passenger charges. Setting aside the legality of Leath using both state-owned planes to facilitate a three day holiday for himself, the 03/15/16 invoice does confirm one of the findings of the Iowa Board of Regents’ recently concluded internal audit (p. 10): “At times, passengers are listed on legs of flights for billing purposes, but the passengers are not actually on the aircraft.”
On 03/16/16, the nine-seat King Air 350 flew the two Leaths from Jefferson to Pittsburgh, then to Omaha, and finally to Denver for a two-night stay, after which the Leaths were flown back to Ames on 03/19/16 (p. 77-80). Six days later, on 03/25/16, the King Air 350 few the Leaths, Kelly Hanfelt, and 2 redacted passengers from Ames to Chicago, IL, where they apparently spent the night before returning to Ames on 03/26/16 (p. 81-88). Among the many interesting aspects of that apparently banal trip, however, is the fact that the Flight Services invoices show the King Air 350 returning to Ames, empty, on 03/25/16 (p. 83-84), then flying back to Chicago, empty, on 03/26/16 (p. 87-88) to pick up the Leaths and their party. In both instances — and in complete contradiction to the false 03/15/16 invoice, which shows the Leaths being flown from Ames to Jefferson when they were already in North Carolina, and the King Air 350 was running empty — the ISU Flight Services invoices for those ferry flights from and to Chicago clearly show no passengers, no charges, and that the flights were billed to Flight Services’ own account. (The invoice for the second ferry flight, to Chicago on 03/26/16, is incorrectly dated 03/27/16.)
As noted in the post before last, the official explanation as to why the 03/15/16 invoice was falsified — meaning why that particular ferry flight included the names of Steven and Janet Leath when they were not on the plane, and when only one name would have sufficed — is that their names were added to make sure the flight was billed to the proper department. Yet only ten days later, ISU Flight Services had no problem properly accounting for two ferry flights in which no souls were on board, and in neither case was the president’s department invoiced for either of those ferry flights. At the very least, then, that would seem to lend credence — if not constitute proof — that the 03/15/16 invoice was intentionally falsified to obscure the fact that the Leaths had been flown to N.C. in the state-owned Cirrus SR22 three days earlier.
(It should also be noted that passengers who were not in the employ of Iowa State, or who only appear once in the invoices for the King Air 350, also have codes by their names, indicating that the codes and names are not inseparable. Given that the ISU billing office would have charged the King Air 350 invoices to the proper department based on the “Charge To” code, and not the names of the passengers, the names are literally immaterial. And that’s particularly true given that it was apparently also ISU policy to allow the inclusion and billing of named passengers who were not even on a particular flight.)
The next oddity about the flights to and from Chicago on 03/25/16 and 03/26/16, is that there are five passengers on the invoice for the trip to Chicago, but only four passengers on the return flight. Somewhere along the way, Kelly Hanfelt — the ISU Foundation’s “Senior Executive Director of Development – Leadership Gifts“, seems to have gone missing. While that might raise the possibility that Hanfelt used the 03/25/16 flight for free travel to Chicago, Ms. Hanfelt seems like a nice person, and in any event would only have followed the rules laid down by ISU President Steven Leath, who was on the plane for both flights.
Still…had Kelly Hanfelt not been on the flight to Chicago, making a party of five, then ace runway incursionist Steven Leath could have flown his wife and the 2 redacteds to Chicago in the Cirrus by himself — assuming he was fit to fly. Because the Cirrus only seats four, however, having Hanfelt along necessitated the use of the much more expensive, if not also regal, King Air 350. Then again, such speculation is obviously moot, because from an earlier post (see the 10/23/16 update) we know that while Steven Leath was being flown to Chicago in the King Air 350, by astounding coincidence the Cirrus SR22 was also being flown to northeast Illinois by someone else:
From p. 3 of the internal audit we know that the Cirrus was flown on a total of 76 trips, and that “The University President was the pilot or a passenger on 72 of those trips”. Looked at purely in terms of percentages, and momentarily ignoring the fact that Leath was on the other Iowa State plane at the time, that would suggest that there was a 95% chance that Leath would have been the pilot of those Cirrus flights to and from northeast Illinois. And yet we know from the King Air 350 invoices on 03/25/16 and 03/26/16 that Leath was actually being flown to and from Chicago in that plane on those dates, so someone else must have been flying the Cirrus.
Except…of course we don’t actually know that, because as confirmed by the internal audit, and as documented in the post before last, and as acknowledged by Iowa State, there are invoices which list passengers who were not actually on a particular flight or trip. Which means instead of assuming that someone else must have been flying the Cirrus on 03/25/16 and 03/26/16, it is entirely possible that Steven Leath himself flew the school’s smaller plane to a point near Chicago — or even to Chicago — perhaps to meet what would then have been a party of four in the King Air 350. (Or less, if some of the other individuals listed as passengers in the King Air on 03/25/16 were also in the Cirrus with Leath.)
While the King Air 350 invoices for the Chicago trip do not list the times of those flights, we do have the time of the Cirrus flights from publicly available flight logs (see #15). On 03/25/16, a Friday, the Cirrus leaves Ames, IA at 3:11PM CDT, and arrives at the Chicago/Rockford International Airport, IL at 04:18PM CDT, for a flight time of just over one hour. For the return trip on 03/26/16, the Cirrus leaves Chicago/Rockford, IL at 07:56PM CDT and arrives in Ames at 09:28PM CDT, for a flight time of an hour and a half. So late in the afternoon on 03/25/16 the Cirrus is at Rockford, and according to the flight logs it stays there until the evening of 03/26/16, when it returns to Ames.
Except…we also know that the Cirrus logs do not necessarily provide an accurate record of where the Cirrus was or what it was doing between those recorded times. In fact, the Cirrus could have flown to Chicago/Midway from Rockford, or to any other airport in the area, without being detected, because the only trips that were logged in the Cirrus flight logs were those filed under an IFR flight plan. After arriving in Rockford under such conditions there would have been nothing to prevent the Cirrus from flying VFR to Chicago/Midway or anywhere else — although the Chicago terminal control area is decidedly not for the faint of heart. (If you zoom out on this sectional you can see just how close the Rockford airport is to the imposing Chicago TCA.)
While it’s tempting to speculate why Leath or anyone else may have flown the Cirrus to the same corner of Illinois that the King Air 350 was flown to on 03/25/16, it’s not actually important who flew what where. In fact, it’s not even important whether Leath was in the Cirrus or the King Air 350 on any of those trips. What’s important is whether there was a business-use basis for having both of Iowa State’s planes in northeastern Illinois on the exact same dates.
Here, of course, we should be suspicious because of the dual-plane dance that began only thirteen days earlier, on 03/12/16, when the Leaths were flown from Ames to Jefferson, NC in the Cirrus. Three days later, on 03/15/16, the King Air 350 was summoned to Jefferson to pick up the Leaths, and the invoice for that flight was falsified. With the Chicago trips, however, instead of a three-day lag between both ISU planes flying to Jefferson at Leath’s behest, we have both ISU planes flying to and from the northeast corner of Illinois on the same exact dates. Moreover, given that Leath was by far the dominant user of the Cirrus, it is exceedingly unlikely that Leath did not initiate or at least approve the two Chicago/Midway flights in the King Air 350 on which he was listed as a passenger, and the two Chicago/Rockford flights in the Cirrus SR22.
Moreover, if we total the maximum number of possible passengers conveyed to and from northeastern Illinois by ISU’s two planes on those dates, we come up with nine: five inbound to Chicago in the King Air, and a maximum of four inbound to Rockford in the Cirrus. As previously noted, however, the King Air seats nine by itself, meaning the King Air could have dropped off anywhere from one to four passengers in Rockford before making the very short hop to Chicago/Midway with the Leaths, Hanfelt and 2 redacteds. And yet clearly that’s not what happened. Even though every soul on those two planes was flying from Ames to the northeast corner of Illinois on 03/25/16, and flying back to Ames the next day, both planes were ordered into the air.
While the movement of ISU’s airplanes on that Friday and Saturday is perplexing to say the least, finding answers would be almost trivial given even a cursory investigation. As to who was flying the Cirrus on 03/25/16 and 03/26/16, the pilot’s flight log would answer that question. (Because Chief Audit Executive Todd Stewart has seen the flight logs of all of the pilots who could have been at the controls that day, he already knows the answer.) As to whether Leath himself was on either of the King Air flights to and from Chicago, questioning the other passengers and the pilots would answer that question. As to what Leath was doing in either plane, and what he knew about the flights of both planes, questioning Leath himself would answer those questions, albeit perhaps only under oath, or at the wrong end of an indictment.
Now…as to why ISU President Steven Leath went nuts in March of 2016, treating both of ISU’s state-owned airplanes like personal property (see p. 59-62 for yet another dubious King Air 350 trip from Ames to N.C., initiated a mere eight days before the 03/12/16 Cirrus trip), we have only to consult the headlines at the time to see why a man of Leath’s entitled temperament and crony connections may have been feeling full of himself. On 03/24/16 — meaning the day before Leath ostensibly flew in the King Air 350 to Chicago, or perhaps in the Cirrus SR22 to Rockford, or perhaps neither — the following announcement was posted to the “Inside Iowa State” website:
The changes proposed by Leath — which were undoubtedly approved by the Board of Regents in the days and weeks leading up to the announcement, or they never would have seen the light of day — meant that Leath’s North Carolina pal, pizza-magnate Miles Lackey, would control all of the following:
* Associate vice president for business and finance and university secretary
* Financial planning and budgets
* Treasurer
* Internal audit
* Ombuds office
* University relations (aka the ISU press office)
As you can see, in one fell administrative swoop, ISU President Steven Leath placed Lackey in charge of every critical financial control, along with giving Lackey authority over ISU’s media operations. What is not apparent from that announcement is that Leath already controlled the ISU Foundation, which afforded Leath millions in anonymous donations with no strings attached. That is, in fact, how the King Air 350 found its way into the ISU fleet for a net $2.5M of Foundation cash, and how Leath bought himself his beloved Cirrus SR22 with $500K that someone happened to leave lying around. Add in Leath firing not one but two of the foundation’s heads, then paying them off to the tune of $1M in order to keep them quiet, and the ability of Leath and Lackey to pipeline everything from legislative funding to dark money wherever they wanted to sprinkle a little green was effectively unchecked as of July 1st of this year.
(To see how far-reaching Miles Lackey’s powers became, seven auditors signed their names to the recently concluded and badly compromised board audit of ISU Flight Services. Of those seven, four of the auditors — Benjamin Olejnik, Matt Dahlsten, Ciaran Bowe and Jordan Bates — work at Iowa State and report to Lackey. The other three work at the University of Iowa, which is presided over by an illegitimate president who was appointed as a result of a conspiracy engineered by Regents President Bruce Rastetter, making it easy to pressure those auditors as well.)
As a result of his radical restructuring, then, ISU President Steven Leath was able to put his own personal fixer — a man Leath brought with him from N.C., when Leath was hired at Iowa State in late 2011, and whose loyalty is clearly to Leath instead of the school — in charge of every critical aspect of ISU’s finances, as well as giving that man control of the school’s state-funded media machine. Meaning, among other things, that Lackey is also the man Megan Landolt has to take orders from, and why the Flight Services FAQ on the ISU website is littered with lies. Case in point:
Again, from the board’s internal audit of ISU Flight Services (p. 3):
All Leath and Lackey had to do from that point on was avoid screwing up and attracting too much attention. Unfortunately, because Steven Leath is by his very nature a colossal jerk, when Leath realized that his megalomaniacal plans for total domination of the ISU campus were being rubber-stamped by the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents, he did what any arrogant, self-absorbed bureaucrat would do. He went on a sixteen-day celebratory bender, spending state money on plane flights of such dubious business justification that they almost certainly constitute serial violations of Iowa Code Section 721.2.5.
Fortunately — at least for Leath and Lackey — because Leath’s minders at the board are covering for him and enabling him in every way, and the board is holding the Iowa Attorney General, the Story County Attorney, and even the State Auditor in check, the likelihood that anyone will ever flip the lid off the corruption at Iowa State (or at the board, or for that matter at the University of Iowa), is effectively nil. So as soon as the uproar dies down about Leath’s airplane abuses, Leath and Lackey can get back to the important business of hiring cronies without job searches, taking large-dollar anonymous donations in the back door at the ISU Foundation, and cutting deals that give those cronies and anonymous donors preferential economic access to the ISU campus.
As for Leath having any lingering responsibility to the 35,000+ students that he warehoused at Iowa State, in anticipation of a performance-based funding model that failed in the legislature in early 2015, Leath solved that problem during the reorganization by shunting the students into a newly constituted Division of University Services. Now, comfortably segregated from Leath and Lackey’s crony financial machine, the student body — as Iowa State Student Government President Cole Staudt recently discovered — can be treated like the cash-cow afterthought that it is. That, in turn, leaves Leath and Lackey free to run Iowa State like the for-profit business that fellow Ames hangar jockey and former $1.15M real estate partner Regents President Bruce Rastetter always dreamed it could be.
Stranger and stranger this story becomes. More corrupt than small time New Jersey mafia organizations.
Leath’s objectives:
1. Enjoy the life of a billionaire flying around on private planes vacationing in Carolina, Colorado, Utah etc.
2. Get paid alot.
3. Be the BMOC: impress friends and family with trips to see ‘his team’ play in Kansas City and New York; hunt with celebrities.
4. Continue his two state strategy of President ISU; tree farmer in Carolina.
5. Enrich his crony friends like Lackey
6. Hobnob with Iowa rich like Rastetter who make land deals for him.
7. Allow cronies like Rastetter to raid ISU for grant monies and cover for things like African land deals
And Leath just has to claim his time, his energy is more valuable than anyone’s so he gets all the perks (the usual bullshit from CEOs).
There is so much corruption and malfeasance here it would take a TV series a year or two of episodes to explain it.
Wrongs (in addition to the above)
1. Leath also speaks at political partisan venues like Rastetter’s Agfest (doubt that is legal for a nonpolitical academic state position)
2. Anyone think Leath reports these ‘perks to the IRS? Obviously these are taxable employee benefits; thus Leath has likely filed false tax returns under cover of ISU
And I bet this is the tip of the corrupt Leath Iceberg.
I think the IRS angle is a good one, and if I was a disgruntled alum at ISU, and sick of having my good name tarnished by the likes of Leath and Rastetter, I’d be pushing hard, internally, for a full audit of the Foundation. And as dormouse suggests (see comments below), if I had enough money ‘invested’ I’d probably have the juice to throw a scare into the powers that be, and shake Leath loose.
At some point, getting rid of Leath is going to seem like the only solution, at which point Leath is going to have to decide just how much damage he wants to do on the way out. As I previously noted elsewhere, the most likely solution to this conundrum is for the board to agree to fire Leath without case, at which point Leath will get to pocket millions of taxpayer dollars without admitted any wrongdoing. And since it’s not the board’s money, they will be perfectly happy as well.
In the preceding four posts, and many before that, we documented in detail the disintegration of Iowa State President Steven Leath’s credibility. Like an airplane coming apart in mid-flight, Leath has left a debris field of corrupt if not criminal acts in his wake, prompting an obvious question. Given all the lies the man has told — some so egregious that they could not be papered over by the regents’ unconscionably forgiving audit of ISU Flight Services — why are the equally disreputable regents determined to keep Leath around when he is a constant reminder that the board itself is without conscience?
While it is true that the regents would owe Leath millions if it fired him without cause, Leath has given the board more than sufficient reason to fire him for cause. From lying about his use of Iowa State’s two airplanes, to telling lies about — and even implicating — subordinates in those abuses, Leath’s behavior is so far beyond the pale that even the Des Moines Register recently acknowledged that there is nothing left of Leath’s reputation:
As to the possibility that the corrupt Board of Regents is retaining Leath out of a twisted sense of corrupt loyalty, that thought is dispelled by the old adage that there is no honor among thieves. Yes, the board may have made a conscious decision to keep Leath around because he is of some value — particularly now that Leath is badly exposed and desperately in need of transactional friends in high places — but that implies that the board is oblivious to, or does not care about, the damage they are doing to themselves. Speaking of which, perennial board clown Larry McKibben outdid himself at the last board meeting with his “Glory Hallelujah” bit, over-calibrating on his insincerity to the point that he portrayed the lying Leath as a savior.
Yet if money isn’t the issue, and it clearly isn’t, and Leath’s very presence makes the regents look complicit in his abuses of power — which they clearly are — why did Regents President Rastetter put on his own clown show at the last board meeting, by uttering this absurdity?
While Regents President Rottweiler inhabits his own ethically barren alternate reality, the board’s internal audit made clear that on at least one occasion (p. 6), in 2014, ISU President Steven Leath actually violated state law by using the state-owned King Air 350 for personal use. And yet, during the exact same board meeting at which the audit was unveiled on 12/12/16, Rastetter allowed Leath to tell this lie, on the record, to the board:
As the regents’ lead auditor specifically noted at the very same board meeting, no findings of legality were made, meaning Leath’s claim to the contrary was a lie, and the corrupt board knew it was a lie the moment it came out of Leath’s mouth. Again, the obvious question — when the board should be able to extract any concession from Leath, and to control him with stage-mother-managed precision — is why the regents would allow Leath to betray their own theatrical pretense to credibility in such an obvious and embarrassing way?
If none of that makes sense given the facts as we know them, then there must be facts we are not aware of which prevented the board from controlling Leath, let alone from kicking him to the curb over the past three months. Given that there are almost certainly additional damaging revelations to come, and that ISU President Leath — as the Des Moines Register pointed out — has “betrayed” the “general principles of openness, transparency and accountability”, the real question we should be asking is why the board might need to keep Leath in place, at least for the time being. And in fact, when we step back and look at the big picture, it turns out that the board — and particularly Regents President Bruce Rastetter — has a very good reason for keeping Leath around for the foreseeable future, if not also for being very nice to the man.
Isolated or Symptomatic?
The steady drip, drip, drip of revelations about ISU Flight Services over the past three months, which began with Associated Press reporter Ryan Foley’s late-September scoop about Leath’s
“hard landing” on 07/14/15, clearly indicates that there is something seriously wrong at Iowa State. Yet just as clearly that same crush of stories gives the impression that what’s wrong is isolated and only applicable to ISU Flight Services.
Leath’s known abuses of Flight Services include violations of Iowa Code Section 721.2.5, the scapegoating of subordinates in order to avoid personal responsibility for those violations, lying to the Iowa State community about those violations, and in general just being a miserable human being. As a result of the board’s recently completed internal audit, to that we can now add the sloppiness of Flight Services as a department, the fact that Flight Services was governed by few if any stated policies — which, in turn, allowed the sanctimonious Leath to claim he had not violated any of those nonexistent policies — and the audit’s conclusion that the financial controls at Flight Services were a disaster (p. 10):
There are two ways that the still-unfolding story of Leath’s abuse of ISU Flight Services will eventually play out. The first — which initially seems like the simplest explanation, but is not — is that Leath’s abuses of power were limited to that department. Where Leath felt free to treat the school’s two state-owned planes like personal perks, and where he allowed Flight Services to maintain slipshod records and lax procedures — if not to actually falsify records in furtherance of his abuses — as president, Leath only behaved that way at Flight Services. Everywhere else, in every other aspect of his presidency, it will turn out that Leath was meticulous and scrupulous in his stewardship of the university.
In reality, of course, that possibility is unlikely because it would mean everything about Leath’s conduct with regard to Flight Services is an aberration, including the copious belligerent and reflexive lies Leath has told since his corrupt activities were first reported in the press. Yet even if we look only at the choices Leath has made with regard to Flight Services, we see those choices directly affecting Leath’s broader duties and obligations as president. And no example stands out more than Leath’s conscious decision to hide his “hard landing” from the powers that be at both ISU and the Board of Regents, until after his fat new contract was approved by the oblivious board in early August of 2015.
The second possibility — which is in reality the simpler explanation — is that what has been, and has yet to be, reported about Leath and Flight Services, is symptomatic of how Leath has conducted himself as president of Iowa State. Here, instead of having to buy into the idea of compartmentalized aberrant misbehavior, we simply assume that Leath’s choices at Flight Services reflect who he is, meaning that’s how he deals with every other aspect of his job, if not also his life. The only difference, so far, is that some of Leath’s abuses at Flight Services have been exposed.
A Tale of Two Airplanes
Do we have any evidence that Leath’s abuses at Flight Services are symptomatic, instead of isolated and aberrant? Well, as it happens we do, and that evidence actually reinforces the idea that what Leath has done at Flight Services flows from other abuses of power which have yet to be fully investigated and reported. All we have to do to see that clearly is look at the two airplanes Leath has been using to fly himself and his wife around the country for the past two-plus years.
From the ISU Flight Services FAQ [#2] we know the King Air 350 was purchased in February of 2014, and the Cirrus SR22 was purchased in July of 2014. The total cost of those two airplanes was close to $4M [#3 and #5], although $800K was later recouped from the sale of the school’s King Air 200. While it is obviously telling that ISU President Leath keeps making “donations” and “reimbursements” to stave off criminal charges as a result of his transgressions in and with those planes, the total amount of money Leath has forked over so far is less than $50K. Yet when we look at the amount of money that it took to make those transgressions possible, it turns out to be millions and millions of dollars.
So where did all those millions of dollars come from?
As regular readers know, Iowa State, the University of Iowa and many other state-funded colleges and universities like to make a big deal out of the fact that money they are otherwise pissing away on small-minded administrators with big egos and voids where their consciences should be is not taxpayer money, but money from a dubiously affiliated foundation. We saw the exact same thing late last year, when it was reported that interim UI president and arch traitor Jean Robillard suddenly chartered a plane to fly to Denver for a meeting with co-conspirator Jerre Stead, to the tune of $10K. While such self-indulgent acts in higher-education are so common these days as to seem normal, blowing $4M on two airplanes is decidedly not normal for a land-grant university fighting for every available dollar.
It’s not only that the ISU Foundation paid $4M for those two planes, it’s that the Foundation then actively used the $3.5M King Air, while also profiting from Leath’s admittedly negligible non-training use of the $500K Cirrus. Even the regents’ own internal audit (p. 3) ascribed 8% of the King Air 350 miles to the ISU Foundation, a number that inevitably under-reports the degree to which the Foundation was able to exploit that plane. In fact, when we remember that ISU President Leath is also a Foundation board member — and, as we will see, that Leath has de facto control over the Foundation — the fact that Leath has taken multiple questionable trips in both planes, which he then publicly ascribed not to his job as president but to his auxiliary administrative role at the Foundation, makes clear that there is often no meaningful distinction between Leath’s malfeasant conduct at Flight Services and his conduct in service of the Foundation. (That is, of course, why we find numerous redacted passengers in the King Air 350 invoices, because otherwise proud ISU donors, or even ‘prospective donors’, wish to remain anonymous while being flown around the country in state property for free.)
In terms of the corruption that has already been exposed, then, it’s not just that Leath was abusing ISU Flight Services for his own personal benefit — although there was plenty of that — it’s that ISU Flight Services facilitated systemic corruption, which is precisely why the ISU Foundation thought it was worth blowing $4M in discretionary funds on those two planes. In the highly competitive chase for external funding, and particularly the pursuit of private donations, having two planes run by a department with no effective oversight was of real value to Leath in his two-headed role as fundraiser-at-any-cost. And no single trip makes that clearer than this bit of insanity:
ISU President Leath flew a bow-hunting celebrity around the country in the state-owned King Air 350, yet because Leath and ISU could not even claim that the bow hunter was a ‘potential donor’, they had to argue that he was “helping Iowa State make fundraising contacts”. And those are trips that Iowa State, the Iowa Board of Regents, and the board’s internal auditors consider legitimate. (As noted in several recent posts, between the Dudley trip and the trip a week later from NC to PA, Leath had one of Iowa State’s staff pilots fly him and his wife to NC in the Cirrus on 03/12/16. When the King Air subsequently arrived on 03/15/16, a false invoice was filed showing the Leaths on that flight, when in fact they had been vacationing in North Carolina for three days.)
Looking at no other relevant factors, what has already been disclosed about Leath and ISU Flight Services is a fifty-foot-tall, hundred-foot-long, blood-red, flashing neon arrow pointing at the Iowa State Foundation, because that’s where the $4M in cash came from for the King Air 350 and the Cirrus SR22. Except the truth is we don’t really know where that money came from. Yes, it was funneled to Leath through the Foundation, but despite the well-deserved horticultural reputation of the ISU Extension Office, the ISU Foundation did not grow that money on trees. Instead, one or more parties donated that $4M so Leath could get him some sexy new aeronautical hardware, and although the Foundation may publicly report those donations as anonymous, you can bet your life that the donor(s) wanted, and got, credit for that money with Leath.
Follow the Money
As to who may have shoveled $4M into the ISU Foundation ATM, so Leath could then blow that money on airplanes and upgrades that made him feel like a big shot, the conventional wisdom is that we will never know because college and university foundations are allowed to run their books like the higher-ed equivalent of a political action committee. A donation comes in with a name attached, the name gets stripped from the money for all but the most stringent bookkeeping purposes, yet somehow the people at each foundation — and by extension the college or university that foundation is laundering money for — know exactly what that anonymous pile of money expects in return. In the case of Leath and the ISU Foundation, however, we probably do know who donated some of that $4M — or, at the very least, who pulled together sufficient dark-money donors to raise that total.
If you’ve been following the Harreld-hire posts for the past sixteen months, or even if you’ve only been reading along recently, try to imagine any scenario in which the ever-servile and corruption-accommodating Regents President Rastetter was not somehow involved in making absolutely sure that Leath got his $4M for those planes. Because I can’t do it, and I don’t think you can either. In fact, when it comes to crony corruption at Iowa State, Leath and Rastetter — both in their professional and personal lives — are inseparable, and have been for half a decade.
Back in late March of 2011, long-time ISU President Gregory Geoffroey announced he would be stepping down “no later than July 31, 2012.” Less than two months later, in early May of 2011, Bruce Rastetter was appointed to the Iowa Board of Regents by Governor Terry Branstad, after Rastetter gave Branstad a big bag of money. Less than two months after Rastetter’s appointment, the kept governor bulldozed the sitting regents president and president pro tem out of their leadership positions, at which point board members and political cronies Craig Lang and Bruce Rastetter, were independently elected to fill those respective positions.
Apparently not wanting to keep Geoffroy in suspense for fifteen months, Rastetter and the board initiated a presidential search almost immediately, and by September of 2011 the regents had selected Steven Leath to be the new president at Iowa State. While Leath took office on February 1st of 2012, and began slowly coming to grips with the horrifying reality that Iowa State’s airplanes were old, Rastetter continued exploiting the board and Iowa State with blatant and detestable conflicts of interest and corrupt crony hires.
In mid-2013 Rastetter was voted in as president of the board, allowing him to corrupt not merely Iowa State, where he had long-standing crony ties, but the entire regents enterprise. Nine months later, in early 2014, $3.5M in Foundation cash made itself available so Leath could buy and upgrade the King Air 350, thus replacing ISU’s shabby King Air 200. Five months after that, another $500K in idle discretionary Foundation funds allowed Leath to buy his coveted Cirrus SR22, thus sticking Iowa State with the insurance, maintenance and fuel costs of what would effectively be his own personal conveyance.
Again, in that context, what is the likelihood that Regents President Bruce Rastetter — who is a powerful political and business crony in his own right — played absolutely no role in either donating part of that $4M to the ISU Foundation, or in putting a group of ‘investors’ together who then expected a return on that investment? And before you answer that, let’s add two more bits of information to the mix.
The Rastetter-Leath Bromance
While returning from an extended vacation in North Carolina on 07/14/15, ISU President Steven Leath slammed into a runway at the Bloomington, IL airport, and in so doing put his beloved Cirrus SR22 out of commission for two months. In response to his accident, which involved a state-owned airplane, Leath did everything possible to cover up the accident while still summoning the King Air 350 to rescue him and his wife — stranded as they were in the vast emptiness that is central Illinois. Not only did Leath fail to immediately notify his bosses at the Iowa Board of Regents, but as noted in the recently completed internal audit, Leath also failed to follow ISU policy (p. 8):
The reason Leath hushed up his accident — including paying off the damage to the airport using a personal credit card and non-work email address — was because only weeks later Leath’s rich new contract was due to be voted on by the board. And as it turned out, Leath’s deception worked. Apparently, no one at the board knew anything about the accident until a week or two after Leath’s new deal was approved, when Leath finally told Regents President Rastetter about the incident. Interestingly, however, although Rastetter immediately knew that Leath suppressed important information until after Leath’s new contract was voted through, Rastetter’s reaction to learning that Leath had betrayed his responsibilities as the president of Iowa State was to also keep that information from the board.
Several months later — in a series of events that would not be reported in the press for another eight or nine months — Regents President Rastetter took Leath and his wife on a personal tour of Hardin County, where the Leaths hoped to buy some land. Several months after that, when the Leaths fell for a plot of land they could not afford to purchase themselves, Bruce Rastetter — Leath’s superior — stepped in with $1.15M and purchased, surveying and subdividing the land before selling the Leaths only the acres they wanted. As if that wasn’t enough, however, when news of the Rastetter-Leath land deal was finally disclosed in the press, Rastetter made his loyalty to Leath crystal clear by lying to the board about his involvement in the transaction — though that particular Rastetter lie would not be revealed for another five months.
Taking all that into account, then, what is the likelihood that the $4M in Foundation cash that Leath blew on airplanes in 2014 did not come from, or was not raised by, or in some way brokered by, Leath’s crony land deal partner, Leath’s abettor in deceit at the board, and the one man Steven Leath has had more crony conversations with than any other person since he took the job at Iowa State? The answer, clearly, is that it is virtually impossible to imagine that the president of the Iowa Board of Regents, Bruce Rastetter, who has business dealings with, and deep crony ties to, Iowa State University, and business dealings with, and deep crony ties to, ISU President Leath, was not a player in the events that made the purchase of the King Air 350 and the Cirrus SR22 possible. All Rastetter had to do was donate or arrange for the donation of $4M to the ISU foundation, and in stark contrast to the Rastetter-Leath land deal — which required multiple on-the-record transactions with Hardin County, which could then be checked by the press — that $4M could be donated anonymously, sheltering the donors from scrutiny while buying $4M in favors and consideration from Leath.
All right, but what about the ISU Foundation? Wouldn’t the Foundation have to be in on such a deal? And of course the answer is yes, but as already noted that was hardly an obstacle, for two reasons. First, because the ISU Foundation is legally allowed to function like a cross between a Swiss bank and a money laundering operation. Second, because ISU President Steven Leath is the de facto head of the ISU Foundation. Meaning all we would have to do to justify taking a close look at the Foundation’s books would be to find evidence that Leath has engaged in the same kind of abuses of power at the Foundation that he has engaged in at Flight Services.
How $4M in Planes Cost $5M
As incredible as it may seem, we actually do have that evidence courtesy of a mid-October bombshell column on the Des Moines CityView website, written by someone with the admittedly unlikely name of ‘CivicSkinny’:
Not only did Steven Leath effectively become boss of the ISU Foundation the moment he took office in 2012, but Leath fired the titular head of the Foundation before he could possibly have developed his own informed opinion about Saftig. Meaning it’s entirely possible that firing Saftig was not Leath’s idea, but that Leath was following orders — perhaps from someone who knew, from direct experience, that Saftig was an obstacle to his own grand plans for exploiting Iowa State. Then again, given that Leath also fired the man that he hired to replace Saftig — or, that he was told to hire to replace Saftig — there’s obviously enough credit to go around, no matter whose idea those firings were.
Whatever Leath’s motives were for those firings, the end result is that Leath cost the Foundation $1.1M, putting the total amount of Foundation cash that we know Leath has blown on dubious expenditures at a cool $5M+. And yet right now, today, nobody is looking at that massive amount of money, or where that money came from, because all eyes are on the serial donations and reimbursements Leath has made for abuses of those planes, which currently total less than $50K. And yet, given that the firing of Saftig came well before the purchase of the new planes, we should actually be emboldened in our belief that the abuses that have been exposed at Flight Services are indeed symptomatic of greater ills, because Leath didn’t hesitate to write off three quarters of a million dollars only a few months after taking office.
The fact that Saftig was fired so quickly may also make it seem as if his termination had nothing to do with the purchase, years later, of the King Air 350 and the Cirrus SR22. And yet, as the CityView column makes clear, that $1.1M in hush money was at least partly the result of Leath’s determination to buy himself $4M in air power:
Compared to Leath’s abuses at Flight Services, his machinations at the Foundation are staggering in both their audacity and cost. Not only has Leath fired two Foundation presidents in five years, but he blew $1.1M in Foundation assets to silence those men with non-disclosure agreements. And yet what could be more consistent? Just as Leath tried to cover up his abuses at Flight Services by various means, including blaming subordinates, and just as he tried to cover up his “hard landing” by paying for the airport damage himself, as the de facto head of the ISU Foundation Leath spent $4M on the purchase of two airplanes, then another $1.1M to cover that up.
What Steven Leath and the Iowa Board of Regents want everyone to believe is that at worst Leath may have stepped over the policy line a wee little bit in his dealings with Flight Services, for which he has now paid an appropriate price, both out of pocket and as a result of the board’s fake public scoldings. The reality, however, is that Leath himself not only insisted on and engineered the purchase of the two planes in question in 2014, but he structured the purchases specifically to avoid board oversight. All of which suggests that we might find even more abuses if the Foundation’s books were ever subject to audit, let alone investigative scrutiny by law enforcement or the Internal Revenue Service.
Admittedly, the idea that we’re basing all of this on a column written by someone named ‘CivicSkinny’ seems sketchy, except that it turns out CivicSkinny is the nom de plume of none other than former regents president Michael Gartner, whose name was clearly visible on the post when it was first published. Not only is Gartner a former president of the board, however, but in many respects he was the precursor to Rastetter’s Machiavellian reign — meaning if anyone would know how such bureaucratic capers are perpetrated, it would be Michael Gartner. (In 2015, Bruce Rastetter ran a $300K sham search at taxpayer expense, in order to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld as the president of the University of Iowa. In 2006, Gartner tried to sneak his own candidate through a UI presidential search, only to have that blow up in his face. Instead of allowing the search to proceed, however, Gartner scrapped the first search and launched a second search in 2007, doubling the time and expense.)
Although Gartner and CityView apparently got what they could from the ISU Foundation pursuant to their FOIA request(s), it’s a sure bet that there’s more to the story. As an entity, the ISU Foundation knows not only where the $4M for the airplanes came from, but where that $1M came from that was used to pay off the two former presidents. Because ISU President Leath was intimately involved in the acquisition of both planes, and Leath was and is on the Foundation board, and Leath was and is the effective head of the ISU Foundation, that means Leath himself also knows, specifically, who donated that $5M, and when.
For Part 2 of Why the Iowa Board of Regents Cannot Fire ISU President Steven Leath, click here.
“Clearly, President Leath’s acknowledgment that he takes full responsibility for the issues identified in the audit and that he should have been more transparent about the use of the planes reassures this board, and I hope all Iowans, that the president deserves our continued trust and support,” Rastetter said. “Furthermore, the board believes the audit has put to rest any concerns about President Leath’s use of the aircraft.”
What a weasel Rastetter is!!! A lying corrupt bogus weasel. For exactly those reasons Iowans should never trust either Rastetter or Leath.
This corruption is smeared in everyone’s face over and over, It has moved into the criminal arena. So why not do something about this?
Iowa’s AG is the emasculated Tom Miller who is also showing malfeasance at letting this corruption occur on his watch. He should be seen as worse than worthless, but as enabling. His inability to step up to the task and try to clean up the state is going to pervert his legacy.
However the greater criminal is Branstad, about to be rewarded for being a dupe in the campaign of the illicit POTUS-Elect Trump. Branstad, while destroying much of Iowa including Medicaid, is corrupting and crippling his state’s great resource – higher education.
Rastetter himself is nothing more than the plantation hog lot owner in a banana republic state, who wallows in corruption, likely a major cause of indigestion among honest people everywhere.
This is Part 2 of Why the Iowa Board of Regents Cannot Fire ISU President Steven Leath. For Part 1, click here.
Miles Lackey Chooses an FBO
How far reaching is the crony corruption at Iowa State? Well, to answer that question let’s take a look at the members of an obscure committee, which was put together in 2015 not by Iowa State or even the Board of Regents, but by the city of Ames — the relatively small municipality in which Iowa State is the dominant player. The goal of this particular committee was to choose a new fixed-base operator (FBO) to negotiate a contract with the Ames airport, which is not only where Iowa State and Bruce Rastetter hangar their planes, but a facility that Iowa State — at least as presided over by aeronautical enthusiast Steven Leath — would like to see improved for the benefit of Iowa State’s 35K+ college students. Or, if not the college students, then for Leath, Rastetter and their crony legions.
Here is how the members of that committee were listed and described in the official report to the Ames City Council:
But who are those people, really? Well, Damion Pregitzer is the Ames Traffic Engineer, and a graduate of Iowa State University. John Joiner is the Ames Public Works Director, who also happens to be a graduate of Iowa State University. Steve Schainker is the Ames City Manager, and has worked in that department since the late 1970’s.
At the time of his yeoman service on the committee, Miles Lackey was (and still is) the Chief of Staff to Iowa State President Leath, who brought Lackey to ISU when Leath was appointed in 2011. Leath and Lackey are friends and confidants going way back to their days in North Carolina, and as such it can be assumed that Lackey was on the committee not because he wanted to be, but because Leath wanted him to be. As to why the president of Iowa State University wanted a say in which applicant would be granted the first right of refusal to negotiate an FBO contract with the city of Ames, that’s obviously an interesting question. (In the summer of 2016, as the committee was concluding its work, Leath gave Lackey the title of Chief Financial Officer, as well as control over Iowa State’s media operations.)
Jim Kurtenbach is a long-time political crony who helped ISU President Steven Leath complete his Cirrus and IFR training, while at almost the exact same time, by complete coincidence, Iowa State decided to give Kurtenbach a six-figure job. While Miles Lackey’s ISU press shop swears Leath never talked to Kurtenbach about working at Iowa State — despite the fact that Leath and Kurtenbach were routinely trapped for hours at a time in the cockpit of a Cirrus SR22 — Leath did waive the search requirement for Kurtenbach, thus making that position permanent without the job ever being advertised. For all of those reasons, it’s again a given that whatever Leath wanted out of that Ames committee, Kurtenbach was there to represent Leath’s interests.
Derek Winkel, another graduate of Iowa State University, is the Executive Director of Manufacturing Operations at Renewable Energy Group (REG), which is headquartered in Ames. REG is a player in the Iowa “Cultivation Corridor”, which is why you will find a picture of the REG CEO here, right next to a picture of the CEO of Summit Agricultural Group, who just happens to be Regents President Bruce Rastetter. If you scroll to the top of that page you will also discover that one of the officers of the Cultivation Corridor is none other than Iowa State University President Steven Leath, whose picture is next to an image of Jason Andringa, President and CEO of Vermeer, in Pella, IA. Andringa, in turn, is the son of former regent Mary Andringa, who, after only a year in office, resigned in 2016 only hours ahead of a breaking story about how the board’s UIHC committee — which she chaired — awarded a fat no-bid contract to a company that Andrigna worked for as a director.
Dean Hunziker, another Iowa State graduate, is the owner of Hunziker & Associates, Realtors, and the son of powerful long-time Ames builder and developer Erb Hunziker. When Dean isn’t flying around in one of ISU’s planes with President Leath, he’s apparently working very hard to keep his name out of a $2M+ land deal between his father’s estate and the Iowa Board of Regents — which, oddly enough, involves a large parcel of land next to the Ames airport (p. 2). Justin Dodge is a Development Coordinator at Hunziker and Associates, Realtors, and is also an Iowa State graduate.
Finally, and as noted in the committee report, David Hurst is an ISU Pilot. What the report omits, however, is that Hurst is also the long-time manager of ISU Flight Services, which means he has been either instrumental in abetting, or routinely victimized by, Leath’s abuses of that department. Then again, to be fair to the city of Ames, even Miles Lackey’s FAQ downplays Hurst’s role at Flight Services, burying any mention of Hurst or ISU’s two staff pilots in a .pdf.
So, which applicant did this esteemed committee of the city of Ames — which, preposterously, included President Leath’s Chief of Staff, Leath’s Head of Flight Services, Leath’s personal flight instructor and then-Interim CIO (whose position Leath would also make permanent [see #10] as the committee was finishing its work), plus one of Leath’s pals from the local business community, whom Leath had flown cross-country with in one of ISU’s state-owned planes — ultimately give the inside track to for the upcoming contract negotiations? Why, miracle of miracles, that would be none other than Classic Aviation, of Pella, IA, which not only happens to be an authorized Cirrus Service Center, and the FBO where Leath did the bulk of his Cirrus training, but also repaired and repatriated the stranded ISU Cirrus after Leath’s “hard landing” in Illinois. Sure, Classic Aviation only bested the second-place finisher by one point in the committee’s rigorous “selection scoring matrix”, and Classic Aviation was projected to bring in the least amount of revenue over five years among the three companies competing for the right to negotiate, but just listen to these intangibles:
I don’t know anything about awarding the right of first refusal to negotiate an FBO contract, but as someone who fools around with language from time to time, I do know that when you string “strength”, “leveraging”, “opportunity”, “grow”, “become” and “community” together in the same sentence, you’ve got yourself a winner — at least by one point. All of which makes it that much more remarkable that after the long proposal process, and only a few weeks after securing the right of first refusal, in early September Classic Aviation withdrew their proposal and bowed out of the competition to run the Ames FBO (p. 2). (As to what may have convinced Classic Aviation to think twice about enmeshing themselves in a crony business deal with Leath and his minions, one possibility is that Classic Aviation was tipped off about an upcoming report on Leath’s “hard landing”, which went to press in late September, only a few weeks after Classic Aviation withdrew their bid.)
Iowa State Airport President Steven Leath
One thing Leath makes clear every time he tries to explain away his serial abuses of power, is that as president of Iowa State he is the busiest person in the history of busyness. Which of course makes it all the more interesting that Leath would loan out his loyal and indispensable Chief of Staff, his head of Flight Services, and his Interim CIO, just to help the city of Ames choose an FBO that it could have chosen all by itself. And yet, despite the fact that the process of choosing a new fixed-base operator for the (very) small Ames airport was a decidedly municipal matter, Leath made sure that key players in his administration, and a key Ames booster and backer of Iowa State — if not also of himself — were heavily involved if not dominant in that process.
Perhaps that’s not surprising, however, given that Leath also had no problem throwing his state-funded presidential weight around not to improve the lot of students on the Iowa State campus, but to improve the lot of another local business crony at the Ames Municipal Airport. In late 2014, ISU President Leath used an administrative pretext to evict a long-time tenant from one of ISU’s hangars, in preference of a cozy new deal with a local developer. And wouldn’t you know, that local developer just happened to own a super-sexy Cirrus that Leath was able to rent — at state expense — so Leath would not have to fly the school’s sad little Piper Warrior:
While Leath did blow $500K in ISU Foundation cash on a Cirrus SR22 in July of 2014, in August of 2014 he took time out of his insanely busy schedule to damage a privately-owned Cirrus, in typical Leath fashion:
So whose plane did Leath slam into a runway in August of 2014? Well, we don’t know, because once again the “open, honest and forthcoming” Steven Leath instructed his state-funded media office to cover his ass:
One problem, of course, is that if Leath damaged someone else’s plane — say, the Cirrus owned by Brent Haverkamp, whether Leath was using that plane for official business at the time or not — we don’t know who paid for the damage. In fact, on those occasions when he did rent the Cirrus from Haverkamp, at state expense, for official business, we don’t even know who provided insurance coverage for Leath. (Given that a binder endorsement was added to the school’s flight insurance after the purchase of the ISU Cirrus in July of 2014, which specifically required Leath to “complete initial/recurrent training in Cirrus SR22 prior to solo”, it’s not at all clear how Leath would have been covered by the school while conducting business in Haverkamp’s rented Cirrus in 2013 and the first half of 2014.)
As for that funny business about Haverkamp ending up in one of Iowa State’s hangers, here’s Iowa State Airport President Steven Leath once again taking time out of his busy schedule to perpetrate yet another administrative abuse:
Again, you have to admire the fact that ISU President Leath — the busiest person in the history of human endeavor — found time to orchestrate such a clever bit of administrative intrigue, what with also having to constantly feign interest in the 35K+ students on the Iowa State campus, to say nothing of dealing with the thousands of faculty and staff who are always whining about every little thing. On the other hand, between that heavy-handed hangar swap and the committee’s awarding of the FBO negotiation rights, it does make one wonder whose names might pop up if someone actually did rip the lid off the ISU Foundation. How much money have Brent Haverkamp, Dean Hunziker, Derek Winkel, and anyone else even loosely associated with ISU Flight Services or the Ames airport improvements, donated to the ISU Foundation since Leath took office in early 2012 — and when were those donations made?
Why the Regents Cannot Fire Steven Leath
Leath’s abuses of power are not limited to ISU Flight Services, but are symptomatic of related abuses at the ISU Foundation. Long before Leath began using both of the school’s state-owned planes for personal trips, and treating state-funded ISU Flight Services like his own private travel service, and throwing his weight around at the Ames Municipal Airport on behalf of crony local developers and favored FBO’s, Steven Leath was scheming to buy two airplanes with $4M of someone else’s money. The fact that Leath was also able to divert $1M in Foundation cash to hush up two former titular heads of that organization, who knew about Leath’s plans, suggests there could be no end to the carnage if someone did start poking around in the ISU Foundation books.
Even if Regents President Bruce Rastetter is not among the big-name anonymous donors funding Leath’s air force, or funding the coverup of Leath’s serial firings at the Foundation, it is in Rastetter’s interest to do everything possible to keep Leath from being investigated or indicted, because if that happens Leath might decide it was in his best interest to roll over on everyone else. Even if Rastetter never donated a dime to the ISU Foundation — and we know he has, and that as president of the regents he has personally profited from that association — Rastetter still has significant exposure to Leath on other matters. For example, did Leath really tell Rastetter about his “hard landing” after his new contract was approved, or before?
And what about the fraudulent hire of J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa? After Harreld concluded his infamous secret regent meetings on 07/30/15, which Rastetter arranged for him at Rastetter’s private place of business in Ames, the impossibly busy ISU President somehow found time to host Harreld for dinner that evening — meaning it’s likely that Rastetter and Leath talked about that get-together before and after the fact. That is interesting in itself because that would put Leath and Rastetter in contact shortly after Leath’s “hard landing” on 07/14/15, but before the approval of Leath’s new contract on 08/5/15 — meaning Leath may have lied about when he and Rastetter first talked after the wreck, or even about the wreck.
Speaking of Rastetter, Leath also knows who told him to hire Joe Murphy as his state relations officer, after Murphy spent a year covering Rastetter’s corporate (and board) ass over Iowa State’s Tanzania fiasco. And of course that conversation might be enough to take down board XD/CEO Bob Donley as well. And what about board COO Mark Braun, and his oversight of a boondoggle project that was developed at ISU, which cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars, yet was never put to use? And what really happened with the Kurtenbach hire? And what really happened with the Paulsen hire? And who put up the $4M that was needed to buy and upgrade Leath’s planes? And where did that $1M in hush money come from?
Given how tight Rastetter and Leath have been for the past five years, imagine how many phone conversations have transpired between them, how many hundreds if not thousands of emails and texts they’ve exchanged. Were those communications always on state or university accounts, or are there private accounts — like the one Leath used to try to hush up the damage to the Bloomington airport? Does Leath have any recordings of private conversations with Rastetter — or with Donley, Braun, Hunziker, Haverkamp or Harreld, or any other individuals who might prefer to keep their names out of the press? How about archives of private texts and emails?
The problem for the Iowa Board of Regents, and for Rastetter specifically, is that Leath isn’t just a guy, he’s the guy. Compared to Leath, even Rastetter is a bit player in the crony corruption that has taken place at Iowa State, and after five years of orchestrating that corruption Leath knows all of it. Which means if Bruce Rastetter really does want to be Secretary of Agriculture in the incoming presidential administration, or just wants to stay as far away from a criminal investigation as possible, Rastetter is not simply going to look the other way, he’s going to do everything possible to make everyone else look away as well. Speaking of which, by complete coincidence the Iowa Attorney General, the Story County Attorney and the State Auditor have all announced that they will be looking the other way, at least until law enforcement forces their hand by actually investigating the violations of state code that they all can clearly see.
So how determined is Rastetter to protect Leath? Well, even a short romp through the regent history books shows that in the past few years not only did the board — meaning, particularly, Bruce Rastetter — treat former UI President Sally Mason like garbage over a relatively minor incident, but only this year the board left UNI President Bill Ruud hanging without a new contract until he resigned. By contrast, here we have Steven Leath spending the bulk of his time fooling around with state-funded airplanes, state-funded pilots and the Ames municipal airport, including causing a months-long scandal that has yet to abate, and yet even after the board’s own damning internal audit was released, Rastetter gave Leath his full-throated endorsement.
The obvious question, of course, is just how far Leath is willing to go in threatening Rasetter with catastrophic disclosures. And the clear answer is that Leath is willing to go all the way. We know that because of the land deal mentioned earlier, which Rastetter claimed to have had no involvement in, even though his company effectively fronted the Leaths $1.15M. Despite the furor surrounding that deal, and its implications with regard to the state’s gift law and the board’s policy manual, Rastetter repeatedly asserted, in the press, that he was “not involved”.
The reason we now know Rastter was lying — and the only reason — is because on 10/05/16, while speaking to students at Iowa State, in a deeply cynical and ultimately failed attempt to discourage further inquiry into his abuses at Flight Services, Steven Leath himself busted out with this:
After months of President Rastetter swearing he had nothing to do with a crony land deal that he had personally negotiated with Leath, Leath himself outed Rastetter as a liar, which was a very public shot across Rastetter’s bow. Leath followed up with a subtler broadside six days later, on 10/11/16, this time in a memo to the entire board (p. 2):
Translation: ‘I’m doing what you hired me to do, so don’t go soft on me just because we’re taking a little heat.’ And Leath is right. If he had told the board, in closed session, about every abuse that has so far been reported, the board wouldn’t have batted an eye. The only reason the board eventually faked its way through an internal audit was because Miles Lackey couldn’t stop the bleeding after Leath’s “hard landing” was outed in the press.
Now you know why the Iowa Board of Regents cannot fire Steven Leath. Despite having more than ample cause, and despite looking like idiots for standing by their man, the regents are trying to keep the lid on a much bigger story. What the board is betting — and in particular what Rastetter is betting — is that endless denials will ultimately succeed in derailing further inquiry. If Leath can be propped up long enough the furor will die down, the press will get bored, the public will move on, then everyone involved can cover their asses by tying off any loose ends, including falsifying or destroying records if that’s what it takes. At which point Steven Leath will announce that he is retiring so he can spend more time with his airplanes.
We know that’s what the board is doing not because we’re clairvoyant, but because all we’re saying is that Leath and Rastetter, and anyone else whose neck is exposed, are doing what they already did once before. Here are the details of the two contracts — totaling more than a million dollars — that were negotiated and signed in order to shut the mouths of the two former heads of the Foundation:
When Leath and Rastetter get in trouble they buy their way out, usually with other people’s money. If all it costs Bruce Rastetter is another $500K or $1M in taxpayer-funded checks to the manifestly corrupt Steven Leath, and that money makes Leath’s abuses of power if not crimes go away, Rastetter will not only happily sanction those payments, he will kick in a suitcase full of taxpayer-funded deferred compensation for Leath’s bus ride out of town. Anything to keep Leath from talking, in exactly the same way that Leath did not hesitate to spend $1M in Foundation assets to pay off the two Foundation presidents he fired.
The difference, of course, is that in Rastetter’s case we know where the hush money is coming from. It’s coming from the good citizens of Iowa, whose taxes fuel the legislative appropriations that purportedly confer a fiduciary responsibility on the members of the board. A responsibility that you will not actually find spelled out anywhere in state code, meaning there is no legally binding obligation for the members of the board to make financial decisions in the best interest of the people of Iowa.
As to where Leath’s $1M in Foundation assets came from, who can say? It was paid out in two separate chunks, over two year-long contracts, so that money could have been quietly deposited in the Foundation ATM in dribs and drabs, over a span of time. On the other hand, raising that much money would obviously be more difficult than simply looting the state coffers. Though Leath knows plenty of heavy hitters in the Ames business community, and plenty of wealthy Iowa State alums, most of them probably aren’t sitting on $1M in liquid assets, which they would be willing to loan or perhaps even give to Leath, if Leath found himself a little short at the time.
Okay. So — cutting to the chase, the only place where pressure can actually be exerted on the whole nest is in fundraising.
So there’s two parts here: one is what looks like a money-laundering operation in which the Foundation is merely a pass-through for political donations and bribes, and one is actual fundraising for the university.
The ISU foundation has the sorry job of begging all day, every day, from everyone from unemployed ISU grads to the lowliest ISU employee to the ISU folks who really made it big, or big enough to write a serious check. And a lot of those ISU folks who made it in will not be in on the action, but instead actually mean their donations to go to help the school. Naturally, they don’t want their money to go into Bruce’s pocket, or the GOP’s pocket, or anyone else’s pocket: they actually want to do good things for students and the university.
And if the ISU corruption is widely- and well-enough documented, they will find other people to give the money to. This is a problem for ISU, because the Foundation reps can’t go have a nice dinner with the rich wellmeaning grads and say look, your money’s not going to be touched, you’re not part of the money-laundering stream. Because people who give a million dollars aren’t usually complete idiots, and they know perfectly well that the money doesn’t just sit there in a box till it’s used for the purpose intended….
ah.
Suppose for example that you had a million bucks and you wanted to give it to your university to run some new program or scholarship fund, or something,, but you suspected that the university foundation was run by mobsters, and you didn’t actually want to hand mobsters a million of your cash to play with. You also want all the tax benefits that come with dumping wads of cash on your university, and you don’t want to be responsible for the taxes that keep piling up while the money’s waiting to be spent.
You can still fund your program and get the tax benefits. You just don’t write the check directly to the Foundation. You write your check to another 503(c) that’s been set up to benefit the university. Friends of Whatever at ISU. The Foundation smoothies will try very hard, of course, to tell you that the university simply can’t do business this way with your gift and it’s much better all around to run it through the Foundation, or a departmental donor account (which is still the Foundation), but in the end they and the deans and departments want your money and will take it however you want to set it up.
Or you shrug and tell the Foundation smoothie that they simply smell too bad, and you’re not going to bother with a 503(c) and audit risks from their jerk friends at IRS, so you’ll set up a trust privately for the program or what have you and have the trust dole out money every year. And trust me, the department will come to believe as an article of faith that this money will arrive, year after year.
So what does that do?
One, it stops the Foundation thugs from playing with your money while it’s waiting to be spent.
Two, it reduces the risk that you’ll be told “too bad, we didn’t make as much as we’d hoped in the market, actually we had losses and your account needs a top-up to keep your programs going.”
Three, it looks bad. Not only do the wealthy alums not trust the Foundation to keep its hands out of the till, but they’re sending a message that they don’t want to be associated with whatever’s going on in there, and — most important of all — the numbers drop. To keep the numbers up, they’ll need massive donations from their buddies who’re in on the game. And word gets out rather quickly when the Foundation numbers drop. Does that matter, yes it does, because endowment strength is a factor in rankings.
So the target audiences for the “ISU Foundation fishy” message are both large and small donors. If the numbers get bad enough, maybe it produces some pressure to shine some sunlight on those books, maybe applied primarily by one of those wealthy donors, and…my guess is there’s prison time for a bunch of those guys at the end of it.
Who’s on their mid-sized donor lists, anyway? Not the total mobsters giving tens of millions of dollars, the Kiplinger/SmartMoney readers who’ve scraped together their two million and now want to do good with it.
As hard as they are all working to make this go away, the pressure on Leath and Rastetter to actually do that — to put this embarrassment to rest — must be enormous. One thing standing in the way of pressure from the donor class, however, may be the fact that Rastetter himself is stinking rich. Most people who have that kind of regent power are long-time cronies, but they don’t have deep pockets. As we learned with the Rastetter-Leath land deal, if you need a million in cash on short notice, Bruce Rastetter is your guy.
Still, the entire apparatus is now a shell, and even the slightest inquiry from law enforcement would collapse any remaining pretense. Which is in turn why State Auditor Mary Mosiman turned a blind eye, because if she actually took a look at ISU herself she would be obligated to make criminal referrals on day one.
So now we wait….
Will internal pressures fracture the shoddy defense and drive Leath out? Is another shoe about to drop? Is someone in law enforcement going to enforce the law — not just on average citizens, but on people with political power?
All over the Iowa people are being pulled over for speeding tickets or fined for parking violations, while Steven Leath gets off scot-free after joyriding in state-owned planes for years. And I guess that may be the most important lesson Iowa’s college students will learn while they’re getting their degrees. If you’re rich and well-connected, you do not have to obey the laws of the state of Iowa.
Oh, I think some disgruntled and well-off alumni donors are exactly the ticket. Look, here are some to choose from. If you cross-ref with donations to HRC it might make the job easier.
http://www.foundation.iastate.edu/s/1463/giving/interior.aspx?pgid=415&gid=1
I’m obviously not without an opinion regarding what’s going on at ISU, but when I followed that link you posted and started reading the names of some of the donors, my initial response was that they were probably all well-meaning people who were caught up in this mess.
Right up until my eyes fell on Rastetter’s name, ninth on the list, and immediately my perspective changed. (And having Wintersteen next didn’t help.) How many of those people are like Rastetter — just rampaging through country and culture, exploiting people at every opportunity, and then using that to leverage crony affiliations and broker power at ISU? Or maybe the better question is, is there anybody left who isn’t doing that?
I think there are still honest mid-sized donors, yes — and I think they’ll be key to bringing in the federal flashlight. It may not be possible during Trump’s admin…but then again it might.
Those are the people who haven’t found the Foundation blandishments terribly appealing, and who haven’t got the memo that the party attire is now sharkskin, and who are going to be really very angry, and who have time and money to make significant noise in a way that’s hard to ignore. The vulnerability of the legit activities of the Foundation is a real thing, too: they make a big deal about how many people give, but as the Foundation associates itself with corruption, fewer are interested in giving. And the fact is they need the money.
There’s also still the question of Gartner. Gartner got fucked somehow and he’s still sore about it, and I’m guessing he’s just waiting to be asked for his story. I’m also guessing, though I don’t know, that under the right conditions a bought silence is not a bought silence, and there are at least two of those that we know of.
Iowa is a microcosm of what is going to go on in Washington DC in a couple weeks. Big money will be immune from law. The burden of financing the plantations and estates and playboy fun the rich will be enjoying will fall on the backs of normal people. Corruption will be tolerated and encouraged.
Maybe it takes a complete meltdown of everything honest and proper for the normal citizen (Iowa and the USA) to stop listening to the Terry Branstads, the Steve Kings, the Bruce Rastetters, the Donald Trumps, and the Fox radios of the world.
Oh I think ‘pay for play’ and quid pro quid’ still exists. ISU has resources (and cover) some of these donors smack their lips about.
I doubt any malfeasance in foundation brings down a president. He dominates it. He has incredible currency — box seats fo football and basketball, naming opportunities, and what appears to be great commercial development opportunities in Story Co.
There is a reason those developers want to be on these little boards: they look at the growth in Polk Co ans see $$$ in Story.
Man, does Rastetter have a pair of big boars!
I still say someone needs to bring in the IRS to investigate all these income-tax frauds/schemes. The Leath benefits are certainly not reports on his IRS forms. Let hose feds nail him.
It appears the feds are not worried about the fraud in use of federal funds that ISU has perpetrated over the years…that’s too bad.
Clearly Rastetter wants his pawn Leath in the ISU presidency when he pulls his next big African or South American land grab. ISU could give him great cover (which was tried in the last Rastetter refugee-dump-for-land), but earn the Rastetter a huge bag of cash.
On 10/20/16, following a series of increasingly embarrassing revelations in the press, the Iowa Board of Regents initiated an internal audit of Iowa State Flight Services, covering all flights since President Steven Leath took office in February of 2012. On 12/12/16, the regents revealed the findings of that audit, including the lead auditor’s charitable characterization of Leath’s abuses as “shades of gray”, instead of as criminal conduct in violation of Iowa Code Section 721.2.5. Although the lead auditor stressed that no legal findings had been made, Leath himself then told the following lie to the board, in that same on-the-record meeting:
True to form, the thoroughly corrupt president of the Board of Regents, Bruce Rastetter, accepted Leath’s flatly false statement as true, ignored multiple damning findings in the audit, and summarily declared the investigation finished without need of a referral to law enforcement:
As regular readers know, the board’s internal audit raised more questions than it answered, particularly regarding violations of university policy, board policy and state law. And yet, even compared to Rastetter’s deluded pronouncement, no member of the board proved more enthusiastic in excusing Leath’s abuses of power than this guy — Regent Larry McKibben:
Here’s Regent McKibben hitting a new low in his role as the board’s go-to crony apologist:
As the Des Moines Register recently pointed out, however, Leath has learned nothing:
As regular readers also know, the current board leadership will pardon any offense from its hand-picked toady presidents. That is in marked contrast to how those same leaders savaged former Iowa President Sally Mason in early 2014, when she committed a gaffe about campus sexual assault in a wide-ranging interview with the student-run Daily Iowan. Following the slobberfest over Leath at the 12/12/16 board meeting, the disparity in how the regents treated Mason and Leath was noted by many, including former regent Bob Downer. Donner , who served on the board when President Bruce Rastetter and President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland raked Mason over the coals:
Downer is right. On 02/18/14, the Daily Iowan published an extensive interview with then-President Mason. The subject of the first question was sexual assault, and was prompted by a string of recently reported assaults on campus. In answering that question Mason momentarily stepped out her role as chief administrator at UI, and in so doing seemed to betray a lack of commitment to a zero tolerance policy against sexual assault. In that 3,133-word interview, here is the entirety of Mason’s ten-word mistake, in context:
In the aftermath of publication of that interview protests took place and letters were written to the Daily Iowan, yet the overall response was what one might expect on a college campus. To the corrupt leadership of the Board of Regents, however — meaning specifically President Rastetter and President Pro Tem Mulholland — that gaffe represented an opportunity to scold and embarrass Mason in front of the entire state, which they seized with bureaucratic glee:
Having held Mason to high standards for being “open and transparent to the board and to the community”, and for “board consultation and discussion”, we now contrast that administrative hard line with the board’s response to ISU President Steven Leath, who damaged a state-owned airplane in a “hard landing” in Bloomington, IL in the summer of 2015. By his own admission, Leath failed to tell anyone at the board about that accident for “one month to five weeks“, which also happened to be week or two after his fat new contract was approved by the board. Even at that, the only person Leath ever informed was Regents President Rastetter, who himself failed to inform any of the other board members, which is why they were as shocked as the rest of the state when Leath’s accident was finally reported more that a year later, in late September of 2016.
So what was Rastetter’s response when the story of Leath’s botched landing finally broke? Did Rastetter enlist Mulholland to dress Leath down, as he had with Mason? No. Did Mulholland take Leath to task for failing to be “open and transparent to the board and to the community”? No. Did Rastetter publicly demand even faux accountability from Leath? Yes, eventually, in a bit of stage-managed regent theater — but only after he personally tried to kill the story with crony propaganda:
Here we have the same regent president, Bruce Rastetter, who never gave a thought to gathering ‘points of pride’ on Sally Mason’s behalf, making it his personal business to marshal a public-relations campaign for Steven Leath. Only when the bad news kept coming was Rastetter forced to feign disappointment with Leath about the accident, when what he was probably furious about was that his crony enabling of Leath had once again been laid bare. In order to take the heat off Leath and himself for failing to inform the full board about the accident, Rastetter called for the board’s half-hearted audit. Flash forward to the farcical board meeting just passed, including Rastetter’s exoneration and reaffirmation of trust in Leath, and it is impossible to square any of that with how Mason was treated, particularly given the seriousness of Leath’s repeated abuses.
So what did Regent Larry McKibben have to say about the board’s rank hypocrisy, given that he was also a regent when Mason was berated? Well, as you might imagine, McKibben had his own clown take on the board’s glaring contradictions:
Not only did the board refuse to launch a public relations campaign on Sally Mason’s behalf, but the board itself was the aggressor in that instance, using legitimate concerns on the UI campus to press its own corrupt agenda. In the aftermath of Mason’s gaffe there was also no need for a months-long audit, which, as Leath himself foreshadowed, “takes (staff) resources, it takes time away from the things we should be doing, and it takes money.” And yet, in what can only be described as a jaw-dropping moment of hypocrisy, Regent McKibben — he of non-transparent TIER committee fame, and an incessant proponent of efficiency as long as it serves the board’s crony aims — conveniently ignored the fact that Leath himself obligated the board to that time and expense.
Despite the lead auditor’s kid-glove acknowledgement that Leath repeatedly wandered into ‘gray areas’ in his use of ISU Flight Services, Regent McKibben — a practicing attorney — also ignored the fact that the audit completely avoided questions of legality. And yet that hardly comes as a surprise given McKibben’s earlier response to the infamous Rastetter-Leath crony land deal, which almost certainly violated Iowa’s Gift Law. Then again, as we learned in that instance, Regent Larry McKibben’s main job at the board seems to be lying to the public about violations of state law which have never actually been investigated.
And yet, in a sense McKibben was right. Because Mason was simply guilty of poorly chosen words, while Leath was caught red-handed, using ISU Flight Services for personal benefit, there really is no easy way to compare Mason’s worm-holed apple to Leath’s thoroughly rancid orange. We can point out that the board was corrupt for the way they responded in both cases — and we have, and they were — but what we really need, at least to satisfy Regent McKibben’s finely honed standard of relevance, is a level playing field. Fortunately, courtesy of the fine reporters at Iowa State Daily, we have exactly that in the form of an extensive interview that Leath gave to that student-run paper, on 10/05/16.
Although Sally Mason’s interview with the Daily Iowan in 2014 was wide-ranging, the context for the answer that got her in trouble was sexual assault — an issue of very real concern to women and men on campus. While Mason’s gaffe did lead directly to her six-point plan to combat campus sexual assault, early in her presidential tenure Mason’s administration bungled the response to a sexual assault case involving student athletes. Although Mason is a woman, and had herself been the victim of sexual assault, her failure to act decisively in that instance primed concerns that she was not doing everything she could to prevent sexual assault on the UI campus. Still, in the entirety of the 3,133-word DI interview, other than the gaffe itself Mason spoke intelligently and evenly in response to questions asked, and nowhere does it seem like she was trying to be evasive, let alone lying to the student reporters.
Which brings us to Steven Leath’s 5,650-word interview with the student-run Iowa State Daily, on 10/05/16. In stark contrast to Mason’s interview, which was about issues central to the UI community, the ISD reporters were interviewing Leath not about issues of critical importance to the student body, but about the fact that their own president seemed to be playing fast and loose with the truth about his state-funded flying habits. Instead of talking about campus sexual assault or student debt, Leath was compelled to publicly defend his poor choices while the board’s leadership worked feverishly behind the scenes, gathering ‘points of pride’ in defense of Leath’s egregious failings. Unfortunately, instead of being “open, honest and forthcoming”, as Leath would falsely assert in a memo to the board six days later, he was obfuscatory and patronizing, talking down to the ISD reporters again and again in the apparent belief that all he had to do was deny, deny, deny.
The 10/05/16 Steven Leath ISD Interview
The full ISD transcript, which can be found here, begins with the following note:
In what will turn out to be a textbook tag-team interview, the ISD reporters begin by asking Leath to explain how he was able to take a state-owned airplane — in this case the Cirrus SR22 — to North Carolina for eleven days, when he spent the vast majority of that time on vacation.
Now, if you’re not familiar with the wily ways of administrators and bureaucrats the world over, it may be hard to understand how flying a state plane on a trip that was almost entirely personal would not constitute personal use of that aircraft, but over generations said weasels have codified a means by which they can either deduct travel expenses from the cost of doing business, or have others pay their travel expenses outright. As long as there is even the slightest pretense of business involved in a trip, all travel expenses for that trip can be deducted or reimbursed, even if the vast majority of that trip is spent screwing off. Even better, the more powerful your position is, the easier it is to claim that you are effectively always doing business. Meaning no matter where you go or what you do, including hanging out in your rustic Carolina cabin in your underwear, you can plausibly claim to be doing important, even critical work.
And if that all seems completely ridiculous, here’s recently retired ISU Business VP Warren Madden explaining the same dodge, shortly after Leath’s 2015 “hard landing” in Bloomington, IL was first reported in the press:
So who decides what constitutes “university business” versus fooling around? Well, at Iowa State members of the faculty and staff must get prior approval for travel from their supervisor. Although Leath, as president, obviously had no supervisor on campus — and for that matter didn’t like reporting to his superiors at the board — that administrative conundrum was anticipated by ISU policy. From the Iowa Board of Regents’ travel-policy review, conducted in the fall of 2016 [p. 3]:
Iowa State’s Senior VP for University Services is retired Navy Rear Admiral Kate Gregory. As it turns out, however, the Department of University Services did not even exist until July 1st of 2016, meaning it was constituted — and Gregory hired — after most of the aeronautical abuses that Leath committed. Unfortunately, what that also means is that while the board’s policy review is technically correct, as an official document it makes it look as if former Navy Rear Admiral Kate Gregory approved all of Leath’s dubious travel justifications, when in fact someone else approved all of Leath’s dubious business travel justifications. (If Leath is ever fired, as he should have been months ago, the ISU provost at the time should be put in charge of the academic side, while Kate Gregory should be given both operational control of the administrative side and license to clean house.)
Who was responsible for approving Leath’s travel prior to the creation of the Department of University Services? Well, that new department was part of the much larger Office of Business and Finance, which Leath decided to hack in two because it was just so darn complicated. As to who was in charge of the OBF at that time, we get that answer from a short timeline on the administrative split:
To be clear, I cannot say of a certainty that Warren Madden was responsible for approving all of Leath’s travel. I certainly looked for that information, but unfortunately the policy blaming Kate Gregory seems to have overwritten the provisions that were in place before her division was scapegoated. Still, it seems likely that was the case because of where that responsibility must have rested prior to the split.
Also, prior to Madden’s retirement in 2016, he had been at Iowa State for 50 years, meaning not only for Leath’s full tenure in office, but long enough to know the school’s travel policies down to the last dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’. In fact, given his position as head bean counter, and his copious institutional knowledge, the only reason I can imagine Madden not being Leath’s supervisor for travel purposes would be because Leath wanted a crony stooge in that position who would green-light his every request.
For the purposes of this post, then, we will assume that Warren Madden was Leath’s travel supervisor. (If I find out some other policy was in effect at the time, I will update this post with a note that the error was Kate Gregory’s fault.) In any event, it is less important who had that supervisory role than it is that the role existed, because it means there was an established chain of command — even for President Leath — for validating the business basis of official Iowa State travel.
As to Madden’s awareness of ISU Flight Service’s business practices, and Leath’s flying habits, the record paints a decidedly conflicted picture. After being quoted extensively in the original reporting about Leath’s “hard landing”, and speaking with the authority and certainty one wold expect from a man with a gold ISU watch, Madden wrote an odd follow-up rebuttal to his own commentary, taking back almost everything he said. In its place, Madden left a puzzling combination of denials that he personally knew anything about any of the events in question, along with legalistic assurances that Leath did not do anything wrong, at least as far as Madden was aware.
When he wrote this, however, Madden screwed up:
The idea that Madden was not alarmed because the cost of the damage was well below his pay grade is disingenuous at best. The president of Iowa State University came very close to injuring or killing himself and/or his wife, and in the process damaged school property. From standing policies and procedures that Madden would have known by heart, Leath’s accident should have been communicated throughout the higher levels of ISU administration, but it wasn’t because Leath covered the accident up. In fact, here’s how Leath himself described the complex process of acquiring administrative permission to fly the school’s Cirrus SR22, from an official statement released only days after news of his “hard landing” broke in late September:
So Leath himself knew about the Office of Risk Management, which was under Madden’s authority, and Leath consulted with ORM and ISU’s house counsel to dot the necessary i’s and cross the necessary t’s. All of which makes this, from the board’s internal audit [p. 9], quite damning for both Leath and Madden:
There is no conceivable scenario in which Leath did not know he was obligated to report his accident to the Office of Risk Management, yet he clearly chose not to do so — meaning he elected to deceive that department. As for Madden, whatever he did not know about Leath’s accident at the time, by virtue of his tenure and position at ISU he certainly did know that damage to the Cirrus needed to be reported to the Office of Risk Management, and yet in his letter he failed to speak to that omission.
Setting aside whatever damage Madden has done to his 50-year legacy by helping a serial liar perpetrate yet another deception, one thing we do know is that if Warren Madden was Leath’s supervisor for travel purposes, he would have known Iowa State’s travel policies inside and out. Meaning we can also assume that Madden would have been a stickler for policy specifics like this:
When Steven Leath proposed taking the ISU Cirrus home to North Carolina in July of 2015, for a mixed-use business and personal trip, he must have run that entire trip by Warren Madden and received Madden’s approval, because anything else would have been a violation of policy. Meaning at the time, Leath must have substantiated — or, as the internal audit put it, documented — the business basis for that trip. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, as of this post, neither Madden nor Leath, nor anyone at Iowa State, has offered any evidence that his eleven-day N.C. trip had any business basis whatsoever. Not an email, not a shred of paper, nothing to indicate that there was any demonstrated business-use basis for Leath’s trip as approved at the time.
Returning to the ISD interview, that all serves as an elucidation of Leath’s opening statement — “you don’t want to use the plane for personal use” — and as preface for where Leath went next, which included a high-yield bushel of presidential whining:
The headline Leath was complaining about seems to have been changed as a direct result of his grousing at the ISD reporters. I have a distinct but potentially fallible memory of an ISD headline around that date which included the words “personal trip”, echoing this headline from earlier, but I can’t find that ISD headline archived anywhere. I also believe the story Leath was referencing with his pouty lower lip was this one — which dovetails with this AP report — but again I’m not a hundred percent sure.
Fortunately, however, it doesn’t matter. Because even though we’re only four sentences into Leath’s defense of himself, we’re already well past the point at which Leath deserves even the barest benefit of the doubt. To see why, here is the ISU policy on mixed-use travel that Leath referenced, which, not surprisingly, reads very much like the policy on straight business travel:
Again, at the time of the purported mixed-used trip in question, in July of 2015, we are to assume not only that Steven Leath had a documented business reason for flying the ISU Cirrus to North Carolina for eleven days, but that he documented that business justification, in advance, to Warren Madden. And yet now, three months after Leath’s assertion to the ISD reporters that his trip was mixed-used, and thus technically legitimate if still a complete joke, there is still no documentation that Leath provided any business-use justification at the time.
Even if you have only been paying marginal attention to Leath’s repeated abuse of ISU Flight Services, you know there are a lot of moving pieces having to do with questions of policy and legality. For the purposes of Leath’s travel expenses, however, we can throw all of the complexities out the window. It does not matter whether the plane Leath flew on was a commercial carrier, a charter, the ISU King Air 350, or the ISU Cirrus SR22 with Wrong Way Leath himself at the controls. If Leath was taking a trip for which there was a justified business basis, then whether that trip was strictly business or mixed-use, Iowa State would cover the cost of travel. If there was no business basis for the trip, then Iowa State would not cover the cost of travel.
Continuing with Leath, from the ISD interivew
Being the inveterate chiseler that he is, Leath takes time out of his busy schedule to school the reporters on the fact that eleven straight days in North Carolina does not equal eleven days on vacation, because there were weekend days and a holiday included. And yet if you or I took an eleven-day vacation anywhere, which would necessarily include some weekend days, and perhaps also a holiday or two, we would just say we took an eleven-day vacation, because we’re not always trying to cover our sleazy tracks. Even after taking pains to explain why his eleven-day vacation was “not quite as dramatic as it seems,” however, Leath acknowledges that he “did take vacation there”.
Why did Leath go out of his way to make such a pedantic point? Because Leath was softening up the three student reporters, using the weight of his office in combination with his grizzly mug to make the reporters doubt themselves. This is not Steven Leath coming clean, this is a rat caught in a trap of his own making, going on the offensive against the very students he is responsible for as president of Iowa State. (If you think that appraisal is unfair, hold that thought.)
As for that “very important donor meeting with a critically important prospect”, we only have Leath’s word on that, and with the benefit of hindsight we know his word means nothing. Again, the only relevant factor is whether Leath justified the business-use portion of that trip at the time, and there is no evidence that he did so. In fact, despite Leath’s constant assertion to the contrary, here is the single most substantive comment on that trip that has ever been put forward, and it comes to us not from Leath or Madden or Iowa State, but from the board’s internal audit [p. 6]:
The first thing you’ll notice about that statement is that it does not talk about a “donor” or a “critically important prospect”. Instead, it simply states that Leath met with someone who was “providing assistance”. What kind of assistance? Well, by leaving that to the reader’s imagination the audit implies that a substantive business meeting took place, when in fact Leath and an old buddy may have just been sitting around, scratching themselves and laughing about how the rubes in Iowa bought Leath his own airplane.
As regular readers know, suspicions are indeed warranted because this is not the first time we have run across a carefully crafted lie in the audit. As noted in a prior post, careful and duplicitous editing of the audit allowed the following statement to be included [p. 8]:
While that sentence seems to establish a hard, substantiated fact, elsewhere in the audit it is clearly noted that the “business purpose” for those trips was not substantiated by the auditors. Rather, the auditors merely accepted the business justifications “reported by the University President” [p. 3], or “obtained” from…somebody [p. 5]. Likewise, in the case of the July 2015 trip, the audit provides no evidence to substantiate Leath’s claim that he “met with an individual who has been providing assistance regarding the development and expansion of the ISU Research Park”.
Again, continuing with Leath, from his reply to the first question:
First Leath makes it absolutely clear to the ISD reporters that conducting even minimal business — during what was otherwise an eleven-day vacation in North Carolina — qualified Leath for full reimbursement of his travel expenses under ISU policy for mixed-use trips. Leath then claims that despite the fact that the trip was mixed-use, he selflessly paid his travel expenses anyway, because the great preponderance of the trip had nothing to do with business. In his own words Leath characterizes this decision as a “good faith move”, when in fact there was no need to demonstrate good faith. Either there was a demonstrable, provable business basis for that trip at the time, or there wasn’t.
Having continually asserted but never demonstrated a business basis for his July 2015 trip, the obvious question is whether we should believe Leath’s claim. And as regular readers know, and as even disinterested citizens now know, the answer is no. Without substantive documentation, Steven Leath is not credible on any issue, and yet for the purposes of this post we are going to limit our skepticism only to Leath’s statements in the ISD interview, illuminated as they have now been by the passage of time.
Here, then, are our two choices:
A) Leath had a valid business-use justification for his travel to North Carolina in July of 2015, and he proved that at the time.
B) Leath did not have a valid business-use justification for that trip, which means it really was an eleven-day vacation.
Yes, Leath may have paid for the July 2015 trip because he’s a wonderful guy, but since sheer weight of evidence strongly suggests that Leath is not a wonderful guy, that leaves open the possibility that what Leath was telling the reporters on that day was true as to the fact of his payment, but false as to the reason he paid. In any event, Leath continued to press his case as a selfless humanitarian to the ISD reporters :
As a purely factual matter, we do know that Leath paid for the travel expenses on his July 2015 trip. The invoice and dated check for use of the Cirrus SR22 on that trip can be seen here [invoice 003], so clearly Iowa State did not pick up the tab for Leath’s travel expenses. And because we said above that travel expenses are only paid if the business reason for a trip is substantiated, the simplest possible explanation for why Steven Leath paid for that trip — and three other Cirrus trips to N.C. besides — is that he was unable to cite a business justification.
Here again are our two choices, only this time factoring in why Leath paid for his own travel expenses:
A) Leath had a valid business-use justification for his travel to North Carolina in July of 2015, but because he’s a saint he ate the travel costs anyway.
B) Leath did not have a valid business-use justification for that trip, and was thus denied or never even applied for reimbursement.
So what do you think? Did Leath actually volunteer, on his own, with “nobody looking, nobody talking about it,” to pay for that trip? Or did he pay for that trip because Warren Madden would have laughed him out of whatever office they were in at the time?
As for the ISD interview, if you thought Leath was laying it on thick when he said “nobody else would’ve done that”, he was just warming up. After playing the hero card, Leath reached up his sleeve and pulled out the victim card:
Without getting “too technical”, even though Steven Leath is president of Iowa State University, and even though he himself ordered the purchase of the Cirrus using $500K in discretionary ISU Foundation dollars, and even though he was, by far, the dominant user of that state-owned plane [p. 8], Leath did not get to elect to pay only the variable cost of operation unless that was spelled out as a perk in his contract. Meaning even if Leath did magnanimously agree to pay for his travel expenses for those Cirrus trips to N.C., the rate that he negotiated — as a super-honest guy — was still well-below the actual cost to the school. And it’s not just me saying that.
Here’s that “one reporter”, Ryan Foley of the Associated Press, from the original report that broke the story on Leath’s “hard landing”:
Paying only variable costs “such as fuel” did not cover all of Flight Services’ costs, as Leath himself acknowledged in the ISD interview. So whether Leath did or did not have a business basis for his July 2015 trip, or for the three other trips he paid for, Iowa State still ended up eating part of the cost of those trips. Two and a half months after Foley’s original story, and after Leath characterized Foley as critical and inaccurate to the ISD reporters in early October, the board’s internal audit confirmed Foley’s reporting [p. 9]:
Incredibly, while Steven Leath thought he was telling the ISD reporters a sob story about how he added a teeny-weeny bit of vacation to an otherwise “critically important” business trip — not counting weekends and holidays — and then paid for that trip out of the goodness of his soul when he didn’t have to, what he was actually telling the reporters was that whether that trip was justified on a business-use basis or not, and whether he reimbursed the school for the variable costs or not, with “nobody looking, nobody talking about it”, Leath still stuck Iowa State with more than half the tab.
For Part 2 of An Apples-to-Apples Comparison of Student Interviews With Sally Mason and Steven Leath, click here.
In terms of corruption:
Leath>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Mason.
So a little sexism?
I kicked the idea of sexism around last year, but I came down on the side of agnostic corruption. As long as you’re willing to play ball I don’t think Rastetter cares about anything else.
Yes, there’s definitely a “boy’s club”, but you still find Mulholland and Andringa at the table, if not featured, so gender is well down the list of disqualifying traits.
As to what gets you in the door, I think that’s pretty obvious. As long as you promise not to hold anyone else accountable, they won’t hold you accountable, at which point the looting can begin.
This is Part 2 of An Apples-to-Apples Comparison of Student Interviews With Sally Mason and Steven Leath. For Part 1, click here.
All of which brings us, finally, to the second question from the ISD reporters:
So Leath’s story for his July 2015 trip is that he flew to Jefferson, North Carolina for a four-hour meeting with a “critically important prospect”, who insisted on meeting at Leath’s conveniently located rustic cabin in the middle of nowhere. Leath then spent six of the next ten-and-a-half days on vacation at his cabin, along with the other four-and-a-half days of weekends and holidays, during which Leath engaged in no vacation activities. Had Leath not been such a great guy and voluntarily reimbursed Iowa State for only part of the cost of using the Cirrus, Leath could have stuck Iowa State with the full cost of using the Cirrus for that four-hour meeting, based on a business-use justification which he has never substantiated.
Because the ISD reporters were apparently among those who “don’t understand how this works”, however, Leath’s explanation prompted a follow-up:
In doubling down on how important his reported four-hour meeting was, here Leath asserts that the meeting was not merely critical, but time-critical. That “critically important prospect” could only be seen in a “small window of time”, meaning Leath had to drop everything and hustle down to North Carolina, in his own presidential airplane, because the entire fate of Iowa State was hanging in the balance. Or something.
Assuming for the moment that Leath was telling the truth, what are the odds that at the exact moment when Leath was summoned to the hills of North Carolina by this “critically important prospect”, that Leath also happened to have a spare ten-and-a-half days lying around, during which he was not obligated to be on the ISU campus? If that same “critically important” meeting had occurred in the middle of October, or in April, or at pretty much any other time of the year, would it have even been possible for Leath to string eleven days together in N.C.?
But of course we know the answer from this earlier bit of whining by Leath:
So out of nowhere a “critically important” meeting appears that Leath must attend to immediately, at which point that emergency four-hour meeting just happens to lead into the longest stretch of time off that Leath has had in his entire tenure as president. Better yet, out of all of the places in the world where this “critically important prospect” could insist on meeting, Leath is summoned to his own rustic cabin in the Carolina woods, where Leath then remains for the following ten-and-a-half open days in his otherwise jam-packed, non-stop schedule. At any other time of year Leath would have been forced to zip down and zip right back, much as he later claims he was obligated to do following a series of personal medical appointments in Rochester, MN, which he ordered himself flown to in the school’s $3.5M King Air 350.
In those instances, Leath claimed that he took the school’s state-owned plane on those entirely personal trips because after those appointments — which he himself scheduled — he had to hustle back to campus for all of the other critically important duties that have forced him to work seven days a week for four and a half years, except for that eleven-day stretch in the summer of 2015. Which raises an interesting question. If we suppose for a moment that Leath was lying about that “critically important” four-hour meeting in N.C. — meaning it either never happened, or it did happen but was not time-critical — what advantage would such a lie confer on Leath? And the answer is obvious.
If Leath did not claim at the time that his “critically important” meeting at his own rustic cabin in the woods was time-critical, then Leath would have been obligated to fly commercial pursuant to Iowa State’s travel policy about using the least expensive option [1; 5 b and d], with all of the drudgery that mode of transport entails. Fortunately, Leath was not only a licensed pilot, but Iowa State happened to own a zippy little plane that Leath had pursued certification in for more than a year, meaning all Leath needed was an imperative business justification for taking that plane on an eleven-day vacation. And wouldn’t you know it — the exact excuse he needed just happened to show up, at least according to Leath.
Perhaps momentarily satisfied (or numbed) by Leath’s primer on the sophisticated art of donor outreach, the ISD reporters moved to another issue that had been raised in the press, concerning Leath’s use of the twin-engine King Air 200, which Iowa State owned in March of 2014:
Again, regarding the ISD interview, all we’re trying to do is make an informed judgment about whether Leath lied or told the truth when he claimed that he volunteered to partially reimburse the school for his use of the Cirrus SR22 on the July 2015 trip. (And, for the sake of completeness, we’ll throw in the other three partially reimbursed N.C. Cirrus trips as well.) With that in mind, the first thing to note about Leath’s reply here, after the part where he blames his own relatives for knowing where and when to force themselves onto his state-owned plane, is when he says, “the truth is this”. Because as we now know, and as was suspected the moment Leath’s explanation hit the wires in early October, everything Leath says after promising to tell the truth to the student reporters is a full-on, unmitigated, shameless, premeditated lie.
In a post on 10/09/16, four days after Leath’s ISD interview took place, we dismantled his claim that ‘the pilots made me do it’ using simple logic. On 10/14/16, DesMoinesDem at Bleeding Heartland demolished Leath’s narrative in a tour-de-force post. Finally, when the Board of Regents’ internal audit was released on 12/12/16, it contained this [p. 6]:
Definitively, then, on 10/05/16, when Steven Leath looked the three ISD reporters in the eye and said, “the truth is this”, the explanation he followed up with was a lie, and Leath knew it was a lie at the time. While one fuel stop was necessary to make the round trip from Ames to New York City, the decision to stop for fuel at an airport near Leath’s relatives was Leath’s alone, and was made on that basis alone.
As if lying to the student newspaper wasn’t bad enough, in trying to avoid responsibility for ordering the King Air to pick up and drop off his relatives, Leath not only hid behind but implicated the staff pilots on that flight. If any violation of school policy or state law occurred while making those stops, then by Leath’s account the pilots’ were at fault, not Leath, which is as flat-out gutless. (Tellingly, Iowa State never made the pilots on that flight available to the press, nor did ISU present any corroborating statements from those falsely implicated pilots.)
As to whether Leath lied about why he decided to partially reimburse Iowa State for four of his Cirrus trips to North Carolina, we now have compelling evidence that the truth means nothing to Steven Leath. As the president of a major university, Steven Leath will look you right in the eye and say, “the truth is this”, then lie to your face. Meaning unless we’re as gullible as Leath would like us to be, we have to assume that Leath’s version of events regarding those Cirrus reimbursements is also false unless proven otherwise.
The most likely explanation, of course, is that at the time those Cirrus flights took place, Leath was not able to provide a business justification for using that state-owned plane, therefore any request for reimbursement would have been denied. In turn, that also means the business-use justifications for those N.C. trips — which you will find reported but largely unsubstantiated on p. 6 of the audit — were likely manufactured after the fact.
Perhaps sensing that something was amiss with Leath’s story about being victimized by his own pilots, the ISD reporters asked a follow-up question, and Leath continued to lie:
As to flight-time only, Leath’s appraisal is plausible. But even if we allow that the King Air 200 needed one fuel stop to make the full round trip — meaning it didn’t add any time to pick his relatives up on the inbound flight — that estimate wasn’t accurate when Leath dropped his relatives off on the return flight. The actual flight time from NYC to Elmira may have been “20, 30 minutes at the most”, but that doesn’t include time spent landing and taking off again, let alone taxiing to the designated shutdown area.
From DesMoinesDem’s post we know that Leath’s statements about fuel-cost savings are flatly false, meaning Leath once again lied to the ISD reporters.
Beyond blaming his relatives yet again for forcing their way onto his plane — which they somehow knew to meet at the Elmira airport at a specific time — here Leath asserts his authority as a pilot to convince the reporters that what he is saying is true, yet Leath’s statement that the King Air 200 needed to stop for fuel on the return trip was flatly false. When flying the smaller, single-engine Cirrus to N.C., Leath did routinely need a fuel stop while returning to Ames because of the west-to-east headwinds, but the fuel capacity and range of the King Air 200 made such a stop completely unnecessary.
In terms of the variable cost of operating the King Air 200, diverting from level cruise out of New York caused Leath’s plane to burn additional fuel while landing and taking off at Elmira — a direct cost to the state as a result of Leath’s decision to fly his relatives to and from the game. As to indirect and/or fixed costs, because landings and takeoffs are inherently more risky, making that additional stop for personal reasons subjected the passengers, the state-owned King Air 200 and the state-employed crew to additional unnecessary risk, and could have had serious insurance and liability repercussions in the event of an accident. (You know, like the one Leath himself had in July of 2015.).
[Update 01/20/17: I had a really great rant here, but it was wrong so I ripped it out. ISU Flight Services does indeed charge a per-mile rate, but it’s not per-customer. If you put one person on the plane, they pay the whole cost. If you put nine people on the plane, the cost is divided between them, but the total costs stays the same. I blew that because I didn’t have the invoice for this flight in front of me, but all of the other invoices I’ve looked at are consistent. And it was such a good rant, too….]
On 10/05/16, Leath’s relentless barrage of full-on lies apparently had its intended effect, turning the ISD reporters away from the fact that Leath used state property, to give his relatives free transportation to and from a basketball game.
Here, for the first time, Leath claims that he told Flight Services before each of his N.C. trips that he wanted to be invoiced for the variable costs of using the Cirrus, yet again we have no proof of that claim. In fact, where you would imagine such predetermined, non-business-use invoices would be promptly delivered to Leath, we find considerable delay in the processing of those invoices, and at times also in Leath’s payment. For example, of the four documented invoices that Leath paid for Cirrus trips to N.C., invoices 002 and 003 were paid on 11/18/15, with back-to-back checks numbered 2260 and 2261, even though those trips were taken in May and July, respectively. As to when those invoices were submitted, invoice 003 is dated the day before Leath’s payments were made, but invoice 002 is dated in mid-September, meaning Leath did not pay that invoice “the next day”, or even the next month.
As to Leath’s claim that he always reimbursed Iowa State “for anything that seemed like it was a mixture of personal and business”, the Cirrus flight logs show an unaccounted-for, single-day round trip from Ames to Jefferson, N.C. Until recently, the business purpose of that trip — during which the Cirrus remained on the ground for only 37 minutes at the Jefferson airport — had never been explained. As we now know, thanks to reporting from DesMoinesDem at Bleeding Heartland, the official justification for that particular trip was training for ISU staff pilot Joe Crandall.
Except…the purported training that Crandall did on that day involved flying Leath and his wife to Jefferson for three days of vacation, after which the Leaths then summoned the $3.5M King Air 350 to pick them up and take them on a multi-leg trip north and then west. Because Leath has never stated that he paid for that particular N.C. trip, what Leath did was use the pretext of Crandall’s training to give himself and his wife a free ride home, at taxpayer expense. In fact, were anyone to question Crandall about that trip, it would probably turn out that Leath proposed both the flight and its destination, precisely to avoid paying any cost himself — including the cost of commercial air travel, which he should have use because Leath himself had no business basis for that flight. (For details on all of the things that are wrong with that trip, including the falsification of a King Air 350 invoice to cover up for the Cirrus flights, see here and here.)
From multiple sources we know that a number of these statements by Leath are also lies. Leath did in fact use the “big plane” — meaning the $3.5M King Air 350, which is always flown by two pilots, who are employees of the state — for multiple personal trips, including several of the aforementioned doctor’s appointments. As for Leath’s claim that he only used the King Air by himself, or alone with his wife, “very rarely”, we also previously demolished that lie:
Continuing with the ISD interview:
Leath did report the accident to Flight Services right away, but only because that’s who he had to call to order the $3.5M King Air 350 to pick him and his wife up at the Bloomington, IL airport. As for Leath’s claim that the Cirrus repairs were minimal, we previously demolished that lie here.
Leath did eventually inform Regents President Rastetter about his accident, but only after Leath’s fat new contract was approved. At that point Rastetter elected to keep the full board in the dark about the accident, which means Rastetter also kept the other regents in the dark about Leath’s “one month to five week” deception.
Finally, as previously noted, the internal audit makes clear [p. 8], that Leath failed to notify the Office of Risk Management about his accident, which was a violation of ISU policy:
That, in turn, contradicts the statement of exoneration that Leath himself made to the board during the very meeting at which the findings of the internal audit were released:
After more back-and-forth about the Cirrus repairs, the ISD reporters tried to move the conversation to more substantive issues:
You can read a repost of that “huge article” here. Ironically, the first half of that piece has to do with concerns about Leath’s safety, which were obviously warranted not only given his mishap in July of 2015, but also an earlier accident that was reported this past November. As for touting the Des Moines Register, you can read the Register’s current very dim opinion of Leath here.
Among the things that Leath did not volunteer for that “huge article” in 2013 was that he was already well-along in his plans to replace Iowa State’s docile Piper with a peppy Cirrus using $500K in discretionary Foundation dollars, that he was engineering the purchase of a newer, faster King Air 350 to replace the aging King Air 200 with another $3.5M in Foundation cash, and that he had already fired one former president of the ISU Foundation in service of those objectives, at a severance-and-silence cost to the Foundation of another $750K. So yes, in 2013 people knew that Leath flew a small ISU plane because it purportedly produced beneficial efficiencies. Then again, in 2013 Leath had yet to fly his relatives to a ball game in the King Air 200, or to crash the Cirrus SR22, or to fly the King Air 350 to multiple doctor’s appointments, and on and on.
While Leath’s claim that flying the older Piper made him more efficient may have been true in 2013, no efficiencies were gained from the purchase and use of the Cirrus. In fact, quite the opposite. From p. 3 of the internal audit:
Because the board auditors failed to define what a ‘trip’ equaled in terms of individual flights, we can only guess as to how much actual flying was done on those 76 Cirrus trips. What we can say with certainty — and did say in this post — is that by Leath’s own testimony he was obligated to fly 52 “proficiency/training” trips in order to be qualified to make the other 20 trips. If true, that would mean that for each trip of potential benefit to the school, Leath was obligated to fly the Cirrus 2.6 times for training purposes, which is self-evidently inefficient. (If that isn’t true, then some or all of those 52 other trips may have had no business basis, meaning each flight in each of those trips would constitute an additional personal-use violation of Section 721.2.5.)
Is there anyone (still) reading this post who actually believes that Leath volunteered to give up flying the Cirrus, despite his contention that he did nothing wrong? Because that’s almost exactly the same line Leath gave about reimbursing the school for the four Cirrus flights to N.C. — that he wasn’t obligated to do so, but did so out of a deep sense of propriety. Well, as it happens, at least one of the ISD reporters had a hard time buying Leath’s explanation:
The most obvious reason why Leath would give up flying the Cirrus — or, more likely, was told to give up flying the Cirrus — is damage control. By getting as far away from the Cirrus as possible, Leath hoped to kill further investigation into all of the other abuses he committed at Flight Services, including that single-day, Cirrus round trip to North Carolina, which at the time was still obscured by a falsified King Air 350 invoice.
Here Leath claims to have gone above-and-beyond in making restitution, and again Leath is lying [see #22 here]. Not only did Leath allow the school to eat the cost of the Cirrus repairs for over a year, only making restitution after the accident was disclosed, but even at that he had to make multiple payments before he covered the full cost of the damage.
Again, the ISD reporters followed up with the obvious question:
If someone was in an accident in an Iowa State car, that accident would be reported to the Office of Risk Management, as required by ISU policy. Leath elected not to report the Cirrus accident to the ORM, and we find details of that omission on p. 8 of the internal audit:
As with Leath’s story about “proactively reimbursing for trips” when he did not have to, Leath’s justification for not filing an insurance claim — and thus sticking Iowa State with the cost of repairs — had no supporting documentation. Meaning the more likely explanation is that Leath chose not to report the accident because he wanted to cover it up, even if doing so cost the school money. That in turn also means that all of the patronizing whining in the above quote wasn’t even real whining, but fake whining, because Leath himself knew he was lying at the time.
The next 600+ words in the ISD interview concern the ISU flight records that the “difficult” AP reporter got his hands on, which the ISD reporters wanted access to as well. While Leath and Landolt fell all over themselves promising to get the students that same information, Leath still managed not only to add a fair amount of sniveling character assassination, but also this jaw-dropping moment of condescension:
As this post has hopefully made clear, regardless of their status as students, at the time of Leath’s interview all three of the ISD reporters acquitted themselves as successful journalists. As to why ISU’s flight records were stored on a website to begin with, one of those successful journalists asked that very question:
This workflow is particularly important regarding the single-day, round-trip flight from Ames to Jefferson, N.C., which was flown by ISU pilot Joe Crandall. From the point of view of the ISU billing office, the official record of Leath’s movements is established by a falsified King Air 350 invoice which shows Leath and his wife being transported to N.C. three days after they arrived there. To-date there has also never been any explanation as to who paid for both of the Cirrus flights during that trip.
Was Steven Leath, president of Iowa State University, “open and transparent” with the three ISD reporters? No, he lied to them knowingly, ceaselessly, remorselessly.
Leath continued to heap on the condescension and sanctimony, even as he knew that virtually everything he was telling the ISD reporters was a lie. As for Leath’s claim that people were only hearing one side of the story, the side that people had heard to that point was factually accurate, while Leath’s version of events was almost entirely premised on deceit.
The bulk of the remainder of the interview — 1,700 words or so — dealt with Leath’s justification for repeatedly traveling to, and purportedly meeting with donors in, North Carolina. Per Leath, his trips to N.C. had nothing to do with the fact that his family owns a Christmas-tree farm there, or the fact that he owns a cabin there, because even when he’s at his cabin he still spends all of his time slaving over a hot telephone. Leath also highlighted his frequent use of commercial carriers relative to his use of ISU’s Cirrus and King Air 350, and yet true to form, in answering the ISD reporters’ remaining questions, Leath told more lies:
As detailed in a prior post, Athletics did not use the ISU King Air 350 “way more” than Leath. You wouldn’t know that, however, from looking at the pie chart on p. 3 of the internal audit, because that pie chart could not be more deceptive if Steven Leath had done the coloring, portioning and labeling himself. Where Athletics is colored neon yellow, Leath’s office is slate gray. Where Athletics is presented as monolithic, Leath’s roles as head of administration and as the effective head of the ISU Foundation are pieced out, reducing what would be 42% of the King Air 350 miles to 28%.
Even if we limit Leath’s use of the King Air 350 to only those flights on which he himself flew as an individual — at least according to the passenger manifests on the official invoices — it turns out that Leath’s use is comparable to that of all of the various Athletics teams and coaches who flew on that plane. From that prior post:
Because of all of the recruiting trips taken by ISU coaches, on a mileage basis the Athletics department does use the King Air 350 more, but only marginally so when compared to Leath’s equivalent responsibilities on the academic side. On the other hand, if we tally the number of times that anyone in Athletics used one of Iowa State’s planes to fly their relatives to a ball game, to fly themselves to doctor’s appointments, to fly to hunting trips with friends, or to fly alone or with their wives or partners, it is abundantly clear that Leath routinely abused ISU Flight Services regardless of the miles flown.
Even at the end of the ISD interview, in response to little more than chit-chat, Leath can’t stop lying:
As noted in yet another prior post, the requirements for Leath to retain his certifications in the Cirrus were trivial – certainly much less than the 52 trips he claimed he needed to take for “proficiency/training” reasons. As for flying to “each place” in the Cirrus, the board’s own auditors could only find 20 non-training trips in more than two full years.
Finally, regarding his use of the King Air 350, even in response to a last-second comment, Leath lied:
From the prior post on Leath’s use of the King Air:
So what do you think? When Leath claimed that he had a business-use justification for his July 2015 trip to North Carolina, but partially paid for the cost of that trip out of the goodness of his heart, do you believe him? Or do you think it’s more likely, given what a complete liar he is, that he was lying about that as well?
Even if Leath had a business-use justification for that July trip, however, or any of the other N.C. trips that he partially reimbursed the school for, the interview that he gave on 10/05/16, to three student reporters working for the Iowa State Daily, is so replete with lies as to require that Leath be retroactively fired as of that date. And yet, as noted at the dawn of this post, Steven Leath is not only still president of Iowa State University, he has the full support of the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents, including the unctuous member who once famously said this to another regent president:
All of which now brings us back to Regent Larry McKibben, fruit expert.
Apples to Apples, Dust to Dust
Here again are Regent McKibben’s comments, after it was pointed out that the treatment Sally Mason got for botching an interview question was merciless, while Leath’s serial abuses at Flight Services occasioned everything from a board-initiated ‘points of pride’ defense to a ‘glory hallelujah’ moment from McKibben himself:
As to the audit not being “very negative”, Regent McKibben is correct, but only because the board leadership, Leath, and Leath’s pal Miles Lackey — who was given direct oversight of ISU’s internal audit department only this past summer, and provided the majority (four) of the auditors who worked on the internal audit — all put their fingers, toes, and other assorted appendages on the scale while the facts were being weighed. From the misleading pie chart to the deceptive editing to the omission of even basic definitions of terms, the board got exactly what it wanted — an audit which assiduously ignored any violations of policy or law that would have forced them to fire Leath.
Sally Mason was never audited, so when McKibben points to the audit as proof that Leath was somehow vindicated, he’s the one comparing apples to oranges. Instead, if we compare the board’s reaction to Sally Mason’s DI interview in early 2014, which contained a single ten-word gaffe, to the board’s reaction to Steven Leath’s ISD interview in the fall of 2016, which may contain more lies than any university president has ever told in a single interview, we find that the board went out of its way — and continues to go out of its way — to ignore the fact that Iowa State University President Steven Leath repeatedly lied to three student reporters, and, by extension, to the entire university campus. And by ‘lie’ I do not mean that Leath misspoke or got his facts wrong, I mean Leath repeatedly told provable premeditated lies in order to avoid responsibility for his own unethical if not illegal conduct.
The one honest thing McKibben said in the quote above is that he doesn’t really care what Leath did as long as the money keeps rolling in. And from a certain deeply cynical if not immoral perspective you can see the advantage in hiring a cold-blooded liar to be your chief fundraiser, because that person won’t have any problem saying whatever needs to be said to sucker loyal alums into donating money. That the current board leadership has once again given Leath its unqualified support, despite the disfavor he has heaped on himself and Iowa State, tells you everything you need to know about their priorities as well.
As for Sally Mason, in 2014 the same board leadership attacked her because they wanted to drive her out at the University of Iowa. When Mason finally announced her retirement in late 2014, on the heels of the board’s assault and other indignities, the board leadership, in concert with UI traitor and board-appointed interim-president Jean Robillard, rigged a fake search that led to the illegitimate appointment of J. Bruce Harreld. (During that rigged search, McKibben himself may have violated state code by participating in meetings with Harreld which were designed to evade the state’s Open Meetings Law.)
In an apples-to-apples comparison, then, what we find is that the corrupt Board of Regents hounded Sally Mason out of her job, in part over a ten-word misfire in an interview with the University of Iowa’s student paper. In marked contrast, not only did the corrupt Board of Regents overlook Steven Leath’s serial lies in his interview with Iowa State’s student paper, but Leath was given a pat of the back despite having admitted to what were almost certainly multiple violations of state law in that same interview. Had the internal audit considered illegalities, or, had the corrupt Board of Regents done its duty and referred the audit, the ISD interview, and multiple other self-incriminating statements by Leath to law enforcement, not only would Leath have already been terminated for cause, but he would probably be headed to trial.
Were all this happening behind the scenes you could understand the deafening silence in state government, but the ugly truth about the corruption in state-funded higher education in Iowa is that everyone knows the system is corrupt. Simply by reading the news and looking up publicly available information anyone can see the startling magnitude of the abuses that have already been disclosed, which means there have to be people who know about much more, and much worse.
What’s happening in Iowa right now has all the hallmarks of a historical period that everyone will shake their heads about in ten years, or even belatedly acknowledge that they should have said something or done something, yet no one is stepping up. Bruce Rastetter is a liar and a cheat, Steven Leath is a liar and a cheat, J. Bruce Harreld is a liar and a cheat, and yet they’re all still calling the shots with virtual impunity.
Say whatever you want about Sally Mason, but she wasn’t lying trash. Mason also understood that silence in itself can be damaging. From the same Daily Iowan interview of Mason in early 2014, also in response to the first question about campus sexual assault:
If you see something, say something. If you don’t, you’re part of the problem.
The way you put together this story, I realized what a sleazy sociopath Leath really is.
Look at the way he describes procuring donor monies. It is as if he is a con artist working on a mark. He appears to have quite a snake-oil salesman protocol going on.
Then there is the interview with students unfolding. Leath is obviously a con man, who wants to live large, live like a billionaire on ISU money. I believe that is what the heart of the matter is. He wants to be as big a man as Rastetter and other really rich guys; the plane trips, the tickets for family are all bragging.
He really has a developed sales pitch, con pitch, script:
1. Sorry about this guys, I am very very sad. But I can explain…lies
2. However everything I have done, every breath I take, every bowel movement and belch is for the good of ISU, for the great good of us all, you and Iowa, and mother…
3. And look how successful I am. Enrollment..blah blah….research park…blah blah…scholarships…blah blah
4. “The truth is, the reality is, let me be honest” Those are key words of a liar and a con man.
5. I would do anything for you, for ISU, for Iowa, I would even cut off my big toe…
6. And I hope you little people, when you grow up, or die, can be as successful as a wheeler dealer, a big wheel like me.
Would love to see:
1. If all the advancements of ISU he brags about are actual accomplishments
2. His actual record at North Carolina State. Was he as much a con artist there, or did this happen when he was kicked up to the Presidency of ISU?
I can just see his smug face as he gets into his various pitches. The guy must be an incredibly slick sleazy smooth con man…
And I doubt if the full story is every heard until someone puts this cast of characters on the witness stand, and under oath.
Dear Attorney General’s office lawyer secretly reading this:
When the hell are you going to get on the stick and prosecute?
If you’re not going to be permitted to do that, why are you still holding onto what you know to be a corrupt job where you have to keep your lip buttoned about the corruption?
Many of us make a whole lot less than you do, and we house and feed our families, and we can’t put out a shingle and bill $250 an hour, either. If you need a stick to go with that carrot, please imagine that you’re explaining this to your children, who are sitting there deciding things about you behind their eyes. If you have children, you can count on their one day putting the pieces together about your role here, or being told about it, and at some point asking you. This is all very public.
So grow a pair of your favorite nads, would you please, and do the right thing, one way or the other.
Wonder if reporters have looked into Leath’s role at a North Carolina campus that just didn’t seem to be fiscally sound?
http://m.salisburypost.com/2011/06/08/departing-murdock-chief-better-days-ahead/
Also wonder if Leath wasn’t in NC fora job interview at some point:
http://cprnc.org/300000-buying-unc-an-iowa-bible-banner/
That’s very interesting about Leath applying for the UNC job — kudos for digging that up. (In 2009 Leath interviewed at Florida State, prior to landing the ISU gig.)
And why wouldn’t he? That’s Leath’s stomping ground, and of course we know that he traveled there quite frequently….
Like the 2015 UI search, the 2015 UNC search was a sham, but even worse for its unrepentant secrecy. SAS — a very large company in NC — was flying preferred candidates and committee members around on its private jets, including Spellings, who was the only candidate sent to the UNC board by the search/screen committees, which were separate.
Records for the UNC search are hard to dig up, but here’s a timeline showing that screening of applicants began in July, with interviews in September:
https://www.northcarolina.edu/search-process/search-timeline
More links on the search here:
https://www.northcarolina.edu/search?search=search%20process
And here’s a propaganda ‘fact sheet’ put out after the politically motivated board selected Spellings:
http://www.northcarolina.edu/sites/default/files/presidential_search_process_fact_sheet_.pdf
Looking at the Cirrus and King Air 350 flight logs, I don’t see any flights in September or October that would have fit the interview process, but he may have used the trip in July to try to lobby for considering during the interviews. On the other hand, he could have flown commercial, or VFR all the way there and back, but I like the long eleven-day ‘mixed-use’ trip in July because it gives him plenty of time to work his connections and size up support for the gig.
Still, there are three Cirrus trips to NC that Leath ‘reimbursed for’ in 2015, and they all fall inside the search timeline for the UNC search, meaning he may have been trying to lay the groundwork for securing that job during any of those trips.
http://www.iowaregents.edu/media/cms/ISU_Flight_Service_and_University_O_BF7913F1791FE.pdf
It is also interesting that Leath was in charge at several periods of the Univ North Carolina Campus at Kannapolis.
David Murdock of Dole Foods financed the campus, which was supposed to be an idyllic, ground up construction of a major agribusiness research campus. However it appears to have experienced major hiccoughs along the way.
Seems there were several questionable management issues over the years. And Murdock kept bailing the place out financially.
Wonder if there are any accounts of Leath’s leadership or his role in the mess? I saw one interview where Leath was promising pie in the sky, which obviously never occurred.
Every once in a while I think about the AG’s office, and how maybe most of the people there couldn’t care less, and how Tom Miller has become nothing more than a zombie administrator. But somewhere in that embarrassment there’s probably at least one person who actually wants to do the right thing, and right now they’re doing a really slow burn.
I don’t know if they will get their chance, or maybe they’ll just throw in the towel and go be happy somewhere else, but this kind of wall-to-wall sleaze is also where truly committed public servants come from.
Everything doesn’t have to be corrupt, and anyone who tells you that’s just the way it is is getting something on the side, some how, some way. Maybe it’s better seats to the ball game, maybe it’s the best table in the house, maybe it’s having opponents kneecapped in the press before they can make a run at you at the polls, but it’s something.
Iowa State University President Steven Leath told so many lies in his 10/05/16 interview with the Iowa State Daily that it’s almost impossible to document them all. In fact, while researching a post yesterday I found one more, and I think this one is particularly important. Here is Leath, again, from that ISD interview:
To be crystal clear, that’s Steven Leath talking about the eleven-day span he spent in North Carolina, between 07/03/15 and 07/14/15. (It was on the last day of that trip that Leath bashed the ISU Cirrus SR22 into a runway in Bloomington, IL.) As noted in the previous post, there were and still are many questions about the purported business-use basis for that trip, and about Leath’s claim that he volunteered to reimburse the school for that trip before he left Ames. But take a look again at the first sentence in that quote:
Between the sloppy record keeping at ISU Flight Services and Leath’s endless lies, even when you’ve been staring at invoices and flight logs for months it can be hard to understand what you’re looking at. For example, in among the King Air 350 invoices for 2014 , on 07/03/14 [p. 51-52] — meaning the day before the 4th of July, only one year prior to the beginning of Leath’s “longest vacation [that he’d] taken in four and a half years” — Steven and Janet Leath took a single-day trip in the King Air 350 from Ames, Iowa to N. Wilkesboro, North Carolina, then back again to Ames. Like the infamous single-day, Cirrus SR22 round-trip from Ames to Jefferson, N.C., which took place on 03/12/16, it’s hard to imagine a business-use basis for that 07/03/14 trip, and yet there the trip is at a charged rate of $6,481.68.
(As to why I have not discussed that trip before, particularly relative to the 03/12/16 Cirrus trip, it’s because the flight logs tell us that the Cirrus was only on the ground for 37 minutes, making a business use impossible to fathom. For the King Air 350 trip on 07/03/14, however, we don’t know how long the plane was on the ground, making a business-use excuse at least more plausible. In fact, I’m confident that the good people at ISU’s Department of University Relations are preparing one as you read this.)
If we look ahead in the 2014 King Air invoices, however, we find something odd. On 07/14/14 — meaning exactly eleven days after the Leaths made their round trip from Ames to N. Wilkesoboro, which also exactly matches the end date for Leath’s “longest vacation” in “four and a half years” in 2015 — we find another invoice [p. 59-61] showing the King Air 350 again flying from Ames to N. Wilkesboro, N.C., only this time without the Leaths. Instead, the only passengers listed are Tom Hill and 1 redacted, and since we know the Leaths are not redacted in the King Air 350 invoices, we know that the redacted name is not one of the Leaths.
And yet, by some miracle of aeronautical prestidigitation, when the King Air 350 arrives at N. Wilkesboro on 07/14/14, who gets on the plane but ISU President Steven Leath. At that point the King Air makes the grueling flight from N. Wilkesboro to Greensboro, which would take an hour and a half by car at most, with Leath, Hill and 1 redacted. Then, later that same day, the King Air returns to N. Wilkesboro, and who gets on the plane there but Janet Leath — at which point all four passengers are flown back to Ames.
So how is that possible? How do Leath and his wife fly round trip from Ames to N. Wilkesboro on 07/03/14, then show up in N. Wilkesboro again, eleven days later, on 07/14/14? Well, months ago, when I originally looked through the King Air 350 invoices, I noticed that oddity, but I naively assumed that the Leaths — in a fit of conscience that they have admittedly failed to actually demonstrate — must have flown back to N.C. on a commercial carrier sometime between 07/03/14 and 07/14/14.
I now know, however, that I was wrong about that. The actual answer is that the Leaths did not fly back to Ames on 07/03/14, but instead remained in North Carolina for that entire eleven-day span — meaning the same exact span of dates in 2015 that Leath currently insists was his longest vacation in four and a half years. But it’s not just me saying that. Fortuitously, because the good people at ISU Flight Services had not yet started falsifying invoices to cover the Leaths’ tracks, on the 07/03/14 invoice we can actually see that the Leaths were not on the return flight, even though at first glance they appear to be listed as passengers.
Specifically, on page 51 of the 2014 invoices, the invoice for the 07/03/14 single-day round trip from Ames to N. Wilkesboro has two important and distinct notations. For the flight from Ames to N. Wilkesboro, after the rate charged per nautical mile, we find the words “PAX FLIGHT” — meaning with passengers. For the return flight on the same day, however, we find that the notation has been changed to “W/O PAX” — meaning without passengers.
So exactly one full year before Steven Leath spent eleven days in N.C. in July of 2015, for what he repeatedly and plaintively described to the reporters at Iowa State Daily as the “longest vacation” in his “four and a half years” at ISU, Leath blew $6,481.68 having the $3.5M King Air 350 fly him and his wife to N.C. for the same exact eleven day span between 07/03/14 and 07/14/14. (What does the Iowa Board of Regents’ vaunted internal audit have to say about those trips, and the circumstances surrounding them? It has exactly nothing to say about those trips.)
Relative to Leath’s ISD interview on 10/05/16, and particularly to his insistence that he had to fly Iowa State’s Cirrus SR22 to N.C. on 07/03/15 to meet with a “critically important prospect”, the fact that he did the same exact thing the year before has important implications. Most obviously, spending the exact same span of time in North Carolina in two successive years makes it extremely unlikely that there was any need to fly the Cirrus to N.C. in July of 2015. Yet even if we accept Leath’s explanation for that trip, that provides no compelling justification for the Leaths taking the King Air to N.C. in 2014, also on the eve of the 4th of July.
Was there another “critically important prospect” who, in 2014, also insisted on meeting Leath at his Carolina cabin the day before the 4th? Or is it more likely that in both years Leath simply wanted to wake up in his own bed on the 4th, with eleven days of nothing but clear schedule ahead? Because unless Leath is willing to state that for two years running he had to race to N.C. on July 3rd to meet some critical deadline, then on at least one of those trips, and more likely both of those trips, he and his wife should have been flying commercial as per ISU travel policy.
(If you’re wondering what Leath did on July 3rd in 2012 or 2013, we don’t know because the King Air 200 invoices have not been made available. As for 2016, there are no known Cirrus or King Air flights to N.C. between the beginning and middle of July in that year, perhaps because that’s when Leath’s crony land deal with Regents President Bruce Rastetter blew up in his face, along with the IT hires that Leath made without advertising those positions.)
In terms of justifying the 07/03/14 round trip from Ames to N. Wilkesboro on a business basis, if you really dig for information you will find the flight to N. Wilkesboro referenced in this document, which is buried in the Flight Services FAQ [#16]. Here is the full text of that mention:
Would you care to guess where North Carolina A&T State University is located? That’s right — NCAT is in Greensboro, N.C.. (How did you ever guess?)
As we now know, however, the Greensboro portion of that trip happened not on 07/03/14, as the quote above implies, but eleven days later, on 07/14/14. More importantly, that aspect of the trip involved an entirely separate series of flights from the 07/03/14 flight that the Leaths took to N.C., which is referenced in the above quote. The “ISU partner campus visit” at Greensboro on 07/14/14 could have been accomplished in one single-day round trip comprising two flights from Ames to Greensboro and back, with Leath, Hill and 1 redacted. Instead, over an eleven day span, the Leaths compelled the King Air 350 to make two trips from Ames to N.C., comprising six flights, because the plane also had to return to N. Wilkesboro to pick up Ms. Leath for the second trip back to Ames.
Now, I know the good people at ISU’s Department of University relations will say that Leath was doing all kinds of “critically important” donor outreach from 07/03/14 to 07/14/14, but here’s the problem. If you stare at the .pdf file that the above quote comes from, it will eventually occur to you that what’s missing isn’t the flight down from Ames on July 3rd, it’s the second flight down from Ames on July 14th, with Hill and 1 redacted aboard. Meaning no matter how you slice it, there is still, at minimum, $6,800 is down-and-back flights from Ames to N.C. missing from the record, and in just the right way so as to obscure the Leaths’ eleven-day stay in N.C in 2014.
Finally, because it’s clear that the good people at ISU Flight Services knew how to correctly use the “PAX FLIGHT” and “W/O PAX” designations in 2014, that makes it equally clear that the 03/15/16 King Air 350 invoice [p. 75] — which is designated as a “PAX FLIGHT” — was intentionally falsified to show the Leaths on that flight to North Carolina, when in fact the Leaths were already in N.C. and had been for three days. As to why that invoice was falsified, it was to cover up for the single-day, Cirrus round trip on 03/12/16, courtesy ISU staff pilot Joe Crandall, which has not only never been reimbursed by Leath, but for which Leath himself has never established a business-use justification. As to who falsified that invoice, or would have had a motive to falsify that invoice, or would have had the authority to order that invoice falsified, once again those would be excellent questions for law enforcement.
So many discrepancies. So much malfeasance. And such criminal intent.
Only a full investigation with subpoena power, followed by a trial where people are put under oath will reveal everything.
Leath learned well. North Carolina has had it’s share of scandals including flight scandals. Although this article doesn’t indicate it, former Gov Easley was sleazy in accepting free flights from the then NC BOR chair, but also landed his wife a nice job with ncsu.
https://www.carolinajournal.com/news-article/trail-of-ethical-lapses-donation-irregularities-emerges-at-easley-hearings/
and
http://www.wbtv.com/story/13554761/former-governor-easley-expected-to-pla
The NCSU ex-President, who resigned after ex-Gov Easily’s wife was exposed as an academic fraud at NCSU, was promoted by Leath to lead his Kannapolis Campus.
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/news/2011/09/13/former-nc-state-chancellor-james.html
Seems Leath has always been a bit shady, I expect.
I’ve gotten to the point where nothing surprises me. Flip over a rock, you find Rastetter. Flip over another rock, you find Harreld or Leath. Rip open the dry wall and crony cockroaches spill out like harvested wheat. Tear up the floorboards and the crony rats run for the shadows.
I’m still looking for the bottom to the sleaze, but now it’s mostly just out of curiosity. Any hope that there might be a functioning, self-regulating government is gone, replaced by the realization that everything devolves from a few power brokers that everyone fears or sucks up to, or both.
You could spend every minute of every day looking for a profile in courage in state government in Iowa and you would come up with nothing. The people who know better are lazy and posers, the people who are doing ill are hostile and protected, and nothing changes. Everybody gets paid, but nothing changes.
You know, if there’s really that much fear and desire to suck up all over the state, it does sort of leave you wondering why. My experience with totally corrupt places, where people behave that way, is that it’s what you get when actually there’s not much business going on except a few things, and those few things are mostly public payroll. Snouts in the trough. Because whatever business existed walked away a long time ago.
It does make me wonder how much non-state business is actually going on in Iowa. I mean I’ve been living in a blind spot for years: this place is, monumentally, public money. State and federal grants for the university, federal student loans, VA money, school-district money for the testing businesses, municipal services, school district, it’s all got to vastly outweigh private enterprise here. But I guess I’d assumed that all over the state, that really wasn’t the case.
If we’ve got Agriprocessors with straws into the ISU Foundation, though, then who knows where else they’re stuck into. That’s not really the kind of game people bother with when they’re busy making massive money on their own. I wonder what actual non-government-related private-industry receipts have looked like in Iowa over the last 15 years. What they look like now relative to 15 years ago.
As an aside, you know, we also pay out about $2B annually in IPERS these days. Entire state budget’s only $7B.
Govt has been huge to the economy, but likely always so…it’s not California with start-up tech everywhere.
I thought maybe agribusiness was going to be big. As you say though, it is tainted in Govt dollars too – as Rastetter knows well.
Health Care, Agribusiness, Education, transportation, all seem to be sucking out of the Govt trough.
It is said Govt spending is 28% of the GDP. Think Iowa is on par?
It would be very interesting to find out. Not least because government employees tend to have government pensions, which are rapidly eating the budget.
Well, it’s quite interesting. Here’s the BLS data for Iowa:
https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/iowa.htm#eag
– you can see that govt, ed, and healthcare provide about a third of the jobs in Iowa, also that frankly not many people work in ag. If you look at IED’s numbers, the biggest sector economically is finance & real estate; government comes third, and ed/healthcare are also pretty large. Ag makes only 6-7% of the money here.
http://www.iowaeconomicdevelopment.com/WhyIowa/WhyIowaEconomy
The thing is, you know that a lot of the non-government sectors are working from government bids and state/municipal bonds. The state budget itself is only about $7B, but you’d have to add to that the value of:
– bond revenues
– various federal monies
– federal student loans
– Medicare and VA payments
– (am I missing any?)
– sales to the federal government and other state governments
to see what, total, the tax dependence of Iowa’s $154B economy might actually be. That’d be interesting too.
On Tuesday of this past week the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents did what it does best — it went into closed session, this time to evaluate its two sitting and equally corrupt university presidents. While those clandestine meetings were taking place, I found myself wondering what criteria the corrupt board would use to evaluate the work of those two corrupt men, and all I could think was that there must be some quota of lies they are required to tell each semester, which then allows the board to objectively grade their performance. Tell too few lies and you get a warning. Tell the expected number of lies and you get an atta-boy, or maybe even a glory hallelujah. And of course if you tell more than the minimum number of lies, you earn the contractual bribe that the board euphemistically refers to as deferred compensation.
I have no doubt that the illegitimate and unqualified president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, and the embarrassingly self-indulgent and thoroughly discredited president of Iowa State University, Steven Leath, met their lying quotas and then-some last semester. Unfortunately, in our rankings-obsessed culture that does little to answer the most important question, which is which one of the two is the bigger liar?
In a literal sense the answer is that Leath is the bigger liar because Leath is both taller and weighs more than Harreld. Just as clearly, however, sheer bulk should not be the determining factor. (You can see a physical comparison of Leath and Harreld here.)
In the abstract — and provided you do not allow yourself to think about the number of lives being negatively affected by their concentrated corruption — judging whether Leath or Harreld is the bigger liar is morbidly interesting. To be sure, had I wrestled with that question prior to late-September of 2016, when Steven Leath’s hard landing was first reported in the press, leading to a veritable spewing of lies from Leath’s pouting lips, I would have said Harreld was the bigger liar by far. Now, however, with his late surge, Leath has clearly made the race competitive.
Because of the inherent illegitimacy of Harreld’s presidency, premised as it is on a sham search and his own abetting of the conspiracy that led to his fraudulent hire, it may seem as if Harreld has a built-in advantage as a liar, but the more I learned about Leath over the past few months the more I found myself wondering about his search as well. Although Rastetter had only been recently appointed to the Board of Regents at that time, Governor Terry Branstad followed that appointment by bulldozing the board’s sitting president and president pro tem out of their offices, allowing political cronies Craig Lang and Rastetter to assume those respective roles. While all of that was happening, the board’s 2011 search for a new president at ISU was also underway, and wouldn’t you know, but despite having both been appointed only months before, Rastetter and Katie Mulholland were the only two regents on that committee, just as they were two of the three regents on the corrupt 2015 UI committee that culminated in Harreld’s fraudulent appointment.
While there was no bombshell moment equivalent to the eleventh-hour disclosure of the spectacularly unqualified J. Bruce Harreld as one of the four finalists at UI, in the 2011 ISU search there was indeed some last-minute intrigue after the ISU search committee also delivered a slate of four finalists to the board:
Personal reasons? Like what? They didn’t want to have their kneecaps broken?
While I still do not know a great deal about presidential searches in higher education, at this juncture I have learned a few things over the past year and a half, and it strikes me that a sudden shrinking of the field by fifty percent would not be particularly hard to engineer. To understand why, note that one of the big reasons why candidates and boards often prefer closed searches — over and above the ease with which closed searches can be fixed — is that they protect candidates from being exposed while in their current positions. (This understandable reticence is often used by search firms and unscrupulous board members to imply that closed searches produce a better crop of candidates, but that has never been substantiated.)
For example, if, say, ISU President Steven Leath applied to be the new president at the University of North Carolina in 2015, and made multiple trips there in Iowa State’s airplanes — ostensibly to conduct ISU business, but primarily to gauge and raise support on his own time — the good people of Iowa might look askance at his desire to leave, particularly if he failed to get an interview and had to return to ISU as damaged goods. Instead, however, by keeping the application and interview process secret, Leath would not only be able to shop for a new job with impunity, he would be able to make Iowa State pay for that privilege.
As to presidential searches generally, and the 2011 Iowa State search in particular, how often does half a slate of finalists simply walk away at the last minute? Well, again, I’m no expert, but one of the things search committees put a lot of time and effort into, for obvious reasons, is making sure that each finalists will take the job if it is offered. Just as candidates don’t want to publicly lose out, search committees don’t want to having a winning candidate decline a position. As a result, there’s a great deal of vetting that goes into choosing finalists, precisely to avoid that unseemly situation — yet somehow half of the final field in the 2011 ISU search bowed out after that rigorous screening process.
While it would be wickedly melodramatic to imagine Bruce Rastetter threatening candidates with mafia-like motivations for dropping out of the 2011 search, that’s not Rastetter’s style as far as we know. What I can imagine Rastetter doing, however, is taking two of the four finalists aside and telling them, in strictest board confidence, out of a sense of deep-seated Machiavellian indecency, that they had no shot at winning the job even though they had been selected as finalists, thus giving them a motivation to save face and withdraw. He couldn’t do that with three of the four finalists, obviously, because that might attract serious scrutiny from the search committee, from the press, and perhaps even from the other three finalists, who could get together and compare notes, but as long as there were two candidates left it would still look as if some sort of meaningful merit-based choice was being made.
But who to leave standing to compete against board-favorite Leath? Well, setting aside questions of racism, ignorance, prejudice, bias and hatred that have often been raised in the context of Iowa’s largely-white population, if I simply spotted you the names “Steven Leath” and ”
Kumble Subbaswamy”, then told you they were vying for the presidency at Iowa State University, who would think would end up getting that job? Or better yet, if I showed you the listings for the names of both men from the ISU web page quoted above —
— and you discovered that you needed a program just to pronounce one of the candidate’s names, what would your gut tell you about which candidate might have the inside track for what we might euphemistically call ‘cultural’ reasons — if not ‘white heritage‘ reasons, as recently legitimized by Leath himself? (Unfortunately, we don’t know the names of the two candidates who withdrew, but based on the last few searches by the Board of Regents, it’s likely that they were male and Caucasian.
Consider also a key difference between Leath’s 2011 search and Harreld’s 2015 sham search. With Leath, he actually had a long history in academic administration as well as a Ph.D., while Harreld had neither. So in terms of clearing a path for Leath, all Rastetter had to do was make sure Leath was the likeliest qualified candidate still standing. With the preposterously unqualified Harreld, Rastetter had to engineer a fraudulent search just to sneak him through the committee, and at the same time he had to fix the final board vote in advance to take any uncertainty out of the equation. On the positive side — meaning for Rastetter — by fixing the 2015 search in advance, he was able to leave the other three finalists in place, using them, admittedly callously, as sacrificial window dressing for that sham hire.
In terms of judging whether Leath or Harreld is the biggest liar, then, to the possibility that Leath’s appointment was rigged by Rastetter we can also add Leath’s conduct as de facto head of the Iowa State Foundation, which included not only using $3.5M in Foundation money to buy two new airplanes, but more than $1M to buy the silence of the Foundation presidents that he fired along the way. So yes, even though Harreld is a grade-a liar and abetted his own fraudulent hire, it turns out that Leath is right there with him, as recently detailed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Despite such a strong recent showing by Leath, however, J. Bruce Harreld did not suddenly discover a conscience and stop lying. In fact, as we will see, Harreld has been his usual lying self, telling falsehoods large and small over the past month or two, including perpetuating grand lies that he has now been telling at Iowa for years, plural. Speaking of which, toward the end of last semester, on December 8th, the Daily Iowan published another in what has become a critically important series of interviews with Harreld. At that time, because we were in the midst of the riveting saga of Steven Leath’s incapacity to take responsibility for his own actions, and because I couldn’t help but think that Harreld granted that interview late in the semester so it would be buried by finals, and by the desire of everyone to head home for the holidays, I decided to save that prevarication-filled interview until the beginning of the spring term, which is now upon us. In the intervening weeks, of course, Harreld perpetrated even more lies, which we will also note.
The 12/08/16 J. Bruce Harreld Daily Iowan Interview
From the top….
The premise here — the conceit, on Harreld’s part — is that he’s an open book. You want to talk to the guy, he’s endlessly available. So go tell that to The Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, who happens to be that paper’s beat reporter for higher education.
Miller has been covering Harreld since his appointment in September of 2015, and doing a thorough job of it. In my view, she’s been overly fair given the number of people who have lied to her, but okay, I guess that goes with the territory. And yet, less than three months ago, when Miller published an extensive profile of Harreld on the anniversary of his first year in office, would you care to guess how Harreld responded to her request for an interview? That’s right — he blew her off:
This is the norm for Harreld. If you’re a business magazine you might get a few quotes, but Harreld can’t talk to the mainstream media, even though he’s supposed to be the University of Iowa’s main mouthpiece. The reason Harreld can’t make himself available to the media, of course, is that he wasn’t legitimately elected, which means he cannot answer questions that might be posed without exposing his own complicity in that fraud. Unfortunately, because his regular interviews with the Daily Iowan are mandated, Harreld does the best he can in that setting, meaning — like his equally corrupt contemporary at Iowa State — he simply lies to the students.
Continuing with the DI interview, and the lies:
I’m fairly confident that Vanessa Miller did not ring Harreld up at 9 o’clock at night, and yet she couldn’t get through to the man even after months of trying. As for the idea that the president of a major university ever gets time off, here’s the advice that ISU President Leath gave to Harreld on 07/30/15, while hosting Harreld for dinner at Leath’s home:
Exactly how many requests has Harreld had for immediate access at 9 p.m.? Almost none, if any, but that’s how Harreld’s weaselly mind works. Because Harreld is an instinctive, compulsive liar, his first response to the Daily Iowan reporters was not to remind them how he repeatedly blew off a reporter for one of the state’s largest papers — which would have communicated his message to hundreds of thousands of readers — but to position himself as a victim of callous individuals who should have had the courtesy to nag him about their petty issues earlier in the day.
Segueing to politics, Harreld then pontificated about the poverty in modern discourse:
After the abuses of power which led to Harreld’s fraudulent appointment were exposed in the press in 2015, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sanctioned the University of Iowa for flagrant violations of shared governance. While Harreld and his eager collaborators on the UI campus have tried to portray those violations as emanating wholly from the Iowa Board of Regents, the reality was that Iowa’s top administrator at the time — Vice President for Medical Affairs Jean Robillard — was a full agent of those abuses, while Harreld himself abetted that administrative hijacking. The AAUP sanction was and remains almost unprecedented given the stature of UI, yet despite the obvious negative implications for his own administrative agenda, and the morale-crushing embarrassment of that self-inflicted wound for the UI community, here is the entirety of Harreld’s commentary on the AAUP sanction, from the only interview that he gave at the time:
For the record, note that Harreld’s entire sputtering response — during what he undoubtedly assumed would be a safe interview with a business journal, which was indeed otherwise wholly devoted to his grand plans for the future — was 54 characters, 67 with spaces. The AAUP sanction is undoubtedly the single most momentous event in his tenure to-date, and will almost certainly remain the most important moment in his presidency, yet Harreld’s only substantive response was to intentionally conflate the AAUP’s collective bargaining arm with its longstanding role as a standard bearer in higher-education. Because of course when you’re J. Bruce Harreld there’s never a bad time to lie.
At that point in the DI interview Harreld reverted to one of his favorite topics — a feeble anecdote that he has repeatedly uttered to goad people into ignoring his illegitimacy:
From CBS2/FOX28’s Dora Miller, eleven months ago, on 02/23/16:
From Harreld’s previous Daily Iowan interview, four and a half months ago, on 09/07/16:
Harreld isn’t interesting in starting a dialogue, he’s interested in changing the dialogue from his own lack of credibility and competence to his board-dictated administrative agenda. In fact, Harreld is paralyzed by his complicity in the sham search that led to his fraudulent appointment, and will be as long as he is cashing taxpayer-funded checks that he does not deserve. And that’s not just me saying that, Harreld himself admitted to that paralysis when he could not sit down for an interview with Vanessa Miller for fear that she would rip his sorry lying hide to shreds.
As for Harreld’s instinctive tendency to lie in any situation, note also the way in which Harreld repeatedly changes the context of that anecdote over time. In February, Harreld appears to use the quote without attribution, and to apply it directly to the protests which took place prior to and during the only town hall he has ever held, which was the subject of that particular report. In September, however, Harreld not only reveals that the line wasn’t his, he notes that the protests referred to in the quote had nothing to do with the University of Iowa. Then, in the most recent DI interview in December, Harreld name-drops the New York Times for dramatic effect, but goes back to implying that the protests in question were ones he was subjected to on campus, when that is provably false by his own prior statements.
And yet all of that serves as mere prelude to the following Harreld whopper, from his 12/08/16 DI interview, which is astounding in both its obvious falsity and premeditation:
The first thing to note, which we will come back to shortly, is Harreld’s use of the phrase, “our community”. Harreld doesn’t specifically define what “our community” means, but it’s clear he believes that some individuals have a right to voice their opinion on UI matters, and others don’t. The second thing to note, which we will now rip to pieces, is Harreld’s claim that he held not one but two town halls last year. Because even if you know nothing about Harreld, you probably know that he promised to hold three town halls during each academic year, as still currently visible on this yet-to-be-scrubbed UI presidential web page:
As also noted on that page, in his first academic year in office Harreld held one — and only one — town hall:
So when Harreld casually dropped “and then the second one” in his reply to the DI, he either knew he was full-on lying to the reporters, or he full-on has a screw loose. Because there is literally no one on the face of the earth who would say that Harreld has held two town halls, and yet there Harreld was, in print, unabashedly making that claim. At which point Harreld outdid himself:
No, you’re not seeing things. While still responding to the first question from the DI, Harreld asserted that he had previously held three town halls, when the record is absolutely clear that he held only one town hall. Fortunately, in this instance Harreld grounded his lunacy in facts we can use to identify the gathering he’s talking about. Not only was it not a town hall, but the only reason it became politicized was because Harreld himself was a late-add, after refusing to discuss the issue of raising the campus minimum wage in any other forum:
As important as Harreld’s complicity was in politicizing that meeting, it’s even more important to note that by inviting himself at the last minute, Harreld bigfooted what would otherwise have been a quiet little campus gathering. Note also that because Harreld blew off all attempts to contact him about the issue of the minimum wage on campus, doing so once again puts the lie to the idea that Harreld is always available and eager to talk. Instead of taking care of business like a man, he turned what should have been a positive meeting for others into a contentious meeting in which he himself played the victim.
I am not joking when I say I do not know what to make of Harreld’s “third town hall” lie, but it is a lie. In no sense did Harreld hold two, let alone three, town halls, and he knows that. As clearly reported in the press, Harreld held one, and only one, town hall, in the 2015-2016 academic year. And yet, for that very reason, it’s hard not to conclude that Harreld must have bats in his belfry for those blatantly false statements to even come out of his mouth.
For the 2016-2017 academic year, Harreld isn’t pretending that he will hold any town halls, and yet as his mention of “our community” makes clear, he is blaming his backtracking on outside agitators and crazy people — not on his own incapacity to lead. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on 10/18/16 — meaning three months ago:
In his tenure so far, Harreld has held one and only one town hall. In the DI interview that he gave less than two months ago, Harreld claimed three town halls. Whether Harreld is a stone-cold liar or off his rocker, this is the man who is in charge of the billion-dollar University of Iowa, with its thousands of staff and faculty, and tens of thousands of students. As Vanessa Miller herself noted in her reporting, as an economic power the University of Iowa dwarfs the vast majority of cities and counties in the state, and yet the man at the helm can’t accurately recount the number of times he has held a town hall, which is once.
So what about the idea that people outside the UI community are causing all of Harreld’s communication problems? That thesis actually fits — albeit inanely — with Harreld blowing off Miller and the Gazette, because they are not part of the UI community. Indeed, in continuing his reply to the DI, Harreld seemed to embrace a very narrow definition of that term:
Here Harreld emphasizes all of his hard work on the UI campus, so you might assume it would be difficult if not impossible to get him to waste time with off-campus concerns, but you would be completely wrong. For example, more than a month before Harreld officially took office, he agreed to be one of the tri-chairs of a local economic development group. And then there was that time, last summer, when Harreld gave a free, five-hour business seminar to the leaders of Regents President Bruce Rastetter’s private company, in Alden, Iowa. On that occasion, Harreld actually traveled to Rastetter’s private place of business, and yet none of that off-campus advocacy is even remotely rare:
The truth is that Harreld is constantly talking to outside groups, including groups whose only interest is making money for themselves. Again, because UI is a massive economic engine in Iowa City, in Johnson County, and even in Iowa, Harreld has an obligation to stay connected to a great many constituencies beyond the physical border of the UI campus. Unfortunately, because Harreld can’t be sure that the press will give him a free pass like all of those business constituencies, he can’t talk to a higher-ed reporter like Vanessa Miller on the record, despite regularly speaking to business groups, business journals and business executives.
The question of whether Harreld is an unrepentant liar or missing a few marbles is further complicated by moments of lucidity. For example, in response to the next question from the DI reporters — about Buttercup Kaufmann’s grandstanding legislation, which was recently withdrawn — Harreld’s response is clear-headed and comprehensive. That in turn suggests that he’s not nuts, and that when he’s lying he knows he’s lying, which is of course even worse. Speaking of which….
As noted in the previous quote about the AAUP sanction, Harreld’s immediate response to the only question that any member of the press was able to ask him after the sanction was announced was to demonize the organization as a union. In reality Harreld knows — he has been told, repeatedly and explicitly — that the AAUP has multiple functions, and that the sanction against UI had nothing to do with the AAUP’s collective bargaining arm. And yet, because Harreld is at heart a miserable human being, any time the AAUP sanction comes up, he immediately mentions the AAUP’s union activities, without also mentioning the AAUP’s other functions.
There are two reasons why Harreld has persistently distorted the AAUP sanction to the press and the public. First, and most obviously, Harreld does not want to talk about how he, UI administrator Jean Robillard, and Regents President Bruce Rastetter, all conspired to steal the job he now holds by ruthlessly betraying shared governance at the University of Iowa. Second, doing so fits with the longer-term goal — as echoed in Governor Branstad’s recent commentary about radically changing the state’s collective bargaining laws — of driving down personnel costs by any means available. (Given that Harreld was the only candidate to ever talk with Branstad during the 2015 search, in a telephone call orchestrated by his co-conspirator, Regents President Bruce Rastetter, such linkage is hardly speculative.)
As a former business executive at a number of large corporations, it is probably fair to assume that Harreld has had his share of experience with unions, and it may even be that union busting was one of the reasons he was fraudulently hired at UI. For the record, the article the DI reporters asked about, and that Harreld was commenting about, was this one. You can also see a slightly longer version of the same piece here, which described the authors as follows:
So when Harreld said, “I know both the authors,” he knew them because they were both faculty at the University of Iowa. And yet, although he talked in McCarthyesque terms about “one of the authors” being “really actively involved in the local union here,” Harreld also knew — but of course did not say — that the AAUP has no collective bargaining presence at the University of Iowa. In fact, Harreld has actually acknowledged that in the past, though as ever he still persisted in trying to blur the lines of distinction. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 08/22/16:
Six months later, then, during his DI interview in early December, why is Harreld still telling the same dissembling lie? Has he forgotten that there is no AAUP “local union here”, or is he just lying again — perhaps because a core component of his job is preventing unionization, or breaking down union activities on campus in line with the political philosophy of employers and minders? Continuing, from the DI interview:
Now, as regular readers know there’s a lot to unpack here — all of it ferociously mendacious — but as Harreld likes to say, let’s get the facts right. The AAUP’s rules do not allow for the sanctioning of governing boards, only the sanctioning of colleges and universities. Harreld’s false premise — which he has unfortunately coerced or seduced others on campus into parroting, to the detriment of their personal and professional reputations — is that the University of Iowa was blameless in the sham search that led to his hire. Leaving aside the fact that Harreld’s own first act as president-elect was to tell a lie to cover for the conspiracy that put him in office, the idea that UI was solely victimized by the board is also a lie, and Harreld knows it.
For Part 2 of Catching Up on the Last Six Weeks of J. Bruce Harreld’s Lies, With Bonus Steven Leath, click here.
This is Part 2 of Catching Up on the Last Six Weeks of J. Bruce Harreld’s Lies, With Bonus Steven Leath. For Part 1, click here.
The sanctioning of the University of Iowa by the AAUP was entirely appropriate because arch UI traitor Jean Robillard — who was interim president at the time of the vote, and also the chair of the search committee — was central to the betrayal of shared governance. By rights both the board and UI should have been sanctioned, but the fact that there was no bylaw to allow sanctioning of the board does not mean UI was innocent. And yet, persistently, Harreld insists on telling that lie.
So of course in the DI interview Harreld just kept lying:
If you remember nothing else about Harreld, about this particular DI interview, or about this post, remember this. J. Bruce Harreld participated in the hijacking of the leadership of a billion-dollar research university. He knew what was happening, and he helped cover it up as soon as he got the job. This is a stone-cold liar telling a stone-cold lie in order to avoid taking accountability for his illegitimacy as president of the University of Iowa.
Yes, there are members of the Board of Regents who were complicit as well, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that if J. Bruce Harreld had any personal integrity, and if he really did care about relieving UI of the AAUP sanction, he would resign and allow a new search to be conducting according to professional norms. But Harreld is not a selfless man and he is not an honorable man. He’s a craven, ego-driven liar, and he’s not going to give up being president at Iowa simply because he does not deserve and did not earn that job on the merits.
As for Harreld portraying someone from the AAUP as baffled or indecisive, even if we momentarily allow that Harreld’s characterization is correct, all you have to do is put yourself in the AAUP’s position. If you’re that AAUP rep, you know the person you’re talking to is dirty — a liar, a co-conspirator — and you know they are never going to take personal responsibility for their own actions. Indeed, you know that the person you’re talking to has done everything possible to obscure the complicity of other administrators at the school, so what are you supposed to say? The one act that would resolve the entire issue is the one act Harreld won’t commit, because it would mean stepping down and acknowledging that his presidency was a sham. What do you say to someone who is willing to perpetrate and perpetuate such monstrous lies, including victim-blaming the very people he abused?
Having repeatedly made the case to the DI reporters that the AAUP was duplicitous and incompetent, Harreld then pivoted to make the case that the AAUP sanction that he’d been lying about for multiple paragraphs was also utterly inconsequential:
Along with all of the reasons why prospective faculty might prefer to teach elsewhere, the AAUP sanction is a red flag. It means the people running UI, and by extension the Iowa Board of Regents, can’t be trusted. And you know what? They can’t be trusted. Yes, you may be able to cut a beneficial deal for yourself, and if you’ve got enough juice you’ll be able to build in contractual protections, but when you are sitting across the table from J. Bruce Harreld you are sitting across the table from a snake, in the middle of the Midwest, at a school that is rapidly being corrupted by the Board of Regents that Harreld owes his allegiance to. Meaning if you have any other job offers on the table, you are taking those other offers, and Harreld knows it.
Having made clear that the AAUP sanction meant nothing, Harreld then explained in detail all of the things that were being done to relieve that meaningless burden:
Again, note the lies of omission and commission. If Harreld wants to do whatever he can to help, then he should resign today, because he is the problem. As for the faculty senate leaders, he destroyed their reputations by enlisting them to peddle the lie that UI was innocent in Harreld’s sham hire, when preeminent administrator Jean Robillard’s treachery was central to the fraud. (There is literally nothing about what is happening with the AAUP that does not make sense to Harreld, because he himself participated in multiple meetings with his co-conspirators, which no other candidate was offered.)
Having defended his indefensible conduct with every lie he could think of — up to and including mutually exclusive rationales — Harreld then went on a rant about another point that had been raised in the same op-ed:
As to Harreld’s claim that the requirement for academic performance was increased in the most recent athletic department contracts, I don’t know about any of the other deals, but that’s not the case with head football coach Kirk Ferentz’s new contract:
Because Harreld is Harreld, his claim that “we’ve increased in those new contacts the requirements of academic performance of our sports teams” was yet another lie to the Daily Iowan. Maybe Harreld thought no one would check, maybe he thought no one would notice the difference between “graduation rate” and “graduation success rate”, but unfortunately someone did, once again giving us a clear view of Harreld’s unrelenting dishonesty.
As for Harreld’s characterization of that part of the Rhodes/Cox op-ed, here is what they actually said:
Regarding Harreld’s assertion that he is not under the thumb of the athletics department, here are the facts. Only two months into the job in late 2015, Harreld signed AD Gary Barta to a massive new contract, even though Barta was, at the time, the subject of a federal gender-discrimination investigation and a related gender-discrimination lawsuit. Harreld was so proud of this accomplishment that he kept the deal secret until it was outed by the press. Harreld later pledged his devotion to AD Barta in a televised interview, even though the number of federal investigations and lawsuits related to gender discrimination had doubled. In doing so, Harreld sold out every woman on the UI campus, and committed himself to the very bro culture that led to the gender discrimination cases in the first place. (Harreld also dusted off — and took credit for — an old plan to take money from athletics and pass it to academics, which went nowhere. More on that in a moment.)
More recently, Harreld followed all of that up by seizing the opportunity to finally get Iowa out from under the poison-pill contract of head football coach Kirk Ferentz, by turning around and signing Ferentz to a brand new poison-pill contract for the next decade. But that probably won’t be an issue, because Ferentz just named his own son offensive coordinator, and may be grooming him to take over as head coach, despite UI policy prohibitions regarding nepotism. The athletics department, however, has assured everyone that there won’t be any problems, because even though the OC works for the HC, on the org chart Ferentz’s son reports to the AD, who is currently facing two federal investigation for gender discrimination and two civil gender-discrimination lawsuits. So no, in no sense is Harreld under the thumb of the athletic department, despite all of the cleat marks on his face.
Returning to the DI interview, Harreld segued from riding roughshod over the jocks to talking about administrative reforms and new programs, the former being a protracted con and the latter being things he had little if anything to do with — which also included stuff he took credit for in the last DI interview, even if he had nothing to do with any of that. Harreld then talked about his commitment to multi-year tuition planning, so kids and their families won’t be surprised the next time he uses a last-minute, $1.7M funding shortfall as a pretext to strip $24M from student pockets. (That windfall included $11M+ for a presidential slush fund.)
Unfortunately, only two months after that DI interview, Governor Branstad announced the rolling back of regent allocations by $25M+, marking the largest targeted cuts in his entire proposed budget. Seizing the opportunity, of course, Harreld immediately trotted out Provost P. Barry Butler to warn that cuts were coming:
Actually, what Harreld has been very good at is lying and ripping people off, including students and their families. Only six months ago Harreld used a pretext to pad UI’s budget by $24M, which would be more than enough to prevent any cuts over the next two years. Because Harreld is a liar, however, he’s now going to use the state’s budget shortfall as yet another pretext to keep that $24M, while also making unnecessary if not punitive cuts To that duplicity you can add the opportunity Harreld now has to use the governor’s rollbacks to cut pay to grad students, or as leverage during ongoing labor negotiations. And of course there may now be another round of tuition increases over and above the percentage already agreed to, because why waste a pretext when you can take in tens of millions of dollars of somebody else’s cash? (The regents are already talking about whittling down the governor’s proposed cuts “significantly“, but you can bet Harreld will not be whittling down any cuts to match.)
So what about Harreld’s advocacy for UI with the governor and legislature? Well, it would be non-existent, except immediately after his appointment, Regents President Rastetter rigged a charade in which UI funding was initially held at zero, so Harreld could then boldly make that stalled request after he was hired. (Which is also pretty much all you need to know about who’s really in charge.) This past summer, Harreld said nothing in opposition to the funding shortfall that he used as a pretext to strip tens of millions of dollars from students and their families, only promising to do so after tuition hikes were approved:
Well, the next legislative session is underway, and until only a few days ago Harreld had once again said nothing to the governor or the legislature, except that he was preparing for cuts that he already has the money to prevent. Continuing with the DI interview, and still in response to the same question, Harreld busted out the vision thing, which apparently includes wrecking Iowa’s vaunted writing programs by doing to them what he did to Boston Chicken on its way to bankruptcy — diversifying the menu to the point of meaninglessness. Only after filling paragraph after paragraph with what reads more like a stump speech than a coherent answer to the DI’s question, did Harreld conclude his reply with yet another whopper:
As detailed in multiple prior posts, nobody agreed to Harreld’s “four filters” or “four values” — or, more recently, his “four principles”. Harreld imposed those criteria on the school, and if you go back through the record you find only one “filter”, “value” or “principle”, and that is chasing the school’s college rank. Literally, step by step, you can watch Harreld fudge the language until that goal is obscured, but it’s still in force, and Harreld alone made that idiotic pursuit a structural part of the entire budget process.
The DI interview continued, first with a question about the athletic department blowing $95M on sprucing up the north end zone of Kinnick stadium, then followed up with a question about Harreld’s plan to take money from athletics and give it to the academic side of the ledger:
Harreld’s leadership style is to take credit for other people’s ideas. He did it with Sally Mason’s six-point plan to combat campus sexual assault, he did it with former regent president Michael Gartner’s plan to take money from athletics, and he did it by taking sole credit for co-authored works on his resume, which got him censured by the faculty even before he took office. So if Harreld was suddenly being humble about getting money from athletics after touting that idea through multiple DI interviews, that means there’s no glory down that road, and he’s going to be lucky to get a set of steak knives for his trouble. (Or, athletics will give Harreld money in a highly publicized gesture, which Harreld will kick back under the table.)
And yet, even after stating that he was going to let the athletic department speak to that issue, Harreld went on for another 350 words about how humble he was before the DI reporters could ask their last question:
Here is the first paragraph of Harreld’s reply:
That’s the black-tie description of the new Children’s Hospital. For context, here’s the smoke-filled-room version of the same building. The planning for the Children’s Hospital goes back a decade or more. The actual construction is now several months into its fifth year. The original budget was $292M. In early September of 2015 the budget was revised upward $70M, to $360M. (Even though construction is still ongoing, there has been no update to the budget for fifteen months.) The naming rights to the new hospital — conservatively valued at between $15M and $20M — were simply given to Jerre Stead by the Iowa Board of Regents, purportedly for prior donations. Jerre Stead is not only an old friend of J. Bruce Harreld’s, and was on the 2015 UI search committee, but Stead was one of the co-conspirators in Harreld’s fraudulent hire. And then of course there’s the advertising campaign….
Undeniably, the new Children’s Hospital was a huge undertaking. Toward the end of last fall, as they were closing in on a deadline they had thrown out far in advance, it did not look like they were going to make it. And yet, as you probably know, there is nothing even remotely unique about such delays in projects of that size and scope.
Because J. Bruce Harreld is a business genius, however — because he single-handedly saved IBM from certain reorganizational bankruptcy — where you or I might say that the project simply ran into unforeseen delays, Harreld’s keen executive acumen allowed him to pinpoint the specific reason why the hospital’s grand opening was delayed not by days or even weeks, but entire months:
Now, I don’t know what you make of Harreld’s explanation for the delay in the opening of the new Children’s Hospital, but I have a number of concerns. First, what does Harreld mean by “out of state workers”, and second, what does he mean by “slow”? (As to what Harreld meant by “they didn’t have any students”, I think he meant there were no students working on the project, but that’s a guess.)
Before we answer those questions, however, note that Harreld really is proposing that the grand opening for the new UIHC Children’s Hospital was delayed for months because of a “number of out-of-state workers who were a little slow to get back into town”. The grand opening was not delayed because the planning was off, or because anybody doing a white collar job dropped the ball, or because of technical snafus, or because of the blown budget — which was already a whopping $68M above original projections. None of those factors screwed up the grand opening for J. Bruce and his Colorado bro-pal Jerre Stead. The real problem, the only problem, was “out-of-state workers who were a little slow to get back into town.”
Okay, fair enough. Harreld is wired into that project at the highest levels, so if he says that’s why the grand opening of the new Children’s Hospital was delayed, that must be why it was delayed. Still, what does Harreld mean by “out-of-state workers”? He could have said a certain trade feel behind, or a certain material was in short supply, but that’s not what he said. What he said is that “out-of-state workers” screwed the project up because they were “slow to get back into town”.
Okay, so what does “slow” mean in that context? It certainly doesn’t sound like they were eager to get back to work, does it? Were they lazy, those “out-of-state workers”? Were they ungrateful somehow? Were they taking advantage of the University of Iowa, maybe? Some sort of work slow-down, or maybe even a dirty union trick?
Well, we don’t know, because J. Bruce Harreld didn’t elaborate. Instead, he finished the interview by reminding DI readers that he was Johnny Bruce on the spot, recognizing and then resolving a problem with the scheduling of the grand opening of the new children’s hospital. In fact, Harreld’s comments read very much like how — in an earlier DI interview — he moved the new UI Museum of Art from one proposed site to a brand new site because he intuitively understood, based on decades of executive experience in the private sector, that it was so much better. Oh, sure, the new site turned out to be the second of two proposed sites that his predecessor, former UI president Sally Mason identified years before, and Harreld left that out in his telling, but still – according to him he saved the day, just as he saved the day by pushing back the grand opening of the UIHC Children’s Hospital. (Which you know is going to happen on schedule, because a savvy, visionary business executive like Harreld wouldn’t be dumb enough to commit to a deadline he couldn’t make.)
Winter Break
Following publication of the Daily Iowan interview in early December, finals came and went, then everyone fled for the holidays, whether down the block, across the country or around the world. In the intervening month between then and now, however, news about UI continued to find its way into the press. For example, only a week or so after Harreld’s interview was published, the Press-Citizen’s Stephen Gruber-Miller published an interesting story, on 12/16/16, about construction workers on the new UIHC Children’s Hospital who were cheated out of pay:
The woman profiled in the story, and four of her friends who also worked on the project, were from Puerto Rico. While that’s obviously quite a distance, if you’re trying to meet an important deadline I can see why you might reach out to workers anywhere you could find them. If you didn’t do that, and you blew your deadline, everyone would wonder why you didn’t try harder, while if you did do that and still blew your deadline, you could just blame those last-minute additions to your crew for failing you, instead of taking responsibility for the missed opening yourself. Granted, it would look even worse if it turned out you were also cheating those workers out of pay, but because they were out-of-state and a long way from home, you probably wouldn’t take a lot of heat even if you got caught.
Following a lull in the news around the new year, the big story was Governor Branstad’s proposal to bleed the regents dry, with all of the implications discussed above. On 01/10/17, Branstad formally proposed his last budget before he becomes the out-of-state ambassador to China. Two days later, on 01/12/17, J. Bruce Harreld shoved UI Provost P. Barry Butler out the door with a warning to the UI community, even though Harreld was sitting on $24m in tuition hikes from six months earlier:
On that same date — 01/12/17 — a state legislator introduced a bill to ban tenure from Iowa’s regent schools. Wasting no time, Regents President Rastetter came out in strong opposition to the bill. Taking considerably more time — as in the better part of an entire week, until after the bill was declared all but dead — Harreld finally spoke out against the legislation on 12/18/17:
It is of course laughable for Harreld to talk about “significant responsibilities and obligations to the truth” in any context, given that he himself is a fraud and inveterate liar, but note that Harreld does not actually say he is obligated to tell the truth. Rather, Harreld’s point is that tenure obligates faculty to tell the truth, while administrators are free to lie in service of any goal, including subverting the entire bureaucracy at the University of Iowa to idiotic pursuits like gaming the school’s college rank. (It should also be noted that this statement now precludes Harreld or anyone else from exercising the tenure provision in Harreld’s contract.)
One day later, on 01/19/17, Harreld himself personally rallied the UI community to the cause of the proposed budget cutbacks, through another ghost-written press release. True to form, Harreld omitted any reference to the $24M he is sitting on from the tuition hikes passed last summer, which would allow him to weather not only any cutbacks this year, but next year as well. Instead, Harreld trumped that lie of omission with yet another lie of commission about Iowa’s “four principles”, which collectively devolve only to the pursuit of gaming Iowa’s college rank:
This is who J. Bruce Harreld is — a consistent, persistent, unrepentant liar, who will do or say anything to get what he wants, or what he’s told he wants. And the truth is he doesn’t even believe that’s wrong, because he belongs to that exulted and exulting entrepreneurial caste who believe that anything that isn’t against the law is okay, and lying isn’t against the law unless you’re under oath. So while faculty may be obligated to tell the truth as a condition of tenure, and students may be obligated to tell the truth as a condition of enrollment, and staff may be obligated to tell the truth as a condition of employment, J. Bruce Harreld, the provably illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, is free to lie his ass of every day of the week.
All of which now brings us back to the question at hand, which is whether the dubiously appointed president of Iowa State, Steven Leath, or the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, is the bigger liar. Unfortunately, as much as it pains me, and despite everything you just read, I think the answer is that it’s a tie. And yes, that’s as dissatisfying to me as I’m sure it is to you.
Fortunately, we can resolve this disagreeable outcome by turning to a time-honored tradition in sports such as boxing, wrestling and MMA. While the volume and magnitude of the lies that Leath and Harreld have told are essentially equivalent, if we do take the relative sizes of the two men into account, we have our answer. Pound for pound, J. Bruce Harreld is the champion presidential liar currently employed by the thoroughly corrupt Iowa Board of Regents. From his dogged determination to lie about the “four principles” that he himself foisted on the school, to his compulsion to lie about the most trivial details, despite having been on the job less than fifteen months, Harreld has shown every indication that he could end up as one of the all-time great liars in the history of higher education.
Despite the ferocious tear that Leath has been on lately, I just don’t think he can sustain that level of mendacity. Harreld, on the other hand, has not only shown no sign of slowing down, but by blaming the delay of the opening of the UIHC Children’s Hospital on “out-of state workers who were slow to get back into town”, he not only told another whopper, he did so perfectly in keeping with the nationalist/nativist spirit that is currently the literal rage. Which, when you think about it, is pretty slick for a man who is not only quite often “slow to get back to town” himself, but who is also an “out-of-state worker“.
Except.
Here’s a guy who has money of his own and is old enough to retire, and here he is doing this thing in a state that was supposed to be a big, big winner under you know who. And instead, you know who is doing as he always does, and shafting the help. Like Rastetter and anyone else in ag who was dumb enough to break a sweat working to elect him.
So we’re looking now at a state that might not be doing so hot the next several years, and that’s not really a place a turnaround king wants to stay. I mean it doesn’t matter how many limbs you hack off your state university if your state’s going broke: you’re not turning anything around. So I dont know that he’ll actually stick around all that much longer.
Of all the variables that went into Harreld taking the Iowa gig, I rank ego at the top by far. Even if he was selling off multi-million dollar homes left and right because his monthly nut was too big, he just did not need the money that came with the job. (And that includes any money he’s getting paid through the back door, via the UI Foundation.)
Instead, I think going from big shot at IBM to hanger-on at Harvard Business School did some serious identity damage, and he wanted to be back in the game, calling the shots, saving the world with his punctuated proactive platitudes.
As for how long he’ll last, here’s what I said in back on 02/05/16 :
Thirteen months would be March of this year, so throw in two more months and that brings him to the end of his second academic cycle. And what will he have to show for it? Greaterness? More like craterness.
Because of the arrogance of Rastetter, Robillard, Harreld and others, it never occurred to them that there would be a price to pay for being liars and cheats. If you would have told them that the AAUP would sanction a school like Iowa, they probably would have laughed in your face, but it happened. They were held accountable for the abuses of power that they committed.
As for Harreld’s grand plans to boost Iowa’s rankings, to hire “world-class” faculty, and on and on, how’s that going? At the exact moment when the U.S. economy seems to have thrown off the last vestiges of the Great Recession (minus all of those people who will never have jobs again), Branstad creates a fiscal crater where there needn’t be one by giving tax breaks to corporations that don’t need them.
There’s no chance that Harreld will do the right thing and pay for the cuts out of his own slush fund, but I’m betting the people he thought he could push around during the UI budgeting process know he’s sitting on all that cash. Whatever cred he thought he would build behind the scenes, by cutting deals, just went out the window, because now he’s going to act just like any other egocentric constituent in protecting his own loot.
Finally, what are the odds that Trump fanboy Bruce Rastetter, Pence hunting buddy Steven Leath, or carpetbagging dilettante J. Bruce Harreld, are going to stand up to closeted fundamentalist Betsy DeVos when she rings them up and tells them what they’re going to do for their federal funding? And of course the answer is that those courageous leaders will sell anyone out on any campus in order to keep that money. (And then funding will probably be cut anyway.)
Harreld said it himself. He’s going to be 70 by the time his contract expires. Does he really want to spend the next three and a half years bailing water on a boat shot full of holes (metaphorically), including the gaping hole that he has blasted himself? I don’t think so. He likes his money too much, and he likes himself too much.
On 07/14/15, Iowa State President Steven Leath piloted the university’s single-engine Cirrus SR22 into a “hard landing” at the Bloomington, IL airport, knocking that plane out of service for several months. In the weeks and months following that accident, Leath made multiple trips to Rochester, MN, at university expense, in the school’s twin-engine King Air 350, which is always flown by two pilots not named Leath. As you may or may not know, the single biggest draw to the lovely city of Rochester is the world-renowned Mayo Clinic, which provides care to patients from around the world. Despite the temporal linkage between Leath’s “hard landing” and his sudden spate of visits to Rochester, however, Leath and his media staff have consistently stated that there were no physical injuries to Leath or his wife in the Cirrus accident, and that his trips to Rochester had nothing to do with seeking medical treatment for that accident, even as all of those trips did include personal medical appointments for Leath.
Given the amount of information publicly available from the Iowa State Flight Services FAQ, and the amount of information disclosed in the Board of Regents’ internal audit, you would think it would be fairly easy to confirm basic facts about Leath’s trips to Rochester, but you would be wrong. While plenty of information has been put in play, even at this late date the context of those trips keeps changing, and new information keeps leaking out even though the audit was released six weeks ago.
While Leath and/or his media team have belatedly acknowledged that all of Leath’s university-funded trips to Rochester did include medical appointments, they claim that on some of those trips Leath also purportedly engaged in donor outreach — meaning those particular trips satisfied the mixed-use provisions of Iowa State’s travel policy. In those mixed-use instances Leath would have been entitled — however absurdly — to have Iowa State pick up the tab for his travel to and from his doctor’s visits, because he also ostensibly conducted some undocumented, unsubstantiated ISU business. Note, however, that even substantiating a mixed-use basis for a given trip does not necessarily mean Leath was justified in using ISU Flight Services to facilitate those trips — an issue we will return to shortly.
Leath has also acknowledged, however, that several of his trips to Rochester did not involve donor outreach or any other business justification, meaning they were purely for personal medical appointments. Leath being Leath, however, he still maintains that using Iowa State’s $3.5M aircraft to seek personal medical care was business related — and thus not in violation of university travel policy or Iowa Code Section 721.2.5 — because after those personal appointments Leath had to race back to campus for reasons that have also never been documented or substantiated. (For more on the absurdity of Leath’s business-use claim for those trips, see this post.)
Though we are now a month and a half past the release of the board’s internal audit, which presumed to be the last word on Leath’s travel at state expense, in a moment of cosmic convergence two stories appeared a week ago today — on Thursday, 01/26/17 — updating and advancing the narrative of Leath’s trips to Rochester. The first was a detailed post by DesMoinesDem at BleedingHeartland, which concerned foot dragging and obfuscation by Iowa State media personnel about which of the Rochester trips Leath had or had not reimbursed. In that post, DesMoinesDem showed that Megan Landolt, the assistant to communications for Iowa State President Steven Leath, had done everything possible to avoid answering clear, direct, unambiguous questions about which flights Leath had or had not reimbursed the school for, while also perpetuating erroneous information about when those reimbursed flights took place.
Shortly after DesMoinesDem’s post went live, however, Landolt sent an email not only to DesMoinesDem but to other reporters as well, radically altering the Rochester narrative, and in the process also correcting erroneous information that had been previously communicated to the press on multiple occasions. We know this because the AP’s Ryan Foley published the second related story that same day, which included answers to the questions that DesMoinesDem had been asking for weeks:
Now, if you haven’t been following the crony carnage at the Iowa Board of Regents, and in particular the administrative larceny known as ‘planegate’ at Iowa State, it would be hard to overstate how radical this change by Landolt was, particularly after DesMoinesDem and others had been asking questions about those Rochester flights for months. Suddenly shifting Leath’s Rochester trips that were purely for personal use from July of 2015 to October of 2015 and March of 2016 was not simply unexpected but unexplained. (In the hours following the release of that new information, DesMoinesDem updated her original post on the subject twice, noting Foley’s report and adding still-unanswered questions by Iowa State.)
As an outside observer I obviously don’t know why Iowa State allowed DesMoinesDem to work under a false assumption for weeks, only to then broadly release the answers to that reporter’s specific questions hours after she posted on that very subject. Still, that does strike me as exactly the kind of thing a corrupt media shop might do to undermine a particular reporter as a reliable source. And now that I think about it, this is not the first time that Iowa State has tried to smear or discredit a reporter that they perceive as “difficult”, so I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised.
Having said all that, I do have some sympathy for those individuals at Iowa State who are obligated — despite personal inclinations to the contrary — to keep coming up with new ways to cover President Steven Leath’s sorry lying ass. Like the fraudulently appointed J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa, Leath’s mendacity and toxicity have corrupted the entire administrative apparatus at that venerable university, reducing career professionals to co-conspirators simply by virtue of their job descriptions. And the worst of it is that protecting Leath is impossible because of the very nature of his entitled, arrogant, reflexive abuse of Iowa State Flight Services. Case in point, the new information that Iowa State released last Thursday proves, beyond any doubt, that on at least one occasion Steven Leath not only violated university travel policy, but also violated state law in Section 721.2.5 of the Iowa Code.
Leath’s Trips to Rochester, MN at ISU’s Expense
Reflecting the slipshod nature of Iowa State’s media relations, even Foley’s AP article on Thursday had to be updated several hours later, because ISU still did not have its story straight. Despite a full six weeks since the release of the internal audit, Landolt initially failed to clearly articulate which Rochester trips did or did not involve personal medical appointments for Leath, when in fact all of them did. Add in the flip-flop as to which Rochester trips Leath had reimbursed the school for, as also detailed in DesMoinesDem’s updated post, and it’s clear that Iowa State is either incompetent in the extreme or still doing everything possible to avoid telling the truth.
With regard to Leath’s trips to Rochester, it is important to note that the way Iowa State bills for flight time for the King Air 350 is different from how passengers usually pay for travel. Normally, when booking a trip on a commercial carrier you pay each time you get on a plane, but only for your seat. At ISU Flight Services, any time the King Air 350 flies — excluding training and maintenance ferries — that flight time is billed at a per-mile rate regardless of the number of passengers on board, usually to one or more administrative departments. (The fact that King Air invoices show a per-passenger cost relates not to the amount paid by those passengers, but the amount to be billed to the department to which each particular passenger belongs.)
While the ability to fly nine passengers in the King Air 350 at the same cost as a single passenger may seem to confer considerable savings on flights/trips involving a full manifest, even a full flight may still cost more per-person than flying commercial. In practice, however, the King Air 350 is rarely flown with a full manifest, and quite often flies with only one or two individuals on board. (Of the 94 King Air invoices that Leath appeared on between 04/14 and 08/16, on 67 of those invoices Leath is accompanied by two or fewer passengers.)
Note also that those billing practices apply to King Air flights/trips which are directed by a given department, but which involve no actual passengers. For example, if Steven Leath ordered the King Air 350 to drop him off in Rochester on one day, then called the King Air back to pick him up several days later, that would net him only two flights, while the King Air 350 would have made four flights during those two round trips. On a commercial carrier Leath would only be obligated to pay for the two flights he was on, while using ISU’s King Air would obligate Leath to pay for all four flights — either through his department if his trip to Rochester had a legitimate business basis, or, out of his own pocket if the trip was not legitimate.
This difference between Leath’s flights/trips and the King Air’s flights/trips is central to much of the story of Leath’s use and abuse of ISU Flight Service, and occurs in other permutations. For example, if Leath is at a location other than Ames, and summons the King Air to pick him up, he is obligated not only to pay for the cost of any flights he takes, but also for the cost of that empty ferry flight. That is in fact why Leath belatedly and begrudgingly reimbursed Iowa State for the cost of summoning the King Air 350 to Bloomington, IL, after he wrecked the Cirrus SR22 on 07/14/15. Because Leath had no valid business basis for that round trip, he was compelled to pay the cost of that King Air round trip himself, even though he and his wife only flew one way.
To demonstrate how unreliable the record is on even the most basic facts surrounding the Rochester trips, for the moment we are going to focus on what should be the simplest, most easily verifiable fact of all, which is how many trips Iowa State President Steven Leath took to Rochester, MN, at Iowa State’s expense. And at first blush it may seem we have the answer at hand, from this passage in the Board of Regents’ internal audit, p. 6:
The board audit categorically states that between 05/13 and 08/16, Iowa State paid for Leath to go “to Rochester, MN seven times”. Unfortunately, the audit then says that “on three occasions the sole purpose of the trip was a medical appointment”. That in turn would seem to suggest that three of Leath’s seven trips “to Rochester, MN” were purely for personal reasons, but as we’ll see that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. What is clear, however, is that on those “three occasions”, Leath had no valid business basis for using the King Air 350, other than his contention that he had to “return to campus to meet university obligations”.
To all that we now also add the following additional revised information from Iowa State, as reported by the AP’s Foley this past Thursday:
By aggregating information from the internal audit, and from DesMoinesDem’s post and Foley’s report, along with prior reporting over the past four months, and flight records previously released by Iowa State, you would think it would be trivial to identify the “seven times” that Leath traveled to Rochester at university expense, but of course it isn’t. Between missing information, claims of inaccurate information that may also be inaccurate, shifting excuses and rationales, and the audit’s failure to define what a “trip” means, it is still almost impossible to pin down basic facts of Leath’s Rochester trips, including how many trips took place.
Identifying Steven Leath’s Seven Trips to Rochester
As of this past Thursday, from all publicly available records and reports, here is what we know about the trips that Leath took to Rochester, MN, at university expense, to seek medical attention, and occasionally also engage in donor outreach.
To Rochester on 07/20/15
Prior to Thursday, the existence of a King Air flight to Rochester on 7/20/15 had been reported in the press but not documented by Iowa State. The first reporter to do so was the AP’s Foley, who had access to ISU’s invoices prior to their redaction [#14] and scrubbing from Iowa State’s servers:
As noted above, however, and as again confirmed by Foley, ISU now claims that the 7/20/15 King Air trip was actually a one-way flight for Leath, who was dropped off in Rochester on that date, then subsequently picked up on 7/23/15:
While the invoice for the 07/20/15 King Air round-trip from Ames to Rochester has never been released, you can see the invoice for the 07/23/15 King Air round trip on p. 131-132 of the 2015 King Air 350 invoices. From the “PAX FLIGHT” designation on both legs of that single-day round trip, that invoice indicates that Leath was flown to and returned from Rochester on that date. As noted, however, ISU now claims that the 07/23/15 invoice is wrong, and that Leath stayed in Rochester between the 07/20 and 07/23 King Air round trips.
Because the internal audit states that Leath was transported “to Rochester, MN seven times”, the 07/20 and 07/23 invoices — which document four flights by the King Air 350 — only comprise one of the seven round trips “to Rochester” by Leath. One problem with Iowa State’s new narrative about that trip, however, is that we do not know whether ISU clarified that 07/23/15 invoice error to the auditors during the audit, meaning the tally from the audit may also be wrong. (As an aside, note that every time ISU asserts that an invoice is wrong, that invoice turns out to be wrong in a way that is of benefit to Leath.)
To Rochester on 07/29/15
This King Air round trip appears on p. 135-136 of the 2015 King Air 350 invoices. The invoice corroborates ISU’s statement on Thursday that Leath was dropped off in Rochester, because it shows that the King Air returned to Ames “W/O PAX”, meaning without passengers.
The next day, on 07/30/15, the King Air 350 returned to Rochester as detailed on p. 137-138 of the 2015 King Air 350 invoices. That invoice also corroborates ISU’s Thursday statement that Leath was picked up on that King Air round trip, because the flight to Rochester is listed as “W/O PAX”, while the return to Ames is listed as a “PAX FLIGHT”.
To Rochester on 10/13/15
This King Air round trip appears on p. 190-191 of the 2015 King Air 350 invoices. The invoice shows a “PAX FLIGHT” to Rochester, and “W/O PAX” on the return trip to Ames. On this occasion, Leath was accompanied to Rochester by his wife.
On 10/15/15, as detailed on p. 192-193 of the 2015 King Air 350 invoices, the King Air 350 returns to Rochester to pick up the Leaths. The invoice for that trip shows “W/O PAX” to Rochester and “PAX FLIGHT” on the return trip to Ames, corroborating claims that the Leaths stayed in Rochester between 10/13 and 10/15.
That two-night stay by the Leaths is the first of the two trips — not three trips as implied by the audit — which ISU says were purely for personal medical care. That means it is also one of the two trips — in this case comprising four King Air flights — that Leath reimbursed the school for. As per Foley’s reporting and DesMoinesDem’s post, Iowa State previously asserted that those purely-personal medical trips occurred in July of 2015, shortly after Leath’s “hard landing”.
To Rochester on 03/08/16
This King Air round trip appears on p. 63-64 of the 2016 King Air 350 invoices. The invoice confirms that this was a single-day round trip, because both flights are listed as “PAX FLIGHT”, meaning Leath was on board for the flights to and from Rochester.
That single-day round trip is the second of the two trips that ISU says were purely for personal medical care. While that trip was also reimbursed by Leath, that trip involved only two flights, or one round trip, by the King Air. In sum, Leath’s two trips to Rochester for purely personal reasons — on 10/13/15 and 03/08/16 — required three round trips by the King Air, which seem to be the “three occurrences” the audit referenced. Unfortunately, that again raises the possibility that the auditors themselves were not consistent in counting either round trips by Leath or by the King Air, meaning their conclusion that Leath was transported “to Rochester, MN seven times” may be off by one.
To Rochester on 08/23/16
This flight/trip appears on p. 212-213 of the 2016 King Air 350 invoices. The invoice shows a “PAX FLIGHT” to Rochester and “W/O PAX” for the return flight, consistent with Leath being dropped off in Rochester.
While the last of the available King Air 350 invoices is dated 08/25/16, that invoice does not show a trip to Rochester. Instead, it shows a round trip from Ames to St. Paul, MN, and the Leaths are not listed on the manifest for either flight. Fortunately, we also have access to some of the trips made by Iowa State’s Cirrus SR22, and in the Cirrus Flight Log we find a round trip from Ames to Rochester on 08/25/16. From that entry we can conclude that someone flew the Cirrus to Rochester to pick up the Leaths and return them to Ames on that date.
Having exhausted the information from all publicly available flight logs, we now have five trips “to Rochester, MN”, of seven cited in the internal audit. Of the two remaining unidentified trips, we can establish the presumed existence of at least one trip from the language in the audit itself. While the other outstanding trip cannot be identified, even obliquely, from the public record, a strong argument can be made that there was no seventh trip despite the audit’s assertion to the contrary.
Consider again the following quote from the internal audit, p. 6:
Reference to the earliest trips that Leath took through ISU Flight Services can be found in this document, which includes trips back to 2013. Unfortunately, there are no trips to Rochester listed in that file. Still, the fact that the audit states a range of dates beginning in “May 2013” suggests that in that month Leath must have made the first of his seven ISU-paid trips to Rochester — else why begin the date range at that time. If so, and despite the fact that we know nothing of the specifics, that would mean we can now account for six of the seven trips to Rochester.
What we cannot conclude, however, is that Leath flew to Rochester in an Iowa State airplane in May of 2013, and the reason we cannot do that is because of the “or” in that same sentence [italics mine]: “…a university-owned aircraft or university resources were utilized….” From that phrasing, at least one of the trips that Leath took to Rochester, and possibly two of the trips — but not more, because we have already confirmed that five of the seven trips were in ISU planes — did not involve aircraft owned by Iowa State, either now or in prior years. (Possible alternative means of conveyance include Leath chartering a plane to Rochester; Leath renting a plane to personally fly to, or be flown to, Rochester; and Leath being transported via ground in a manner which I will leave to your imagination.)
Accounting for the Seventh Trip to Rochester
As to the seventh trip cited in the internal audit, there are two possibilities. Either there is another trip to Rochester which has not shown up in any publicly released information, or, the auditors themselves were confused — if not actually deceived — about the number of trips Leath made to Rochester at Iowa State’s expense. If the former, then we simply don’t know the answer, although clearly the auditors must have seen some direct evidence of that seventh trip. If the latter, the most likely explanation is that at the time of the audit, which was completed in mid-December of 2016, the auditors erroneously concluded that the 07/20/15 and 07/23/15 trips were indeed separate, single-day round trips.
Again, as of last Thursday, Iowa State claims that the 07/23/15 invoice, which clearly shows Leath on the King Air to and from Rochester — as denoted by “PAX FLIGHT” in both instances — is wrong. Unfortunately, because we do not have the 07/20/15 invoice, which the auditors certainly saw, we don’t know if that invoice confirms ISU’s new version of events or not. If the return flight from Rochester on 07/20/15 indeed shows “W/O PAX”, then that lends credence to ISU’s claim that the 07/23/15 invoice is in error. On the other hand, if both flights on the 07/20/15 invoice are also listed as “PAX FLIGHT”, not only would that make ISU’s new story that much harder to believe, it would explain why the auditors may have concluded that those two King Air round trips constituted separate round trips by Leath, rather than one as now asserted.
One obvious problem with the idea that the 07/20/15 and 07/23/15 invoices are asymmetric — meaning the 07/20/15 invoice shows the outbound and inbound flights as “PAX FLIGHT” and “W/O PAX”, respectively, while the 07/23/15 invoice clearly shows both flights as “PAX FLIGHT” — is that the auditors should have caught that contradiction and inquired as to which invoice was incorrect. That in turn would have led ISU to clarify that Leath himself only made one trip “to Rochester, MN” as a result of those two King Air round trips, thus eliminating one Rochester trip from the auditor’s count.
While it’s possible that the auditors did catch that asymmetry, and the seventh trip is simply unaccounted for in any documentation, as just noted the 07/20/15 invoice may also show “PAX FLIGHT” in both directions — meaning, according to the new ISU narrative, that it is also in error. And yet as far-fetched as such a claim might be, that actually seems to be what Iowa State is now saying. From Foley’s AP report on Thursday:
Note the specificity in the last sentence: “…showing separate roundtrip flights to Rochester on those dates….” That would seem to suggest that both the 07/20/15 and 07/23/15 invoices do show “PAX FLIGHT” in both directions, meaning both invoices are “inaccurate” according to ISU. Adding credence to that possibility is not only the fact that Landolt has clearly seen the 07/20/15 invoice, but Foley also has a copy, making it exceedingly unlikely that he would write that sentence if the invoices were asymmetric.
While you might think any uncertainty would have been resolved long ago, because ISU would have released the missing 07/20/15 invoice, as noted in DesMoinesDem’s post last Thursday, that’s not the case. Despite having released hundreds of King Air 350 invoices, the invoice for the 07/20/15 round trip to Rochester — which is the first invoice Leath appears on after his 07/14/15 “hard landing” — has been treated like a state secret:
Given that we cannot identify all seven of the trips that Leath made “to Rochester” at Iowa State’s expense — let alone determine whether that number is accurate, because of “incorrect” invoices that ISU may not have alerted the auditors to — it should be clear that any claim that the audit is now the “definitive document on this matter” is at best inane and at worst yet another mendacious attempt to derail further inquiry. And that’s particularly true in this instance, given that Iowa State clearly retains the information in dispute.
So how many trips did Steven Leath take to “Rochester, MN”, at university expense, for medical attention, either solely or in purported combination with donor outreach? The answer is: at a minimum six, but possibly seven, depending on whether the good folks at Iowa State gave “inaccurate information” to the board auditors. Which at any other school would be cause for concern, but in this case is simply par for the course.
Sequence and Causality
Although Leath and his spokespeople have insisted that he was not injured in his “hard landing” at the Bloomington, IL airport, and was thus not seeking medical attention on that basis during any of his trips to Rochester to seek medical attention, it is not hard to see why people have doubts about that assertion. Leaving aside the constant stream of lies emanating from Leath and Iowa State about every single aspect of his use and abuse of ISU Flight Services, the timeline alone paints a compelling picture of cause and effect. And that’s still true despite last Thursday’s revisions to the Rochester narrative.
Where it previously looked as if Leath made four separate trips to Rochester in July alone — meaning four trips in the two weeks or so following his 07/14/15 accident — the new story from Iowa State is that Leath made only two trips total, which constituted four round trips by the King Air. Setting aside whether the 7/20 and 07/23 invoices really are “inaccurate” or not, even if we accept that new timeline, the concentration of visits to Rochester after the crash does nothing to discourage the impression that there is some relationship between the crash and those medical visits. In fact, if anything last week’s revisions to the Rochester trips seem to intensify that connection.
Here are the beginning dates of Leath’s five trips to Rochester, as detailed above, plus the hard landing and the presumed sixth trip:
05/XX/13 — Undocumented trip to for medical appointment(s)
07/14/15 — Hard landing
07/20/15 — 4 days/3 nights: medical + donor outreach
07/29/15 — 2 days/1 night: medical + donor outreach
10/13/15 — 3 days/2 nights: medical appointment(s)
03/08/16 — 1 day/0 nights: medical appointment(s)
08/23/16 — 3 days/2 nights: medical + donor outreach
If we assume that Leath did visit Rochester for medical care in May of 2013, then a year and two months passes before his next visit to Rochester at state expense. (While the publicly available 2014 King Air invoices begin on 04/04/14, for the remainder of that year there are no King Air or Cirrus trips to Rochester.) Leath’s first documented visit to Rochester, on 07/20/15, occurs only six days after his “hard landing”, and lasts 4 days and 3 nights. The next visit occurs nine days later, on 07/29/15, fifteen days after the “hard landing”, and lasts for 2 days and 1 night.
While Leath does seek medical attention on both of those trips, ISU claims that those two trips also included donor outreach of an unspecified nature. After that, there is a two-and-a half-month gap to the first medical-only trip on 10/13/15, which lasts 3 days and 2 nights, then a five month gap to the second medical-only trip on 03/08/16, which takes place in one day. The final documented trip to Rochester for medical care takes place almost six months later, on 08/23/16, and per Iowa State that 3-day, 2-night stay also involved unspecified donor contact.
As you can see, although the latest information about the Rochester trips reduces nine King Air round trips to five trips by Leath — including turning four separate King Air trips to Rochester in the last two weeks of July into only two trips by Leath — the nature of those trips has changed considerably. What previously looked like four single-day round trips to Rochester by both the King Air and Leath is now two extended stays by Leath.
Again, that does not mean Leath was injured in the crash and sought medical attention on that basis, but the sequence is clear. In the first fifteen days post-crash, Steven Leath spent six of those fifteen days in Rochester, MN — in 4-day and 2-day stays — seeking both medical care and funds for ISU. While we don’t know how much medical care he received during those six days, or how much donor contact he engaged in, from the 3-day, 2-night stay which began on 10/13/15, which involved personal medical appointments only and no donor contact, it’s hard not to conclude that Leath spent the majority of time during those two July trips primarily involved in personal medical care or recovery, and not business. (It’s also worth asking what Leath scheduled first, his medical appointments or donor meetings. And for all of that scheduling, how much of it, if any, predates the “hard landing” on 07/14/15?)
As noted in an earlier comment, one way Iowa State’s claim that Leath was not injured in the crash could be true is if Leath had a preexisting condition which either contributed to, or was exacerbated by, his hard landing. Even something as simple as a bout of persistent vertigo would be sufficient to prompt anyone to seek treatment, and yet that doesn’t explain why Leath needed to seek treatment out of state. Not only are there fine hospitals in Iowa, but one of them — University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City — is part of the Iowa Board of Regents that Leath works for.
Finally, while there is clearly a sudden spike in medical visits to Rochester after Leath’s “hard landing”, at that same juncture his flight hours also seem to come to a halt. While that might be understandable through mid-October of 2015, when the school’s Cirrus SR22 was out of service for repairs, Leath could still have rented an SR22 to fly for personal trips, or even for valid business trips. Instead, from mid-July of 2015 until mid-February of 2016 — a span of almost seven months — there is no evidence that Leath did any flying at all. If he was not injured in the accident it once again seems incredibly coincidental that a man who, on multiple occasions, professed great sorrow that he might have to give up flying the school’s Cirrus, not only did not return to the skies immediately, he did not do so as soon as the Cirrus was again deemed airworthy.
For Part 2 of The Rochester Trip That Violated ISU Travel Policy and State Law, click here.
This is Part 2 of The Rochester Trip That Violated ISU Travel Policy and State Law. For Part 1 click here.
Why A Mixed-Use Trip is Not a License to Fly
As with every other aspect of ‘planegate’, the central question with regard to the Rochester trips is whether ISU President Steven Leath was entitled, either as a result of his position, circumstance, or contractual rights, to use either of the school’s two state-owned airplanes at university expense. As Leath himself acknowledged in an otherwise devastatingly deceitful interview with the student-run campus newspaper on 10/05/16, the Iowa State Daily, in no case was he ever entitled to use either plane for purely personal reasons. In every instance Leath was required to have a business justification for his school-compensated use of ISU aircraft, whether that use was purely business or a mixed-use trip involving both business and personal use.
There is, of course, nothing unique about any of that. Travel policy for all businesses, whether for-profit or non-profit, and for governments large and small, is covered by similar strictures not just in the United States but around the world. If you’re on the job, and travel is necessary, then your employer either pays for that travel or you are allowed to deduct that business-related travel from your income at the end of the year.
As noted in the board audit, and as confirmed by Iowa State’s revisions to the Rochester trips last Thursday, Steven Leath has already acknowledged that “on three occasions the sole purpose of the trip was a medical appointment”, meaning those trips were entirely personal. The excuse by which Leath claims he was still justified in using the school’s $3.5M, staff-piloted King Air 350 to take him to and from those personal appointments is laughable, but for the time being we’re going to set those personal-use trips aside and focus on the Rochester trips that Leath claims were mixed-use. (We’re going to do that because despite claiming he was entitled to use state property to facilitate those personal trips to Rochester, Leath has reimbursed the school for those personal trips, meaning the narrow question of payment is no longer in play.)
There are two tests as to whether travel expenses will be reimbursed. The first and most obvious test is whether travel expenses are related to business or personal use. While the criteria for establishing a business justification are absurdly lax, that test must still be met. The second test is economic, and has to do with using the lowest-cost travel option if more than one option is available. That test is also squishy, but the intent is obvious. If travel from Point A to Point B were not subject to such a restriction, then any time an organization was picking up the tab for travel, everyone would choose the most luxurious mode of conveyance. For example, everyone would prefer to fly first-class as opposed to coach, which is why many if not most organizations — including Iowa State — have travel policies which specifically preclude doing so:
Because Steven Leath is the president of a large university, and because he wears a second hat as de facto boss of the massive slush fund known as the ISU Foundation, and because he used his Foundation authority to buy both of ISU’s airplanes after he was hired, and because one of those state-owned planes (the Cirrus) was essentially Leath’s personal toy, sorting out what is and is not legitimate business use of either plane is considerably more complicated than it would be for an honest person who was simply doing their job in a conscientious manner. Be that as it may, however, Leath is still obligated, despite his lofty and protected crony status, to meet the requirements of Iowa State’s travel policy.
Unfortunately, as last fall’s board review of travel policies at all three of Iowa’s state universities attested, there are massive gaps in Iowa State’s guidelines, particularly with regard to the planes owned by Iowa State. From p. 2 of that policy review:
This is of course the main reason Leath was able to claim, after that policy review was completed, that he had not violated university travel policies despite his serial misuse and abuse of both the Cirrus SR22 and the King Air 350 — because there literally were no policies to violate:
As it happens, the board’s policy review is correct. If you drill down into the details of Iowa State’s travel policies, including particularly its polices with regard to air travel and allowable expenses, despite that fact that Iowa State owns two airplanes there is no mention of how those planes factor into ISU’s guidelines. And yet, in a way that’s understandable, because of course the vast majority of business or mixed-use travel by students, faculty and staff occurs on commercial carriers, not on chartered King Air 350 flights, and certainly not on flights in the Cirrus SR22 that are piloted by those individuals themselves.
The nearest thing to a prohibition regarding either of the school’s airplanes comes from this section of the ISU Air Travel FAQ, which deals with mixed-use trips:
Even for valid business use it would not make sense to allow anyone from President Leath on down to a scrub freshman to use the Cirrus or King Air, then reimbursable those expenses in every case. Although such use is not specifically prohibited, the economic test for business expenses — either in a purely business or mixed-use context — still holds, and as it turns out that commonsense doctrine is specifically stated in Iowa State’s travel policies. We find that, however, not by drilling down into the fine print, but by pulling back to the overview on the Travel – Reimbursement page of the ISU Policy Library:
Here, in a single sentence, we find both tests accounted for. First, for travel to be reimbursed by Iowa State, it must be “incurred on university business”. Second, travel will only be reimbursed for the “actual, reasonable cost”. While the question of reasonableness is open to interpretation, it is not hard to imagine scenarios which do and do not meet that criteria. For example, if you fly coach from Des Moines to Los Angeles on university business, your ticket will almost certainly be covered by Iowa State. On the other hand, if you fly first class that expense will be denied as a matter of policy, regardless of any valid business basis or who you are. (You may be able to pay the difference between a first class and coach seat, but you won’t be reimbursed for the full price of a first-class ticket.)
This second, economic test of allowable travel expenses, and in particular the question of whether an expense is “reasonable” or not, is clearly relevant to the three mixed-use trips that Leath took to Rochester, MN. While Ames and Rochester are not served by major airports, they are both relatively close to large cities that do have major hubs — Des Moines and Minneapolis/St. Paul, respectively. To that point, it’s worth wondering whether Leath should have flown commercial on those mixed-use trips, with travel between Ames and Des Moines facilitated by his personal vehicle, and travel between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Rochester facilitated by a rental car.
As DesMoinesDem noted in her post, however, the fact that Ames and Rochester are less than 200 miles apart also raises the possibility that Leath should simply have driven between those two cities and eschewed flying altogether, as would seem to be compelled by the requirement that travel expenses be “reasonable”. If your choice is between a $1,200 round trip in a chartered plane, or half a tank of gas plus mileage, or even the cost of a rental car, it seems self-evident that the lower-cost and more reasonable expense would be to drive. And if you did insist on flying, you would still have to fly commercial for the same reasons.
Leath’s Three Mixed-Use Trips to Rochester
Although last Thursday’s revisions to the Rochester narrative changed which trips were and were not entirely personal, the updating of that information also clarified the extent of Leath’s five trips to Rochester, which was previously unclear. In that latter regard, however, the new information from Iowa State is particularly damaging to Leath because it exposes the fact that what seemed to be an absurd number of single-day round trips to Rochester was instead half as many multi-day trips. Previously, for reasons including the invoices themselves, it was not clear which King Air 350 flights Leath was on when he traveled to and from Rochester, but as of this past Thursday any possible confusion has been resolved. (At least until Iowa State releases its next correction.)
Of Leath’s five trips to Rochester detailed in Part 1 of this post, we now know that on four of those occasions — 07/20/15, 07/29/15, 10/13/15 and 08/23/16 — each multi-day trip by Leath required two round trips by the King Air 350. Because the 10/13/15 trip, along with the single-day 03/08/16 round trip, were for personal use, in this section we will again set them aside and concern ourselves only with the three trips that Leath claims were valid mixed-use trips, albeit with personal medical appointments thrown in each time.
Here are Leath’s three mixed-used trips, broken out to show the initial King Air round trip which took Leath to Rochester, and the subsequent King Air round trip which returned him to Ames. (As noted earlier, the final round trip on 08/25 was flown in the Cirrus SR22.)
07/20/15 — King Air round trip drops Leath off in Rochester
07/23/15 — King Air round trip picks Leath up in Rochester
07/29/15 — King Air round trip drops Leath off in Rochester
07/30/15 — King Air round trip picks Leath up in Rochester
08/23/16 — King Air round trip drops Leath off in Rochester
08/25/16 — Cirrus round trip picks Leath up in Rochester
Assuming for the moment that Leath did engage in donor contact or outreach during each of those tree trips to Rochester, the next question is whether all of those rounds trips by the King Air represent “reasonable” travel expenses to a town less than 200 miles from Ames. As noted in the prior section, not only could Leath have flown commercial between Des Moines and Minneapolis/St. Paul, he could have driven directly between Ames and Rochester in three hours or less each way.
Because travel necessarily involves time, time necessarily factors into what are and are not “reasonable” travel expenses. On that point, Leath himself has drawn a direct connection between what he is paid and what he should be allowed to expense, although as a matter of policy such considerations are not relevant. From a Des Moines Register profile of Leath by Jens Manuel Krogstad, originally published on 09/02/13:
While obviously favoring wide latitude for himself in determining what are and are not valid business expenses, in the case of Leath’s three mixed-use trips to Rochester it is fair to ask whether a three-hour drive each way might constitute an unfair burden, or whether flying commercial and driving to and from the airports would have taken up too much of Leath’s valuable presidential time. On the other hand, if the average student, staff or faculty member attempted to pass off a $1,200 King Air invoice for a round trip between Ames and Rochester, which could have been driven in three-hour stints on each of two travel days, I think that expense would be uniformly rejected. Some reimbursement would be granted if the trip did have a valid business justification, but the difference between that cost and the $1,200 cost of taking the King Air would have to be born by the individual.
As to the dollar value of Leath’s presidential time, Leath has acknowledged that he often travels on commercial carriers, which means he has to spend hours waiting around airports because of layovers or delays like everyone else — plus travel time to and from airports, etc. So it’s not as if he isn’t routinely subjected to such inconveniences. As to the specifics of the Rochester trips, in her post last Thursday, DesMoinesDem raised similar issues:
Because we now know that Leath’s three mixed-used trips to Rochester involved stays of three, one and two nights, respectively, the idea that Leath could not drive to and from Rochester — a distance of some 200 miles or less one way — and still keep to his schedule is not credible. In fact, for the duration of those out-of-state, multi-day stays, Leath had no problem rescheduling or cancelling all of his university obligations in Ames, which is impressive in itself given that all of those trips were mid-week, and include not a single weekend day. Yet somehow, despite being able to clear his schedule and leave town on those occasions, Leath apparently couldn’t afford to spend time driving to and from a town less than 200 miles away.
From the King Air 350 invoices we know that the flying distance between Ames and Rochester is 140 nautical miles, or 161 statute miles. At normal cruise speed of 300 ktas (about 350 mph), each flight would take a little less than half an hour, but drive time to and from the airports would also have to be factored in. Assuming an hour total for each King Air flight to and from Rochester, then, does saving two hours traveling between Ames and Rochester equal an additional $1,000 in cost as compared to driving? If so, is that true only for Leath, or for anyone at Iowa State University?
Leaving that determination to the ISU comptroller, or to whomever approved Leath’s use of the King Air 350 at the time — assuming Leath actually ran his plans by the person who was required to sign off on his travel — it’s also fair to note with regard to his mixed-use Rochester trips that Leath has not actually argued that he had to use the King Air 350 on those trips for reasons related to scheduling. He has done so with regard to the two personal-use trips he took to Rochester, insisting that he was justified in those instances because he had to race back to campus for “university obligations”, but he has not made that case for the mixed-use trips.
Here again is what the audit said with regard to that (lame) excuse:
Nowhere can I find any statement in which Leath or his surrogates argue that Leath needed to take the King Air on the mixed-use trips for scheduling reasons. Yet even we were to allow for the same “university obligations” argument with regard to the mixed-use trips, that would only apply to the King Air round-trips which returned Leath to Ames. For the three King Air round-trips that took Leath to Rochester, there would still be no claim that those trips were valid for scheduling reasons, meaning they would have been taken on the basis of convenience, again leading back to the test of what is and is not a reasonable expense.
All of which is to say that as of this writing, I don’t believe anyone has taken a serious look at Leath’s mixed-use trips to Rochester and actually determined whether they did or did not represent a reasonable expense given the distance and the lack of a compelling need to fly, let alone to fly on the school’s own chartered airplane. Leath had to go from Ames to Rochester and back, for a stay of anywhere from one to three nights, and in order to do so he chose the most expensive travel option he could get his hands on, for no apparent reason other than his own personal convenience.
As a practical matter, I have no doubt that anyone who had to make such a determination in those six instances would do so in Leath’s favor, and that’s particularly true now that the Iowa Board of Regents has reaffirmed Leath’s presidency despite his litany of lies and abuses of power. When board buffoon Larry McKibben gave Leath a “glory hallelujah“, the message was sent that although Leath may be corrupt to his core, he’s not going anywhere. Which brings us now, fittingly, to the two Rochester trips which Leath himself acknowledges were undertaken for purely personal reasons.
Leath’s Two Personal-Use Trips to Rochester
Again, to use the King Air 350 for a given flight or trip, even ISU President Leath must meet two tests. The first and most obvious test is whether there is a business basis for the trip at all. If not, then Leath is precluded as a matter of both university policy and state law from using state property for personal use, and both of Iowa State’s airplanes are state property. That Leath did so anyway on two of his Rochester trips — which were previously assumed to have occurred in July, but have now been identified as the 10/12/15 and 08/23/16 trips — explains why Leath has reimbursed the school for those two trips, which comprised three round trips by the King Air 350. Under no conceivable circumstance, regardless of the willingness of anyone to grant Leath wide latitude and discretion in his travel, could either of those trips be considered valid business expenses by Leath.
In order to inoculate himself against charges that he did in fact violate university travel policy, if not also state law — and despite the fact that he reimbursed the school for the cost of both trips because they were entirely personal — Leath has maintained that using the King Air 350 on those trips was legitimate because he had to return to campus in short order. Again, quoting from the Iowa Board of Regents internal audit:
As previously noted, where the audit says “three occasions”, those map not to three trips by Leath, but to the three King Air round trips which were required for Leath’s two personal-use trips to Rochester. Interestingly, however, when you break out those “three occasions” as we did in the section above, you find a gaping hole in the patchwork of excuses that Leath and his cronies have slapped together over the past few months. Because while two of those King Air 350 trips do meet the laughable test of “university obligations”, which Leath claims allowed him to use state property for personal reasons, one of those trips does not:
10/13/15 — King Air round trip drops Leath off in Rochester
10/15/15 — King Air round trip picks Leath up in Rochester
03/08/16 — King Air round trip by Leath to and from Rochester
For the 10/15/15 and 03/08/16 King Air round trips, Leath's claim that he was allowed to use the King Air 350 on those occasions because had to rush back to campus applies, no matter how ludicrous that claim might be, because in fact Leath left Rochester and returned to Ames on those dates. For the 10/13/15 King Air round trip, however, that excuse does not apply because Leath was delivered to Rochester on that date.
For that 10/13/15 round trip, not only did Leath have no business basis for ordering the $3.5M King Air 350 to take him to Rochester, neither he nor any of his surrogates has ever offered any scheduling excuse for doing so. Instead, on that date, ISU President Steven Leath ordered himself flown to Rochester in the school’s $3.5M King Air 350, at a cost of $1,265.60, for no other reason than because it saved him a three-hour drive. In doing so, not only did he violate Iowa State’s travel policy, but he violated Section 721.2.5 of the Iowa Code, which reads as follows:
All of which is why, at this very minute, some poor soul charged with making sure Leath never ends up in court is reading this and throwing up in their mouth. Yes, in an hour or two they will patch together another preposterous excuse about how the round trip delivering Leath to Rochester on 10/13/15 was not a violation of ISU travel policy or state law, but as I write this, that round trip by the King Air 350 is a clear violation of ISU travel policy and a clear violation of Iowa Code 721.2.5.
If Leath had adhered to ISU travel policy, then even if we assume he intended to fly back to campus at the end of that trip, to meet obligations that he could not reschedule, Leath was still obligated to use the least-expensive means of covering the 200 miles on the way to Rochester, and that would likely have involved traveling by car. How could Leath drive from Ames to Rochester, then fly back from Rochester to Ames? Well, there are at least three ways. First, someone could have driven Leath to Rochester and dropped him off, perhaps with an overnight stay if they were too tired to return on that same day. Second, Leath could have driven to Rochester in his own car, then had someone fly up in the King Air on the 23rd to drive his car back to Ames, while he was flown back in style. Third, and most obviously, Leath could have rented a car in Ames and driven it one-way to Rochester, which not only would have avoided violations of university policy or state law, but, ironically, would not have cost him a dime.
From Foley’s AP story last Thursday, quoting Leath at the special 12/12/16 meeting of the Board of Regents:
As of this incredibly late date, neither Leath nor anyone from Iowa State has claimed that Leath had to hustle to Rochester for his medical appointments, or even for his donor meetings for that matter. While such an assertion might seem as ridiculous as Leath’s claim that he had to repeatedly race back to campus from any or all of his Rochester trips, we know that Leath has not been shy about putting forward that same rationale in the past. Specifically, that is the exact justification Leath offered for his 07/03/15 trip to North Carolina, which ultimately ended in his “hard landing” in central Illinois.
In that instance, Leath insisted that he was compelled to take the Cirrus SR22 on an eleven-day vacation to his home in North Carolina — instead of flying home on a commercial carrier — because he had a “small window of time” in which he could meet a “critically important” prospective donor. The fact that such an imperative is entirely absent with regard to any of the Rochester trips may simply mean someone forgot to deploy that same ass-covering rationale in those instances, but the fact remains that Leath has made no claim that he needed to use the King Air 350 to meet scheduling obligations in Rochester.
The 10/13/15 King Air Round Trip to Rochester
On 10/13/15, four days after final repairs were completed on the Cirrus SR22 that Leath had damaged three months earlier, Steven Leath and his wife boarded the Iowa State King Air 350 for the short flight from Ames, IA to Rochester, MN. On that day Leath not only knew he had no valid business reason for taking the King Air 350 on that trip, he knew he was not returning to Ames that day, so “important university commitments” played no part in his justification for using that plane. Among the many implications flowing from Leath’s decision is the fact that he could not have been granted permission for that trip by the person responsible for signing off on his travel requests at that time, which raises questions about how many other trips Leath may have self-approved.
As to the audit proper, this statement by Leath, which was included but not contested on page 6 of the audit, is now revealed to be factually false:
While the “University President” may have made that statement, even a cursory look at the “three occasions” in question would have demonstrated to the auditors that Leath’s statement could not possibly be true, because on only two of those “three occasions” did Leath actually return to Ames.
The audit proper avoided any legal findings about Leath’s use of ISU Flight Services, and it also avoided stating whether or not Leath violated university travel policy. Even in comments to the board on 12/12/16, lead auditor Todd Stewart took pains to note that questions of legality had not been entertained, and he avoided exonerating Leath with regard to violations of policy. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 12/12/16:
From the 10/13/15 King Air round trip to Rochester, we now have at least one example — which the auditors missed — of a clear-cut, jet-black violation of university and board policy.
After Stewart testified before the board, Leath had the audacity to make the following claims during the same meeting — from the Ames Tribune’s Dan Mika, also on 12/12/16:
From the King Air round trip on 10/13/15, not only do we now know that both of those claims by Leath are unambiguously false, but every prior instance in which Leath made either of those claims is now also proven to have been a lie.
From Leath’s extensive, lie-packed interview with Iowa State Daily, on 10/05/15:
Note the last paragraph, where Leath starts to say that he “never used the big plane for….” meaning a mixed-use or personal trip — then suddenly he catches himself and adds a qualifier. Yet even that qualifier does not cover the purely personal trip that he took in the King Air on 10/13/15. Not only was that trip not mixed-use, it was not a “normal work trip” because it had no business basis at all.
From former Iowa State VP for Business, Warren Madden — who was almost certainly the individual responsible for authorizing Leath’s business travel on the dates in question — on 10/01/16, rebutting his own previously published comments from the initial press report of Leath’s “hard landing”:
The very fact that Leath took the King Air 350 to Rochester on 10/13/15 means Madden could not have known about that trip, because Madden would not have approved such a trip as a matter of university travel policy. As to Madden’s understanding, at the time that he wrote the above statement he may have believed what he said, but as a factual matter his understanding at that time was wrong. Steven Leath did in fact violate university policy and state law on that 10/13/15 trip.
Finally, to the question of reimbursement. While it is true that Leath has reimbursed Iowa State for the cost of the three King Air round trips which constituted his two personal use trips to Rochester, at best that only resolves any outstanding balance with regard to his violation of university travel policy. With specific regard to the 10/13/15 round trip — which has no justification whatsoever — that reimbursement is an admission that Leath did in fact violate ISU travel policy, which in turn puts the lie to any statement he has ever uttered to the contrary.
As to the question of violating state law, however — which Leath clearly did on 10/13/15 — reimbursement confers no immunity from prosecution for reasons that should be obvious to anyone. As noted elsewhere, if you rob a bank you don’t get to evade jail time simply because you give the money back when you think the law is closing in. Violations of law are violations of law whether restitution is made willingly, or, in Leath’s case, compelled by a panicky desire to avoid prosecution.
If Leath ends up in court because he broke state law, it’s entirely possible that a judge could find his prior reimbursements of some relevance. It’s also possible, however, that a judge might see them as admissions of guilt, or as belated attempts to avoid accountability for his own actions. And that’s before said judge took in the full measure of Leath’s mendacity with regard to his repeated denials about his abuses of power, including at times attempting to blame others for decisions that were wholly his own.
In late 2014, having been worn down by an overtly hostile Iowa Board of Regents for years, University of Iowa President Sally Mason decided to retire. Even if you do not know what Mason went through at the malevolent hands of Regents President Bruce Rastetter and his right-hand scold, President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland, you will detect the wry humor in this quote:
Thrilled with the opportunity to finally corrupt his hated alma mater, Rastetter quickly set about doing so from inside and out. On what may well have been the same day that he met with Mason, Rastetter appeared before the University of Iowa Faculty Senate — at the time led by Alexandra Thomas, an eager collaborator — and encouraged that august body to rig a rise in the university’s national collegiate rank. As regular readers know, not only are such bootstrapped initiatives historically counterproductive, Rastetter’s unfunded challenge led to the infamously compromised “Top-Tier” white paper, which has since been scrubbed from the UI Faculty Senate site.
During the following two months Rastetter put together a presidential search committee, to which he appointed himself, Mulholland and two other regents; wealthy alumnus Jerre Stead; and long-time UI VP for Medical Affairs Jean Robillard — whom Rastetter not only made chair of the committee, but would later install as interim UI president during the final critical month of the search, in August of 2015. Shortly after the full search committee was announced in late February, the earliest known contact between anyone at the board and the eventual appointee — current illegitimate Iowa president, J. Bruce Harreld — took place sometime in March. (We know about that contact from Harreld himself, who let the news slip while he was lying about something else.)
The next critical development in Harreld’s fraudulent hire took place in mid-April of 2015, at what we previously described as the ‘missing meeting‘. While that meeting does not show up in any on-the-record comments, it involved Rastetter and Robillard and others traveling to Stead’s winter home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Given that all three men were on the search committee; that all three men conspired to hire Harreld; that Stead and Harreld were not only old friends, but Harreld worked for Stead in the past; and that Harreld had recently returned to Colorado, where Stead maintains his business and summer chalet; it’s hardly a stretch to suggest that at least one of the topics of conversation at that clandestine meeting was J. Bruce Harreld himself.
In May of 2015, search chair and arch UI traitor Robillard suddenly began talking in the press about hiring a CEO-type to run UI, as opposed to hiring someone with experience in academic administration. As to why he began doing that only weeks after meeting with his co-conspirators in Scottsdale, the most likely explanation is that Robillard and the others had agreed that Harreld would be their stealth candidate. At that point they then collectively set about ensuring Harreld’s successful candidacy within the context of what would become a $300K sham search at taxpayer expense.
In June of 2015, in a gathering arranged by, but at the last minute reportedly abandoned by Jerre Stead, Harreld met for three or four hours with Rastetter, Robillard and crony UI administrator Peter Matthes in a conference room on the Kirkwood Community College campus, near the Cedar Rapids Airport. While there are a number of belated on-the-record statements about what was discussed at that meeting, most of what those individuals have said about the search process turns out to be a lie, so we’re under no obligation to believe them — up to and including any claim that Stead himself did not attend. And while there was certainly some sizing up at what seems to have been the first in-person meeting between Harreld and his key in-state co-conspirators, there was almost certainly some carving up of UI that took place as well. Rastetter would have asserted overarching control from his perch at the board, Robillard would have lobbied for a free hand at UIHC — which Harreld did immediately grant upon taking office — and, whether he attended the meeting in person or not, it would have been understood that Stead would be issuing occasional orders from his fortress in the Rockies.
Whatever Harreld’s contribution to that secret Kirkwood meeting — the existence of which was only revealed to the public, the UI community and even the majority of the search committee weeks after Harreld’s fraudulent appointment in early September — Harreld’s practiced song and dance clearly worked on Rastetter and Robillard, leading to a series of similar auditions. Only a few weeks later, in early July, Robillard invited Harreld to speak to forty or so movers and shakers at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, again without notifying the full search committee. That meeting, also attended by Rastetter, search committee member and dean of the College of Business, Sarah Gardial, and search committee member and then-Faculty Senate President Christina Bohannan, was yet another success for Harreld. We know that because at the end of that same month, on July 30th, Rastetter arranged clandestine meetings with Harreld and four other regents, two of whom were not on the search committee, while the full committee was once again not apprised that those meetings were taking place. Following Harreld’s secret regent meetings — which Rastetter arranged in two meetings of two regents each in order to avoid the state’s Open Meeting law — at the end of July Harreld locked up a five-vote majority among Iowa’s nine regents before the search committee’s cut-down process even began.
Harreld’s final two performances during the sham 2015 presidential search, however, were not only polar opposites, they exposed the degree to which Harreld required the aid of his co-conspirators to have any chance of being appointed. In mid-August, several weeks after the secret regent meetings, Harreld participated in the so-called ‘airport interviews’ with the full search committee, as one of nine semi-finalists. Present for Harreld’s interview were co-conspirators Rastetter, Robillard, Matthes and Stead, among others, yet none of those men, including Harreld, explained to the full committee that Harreld had been granted preferential treatment throughout the search process, let alone that Harreld and Stead were old chums who had been working together for months to ensure Harreld’s success. Instead, all of those men keep quiet about what they were doing, and it worked: the full committee passed Harreld along to the regents as one of the four finalists, completely oblivious to the fact that the final board vote had already been rigged in Harreld’s favor.
Two weeks later, at the end of August, the ‘open’ part of the search got underway with the disclosure of the first of the finalists, who then participated in a candidate forum before the UI community. Despite the inherent inequity of releasing some names earlier than others, the four finalists were released sequentially, meaning the first to speak received the longest period of exposure and consideration, while the last to appear did so less than two full days before the board’s final vote. Betraying the extent of Rastetter’s determination to manipulate the search in Harreld’s favor, not only had Harreld gone last at the airport interviews, when the committee was tired from having vetted and interviewed eight otherwise qualified candidates, but Harreld was also the last of the four finalists to be named, and the last to speak before the UI community.
Despite an unbroken string of successful performances with the insiders who greased his appointment, Harreld bombed at his job talk, but it was worse than that. Not only was he clearly out of his depth on key issues, as might be expected of a man with no experience in academic administration, but Harreld betrayed failings of temperament that would lead to repeated gaffes when he finally took office. That abysmal performance also took place before the public knew that Harreld had fudged his resume, that Harreld had made multiple trips to Iowa during the search, or that he had been given multiple preferential meetings with key members of the search committee that no other candidates were offered.
In the explosion of outrage after Harreld’s sham appointment, Rastetter and his minions both at the board and on the UI campus justified the radical if not blatantly hostile appointment of Harreld on the basis of a critical need for ‘transformational change’, as opposed to maintaining the dreaded ‘status quo‘:
While no one ever imagined that bucking the status quo would include hiring someone who had no idea what they were doing, Rastetter was right — not about the importance of transformational change or the curse of status quo, but about the fact that he and others, including particularly regent apologist Larry McKibben, had been flogging the status quo in the press for years. Admittedly, such propaganda was useful in legitimizing whatever they wanted to do, including jamming an unqualified candidate into the presidency at Iowa, while simultaneously invalidating any opposition. It was also useful in asserting that there was an unacknowledged crisis in higher-ed, instead of admitting that the crisis came directly from plummeting gubernatorial and legislative state support in preference of corporate tax breaks.
While Rastetter and his cronies at the board had indeed provided a flimsy context for Harreld’s fraudulent hire, Harreld himself was not only complicit in selling the idea that higher education was in desperate straits, but that as a remaindered executive he alone among the finalists, if not all of the candidates who applied for the job, was the man to solve that problem for UI. From emails between Harreld and former one-year regent Mary Andringa, following the secret regent meetings, as reported by the Press-Citizens’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 09/24/15 — three weeks after Harreld’s sham hire:
Despite the fact that Harreld lied on his resume, and had no prior experience in academic administration at any level, and that Harred needed a cabal of conspirators to give him the job, his inherently corrupt candidacy and appointment was portrayed as critical to meeting UI’s existential needs. Whatever “strategic change” was, and whatever the “status quo” was, and whatever “crisis” higher education was “heading toward”, after lying though their teeth and running a fake, $300K search at taxpayer expense, Harreld’s co-conspirators justified his shocking appointment over the vehement objections of the UI community on the grounds that his unique business background made him the man to save the day.
Critically, along with abetting and covering for his co-conspirators, Harreld agreed with that appraisal. It wasn’t just that he was a businessman, it was his mastery of organizational change and his judgment about how to proceed in an uncertain world that was necessary for UI to go from “great to greater”. If UI was to have any hope of avoiding the precipitous slide into mediocrity that Harreld himself foresaw, the UI community needed to listen to him.
J. Bruce Harreld Declares His Independence
In the eighteen months since Harreld’s scandalous appointment, while Harreld has worked his black magic on the budget and in service of Rastetter’s misbegotten rankings goal, he has been almost resolute in his determination to avoid committing himself to decisions which can actually be judged. Everything Harreld touts is about to happen, yet it never seems to arrive. “Stay tuned”, he likes to say (11/11/15, 12/01/15, 05/03/16, 09/07/16), betraying the always-teasing, always-promising marketing weasel he is in his heart.
Follow Harreld’s speeches as reported in the press — which, by the way, is your only option, because none of Harreld’s speeches are ever added to the UI presidential speech archive — and you repeatedly find him connecting with rapturous businesspersons in the surrounding community, simply by updating the dog and pony show he bombed with at UI. And yet that shouldn’t be a surprise, because Harreld is in fact more of a motivational speaker or self-help guru than an academic leader — which is in turn why he’s so careful about not committing to courses of action that can be proven wrong. Despite being a self-professed data guy, and despite insisting on metrics for everyone else, Harreld avoids any situation in which people can measure his performance. Everybody else gets graded, but Harreld gives himself a free pass.
And yet, despite the fact that Harreld and his collaborators were undeniably successful at hijacking the UI presidency, there are clear signs that things aren’t going particularly well. Jean Robillard, the arch UI traitor whose pivotal role in that theft so many have worked to erase from collective memory, announced at the end of last September that he is stepping down from his twin roles as VP for Medical Affairs and self-appointed dean of the College of Medicine. (Although at the rate the replacement search is progressing, he’ll retain both titles for another two years.) Only three and a half months later, Bruce Rastetter just announced this past Friday that he will not seek a second term on the Iowa Board of Regents, bringing his corrupt and autocratic presidency to a close at the end of April. And while Jerre Stead finally got his name on top of the new Children’s Hospital at UI, that project has not only fallen months behind in its scheduled opening, as of last report it was also $70M over budget, and climbing. (Hinting at something more ominous, there have been no updates to the CHI cost overruns since two days before Harreld’s appointment, almost eighteen months ago.)
And then of course there’s Harreld, who seems to be getting smaller and smaller by the day, at least on campus. While he has no trouble getting rave reviews from local business types who love his motivational blather, or, who at least who see the potential for a profitable relationship with one of the largest economic entities in the state, Harreld recently managed to get himself booed at the UI Dance Marathon, which is almost certainly a singularly unique accomplishment in the history of that charitable undertaking. But okay — Rastetter doesn’t hire university presidents to preside, he hires them to make money by hook or by crook, as attested to in spades by the board’s ongoing and embarrassing embrace of ISU President Steven Leath, despite Leath’s repeated violations of university policy and state law.
All of which makes it very interesting that at the end of the first short workweek in February, J. Bruce Harreld — Rastetter’s hand-picked toad at the University of Iowa — broke with Rastetter on not one but two key issues regarding university policy. While the volume of lies that both of those men have told would make anyone wonder if there wasn’t some crony motivation for Harreld’s ideological split, in both cases Harreld does seem to have veered sharply from his minder not simply in terms of policy specifics, but publicly and rhetorically. Making those breaks all the more interesting is that at that time Rastetter was still on the fence about asking Governor Branstad to appoint him to another six year term on the board.
Was there some correlation between Rastetter’s limbo and Harreld’s timing? Did Harreld have advance warning that Rastetter was on the way out? Or was Harreld preemptively undermining Rastetter’s support, and in so doing attempting to rid himself of the second of his two key co-conspirators (the first being Robillard), so he would have a completely free hand on campus? Whatever the answer, at the time Rastetter was still reportedly on the fence, meaning Harreld’s divergence — if not outright disloyalty — may have involved significant risk.
Then again, while Rastetter and Harreld, and to a lesser extent Robillard, are all millionaires, Jerre Stead — the Oracle of Denver (and Scottsdale) — is either a billionaire or close to it, particularly after closing on his merger with Markit. Having given generously to UI in the past, and with his wife on the UI Foundation board (along with ex officio member J. Bruce Harreld), and plenty of money in his bank account at a time when UI is being starved by the state, Stead is positioned with the one asset that everyone agrees is desperately needed: cold hard cash. Because Stead was in on the ground floor of Harreld’s sham hire, and because Stead and Harreld go way back, it is not irrational to wonder if that’s ultimately where Harreld’s loyalty lies among those who levered him into the presidency. (Last summer Harreld floated the possibility of UI partnering with a ‘big data’ firm, of which Stead’s company — IHS/Markit — is one of the largest in the world.)
Whatever the method to Harreld’s madness, if any, there can be no denying that what were evolving differences between Harreld and Rastetter on two important policy matters became sharp breaks because of comments made by Harreld during and after yet another off-campus speaking engagement. The event in question was the annual meeting of the Metro Economic Alliance (MEA) — a group which Harreld agreed to serve and promote as tri-chair of their Creative Corridor Regional Vision Strategy Committee, even before he officially took office at UI. Tailoring his usual dog and pony show for that audience, Harreld gave the keynote address, and once again resorted to his favorite rhetorical device: asking aspirational questions without offering answers himself:
Say what you want about the role of the facilitator or change-agent in life — from the utility of talk therapy to the rank commercialism of the self-help industry — when you’re the president of anything, there comes a time when you have to stop gathering information and commit to a course of action. Unfortunately, other than committing to gaming Iowa’s national college rank, Harreld has taken few if any public stands by which he can be judged, preferring instead the kind of Pavlovian marketing rhetoric that seems to work businesspeople into a lather. And yet that’s why it was all the more surprising that in comments after his talk, Harreld was uncommonly specific about his views on the size of the University of Iowa going forward, and about his response to the proposed federal ban on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
On the first point, regarding the size of UI, it’s important to note that Rastetter himself had come out only a few days earlier, in the press, explicitly in favor of continued growth at all of the regent universities. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 01/27/17 — only six days before Harreld’s keynote address:
It is of course ironic that Rastetter directed his ‘status quo’ taunt at Harreld, when only a year and a half ago Rastetter was touting Harreld as the ‘transformative’ change-agent UI should believe in. In fairness to Rastetter, however, his pro-growth mantra not only goes back years, he believes in it so strongly that he had it inserted into the new strategic plan [p. 4] for the Board of Regents, which had — for some inexplicable reason — previously neglected “transformative growth” among its basic educational tenets. And yet, in fairness to Harreld, he also went on the record only a month or so into his presidential tenure, stating that growth was not the way forward for the University of Iowa. From the Gazette’s Miller, way back on 12/01/15:
While it may seem that Harreld was drawing a distinction between himself and Mason, that’s not the case. Mason’s increase in enrollment was compelled by — who else — Regents President Rastetter, whose failed performance-based funding plan monetized enrollment in ideological lockstep with his commoditized view of human existence. Enroll more in-state students and you get more money — which would not only have created an enrollment arms race between Iowa and Iowa State, but would have eventually turned the statewide higher-ed ecosystem into a board-dominated monoculture.
In that context, then, here are Harreld’s comments on growth following his keynote speech to the MEA on 02/02/17:
Whatever you think about their respective arguments, it’s clear that Rastetter and Harreld fundamentally disagreed on whether UI should continue to grow or not, and their dispute was not economic. While Harreld was right that more students would require more facilities, more students would also bring in more tuition, which — as Harreld proved with his rapacious and unwarranted tuition hikes last summer — could be raised with relative impunity, at least until students decided that the price was too high and went elsewhere. (Even at that, in-state students have relatively fewer educational options because going out of state usually involves a massive increase in tuition. That in turn explains why Rastetter wanted to crush competition and monopolize the educational opportunities across the state, because that would allow the board to squeeze in-state students for revenue with impunity.)
Only days after Rastetter made the media rounds at the beginning of the month, floating the possibility of, and feeling out support (or not) for, another six-year term on the board, Harreld publicly stuffed him on the issue of growth at UI, and yet Harreld was just getting warmed up. Having already dealt with a few protests on campus in the wake of the recent presidential election, Rastetter was insisting on a law-and-order reading of university policy well before the ill-conceived travel ban by the executive branch of the federal government. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 12/10/16:
Now, as regular readers know, Rastetter himself has nothing but contempt for board policy or state law, and as for federal law, who knows? Not only did Rastetter dedicate the entire bureaucracy of the Iowa Board of Regents to protecting ISU President Leath, despite Leath’s serial violations of board policy, university policy and state law, but only last week we discussed a specific flight that Leath took in the school’s King Air 350, which was and remains a flagrant violation of all three. So no — Rastetter only cares about policy or law when it favors his positions and furthers his aims.
As to his opinion on the recent federal travel ban, Rastetter — an all-in Trump supporter during the election, after he was an all-in Christie supporter — has been tactically mum. From the Iowa Informer’s Gavin Aronson, on 01/31/17:
Now contrast Rastetter’s silence, and his espousal of law and order, with Harreld’s views on the ban as reported in a second piece by the Gazette’s Miller, also on 02/02/17, following Harreld’s MEA keynote:
While Harreld himself has rejected the idea of cities or campuses as sanctuaries in any legal sense, he has also personally pledged to help any students who are concerned about their documentation. And yes, if Harreld came out as pro-ban he would get roundly roasted, so who knows if his opinion reflects commitment or tremulous pragmatism. And of course Harreld being Harreld, he also noted that the ban might hurt in the recruitment of international students, who are a cash cow, but still — and unlike Rastetter — Harreld is not hedging his rhetoric about that particular federal executive order. (Harreld has not, however, spoken against this Iowa bill, which lends credence to the idea that he’s simply covering his ass.)
So why did Harreld break so publicly, on two prominent issues, not only from his boss of bosses at the Board of Regents, but from the one man who was most responsible for rigging his appointment at Iowa? Was that evidence of a falling out — or of a power play of some kind? Was Harreld actively trying to diminish Rastetter’s support, thus scuttling Rastetter’s chance at another six years of running the regents into the ground?
The question of who J. Bruce Harreld works for, or at least is loyal to, is not simply academic (ha), but central to understanding his sharp policy splits from Rastetter. While Harreld is being paid by the taxpayers of Iowa, the very nature of his sham appointment made it seem that he must be an agent of the people who conspired to put him into office, yet after only a year and a half that imposing cabal is shedding parts like a disintegrating flywheel. As already noted, Robillard is on the way out for whatever reason, and Rastetter just announced that he’s passing on another term — probably because he does not have the votes for confirmation, or at least cannot be sure he’ll have the votes, which would mean risking public humiliation if he came up short. That of course leaves Jerre Stead as Harreld’s silent partner and long-time friend, and with his name going up over the new Children’s Hospital Stead looks pretty good as an ally, but he’s also clearly not in the day-to-day mix at UI.
The one person we’re leaving out, of course, is Harreld himself, and therein lies the answer as to what drove Harreld’s radical break from Rastetter. Because if we’ve learned anything about Harreld over the past year and a half it’s that he not only has a colossal ego, he has a deep-seated need to be seen as visionary and transformative in exactly the way that Rastetter and Robillard sold his illegitimate hire. Where Harreld’s co-conspirators could have picked a rudderless tool to lead UI, pulling that person’s strings on every issue, instead they picked a man with an abiding if not bitter belief that he really does have special gifts that have gone unappreciated for far too long.
In fact, we got an unsettling look at how big of a fan J. Bruce Harreld is of J. Bruce Harreld at the beginning of this academic year, when Harreld orchestrated a two-week celebration of himself leading up to his official installation — even as he knew the entire time that he could not have been appointed on the merits of his own candidacy. In his own mind, if no one else’s, J. Bruce Harreld was not a guy who could do the job at Iowa, he was the guy who could save the University of Iowa from inevitable collapse, in the same way that he saved IBM. Sure, in his presidential bio Harreld is described “[as] senior vice president of IBM”, when in fact there were fifteen or more SVP’s at any given time, but still — Harreld makes it abundantly clear that he was the SVP who saved the day. And the core of his ability to do that, and of his singular ability to save UI from an equally ignominious fate, was and is his superior judgment.
For Part 2 of In Demonstrating His Superior Judgment J. Bruce Harreld Proves He Is a Fraud, click here.
This is Part 2 of In Demonstrating His Superior Judgment J. Bruce Harreld Proves He Is a Fraud. For Part 1, click here.
J. Bruce Harreld, Academic Action Hero
Whatever else may be going on behind the scenes at the University of Iowa, I think J. Bruce Harreld finally realized that it’s his name on the door, albeit only by fraud. If he’s going to have any shot at saving face during his otherwise failed tenure at Iowa, he has to take destiny in his own grifting hands and not wait for others to pave the way. Unfortunately that’s not the same thing as doing what’s best for the university, or even what’s right, and therein lies the rub. Because while Harreld is correct on the issue of growth and the recent federal travel ban, and Rastetter is, as usual, cravenly wrong, Harreld arrived at his answers not by virtue but by vice.
The critical thing to note about Rastetter, Harreld and their disagreement about the appropriate size of UI, is that nowhere in either man’s calculus are the students at Iowa factored in. Rastetter and Harreld are advocating for different policies not because they care about education, but because they care about how those policy preferences will further their own agendas. As noted on multiple occasions, Rastetter is a commodities guy and sees the world through that filter. For Rastetter, growth means the state-funded Iowa Board of Regents can crush smaller colleges in the state and corner the market on resident enrollment, further reducing competition and increasing the crony power of the board. (When Rastetter proposed his performance-based funding model, and ISU President Leath began stockpiling undergrads in order to cash in, neither man gave a second’s thought to what would happen if the plan failed in the legislature, as it ultimately did. Today, ISU is still trying to dig out from that disaster.)
For Harreld, his desire to keep UI the same size and focus on quality — including, particularly, his snobbish mania for hiring “world-class faculty” — reflects his deep-seated emotional need to be seen as uniquely talented, special and even heroic. It’s an issue we’ve also covered multiple times, and it’s both revealing of who Harreld is, even in his mid-sixties, and embarrassing. For example, at his job talk — when he bombed in front of the UI community — Harreld disparaged former UI President Mason’s six-point plan to combat campus sexual assault, instead putting forward his own two-letter, tough-guy, “N-O” plan. Harreld then followed that brain cramp up several days later with the idea of deputizing the football team to “do something”. Granted, Harreld came full circle and took credit when Mason’s plan was finally completed during the 2015-2016 academic year, but that’s an entirely different embarrassing tendency….
For Harreld, students aren’t commodities, they’re props to be used as needed for his own starring role as an academic action hero. And in a way, who can blame him? After the perpetual ego gratification of being one of admittedly many senior vice presidents at IBM, it must have been agony slumming for eight long years as a lecturer at the Harvard Business School. What better way for Harreld to solve that identity crisis than to show a bunch of rubes in Iowa that he really was an unrecognized genius at organizational change? Sure — he couldn’t actually earn the job on the merits of his candidacy, and he had to be installed by a cabal of co-conspirators, but in the high-flying life of J. Bruce Harreld those were simply long-overdue and just compensations.
Harreld is determined to focus on excellence not because he believes it’s in the best interest of the University of Iowa or its students, but because Harreld believes it’s in the best interest of Harreld. As IBM’s former senior VP of Marketing from 2005 to 2008, Harreld knows all he needs are a few success stories to distract from the otherwise disastrous legacy he will be leaving, irrespective of how much those successes cost and how much damage they do behind the scenes. And as should be clear by now, Harreld doesn’t care if he has to lie and cheat to achieve those successes.
Note also that there is no coherence to Harreld’s determination to use his hijacked presidential authority to generate the adulation that has long been denied him. As such, Harreld pitches whatever he thinks will sell to a particular audience, even if that means contradicting himself only days later. For example, here’s Harreld on 02/02/17, as reported by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller:
That’s Harreld in charismatic visionary mode. He understands the big-picture funding problem at the University of Iowa because he’s a business genius, while everyone else at UI — the students, the staff, the faculty, even the career administrators — are narrow-minded whiners, complaining about a collapse in legislative support that is never going to be reversed. (A collapse, which, if the same loss of revenue were levied against businesses in the form of equivalent tax increases, would send everyone Harreld was speaking to into a rage.) Meaning not only was Harreld portraying himself as a sage to the assembled business masses, but in so doing he was selling out his own school — even after belatedly promising, and failing, to do this six months ago, after socking the students with his egregious, predatory tuition hikes:
So last summer Harreld was promising to “fight as hard as [he could]” for additional legislative funding, and yet only a few days ago he was not only throwing the UI community under the bus in front of an off-campus economic group, he was denying that additional funding was needed. Which must be how he really feels, but Harreld has done nothing during the current legislative session to fight for more funding, thus putting the lie to his prior commitment. And yet all of that is merely prelude to the blatant contradiction Harreld perpetrated at the beginning of this month. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 02/06/17, at an event celebrating the conclusion of a $1.95B UI fundraising campaign:
So four days after announcing that Iowa does not “need much more money”, Harreld announced that UI needed “other sources [of funding]” — and yet that kind of flagrant contradiction is normal for Harreld. Whatever message a given audience wants to hear, or whatever message Harreld wants to push on any particular day, Harreld will deliver that message like a boss regardless of the truth. Speaking of which, as noted, the occasion of that last Harreld quote was the announcement that Iowa had just closed out an eight-and-a-half-year, $1.95M funding drive. Because Harreld is always on the grift, however, here’s the message he pushed in the press, as also reported by the Gazette’s Miller on 02/06/17:
While it’s true that budget cuts did recently hit the UI campus, it was only a few days ago — well after those cuts had been announced — that Harreld was telling a business group that UI didn’t need “much more money”. Days later, of course, he was telling another audience that UI did need “other sources [of funding]”, yet when the $1.95B haul was announced Harreld was suddenly desperate to make clear that none of that money was available to offset the budget cuts. And yet that statement in itself was factually false. While the majority of that $1.95B, and indeed the majority of the money at the UI Foundation, is either permanently or temporarily restricted, as of the last financial statement [p. 5], fully $30M was unrestricted. And of course as a member of the UI Foundation board Harreld would have known that — meaning once again he simply lied to the UI community.
As bad as all that is, however, that’s not the worst of it. Six months ago Harreld rocked the student body with excessive tuition hikes, taking in $24M above the previously requested supplement to UI’s standing appropriations — $11M of which he stuffed into a discretionary slush fund under his control. Now, incredibly, Harreld is not only saying that he won’t use any of that money to pay for the budget cuts, and that there isn’t there any money in the Foundation when there clearly is, but the only way to pay for those budget cuts is to hit students again — this time by going after their financial aid.
Even more incredibly, Harreld floated that naked abuse of power in the exact same interview in which he said, “I’m not sure we need much more money”. Again, from the Gazette’s Miller, on 02/02/17:
Whether he himself specifically used the word ‘force’ or not, it’s clear that Harreld wants the UI community to believe he has no options, even as he is sitting on $24M from tuition hikes and $30M at the UI Foundation. And that’s setting aside the crazy idea that Harreld could find other ways to cover that $8M so students won’t bear the brunt of the cuts — which is exactly what President Leath is doing at Iowa State:
As regular readers know, Leath is himself a serial liar, and completely in the tank with Rastetter when it comes to crony corruption. As president of Iowa State he had no problem using $4M in ISU Foundation money to buy himself two snazzy airplanes, and another $1M in Foundation donations to silence the two Foundation presidents he fired along the way. And yet even though Iowa State did not take in as much as UI from the tuition hikes last summer, here Leath is, ponying up for half of the cuts out of his own department.
By contrast, what is Harreld doing with his $11M slush fund? He’s protecting that money at all costs, and instead hitting up students for cash for the second time in six months. And yet none of this is even remotely surprising.
It was evident the moment the budget cuts were announced that Harreld would hoard his cash reserves while socking it to everyone else, and he won’t stop at raising $8M. If he thinks he can hit the students for $20M by slashing student aid, he’ll happily pocket the $12M difference because no one outside of the easily-impressed administrators currently in his thrall will ever get a look at the books. Sure, while they’re giggling about how clever they are a few students who were living on razor-thin margins will be forced to drop out, or be unable to enroll, conceivably changing their lives forever, but those are the breaks when you run a public university like a business.
We knew to expect such ruthless greed because J. Bruce Harreld — a purported business visionary who somehow couldn’t find an industry job between 2008 and 2016, who had to be installed at Iowa by fraud because he couldn’t cut it on the merits of his own candidacy — is little more than a huckster chiseling everyone in sight. He’s got the patter, and in a single encounter can sound like he knows what he’s talking about — provided he’s not talking about higher education — but if you’re a lowly student standing in the way of his success, he will lie to your face and lift your wallet at the same time. And then six months later he’ll come back and do the same thing all over again.
J. Bruce Harreld Flunks His Own Test
As alluded to earlier, another big problem with pinning Harreld down and holding him accountable is that over the years he has honed the ability to take credit whether it was deserved or not, while never committing himself to decisions by which he can be judged. After he was roundly and appropriately panned for his just-say-N-O plan to combat campus sexual assault, Harreld waited six months, took credit for Sally Mason’s plan, and has stayed away from offering solutions ever since. Or at least that was the case until last December, when he was apparently still so high on himself from his coronation that he staked his reputation on what he thought was a sure thing, only to then have the exact same situation that he cautioned others about blow up in his own face.
It was having others take the risks and do the hard work, while taking credit for the success stories, that allowed Harreld to position himself as the savior of IBM to Robillard and Rastetter. For a time, at the direction of then-CEO Lou Gerstner, Harreld did indeed head up the Emerging Business Opportunities division, which incubated new products and services internally. The obvious problem with such an organizational structure, of course, is that there was no way to track individual contributions, meaning anyone involved could portray themselves as the agent of a particular success. As the manager, however, if IBM had multiple hits — and it did — Harreld could claim all of them without demonstrating any actual contribution. At the same time, buried in the books would not only be the failures — and there were numerous failures on Harreld’s watch — but any personal responsibility for having crippled initiatives which might otherwise have prospered.
The comparison to what Harreld is now doing at UI should be clear. He is taking as much money as he can get his hands on from other sources — including, repeatedly, abusing students and their families — to fund his own UI division of Emerging Business Opportunities. The problem, of course, is that while IBM was a business, the University of Iowa is a public university and a public trust, and it’s goal is educating the minds of living, breathing students. Meaning when you start ripping off those kids for your own ego-driven ends, including hitting them in the wallet over and over again, while simultaneously refusing to provide desperately needed mental health services, you run the risk of literally burying someone who would otherwise have remained alive. Although because of the sensitivity of such tragedies, that too will happen quietly, off the books, so you will never be held accountable.
Still, you can see the appeal of such a plan for people who don’t know that former business executives of Harreld’s caliber are a dime a dozen. Compared to academics he speaks a different language — the language of profit, of swashbuckling success — and as a result his collaborators on campus undoubtedly believe they are getting in on the ground floor of something good, even if a few struggling students will be ground to dust in the process. Better yet, any time Harreld needs to raise money for a new UI venture, all he has to do is squeeze the students again, instead of going through the tedious private-sector process of passing muster with venture capitalists, in-house committees or other seasoned investors.
Likewise, if Harreld’s supporters haven’t been paying attention to what Harreld claims to have accomplished so far, they may not know that the bulk of those accomplishments belong to someone else, with Harreld simply appropriating claims of success. Even though Harreld stopped originating solutions following his idiotic plan to combat campus sexual assault, that didn’t stop him from presenting and then taking credit for other people’s ideas. For example, when he rolled out the idea of taking money from athletics and giving it to academics, Harreld neglected to mention that that idea originated with Michael Gartner, a former president of the board of regents. And when Harreld blew up the proposed UI Museum of Art, then announced that he had found a much better site, he neglected to mention that the new site had been identified a decade earlier by Sally Mason.
Like all egotists, however, Harreld inevitably fell for his own line of malarkey and made an arrogant mistake. Regarding the delayed opening of the new Children’s Hospital, which was dedicated on 11/11/16, here’s what Harreld had to say in an interview with the student-run Daily Iowan, on 12/08/16:
So we’re clear, it is obviously well past “late January”. As to when “early February” lapsed, the implication of “early” is that the month would be divided into thirds — early, middle and late — meaning approximately ten-day increments for most months in the year. Because February is the slacker month, however, and in three out of four years comes in at only twenty-eight days, we could chisel another sixteen hours off of Harreld’s date range — and thus another calendar day — but why bother? Let’s give Harreld the whole first ten days of February to get in under the wire and not look like a colossal idiot.
Unfortunately, here we can only note that despite Harreld’s rarefied judgment in such matters, it is now February 12th, and not only has there been no move-in or grand opening at the new Children’s Hospital, there hasn’t been an update or announcement about when that’s supposed to happen. Which means after a year and half of insufferable arrogance, what we have here is the first real test of J. Bruce Harreld’s vaunted executive judgment — of his expertise at running large organizations and making critical decisions — and yet after telling everybody else how it’s done, he got it wrong himself. The sanctimonious, condescending J. Bruce Harreld, who two months ago told the world he would never box himself in to a deadline he couldn’t meet, still accomplished that feat, even after giving himself a 20-day fudge factor two months out.
As to whether Harreld knows that he blew it or not, you bet he does. Here he is on 02/06/17 — six short days ago — already covering his ass:
Wait — Harreld “didn’t give a date”? Well, he may not have given a date to Vanessa Miller last Monday, but back in early December he specified a date range, and at the end of that range was indeed a hard date. Again, by any accounting the last day of “early February” was 02/10/17, which was two days ago. And that’s ignoring the fact that February is a notoriously skimpy month, meaning we could say the clock ran out at 8 a.m on the 9th, and really let Harreld have it.
Yet here we are on the 12th, and not only has there not been any announcement that the new Children’s Hospital is up and running, or that it has already held its grand opening, but despite numerous searches in the preceding days, I haven’t found a hint that such an announcement is in the offing. Which means the next item of interest will be just how far off Harreld was in his prediction last December. Will the “move-in/opening” happen this week? Next week? In late February? How about early March? April, anyone? (Here’s the UIHC/CHI web page that should have that information when it becomes available, but as of this writing it hasn’t been updated since 11/30/16.)
So after dripping condescension all over the campus for a year and a half, the great man is unmasked as the fraud he has always been, but only because he screwed up and committed himself to a specific outcome. Which raises an obvious question. Given that Harreld seldom commits to anything, and that most of what he’s been doing has taken place behind the scenes, what are the odds that he’s knocking all of that out of the park? Or, is it more likely — given the .000 batting average between his just-say-N-O plan, and his prediction for the opening day of the Children’s Hospital — that there’s already a whole lot more that’s gone wrong than we know?
The amazing thing about the opening day of the Children’s Hospital is that all Harreld had to do was follow his own advice, stay humble, and acknowledge that predicting the conclusion of any massive undertaking is an inherently tricky business. Instead, because Harreld’s ego is always writing checks that Harreld can’t cash, he not only went out of his way to commit the same mistake, in doing so he slapped a carton of Extra Large Grade-A eggs on his face. Which may of course give you a momentary chuckle, but unfortunately this is no laughing matter. Even as the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld has authority over tens of thousands of lives, many of them young, vulnerable, and — unlike his well-paid collaborators among the faculty and administration — without recourse to his failures of judgment.
The Measure and Menace of the Man
Like Rastetter, Robillard and Stead, you can tell Harreld thinks he’s always the smartest guy in the room, but as of today he’s lucky if he’s the smartest guy in his own clothes. Unfortunately, in taking the measure of the man even over the past ten days, it’s clear that Harreld’s menace runs deep. Worse, whatever smarts he does have are — as with Rastetter — reflexively turned to exploiting whatever organization he is involved with for his own self-aggrandizement.
In response to unexpected budget cuts — technically, deappropriations — Harreld is proposing to ‘find’ $8M by reducing student financial aid. Leaving aside the fact that Harreld’s response is the equivalent of attacking Iraq after 9/11, why is Harreld once again victimizing the students? We know it’s not out of actual economic need because Harreld is sitting on $24M from the last time he took the students and their families to the cleaners. We also know Harreld hasn’t been forced to do it because there are no other options, because Iowa State is eating the same $8M loss without attacking student aid. All of which means that for the second time in six months, J. Bruce Harreld is taking money from the students because he wants to, and the only remaining question is why?
With the tuition hikes last summer, Harreld was clearly raising cash on the backs of students and their families, in anticipation of launching one or more “world-class” schemes . Now, threatened with unexpected budget cuts, he’s protecting those reserves — if not also adding to them — by raiding student financial aid. Note also, however, that doing so will also help Harreld raise Iowa’s national collegiate rank, because the closer current and prospective students are to being unable to attend Iowa for financial reasons, the more likely it is that a cut in financial aid will cause them to go somewhere else, or quit.
Why is that good for Iowa collegiate rank? Well, it’s good for two reasons, both of which further Harreld’s long-term plans. First, as noted in our Ditchwalk book review of “Engines of Anxiety”, there is a direct correlation between wealth and grades, and better grades correlate with higher rankings. By driving students who are hanging on financially out of the pool of UI students, Harreld will get an uptick in Iowa’s ranking. At the same time, cutting financial aid will help stall or even reduce enrollment, which, as noted earlier, is also Harreld’s goal.
For context, if you’re at all familiar with the deeply cynical manipulations of former Mount St. Mary’s President Simon “Drown the Bunnies” Newman — another private-sector tyrant who had no prior experience in academic administration — what Harreld is doing now is little different, save the absence of violent rhetoric. Just like Newman, Harreld is determined to pick on those students who are most at risk in order to further his own agenda, because doing so helps him in multiple ways. Even worse, Harreld could target financial aid cuts at specific lower-performing students — instead of implementing them across the board — either by using UI’s grade reports, or using data scraped from Raise.me.
To underscore how eager J. Bruce Harreld is for justifications that will allow him to abuse the students, as opposed to forking over his cash reserves to cover the $8M budget cut himself, last week Harreld also pushed the idea in the press that there may be even more cuts coming. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 02/07/17:
And later:
Ironically, the idea that there may be more cuts coming badly undermines claims by the Board of Regents that they were able to significantly reduce the cuts that were originally proposed by the governor. In fact, it’s entirely possible that the total required cuts could be higher than the governor’s initial proposal. On the other hand, it’s also interesting that almost no one else mentioned that possibility over the past week, while J. Bruce Harreld aggressively pushed that possibility in the press. Which may be why Charis-Carlson’s report ended with this:
Again, J. Bruce Harreld is screwing the students electively. For the second time in six months, he’s identified the University of Iowa’s student population as the most defenseless target, and he’s pulling out all the bureaucratic stops to make the students pay for budget cuts that he should be covering out of his own administrative surplus. And yet, if we flash forward from Monday to Friday of last week, we find this report from the Daily Iowan’s Elianna Novitch, on 02/10/17:
The first thing to note here is that although student financial aid is clearly being cut, purportedly as a result of “changes in [state] funding”, these are not the financial aid cuts Harreld was talking about last Monday. We know that because the cuts to the Summer Hawk grant program have been in the works for a while, while notice has yet to go out about the cuts Harreld is implementing to cover the $8M in deappropriations. At the same time, some students may be counting not only on those summer grants, but on the courses themselves in order to either graduate, or to stay on their current schedule to graduate. Unfortunately, it’s not simply financial aid funding that has been scaled back for the summer, but the number of classes as well.
One obvious question, of course, is just how much money Harreld will bank by making those cuts in the summer program. Because if he’s covering the $8M in deappropriations by taking money out of other financial aid packages, then the money he saves by gutting the summer program will effectively be profit he can add to his $11M warchest. Not surprisingly, students are already having to make last-minute adjustments, just as they did last summer when they were sucker-punched with Harreld’s excessive tuition hikes. More from Novitch:
If you need the hours from one of the summer courses that was just cut, and you planned on those hours being there at the beginning of this academic year, or even at the beginning of the current semester, tough break. If you were counting on those grants based on prior years, you’ve just been given short notice — little more than two weeks — that the deadline for the now-reduced grant program is March 1st. Also, if you’re a local downtown business, I’m pretty sure business-bro J. Bruce Harreld didn’t ask if it was a good idea to drive down summer enrollment, with its consequent effect on the downtown economy. And why would he? Although he talks a good game when he’s schmoozing with local business leaders, Harreld has as much interest in their welfare as he does in the welfare of the students he’s fleecing for the second time.
At the beginning of December J. Bruce Harreld saw a cheap opportunity to make himself look good — to feed his insatiable ego at the expense of a good many people who made a mistake common to long-term projects. All Harreld had to do was keep his mouth shut in order to avoid falling into the same trap himself, but because he’s a pugnacious brat at heart he gave the Daily Iowan a long, conceited answer to a question they never even asked. In doing so Harreld betrayed the degree to which everyone at the University of Iowa is a prop in his own internal psychodrama, which, for the second time in six months, now requires that students and their families pay through the nose so Harreld has enough vanity cash to hire “world-class faculty”, or to fund profit-making business partnerships with corporations that have plenty of money themselves.
To the extent that Harreld has broken with Rastetter recently he has done so because he is a mercenary, a carpetbagging dilettante, an executive burnout who couldn’t get hired in the private sector for eight straight years. Because of that enduring insult to his ego, he is now determined to do whatever it takes to prove that he is the strategic genius he thinks he is. And yet, as of two days ago, on 02/10/17 — the last day of “early February” by anyone’s count — that conceit has been demolished.
For Harreld to feel good about himself he not only has to be right, he has to tell others they’re wrong. He may couch his admonishments in mannered verbiage, playing the role of wise old man to the hilt, but the point is still made. And yet, after telling everyone else how wrong they were to commit to a hard opening date for the new children’s hospital, J. Bruce Harreld gave himself a three-week window at the end of two additional months of construction for a building that was already ninety-nine percent complete, and he still blew it.
Update 02/14/17: Here’s what J. Bruce Harreld said about why the move-in/opening of the new Children’s Hospital of Iowa (CHI) was being delayed, from the interview he gave to the Daily Iowan on 12/08/16:
And later:
So the premise from Harreld is that “out-of-state workers” screwed everyone else — a lie we dealt with here — and revenue and construction costs had nothing to do with the delay. Instead, it was just his own sweet judgment about how to do things “first class” that caused the still-ongoing delay in opening the biggest new addition to UIHC in decades.
And yet, it should be noted that Harreld neglected to mention one important fiscal impact of opening the new CHI, which is the cost of the payroll for all of the additional staff that have to be hired. While many doctors and nurses will transfer, there will also necessarily be more maintenance and housekeeping staff. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 11/30/16, announcing the delayed move-in/opening:
Fortunately, in explaining his benevolent reasoning, Harreld gives us a useful timeline. The issue of opening day was put in play on or after Thanksgiving, then came up at a hospital board meeting during the week of 11/28/16 – 12/02/16. One obvious question then, is what else changed around that time, that might have caused the UIHC board to delay the opening of the CHI for other reason?
Well, a quick look at the news that was breaking in mid-November of 2016 gives us an answer. From William Petroski of the Des Moines Register, on 11/13/16:
So just after the elections in early November, with a friendly majority in both houses of the state legislature for the first time in years, Branstad puts major changes to collective bargaining on the table, but doesn’t commit to a timeline. From the Register’s Petroski and Brianne Pfannenstiel, on 11/21/16 — three days before Thanksgiving:
From the Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel, on 11/23/16 — the day before Thanksgiving:
So on or about the time when Harreld was becoming “a little concerned” about making the original move-in/opening for CHI, the state bureaucracy was already starting to gut union contracts on the premise that state law might be rewritten to allow similar changes across the state — including at the University of Iowa, and at UIHC. As predicted, and after a bit of delay, the state legislature rolled out a bill that completely gutted collective bargaining for state employees, along the lines of anti-union legislation in Wisconsin.
Because the new bill effectively removes the ability of public-sector unions to negotiate anything, a number of unions are now jumping at the chance to agree to the most recent offer on the table, even though those offers may now be reneged on and contested in court. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, last week on 02/08/17:
From the Gazette’s James Q. Lynch, on 02/09/17 — late last week:
So…we will have our answer soon enough. If the new union-crushing bill is passed into law, and the new union contracts are ratified or at least agreed to, and CHI suddenly goes live, then it’s pretty clear the only reason the opening of the hospital was delayed was to wait to resolve those labor/personnel issues, as opposed to the delay being “the right thing to do”. Not only would that fit Harreld’s reflexive anti-union bias, as demonstrated multiple times in his sputtering and deeply disingenuous response to the AAUP sanction, but it would mean once again that J. Bruce Harreld simply lied to the UI Community in his interview with the DI.
Although to be fair to Harreld, that would hardly be news.
Interesting to hear the great man’s speeches or interviews. For being the smartest guy west of the Mississippi Harreld speaks in broad generalities without specifics. I doubt he can remember any specifics.
Higher education in Iowa is messed up. Obviously even before the GOP started cannibalizing the country and the state, Robillard jumped off the ship; now Rastetter gets into the lifeboat, understanding that women, children and students are not first. Rassy is.
So now the Republicans sweep into office with the mission and mandate to take the state back to about 1880. They also hate higher education which only produces elites, as well as ‘brainwashes’ students into being liberals (actual quote from one of our fine solons who at most went to school a year or two past high school). Add in Betsy DeVos Amway about to destroy public education, hand in hand with the GOP plans to screw grade/high schools in the state with cuts in funding as well as nasties against teacher because after all the teachers union are communists who produced idiots like those in the legislature.
On the other hand the U of Iowa wont need as much money as thought. Some students can’t get (back) into the USA. Some faculty might not either. And faculty from the Middle East and Pakistan as well as other Muslims (a surprising large amount of the UIHC) likely are not feeling secure with Donald Trump’s witch hunts. Will they stick around in this hostile environment?
But don’t worry because the GOP is going to decimate the minimum wage across the state. The University apparently won’t honor collective bargaining agreements with employees like nurses (who needs them?) because the GOP is going to destroy and bust unions. So there will be some cost savings in screwing the people in ‘union’ jobs.
At this point who cares if the Stead Childrens Place ever opens because they won’t field enough doctors, nurses, and housekeepers to run it. Furthermore, insurance bennies will be cut and the ACA may be gutted so families in Iowa won’t afford health care. Same with Medicaid. Same with Mental Health. (short memories forget nursing shortages a few years ago such that UIHC was recruiting in the Phils and around the world; good luck with that under Trump)
Obviously there are going to be more illnesses evident in Iowa with the gutting of environmental regs — like Iowa’s filthy water and air. Now we are talking about asthma, cancer, etc etc, even in kids.
Innovation and development. Has the Univ of Iowa looked at it’s faculty? As with Silicon Valley, there are tons of skilled and smart Muslims. Are, but how long will they live where they are not wanted? So forget some world class faculty development. We are now limited to ‘White Christian Nation Class’
May as well defund Planned Parenthood which will increase STDs (thanks to Pences experience in Indiana we know that) and fewer places to treat them. Less birth control, more kids, more kids born with toxic chemicals, drugs and STDs.
OK, now I am depressed. Let’s face it: The GOP one-party rule is going to destroy the state and in turn themselves — like Kansas a once comparable state — did. Trump will finish off the rest with trade wars which ultimately kill farmers exports. Apparently the GOP and it’s supporters can’t think that far ahead.
The state will expand on it’s great talent to lie to not only students but citizens, as the federal government now lies 90% of the time. Even as the quality of life deteriorates, the GOP will tell you to go to church despite the 3rd or 4th world conditions that will exist and just be thankful you have some scraps on the table, thankful that the weather is nice — due to climate change — and thankfull that we are not in a war…..although….
Except that DJT appears to be ginnning up a war like ASAP.
So really, J Bruce Harreld is actually not even close to worst of the idiots out there, dancing around like fools. In fact, he almost looks good on some aspects of his tenure — like the ones that say hold on U Iowa growth,
Harreld with never deliver on his other promises. He will have empty dorm rooms, empty beds, a demoralized employee base, empty classrooms, want ads for positions unfilled, and likely unpaid student debt. Maybe students will be fighting in uniform, to protect Trump hotels overseas, or stealing ‘the oil’ from Iraq, or god knows what other fights Bannon and Trump pick. The U Iowa may default on it’s debts, as may the US Govt because that is how businesses run – they go bankrupt after the COEs drain them of assets like DJT will drain the USA.
I expect Harreld will hightail it out of Iowa, along with many other highly paid administrators to hated blue states, where services may be better and the quality of life will be alot better. Iowa will join the vast red state depression.
After the debacle (I say 2020) it may take 20 years for red states like Iowa to get back to 1980. By then Harreld will be long gone in 2040.
Overall the election has changed the battles from manageable ones (although formidable) that seemed to get tougher and tougher say at U Iowa, to massive civil unrest aimed at Washington DC. Maybe some battles in Des Moines. I just don’t see where anyone will have time and money and effort to put up fights on college campuses. Too much.
One might look back at the coming of Harreld as the begging of the end. The culmination of the corruption of one state’s downward trajectory. If a state allows Branstad and Rastetter and Harreld and Leath to corrupt it, then we should have seen the coming of Trump and the GOP one party domination on the way. And now it is here. And there is literally no way out of the quagmire until 2020 on a national level. The state will dangle on the noose a bit longer.
If all these things happen, who gives a damn about the U of Iowa. It will be at the point of the last person in Iowa please close the empty hoglot gate.
It’s amazing how much the context has changed around the Harreld hire in a short year and a half, both internal and external to the conspiracy. I could write 50,000 words on your comment, and barely scratch the surface of the dynamics taking place at the national level — much of which will put pressure on higher education because of the people at the heart of the current red tide. (And that in turn may convince Harreld to move on.)
I read a lot about evangelicals driving much of the recent American regression in local and state politics, but I personally think that’s the wrong label. Evangelicals don’t necessarily believe in overthrowing or subverting the U.S. Constitution in order to compel others to follow their own beliefs. Many of them are quite aware that the separation of church and state gives them critical protections that are absent in most other countries.
The correct word for the current religious movement aimed at overthrowing or subverting the Constitution is fundamentalism, and that is indeed the heart and soul of whatever is left of the hollowed-out husk of the Republican Party. That they have formed an alliance with psychopathic libertarians led by the Kock brothers and others — of which both Branstad and Rastetter are devoted adherents — truly reveals the seriousness with which the fundamentalists are dedicated to their cause.
While anti-American fundamentalists — who I put at about about 30-35% of the U.S. population — have been with us since the beginning, they have gotten much better about remaining closeted in pursuit of their aims. To that point, from the perspective of the average American fundamentalist Donald Trump is an abomination, and yet they had no trouble not only lining up behind him but praising him in order to further their agenda.
Unlike the evangelicals I know, who are open about their faith, fundamentalists are willing to lie to get what they want, and what they want is control of the firehose of federal money that can truly weaponize their determination to abolish the separation of church and state. In the current presidential administration, while the president is flailing around, Mike Pence — a closeted fundamentalist — is quietly going about burrowing his flock in the apparatus of government, so the mechanism of governance is controlled by fundamentalist views.
As to how this relates to Iowa and higher-ed, Betsy DeVos, the new Secretary of Education — who was approved on a tie-breaking vote by Mike Pence — is yet another closeted fundamentalist, but one who is also a billionaire (by marriage). She has an abiding hatred of public education, and indeed of freedom of thought, and will be working ceaselessly to corrupt public higher education across the country at the national level, while closeted fundamentalists at the state level erode the state universities in every possible way — as is already clearly under way.
And yet, as bleak as all that may be, there are obstacles, including the fact that any money diverted by fundamentalists in one religion will necessarily have to be made available to all religions, including those that the dominant religions in the U.S. not only oppose but hope to destroy. So when the vault door is flung open to fund one kind of religious organization, it will also necessarily be opened to funding others, and subject to suit if it fails to do so. Unfortunately, that will leave that much less money available to secular, godless institutions, which will continue to be starved at the state level by fundamentalist legislatures.
May you live in interesting times.
Update: Case in point, read this post from DesMoinesDem at Bleeding Heartland, about public reaction to the ‘Republican’ (fundamentalist) plan to defund Planned Parenthood in Iowa, and replace it with a program which costs a lot more and does a lot less. In that post there is this key quote regarding an Iowa Poll on the subject:
First and most obviously, note the support among evangelical Christians. People of the most abiding faith often have no problem recognizing a humane distinction between ideological purity and the infliction of pain and suffering on others. Fundamentalist don’t think twice about inflicting pain on others in pursuit of ideological purity — and, in fact, it’s often the whole point. (You can see this devolve into barbarism in ISIS, but it’s the same instinct regardless of the religion. Inflict pain on unbelievers so you feel closer to God yourself.)
Next, note the percentage — 62%. Again, there is an almost hardwired 35% support for fundamentalism not only in Iowa, but across the country. Go back and look at the numbers in poll after poll during the Obama years, and you find an impenetrable opposition of about 35% who opposed Obama on everything, even if they would have otherwise supported that proposal or plan.
This is American hatred, these are our American Taliban, and they are roughly one in every three citizens — but after decades of political activism they are much more organized that the other two thirds. They have taken over schools boards and statehouses, and they now make up a majority of the Republican party, which is currently in political power. You will find more and more policies coming to a vote in the next four years that are supported by a minority of Americans for precisely that reason, including radical changes to the ACA (Obamacare).
As to why that will be happening, it’s because the whole point of the exercise is to collapse America into chaos, so that it can be remade along ideological lines which originate in a religious text, as opposed to laws in the Constitution.
And I don’t say that any of this is particularly insightful. Simply that you can watch it actually playing out if you know what to look for.
On 10/12/16, amid a deeply disingenuous effort to portray — but not actually deliver — transparency with regard to Iowa State President Steven Leath’s use and abuse of his school’s two airplanes, ISU posted a Flight Services FAQ on the university website. While hundreds of invoices were released through that FAQ for the twin-engine King Air 350 [see #14], all of the flight information for the single-engine Cirrus SR22 that Leath himself was authorized to fly was contained in two small singe-page files [#15]. The main file, Cirrus Flight Log.pdf, contained what looked to be tracking information from the FlightAware tracking service — a supposition that was later confirmed by the Iowa Board of Regents internal audit [p. 4].
Information in the smaller file — Supplemental Cirrus Log.pdf — was considerably less voluminous, both with regard to the number of flights listed and the information reported for each flight. That led to speculation that the data in that file came from the flight log(s) of the pilot(s) who had flown those particular trips. While the internal audit did note [p. 4] that the auditors “observed pilot logs for the University President, Flight Service Manager, and the two full-time Flight Service pilots”, neither of the two files posted on the FAQ were referenced in the audit, which had only this to say about the Cirrus flight records [p. 8]:
While acknowledging that flight information for Iowa State’s Cirrus SR22 is incomplete, we can still connect a few dots by cross-referencing specific information in the Supplemental Cirrus Log with other facts that have been disclosed by Iowa State. That in turn will help us focus on questions which have yet to be answered, and who should be questioned in order to obtain those answers. (Note that the Cirrus Flight Log and Supplemental Cirrus Log were compiled and posted before authorization of the internal audit, which occurred about a week later, on 10/20/16.)
The Origin of the Supplemental Cirrus Log Entries
In a recent two-part post we drilled down to a specific King Air 350 round trip which delivered Leath to Rochester, MN on 10/13/15, in violation of both university policy and state law. While we also tried (and failed) in that post to identify Leath’s seven trips to Rochester, as referenced in the internal audit, we did note an anomaly in the last Rochester trip on 08/25/16. On that particular trip Leath and his wife returned from Rochester to Ames, but unlike all of the preceding trips the Leaths were transported not in the King Air 350, but in the Cirrus SR22.
While both of the Cirrus flights on 08/25/16 appear in the Cirrus Flight Log, indicating that a flight plan was filed for that round trip, only the flight from Ames to Rochester appears in the Supplemental Cirrus Log, as follows:
The first item in that entry is obviously the date. Next comes the departure time of the flight using a 24-hour clock, with “1415” translating to 2:15 p.m. “N176CF” is the aircraft registration number for the ISU Cirrus, also commonly called the n-number. “AMW” is the three-letter designation for the Ames airport, while “RST” is the three-letter designation for Rochester. Because AMW precedes RST, Ames is the point of origin for that particular flight, while Rochester is the destination. “SR22” denotes the aircraft type (A/C Type), while “0.9” denotes the time of the flight, or ETE (Estimated Time Enroute). “125” denotes the nautical miles flown on the trip, and “144” represents the Standard Industry Fare Level (SIFL) for the flight, which we will completely ignore.
The fact that the Supplemental Cirrus Log only shows the flight to Rochester on 08/25/16 strongly suggests that entry came from the personal flight log of the pilot who flew that leg of the trip. Although Leath was the dominant user of the Iowa State Cirrus SR22, because he was already in Rochester at that time, the 08/25/16 entry in the Supplemental Cirrus Log cannot have come from Leath’s flight log.
As to who flew the Cirrus to Rochester on 08/25/16, from the passage in the internal audit quoted above we know there are a number of possibilities — and more, in fact, because any qualified pilot could have been at the controls of the Cirrus on that day. If we make one simple assumption, however, at least for this post, we can actually arrive at a specific answer from other entries in the Supplemental Cirrus Log. While there are reasons for and against making that assumption, even if that assumption is wrong we know from prior disclosures by Iowa State that we can tie one flight in the Supplemental Cirrus Log to a specific named pilot, and that pilot is on staff at Iowa State.
As detailed in another post, on 03/12/16 the ISU Cirrus SR22 flew from Ames to Jefferson, NC and back in a single day, remaining on the ground at the Jefferson airport for only 37 minutes. While any possible business basis for that trip had long been contested, it was only recently that we learned ISU staff pilot Joe Crandall accompanied Steven and Janet Leath on that flight, dropping the Leaths off in Jefferson before flying the Cirrus back to Ames himself. (The purported business justification for the entire round trip was “training” for Joe Crandall, who was already a high-time pilot qualified not only to fly the university’s twin-engine, pressurized King Air 350 under IFR conditions, but also helicopters for the U.S. Army.)
Among the various flights listed in the Supplemental Cirrus Log is Crandall’s solo return flight from Jefferson to Ames on 03/12/16. Because that flight included a fuel stop along the way, there are separate entries in the Supplemental Cirrus Log for each of the two legs of that one-way flight:
In this instance “GEV” is the three-letter designation for the Ashe County Airport near Jefferson, “CMI” stands for the University of Illinois Willard Airport in Champagne County, and “AMW” again stands for Ames. On that two-leg flight, Crandall took off from Jefferson at 6:00 p.m. and flew for 2.3 hours to Illinois. After fueling up, Crandall took off again at 10:56 and flew another 1.6 hours to Ames. (It is not clear whether the listed times were corrected for changes in time zones.)
Because we know Crandall flew both return legs of the 03/12/16 flight from Jefferson, NC, and because both legs of that return flight are listed in the Supplemental Cirrus Log, and because the flight from Ames to Jefferson is not listed in the Supplemental Cirrus Log, there can be no question that the two entries above came from Joe Crandall’s pilot’s log. If we also assume that all of the entries in the Supplemental Cirrus Log came from the same pilot’s log — as opposed to being compiled from multiple such logs — that means Crandall was the pilot for the 08/25/16 flight from Ames to Rochester to pick up the Leaths.
We know that Leath and Crandall — who are both qualified to fly the Cirrus — were on the 03/12/16 flight from Ames to Jefferson. Because there is no Supplemental Cirrus Log entry for that flight, however, that suggests Leath flew as pilot-in-command on that leg of the trip, with Crandall flying as pilot-in-command on the solo return legs. Likewise, we see the same pattern of entries for the 08/25/16 round trip from Ames to Rochester. There is an entry in the Supplemental Cirrus Log when we believe Crandall was at the controls and flying solo, and no log entry for the return flight to Ames, when we know Leath and his wife were on board.
From those two journeys five months apart we know that at least two entries in the Supplemental Cirrus Log are directly attributable to Crandall, meaning specifically the return legs of the 03/12/16 flight from Jefferson to Ames. We also know that on two flights when Leath would have written a log entry in his own pilot’s log — the flight from Ames to Jefferson on 03/12/16, and the flight from Rochester to Ames on 08/25/16 — those entries are not in the Supplemental Cirrus Log. While the other entries in the Supplemental Cirrus Log could have come from other pilots, the fact that Leath’s own log entries — which almost certainly constitute the majority of Cirrus flights, and thus the majority of Cirrus entries in any pilot’s log — are absent from any documents provided by ISU, suggests that the Supplemental Cirrus Log is not a compilation from multiple pilots including Crandall and Leath, but that it only contains N176CF flights from Joe Crandall’s log. (If the Supplemental Cirrus Log is a compilation of log entries from all other Cirrus pilots except Leath, no reason has ever been given for excluding Leath’s business-related log entries from the documentation released by Iowa State.)
The Supplemental Cirrus Log in Detail
The following list contains all of the flights/trips in the Supplemental Cirrus Log, with markers added for the first and last reported flights in the Cirrus Flight Log and in the King Air 350 invoices. (Formatting of the dates was adjusted to make the entries easier to read.)
Even if you do not know the three-letter codes for each airport denoted in the Supplemental Cirrus Log (or the Cirrus Flight Log), it is abundantly clear when two entries on the same day reference a round trip between two cities. If the Cirrus flies from XXX to YYY, then from YYY to XXX, that’s a round-trip, and if that pattern occurs on more than one day the trip necessarily involves one or more overnight stays. Likewise, when there are multiple entries on the same date, or even over multiple dates, which do not resolve to the original point of departure, that’s necessarily a one-way trip even if you have no idea where that one-way trip started or ended. Finally, while VFR flights are not tracked by FlightAware, and thus do not show up in the Cirrus Flight Log, IFR and VFR flights are noted in the personal log of the pilot-in-command on every flight — meaning we might expect that some VFR flights would appear in the Supplemental Cirrus Log which do not appear in the Cirrus Flight Log, thus confirming that those entries are from a pilot’s log.
The first two flights in the Supplemental Cirrus Log take place on the same day, but they are not a round trip:
At 5 p.m. on 08/22/14, the Cirrus flies from the Cherokee County Regional Airport (CKP) in northwest Iowa to nearby Spencer Municipal Airport (SPW), in roughly twenty minutes. After spending approximately two hours on the ground the Cirrus then flies another 40 minutes or so to the Ames Municipal Airport (AMW). From the ISU Flight Services FAQ we know the Cirrus SR22 was purchased from the previous owners in July of 2014 [#2], so it is reasonable to assume that these flights represent the physical transfer of the plane from the previous owner’s airport to the Ames airport, where Iowa State stores its planes.
This flight takes the Cirrus from Ames (AMW) to Iowa City (IOW) in about 35 minutes, at around 2:30 p.m. While the Iowa Board of Regents held two-day meetings in Iowa City on 10/22 and 10/23, from the meeting minutes it looks like the first day was taken up with committee business, and the three university presidents presented only on the second day. From the 2014 King Air 350 invoices [p. 147], however, we do know that Leath was in Iowa City on 10/22. On that date both Leath and VP for Business Warren Madden were flown from Ames to Iowa City in the King Air 350, although the invoices for that trip also shows both men being returned to Ames that same day.
If Leath did return to Ames on 10/22, and the Cirrus only flew to Iowa City from Ames at around 2:30 p.m. on 10/23, it’s not clear how Leath would have gotten back to Iowa City for his testimony before the board. The fact that there is no Cirrus return flight from Iowa City to Ames, however, strongly suggests that once again Crandall flew the Cirrus to Iowa City to pick up Leath, who then logged the return trip to Ames as pilot-in-command, which is why that flight does not show up in the Supplemental Flight Log. (It is possible that Leath stayed in Iowa City from 10/22 to 10/23, and that the King Air invoice is incorrect about Leath’s return to Ames on 10/22, if not also incorrect about Madden’s return on that date.)
Here we have a two-day round trip to Indianapolis (MQJ) with a one-night layover. The Cirrus leaves Ames at 5:15 on 01/09, then flies for 1 hour and 55 minutes before arriving at Indianapolis. The next day the plane leaves Indy at 10:00 p.m, flies for 2 hours and 35 minutes or so (the increase in travel time due to west-east headwinds), and arrives back at Ames. From another doc on the Flight Services FAQ — King Air flight details (document.pdf) — we know that Leath and his wife travel to Indy on 11/15/15 for the 128th APLU Annual Meeting, so perhaps there was other APLU business that needed tending on 01/10/15. (If Leath was on board however, it’s not clear why he did not log time as pilot-in-command, so perhaps Crandall flew someone else to Indy on that trip — either Janet Leath, or some other representative of Iowa State.)
Here we have a one-way flight from Ames (AMW) to Pella, IA (PEA), which is the site of a Cirrus Service Center, and one of the airports where Leath did some of his pilot training [#8 and #9]. Although Leath acquired his instrument rating in early 2015, it’s not clear exactly when that happened, and it may be that he took his check ride on this date — either with Crandall along for the fun of it, or in some capacity as a seasoned pilot. In any case, there is no return flight logged, so we will once again assume that Crandall flew the plane to Pella, with Leath flying the Cirrus back to Ames as pilot-in-command.
These two flights call into question the assumption that all of the flights in the Supplemental Cirrus Log come from Joe Crandall’s log, or from a single pilot’s log. Unlike every other entry, here the Cirrus model is referred to as an “SR22/G” rather than simply an SR22. If Crandall was making all of the entries, why the change? Then there’s the fact that the plane flies from Ames (AMW) to Waterloo (ALO) on two successive days, with no logged return trip on each day. On the other hand, if we ignore the different dates the entries are so similar there is also the possibility of a transcription error, meaning there may have only been one flight, or two flights with the locations reversed, or some other error which confuses the issue. In any case, flying the Cirrus on the relatively short trip from Ames to Waterloo — which occurs on other occasions — seems very much like the kind of simple touch-and-go flying that a pilot perform to maintain ratings currency.
Here we have two flights on the same day, with cities swapped between the two flights, clearly indicating a round trip. Oddly, however, the Cirrus appears to leave Cedar Rapids (CID) for the short flight to Ames at around 2:15 p.m, at which point it loiters for several hours before returning to Cedar Rapids at 6 p.m. that same evening. How the plane got to CID, and how it gets back to Ames after the second flight, is not clear. If we look at the Cirrus Flight Log, however, we find not two flights but four flights between Ames and CR on that date — comprising two full round trips. Whoever contributed the entries to the Supplemental Cirrus Log flew legs 2 and 3, while someone else flew legs 1 and 4. Again, because the distance between cities is so short, it’s possible that two pilots — meaning, specifically, Leath and Crandall — went flying together to maintain currency requirements in the Cirrus.
This is the infamous single-day round-trip from Ames (AMW) to Jefferson, NC (GEV), which made absolutely no sense until recently. These two entries are for the solo return flight by Joe Crandall, after he dropped the Leaths off in Jefferson. (That trip in turn led to the falsified King Air 350 invoice on 03/15/16, when the King Air flew from Ames to Jefferson to pick up the Leaths in anticipation of a western swing over the next few days.)
These two flights between Ames (AMW) and Rockford, IL (RFD) correlate with two flights by the King Air 350 to Chicago on the same dates. (Note that the 03/27/16 date is only thirty minutes past midnight, so the events preceding that late-night flight all take place on the 26th.) Although we have discussed those converging trips extensively, there is still no coherent explanation as to why both of ISU’s planes traveled to roughly the same locale on the same days. From prior Cirrus flights, and entries in the Supplemental Cirrus Log, the likeliest answer is that Crandall was shuttling one or more persons around on Leath’s behalf — if not Leath himself — but that still doesn’t explain the correlation between the movements of the two planes.
This is a 50-minute flight from Council Bluffs (CBF) to Ames (AMW). It is also the only flight in the Supplemental Cirrus Log which does not show up in the Cirrus Flight Log, indicating that it was flown under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), without a filed flight plan. While there is obviously a flight missing from Ames to Council Bluffs, that could be accounted for if a different pilot (likely Leath) flew that leg. As to the reason for the flight(s), there was an Iowa Board of Regents meeting in Council Bluffs on April 20th and 21st.
These two entries are a round trip between Ames (AMW) and Rogers, Arkansas (ROG), with a two-day layover between flights. Because both flights are in the Supplemental Cirrus Log, we can assume that Crandall (or at least someone not named Leath) flew the whole trip. While we don’t know the basis of the trip, May 6th is a Friday and may 8th is a Monday, so it looks like someone leaked out of work early on Friday (1:30 p.m.) and spent Friday night, Saturday night, and most of Sunday in Rogers or the surrounding area, prior to heading back to Ames at 5:30 Sunday night.
This odd dance of flights/trips over four days can be better understood if we include two related flights from the Cirrus Flight Log — added here in italics:
On 07/13 the Cirrus leaves Ames and flies to Kansas City, MO. After spending a good part of the day in KC, the Cirrus then flies to Springfield, MO, where it sits on the ground for a very short time before returning to Ames. Four days later, on 07/17, the Cirrus returns to Springfield, appears to go backward in time four hours (taking off at 9 a.m. after arriving at approximately 1 p.m.), then returns to Ames.
Because the clocks for the supplemental entries and the FlightAware entries are clearly off, it may also help to look at the totality of these trips as referenced in a prior post:
With regard to the Supplemental Cirrus Log entries for these trips, the important thing to note is that the flight to KC from Ames, and the return flight from Springfield to Ames, are not logged — suggesting, again, that Leath may have flown those flights as pilot-in-command. Why he would not have flown all five flights himself — when that was effectively the whole point of buying that plane with ISU Foundation dollars — is unknown.
This is the previously discussed trip to pick the Leaths up in Rochester. Because there is no entry in the Supplemental Cirrus Log for the return flight, it is assumed that Leath was pilot-in-command of the Cirrus for the flight back to Ames.
Ironically, this flight took place on the same date that news finally broke about Leath’s “hard landing” in the Cirrus in July of 2015. In these two entries the Cirrus makes a round trip from Ames (AMW) to Muscle Shoals, AL (MSL), and the timing of the flights is quite familiar. As with the 03/12/16 round trip from Ames to Jefferson, NC, here the Cirrus is on the ground in Muscle Shoals for half hour or so at most. Specifically, the flight to Muscle Shoals leaves Ames at 12:30 p.m. and arrives 3.2 hours later, at approximately 3:45 p.m. The flight from MSL to Ames departs at 4:10 p.m., meaning the Cirrus is only on the ground long enough to fuel up for the return flight. As with the 03/12/16 trip, this suggests that Crandall flew Leath to Alabama to drop him off, which in turn suggests that a later Cirrus log entry or King Air 350 invoice will show that Leath was also picked up at that location.
Steven Leath and the IFDC
Why would Steven Leath, president of Iowa State University, need to zip down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in the middle of September of last year? Well, as it turns out — and I did not know this until I began writing this post — Leath is a member of the board of directors of the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC). And no, in the entire history of governing boards there has never been a more perfect association between an individual and an organization.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the IFDC:
While laudable, even after poking around on the IFDC website I’m not really sure what they do except talk about fertilizer. In fact, although the website seems to be adding posts and news items, it’s not at all clear that the board of director’s page has been updated in the past two years, because Leath’s initial term on the board ran out in 2015. His picture and bio are still there, however — despite that fact that there has been no news about him being reappointed — and of course the fact that he raced down to Muscle Shoals suggests that he still has some affiliation.
In most respects the association between Leath and the IFDC seems germane to his aims and obligations at Iowa State, but there is one facet that strikes me as odd. The fact that the IFDC has projects around the world got me thinking about 2011 and 2012, when Bruce Rastetter was caught in the kind of neo-colonial ugliness that would have mortified a man of even marginal conscience. What is particularly interesting about the Agrisol/Tanzania scandal is that it blew up in Rastetter’s face in the summer of 2011, shortly after Rastetter told Governor Branstad to appoint him to the Iowa Board of Regents. After first recusing himself, then backing away along with Iowa State, which was also involved in the scummy Tanzania project, Rastetter waited an entire year before publicly commenting on his involvement.
During that year, however, — as both a new regent, and as a member of the regents’ presidential search committee — Rastetter also helped appoint Steven Leath at Iowa State, with Leath taking office in February of 2012. Not only did Leath thus inherit the fallout from the Agrisol deal, including pushback on campus, but shortly after Rastetter decided to try (and fail) to explain himself on 07/20/12, Leath spontaneously hired Rastetter’s private-sector spokesperson — Joe Murphy — as his legislative liaison at ISU. What I also did not know until I began writing this post, however, was that Leath was elected to the IFDC board on 08/01/12, only ten days after Rastetter’s non-mea culpa.
[Note: Google search indicates that the AgrisolEnergy site has been hacked, so you may want to avoid clicking on any of the following Agrisol links.]
The current AgriSol site seems to have been abandoned in 2013, so it’s hard to get a fix on what was happening back then. The infamous Tanzania project is the only project listed on the ‘Our Projects’ page, and in fact that page and the entire site are at least four years out of date. In addition, nowhere on the site is there any reference to the owners, either as corporate entities or individuals, and there is no reference to a board of directors. And yet, if you do a search for ‘AgrisolEnergy’ and ‘board of directors’, you will find a few stray individuals who seem to still be party to that company.
Bruce Rastetter co-founded Hawkeye Renewables in 2003 with Russell Stidolph. The managing director of Stidolph’s Alt Energy LLC is Arul Gupta, who serves as “AltEnergy Board Observer to Eos Energy Storage, Viridity Energy, Tres Amigas and AgriSol Energy….” If you dig a little more you find that Stidolph himself is on the board of Agrisol Energy, and Chairman of Viridity, and Director of Tres Amalgas, so it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine that Stidolph is Agrisol, but who knows.
Other than Leath suddenly appearing on the IFDC board ten days after Rastetter’s non-apology for his involvement with the AgirSol deal, I can’t find any connection between that scandal and the IFDC, or even between the principals involved in the various organizations. I also don’t know enough about shell corporations and how one organization can be used to front for others, so I’m not sure how to go about plumbing such murky depths. Still, the timing of Leath’s appointment to the IFDC board seems more than a little odd, particularly after Rastetter spent the prior year not only getting his ducks in a row about his involvement with AgriSol, but putting Leath in office.
The Supplemental Cirrus Log in Context
Having taken a long look at the Cirrus Flight Log in a prior post, and at the Supplemental Cirrus Log in this post, it’s interesting to note what the two logs tell us relative to each other. Whether the Supplemental Cirrus Log is made up of log entries from a single pilot or multiple pilots, it does not seem to include any entries from Leath’s pilots log, which is interesting in itself. In fact, particularly so given Leath’s claim that the vast majority of his business-use Cirrus trips (52 of 72) were for “proficiency/training” purposes [p. 3].
Following Leath’s “hard landing” in the Cirrus on 07/14/15, and apart from two maintenance ferries to repair the damage caused by Leath, neither of which Leath flew himself, the Cirrus stayed grounded for seven months, until 02/10/16. Subsequent to that date the majority of the trips listed in the Cirrus Flight Log overlap entries in the Supplemental Cirrus Log, suggesting that Leath was also not the pilot on most of those flights. In fact, the first flights which show up in the Cirrus Flight Log but not in the Supplemental Cirrus Log are two short flights each, on 02/10/16 and 02/23/16, both between Ames and Waterloo. As noted in the earlier post on the Cirrus Flight Log, those trips seem like flights a pilot might take if he was behind on currency with FAA certifications, and because those flights do not show up in the Supplemental Cirrus Log it’s possible if not likely that Leath was at the controls.
The gap between flights in the Supplemental Cirrus Log is also greater than in the Cirrus Flight Log — from 06/02/15 to the single-day trip to NC on 03/12/16 — as would be expected given that Leath was the dominant user of the Cirrus. Interestingly, however, only four days prior to the 03/12/16 single-day round trip to Jefferson, Leath was flown to Rochester and back on 03/08/16 in the King Air 350, purely for a personal medical appointment, suggesting that perhaps he was unable to fly to Rochester by himself in the Cirrus. Likewise, if Leath was told at that doctor’s visit that he would not be allowed to fly to Jefferson without another qualified pilot in the cockpit, that might explain why he didn’t simply take the Cirrus on that entire trip, including the Western swing that started on 03/16/16. (That in turn also raises questions about whether Leath’s short flights on 02/10/16 and 02/23/16 were flown alone, or with Crandall or another pilot in the cockpit as well.)
As to the first substantive Cirrus flights that Leath takes by himself after his accident, those seem to occur between 04/06/16 and 04/10/16, on a trip to Wyoming and Montana. If correct, that would mean that between Leath’s “hard landing” and that four-day trip, almost nine months passes in which the Cirrus is flown by Leath on only a few brief occasions. That in turn would obviously contradict Leath’s frequent assertions that he regularly used the Cirrus for business.
Relative to the King Air 350 invoices, the 08/25/16 Cirrus flight to pick up the Leaths in Rochester is also interesting. Prior to that trip Leath made six and a half trips to Rochester, all in the King Air, either alone or with his wife. On 08/25, however, Leath was picked up and returned to Ames in the Cirrus, even though the King Air 350 was almost certainly available to make the trip, if not more so than the Cirrus.
Although the King Air 350 was used to transport four passengers (two redacted) from Ames to St. Paul, MN and back on that same date, the King Air would have had plenty of room for the Leaths if the Leaths were returning at approximately the same time. Because Minneapolis/St. Paul is roughly 80 miles past Rochester relative to Ames, Leath and his wife could have been picked up on the way there or on the way back if the timing was right. Even if the timing wasn’t right, however, that would only mean the King Air would have been free to pick the Leaths up and return them to Ames on a separate flight, perhaps between the flights to and from MN/STP.
If Leath was not in the mood for company after his medical appointment, would he really have preferred flying in the smaller, less-stable Cirrus than the King Air 350? Or was there some other reason for using the Cirrus on 08/25/16? Well, as it turns out, the very next day the Cirrus Flight Log shows the Cirrus taking off on a five-day trip to Jefferson, North Carolina, which is of course where Leath and his wife have their cabin.
If Leath had not flown the Cirrus for a while — and it may have been a month or more, at least — he may have used the return flight on 08/25/16, with high-time ISU staff pilot Joe Crandall aboard, to scrape off his aeronautical rust. At the same time, if Leath had been having health problems which interfered with his ability to fly solo or carry passengers, he may also have been given the all-clear during that particular stay in Rochester. In any case, however, the fact that Leath had no problem using the much more expensive King Air 350 for multiple doctor’s visits to Rochester, then suddenly opted to return from Rochester in the Cirrus the day before taking an extended trip in that plane, certainly seems to suggest that something changed. Or perhaps Leath simply decided that he couldn’t get away with taking the King Air 350 home for a four-day vacation, so he had to settle for running off with the Cirrus SR22.
In a little less than a week it will have been a year and a half to the day since J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of the University of Iowa. Sometime in March it will also be two years to the day since Harreld was (at least according to Harreld) first contacted by a member of the Iowa Board of Regents (almost certainly outslinking President Bruce Rastetter) about that impending vacancy. During all that time, however, and despite all of the shocking disclosures about how that sham search actually went down, I don’t think we’ve seen a week like the one just passed, when every aspect of the Iowa Board of Regents’ institutional corruption took a turn in the reportorial spotlight.
Rapidly developing into a full-blown scandal last week, including a credible threat of legal action against UI, was J. Bruce Harreld’s seizure of scholarship funds in a trumped-up scheme to avoid defraying legislative de-appropriations with his own cash reserves, which would almost certainly be adequate to that task. Because the story was still breaking last Friday, however, including the fact that Harreld may have lied about his legal right to cancel those scholarships, we’re going to let that story play out more before diving in. Also in the news last week was the decision by the Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation — or maybe it was the Story County Attorney, or both — that ISU President Steven Leath would not face charges for his use and abuse of ISU Flight Services, despite the fact that he clearly broke state law. While it is tremendously disappointing to learn that law enforcement across the entirely of Iowa state government is corrupt, given that everyone else has gone out of their way to excuse Leath’s serial violations of state law and school and regents policy, the decision cannot be characterized as surprising. Despite the DCI’s indefensible abdication of its sworn responsibility, however, there are still a few outstanding issues that we will dig into in an upcoming post.
To all of that we can add new salvos in the full-on assault against higher education by various factions in the Iowa state legislature. From an earlier attempt to outlaw tenure, to a more recent proposal to flood the state’s campuses with guns, to a bill last week that would proportion faculty hires by political ideology, the shaky alliance between closeted fundamentalists and psychopathic libertarians is having a field day proposing — and at times passing — legislation aimed at driving a stake through the heart of the benevolent and blessed Iowa we all grew up with. All of which, as you might imagine, is more than a little dispiriting to those who see the potential in the people of Iowa to excel, if only they were invested in as eagerly as politicians invest in corporate tax breaks and social policies which exploit and punish those same citizens.
Finally, last week also saw important developments in the ongoing debacle that is the new UI Children’s Hospital of Iowa (CHI). As noted in a recent two-part post, in early December J. Bruce Harreld went out of his way to explain how stupid it was to aim for a specific opening date, given how often such dates are blown by unforeseen delays. Predictably confident in his own ability to handle such a task, however, Harreld then specified a twenty-day window several months out, during which CHI would conduct a coordinated move-in and opening. When “late January or early February” came and went, however, the arrogant Harreld was revealed to be a fool himself, not only for having made the same mistake, but for having failed to hit a span of opening dates twenty times wider.
Two New CHI Opening Dates in Two Days
The previously mentioned two-part Ditchwalk post about Harreld’s scheduling face-plant was published on Sunday, 02/12/17. Six days later, on 02/18/17, in the early hours of the following Saturday, the Gazette’s Erin Jordan and Vanessa Miller published a story about the new Children’s Hospital which was important on multiple fronts. Not only did the Gazette story detail a financial dispute between UI and a well-respected local contractor that was working its way through the courts, but the Gazette report also included yet another new opening date for CHI:
If you’ve been following the CHI story at all, you know that shifting the opening from a fixed date in early December to a range in “late January or early February” occasioned a lot of chatter about why that delay occurred. More recently, you also know that blowing Harreld’s opening date range not only revealed Harreld to be a condescending fraud, but it raised very real questions about the competence of the administrators driving that project to completion. At the very least, then, you would probably presume that the new announcement by Lehnertz — who, as SVP of Finance and Operations, is clearly privy to the actual status of the project — would have followed from a great deal of considered discussion and thought, if only to avoid yet another round of embarrassment.
In fact, in keeping with Harreld’s own strategy, Lehnertz offered the widest date range yet, specifying not a week or a month but an entire season in which the move-in and opening would take place. And given that the opening had already been rescheduled twice, who can blame Lehnertz for not wanting to take a ownership of a third blown deadline? Still, whether “spring” meant the calendar months of March, April and May, or the solar period from March 21st to June 21st, that timeline clearly signaled that Harreld’s twenty-day window had been wildly off the mark.
As of Saturday, 02/18/17, then, the re-revised official opening/move-in date for CHI was “spring”. On 02/20/17, however — meaning the following Monday — the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson reported the following:
Only two days after official word from UI’s Lehnertz that CHI would be opening sometime in “spring”, that announcement was trumped by “officials with University of Iowa Health Care”, who declared that the move-in would take place during the very next week — meaning the week of February 20th. Even more amazingly, that update was sent not during the regular workweek, but “over the weekend”. While it seems obvious that someone at UI freaked out after reading Lehnertz’s comment about “spring” in the Saturday morning Gazette, and it’s not particularly difficult to imagine who that someone might be — given that said individual would have to have the administrative juice to order an “enterprise-wide email” to be drafted and sent on a weekend — what is a bit of a mystery is how CHI was suddenly deemed ready for the move-in only hours after Miller and Jordan reported that the move-in would not occur until “spring”.
Fortunately, we can resolve that conundrum by noting the inclusion of a single world in that email blast [italics mine]: “…to enable our phased move….” While it’s a given that any move-in at CHI would have taken a number of days, note that the words “phased move” in the blast email belie a great deal of the prior planning that was touted by UI. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, way back on on 09/07/16:
Clearly, the original plan for the CHI move-in date was not to do a “phased move” over weeks or even months, but to perform a smooth, coordinated, practiced transfer of patients and services from the old units to the new centralized building in a matter of days. And yet from the blast email two weekends back, it’s equally clear that the “officials” who sent that email were describing a much longer process. Continuing, from Charis-Carlson’s report:
So Jordan and Miller’s Gazette report was published early Saturday morning (5:30 a.m., to be exact), then a few hours later three of the tip-toppiest administrators at UIHC sent a corrective email announcing that the move-in would begin the very next week. And yet that claim was itself clearly misleading, both as to the squishy specificity of the timeline and the piecemeal nature of the move. Continuing:
“Saturday” in that follow-up Monday email meant the 25th, or two days ago. Yet even if you don’t know the size and scope of the new CHI, it’s abundantly clear from the list of “areas” that would supposedly be up and running on the 25th that the majority of the new CHI would still be “open at a later date” — perhaps even in “spring”. (You can get some idea of the size of CHI by looking at the elevation and floor plan for the 14-floor building here.) As to the idea that a “phased move” was ever part of the CHI gameplan, here’s the Gazette’s Miller reporting on that issue back on 11/30/16, which was the same day UI announced that the project would not make the 12/10/16 opening date:
Despite Regent McKibben’s stated preference, three months after his comments — meaning also three months after the first blown deadline — CHI is getting a “piecemeal opening”. And yet, from the panicky weekend email sent by Robillard, Kates and Turner, it’s not too hard to imagine that the decision to announce a phased-opening may have been rushed in itself. To see why, consider that even in asserting that the “phased move” was ready to begin, that email still hedged on setting a hard date: “…we are able to set a firm date for the move, which should be next week.” Should be?
It is also significant that the weekend email was collectively signed by Robillard, Kates and Turner. Had any one of them made the decision to begin the phased move on their own, they would have signed that email themselves. Instead, there are three administrators listed, almost as if they were all ordered to sign their names by someone else. As to what kind of a person would roust three high-ranking hospital administrators out of bed on a weekend, then demand that they countermand Lehnertz’s statement that very same day, well, it’s obviously hard to imagine any seasoned academic administrator becoming so hysterical, but of course one possibility would have to be J. Bruce Harreld. Not only did he have the authority as president to order that such an email be sent, as the man who promised that CHI would open in “late January or early February”, he clearly had a motive for not allowing Lehnertz’s new “spring” time frame to take hold that weekend.
Waste, Fraud, Abuse and Delay at CHI
If you’ve been reading Ditchwalk about the Harreld hire for the past year or so, you know the whole premise of appointing J. Bruce Harreld was that his private-sector business genius — including, presumably, his ability to project the opening dates of large-scale projects — was desperately needed at a critical time in higher education. You also know that Jean Robillard and Jerre Stead are two of the three main co-conspirators who orchestrated Harreld’s sham hire, the other being Regents President Rastetter. And of course you also know that the official name of CHI is the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, albeit for reasons that no one has ever adequately explained.
While Harreld had nothing to do with the inception of the CHI project, as noted earlier in this post he’s been on the job for the past year and a half, and as of last December was obviously comfortable telling everyone how to properly schedule the opening of that particular long-term project — at least until his condescending and decidedly generous date range blew up in his face. Between Harreld’s karmic misfire and the recent attempt by Robillard and others to claim that CHI is now opening on time, it also seems patently obvious that no one in higher administration at the University of Iowa should be allowed to make decisions about anything. If you can’t get the announcement of the completion of a project right, odds are you’re probably going to screw up the project itself in multiple ways. (The page on the CHI website which long ago promised to update the new move-in/opening date still has not been updated.)
Here is the actual lede to the Saturday morning Gazette report by Jordan and Miller, on 12/18/17:
While I have never worked construction myself, I’ve been around Eastern Iowa long enough to know the name Modern Piping. This is not a company that just fell off a rutabaga truck, and as Miller and Jordan note, it has been involved in a number of large, high profile projects over the years. Interestingly, however, last April — by which time Harreld had been in office for six months — UI made the rather novel legal argument that they were simply too busy to “settle a dispute”, because doing so might prove detrimental to critically ill patients. (Apparently, there must be some key pediatric nurses and doctors at UIHC who also manage contracts and practice law for the UI Office of General Counsel.)
Having now endured three solid months of delays in which, presumably, none of the pediatric patients at UHIC were adversely affected when administrators could not figure out how to open the new units at CHI, it’s worth wondering just how sincere those claims of potential harm to “one of Iowa’s most vulnerable populations” actually were. Then again, it’s not as if anyone is accusing the project managers and hospital administrators of screwing off, or of actually going out of their way to delay the project. Not only would such behavior obviously be inexcusable in itself, it would also expose UI’s prior claims before the court in the Modern Piping case to have been bald-faced lies.
Continuing, from Miller and Jordan:
On a project already behind schedule, with a budget that had exploded by more than $70M over a year earlier, someone decided that workers should spend time and money building false fronts for areas that were still under construction, only to later rip out those facades. While it may at first blush seem hard to imagine why someone would order such waste, fraud and abuse, it’s important to remember that Jerre Stead made a personal appearance at the CHI dedication in early November. And of course Harreld owes Stead a deep debt of gratitude for giving him the job he now holds, which he could not have achieved on the merits of his own blithering candidacy.
Continuing, from the Gazette’s Jordan and Miller:
Even in early November, everyone involved at CHI had to be aware that there was zero chance the 12/10/16 opening date was viable — meaning contrary to all of the talk at the time, any high-level manager or administrator who uttered such claims knew they were a lie. And that of course includes J. Bruce Harreld, who not only went out of his way to school everyone on how to accurately project the opening of CHI — at least until he turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong — but Harreld also went out of his way to tell the heroic tale of when and how he personally knew the project was in trouble. From another two-part post on Harreld’s intrinsic mendacity:
As has hopefully been made clear by now, the only thing first-class about J. Bruce Harreld is his prevaricating. Not only did Harreld blow his own twenty-day window for the opening of CHI, but because Robillard and other administrators are now adopting a “phased move”, there will also be no “first class” opening. Even back in early December, however, when Harreld was blaming the delay of the CHI opening on “out-of-state workers”, he had nothing to say about the fact that over a month earlier someone in management or administration ordered that time and money be wasted in order to make the project look good for the November open house that Jerre Stead attended.
Whatever the actual cost in wasted time and materials, that inforation will come out sooner or later whether the Gazette pays UI’s ridiculous fees or not. The more important question — and one which should cost the press nothing — is who exactly ordered all of that vanity work to be done? Because I’m willing to bet it wasn’t UI Hospitals spokesman Moore, or CHI XD Turner, or UIHC CEO Kates, or even VP for Medical Affairs and arch UI traitor Robillard who made that call. And there’s only one man on campus who is superior to all of those people, and that’s J. Bruce Harreld.
If it was fair a year and a half ago for Harreld’s co-conspirators to extrapolate theoretical future benefits from his grandiose and completely unsubstantiated claims of success at IBM, then it’s more than fair to extrapolate future ills from Harreld’s blatantly demonstrable failings as president of the University of Iowa. Projecting a “late January or early February” opening date was a brain cramp of the first order, but okay — people make mistakes. The fact that one of Harreld’s key administrative subordinates announced a “spring” opening for the already troubled CHI, only to have other high-ranking administrators countermand that statement hours later — and on a weekend no less — shows that Harreld’s staff is in disarray. That such disarray exists over what is unquestionably the most closely watched project on campus only makes it that much more likely that mismanagement may be pervasive in darker corners of the UI bureaucracy.
The most obvious concern, however, is that someone with significant authority at UI ordered time and money wasted on a project that was already behind schedule and over budget. Notwithstanding the admirable dissembling of UI Hospitals spokesman Tom Moore, even if the “vast majority” of the materials from those staged settings and false fronts “will be reused elsewhere across University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics” — meaning not necessarily at CHI — the cost of the labor to build those sets, and the time spent doing so, will never be recouped. And yet someone with the requisite authority still went ahead and ordered all of that time and labor thrown in the trash, despite knowing full well that it would put the project farther behind and deeper in the red.
As of today we don’t know who ordered all of that wasteful construction. Were J. Bruce Harreld a real leader — as opposed to a fraud foisted on the University of Iowa by a small cabal of self-interested co-conspirators — he would be the first to demand answers, while also apologizing to the “out-of-state workers” he previously blamed for the project’s delay. On the other hand, if Harreld himself ordered those false fronts to be built, then not only did he knowingly malign “out-of-state” workers in order to cover for his own duplicity, but we will know as much because he will be the last person on campus to demand accountability.
Asking who ordered time and money wasted on the CHI open house in early November, however, is only half of the mystery. The other question that needs asking is why that decision was made. While it’s possible that Jerre Stead not only knew about or even demanded such wasteful spending in order to make himself look good, it’s also possible that Stead himself was fooled by the facades. Unless he climbed behind the fake walls, Jerre Stead may have had no idea that what he saw at the dedication was a fraud being perpetrated on him as well — perhaps even involving money that he donated to the project. (Or maybe the money that UI wasted was donated by the Gerdin family, or some other loyal donors who were taken to the cleaners by whomever ordered that wasteful construction.)
Was someone trying to suck up to Stead, or to appease such an important donor after allowing his namesake project to go off the rails in multiple ways? If Harreld ordered that time and resources be wasted, did he get permission from Stead beforehand, or did he do it on the sly, perhaps hoping to keep Stead in the dark, and thus on the hook for future projects? Or maybe Harreld had previously given Stead assurances that everything was on schedule when it clearly wasn’t, and he had to cover his own ass in order to avoid antagonizing one of the school’s wealthiest and most generous donors. Then again, Stead is also one of the men who conspired to hire the incompetent Harreld, and who himself lied to the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller two weeks after Harreld’s sham appointment, so perhaps Stead himself was in on the deception, or even ordered it using Harreld as a proxy.
Whatever the answers to such questions, it’s a given that Jerre Stead — whose family name now adorns the Children’s Hospital of Iowa, and will be prominently on display to tens of thousands of Hawkeye football fans at every home game — would have preferred that less attention be brought to such matters than has already been generated. Meaning it’s also a given that everyone at UI and UI