A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
08/27/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Five-Year Tuition Proposal — Part 2.
08/21/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Five-Year Tuition Proposal — Part 1.
08/12/17 — The UNI and ISU Five-Year Tuition Proposals.
08/05/17 — The Iowa Board of Regents and the $91M Lie.
07/30/17 — Perusing the Tuition Task Force Reading Room.
07/27/17 — The Iowa Tuition Task Force is Exposed.
07/24/17 — Regent Larry McKibben, chair of the Iowa Tuition Task Force, has cancelled Thursday’s big meeting, and it will not be rescheduled. Reporting here, here and here.
07/23/17 — What the Iowa Tuition Task Force is Really About.
07/16/17 — What the Iowa Tuition Task Force is Not About.
07/03/17 — Reintroducing Steve McGuire to Reality.
06/25/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce — Part 4. Updated.
06/22/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce — Part 3.
06/18/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce — Part 2.
06/14/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce — Part 1.
06/04/17 — Today Tuition Hikes, Tomorrow a Task Force.
05/28/17 — Iowa Board of Regents President Mike Richards. Part 1. Part 2.
05/21/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Peer Group Tuition Lie: Part 2. (Part 1 was published on 05/17/17.)
05/19/17 — The University of Iowa has settled the case brought by Tracey Griesbaum, and reached a final agreement with Jane Meyer. UI press release here, which includes links to regents source docs. All moneys to be paid from Athletic Department funds.
05/17/17 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Peer Group Tuition Lie: Part 1.
05/03/17 — What Gary Barta Did to Jane Meyer. Updated 05/04/17.
04/27/17 — J. Bruce Harreld Makes His Move.
04/19/17 — The Riverside Recital Hall Remodel and the Levitt Center Lease.
04/12/17 — J. Bruce Harreld at Eighteen Months. Part 1. Part 2.
A little over nineteen months ago, on 09/03/15, following a sham search which culminated in a fixed vote at the Iowa Board of Regents, J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa. A little over seventeen months ago, on 11/02/15, Harreld finally took office, while also exposing the conspiracy which jammed him into office over three eminently qualified candidates, and over the resounding objections of the faculty, staff and students who are the heart of the UI community. The key players in that secretive cabal were all members of the search committee, who warped the process in Harreld’s favor at a cost of $300K to state taxpayers: mega-donor alum and long-time Harreld pal Jerre Stead; Regents President Bruce Rastetter; and VP for Medical Affairs, interim president, and chair of the search committee, Jean Robillard.
Given America’s frenetic twenty-four hour news cycle, hyper-accelerated as it is by the internet and social media, looking back a year and a half seem more like surveying an anthropological age than contemplating recent history. Relative to the administration of a university, however, or the careers of individuals involved in that pursuit, transitioning from one year to the next is but a turning of the page. In that context, what makes the Harreld hire all the more surprising is that only eighteen months into his original five-year deal, the same tight-knit cabal that manipulated the 2015 UI search in Harreld’s favor is already coming apart.
UI administrator Jean Robillard, who was a remorseless traitor to the school in his overlapping roles as search chair and interim UI president, was the first to head for the door. While not retiring from the university, Robillard announced at the end of last September that he would be stepping down from his regular overlapping roles as vice president for medical affairs and dean of the College of Medicine, the latter of which he bestowed on himself only six months earlier. Buried in the fine print of Robillard’s surprise announcement, however, was that he would stay on in both capacities until his replacement was hired, which UI administration immediately set about doing with glacial urgency. Although his announcement came almost six months ago, only in the past few weeks has the search committee gotten around to hiring a search firm, suggesting that Robillard will retain both titles for the better part of a year.
Next to announce his departure — albeit not by his own choosing — was Regents President Rottweiler. With his term set to expire at the end of this month, Rastetter said in a late January appearance on Iowa Press that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to do another six-year stint on the board. Following earlier disclosure of his crony land deal with Iowa State President Steven Leath, however, and Leath’s subsequent ‘planegate’ saga — which Rastetter also abetted and attempted to cover up — the decision was apparently taken out of Rastetter’s hands. Even assuming that Governor Terry “The Butcher” Branstad would have reappointed Rastetter if that’s what Rastetter told him to do — Rastetter being a major donor to, if not also having a controlling interest in, Branstad’s political career — the state Senate seemed poised to reject his confirmation. Faced with the choice of bowing out or being embarrassed, Rastetter announced several weeks after his Iowa Press appearance that he would not seek a second term.
As for Jerre Stead, although the actual honor was bestowed less than two months after Harreld took office, only a year later was Stead finally able to see his name up on the new UIHC Children’s Hospital. While there has never been an adequate explanation as to why Rastetter simply gave the multi-million-dollar naming rights to Stead — particularly after other families contributed significantly more to the hospital’s construction — Harreld and the UIHC administrators, including Robillard, pulled out all the stops for Stead’s appearance at an open house last November. In fact, they went so far as to blow scare funds on fake construction to make the behind-schedule and over-budget project look more finished, then they pulled that out as well. Other than that on-campus sighting, however, Stead has kept a low public profile over the past year and a half — though we don’t know how often he calls up his former protege, former employee, long-time friend and personal administrative manservant, J. Bruce Harreld, to tell him how he’d like to see things play out at Iowa. And that includes, particularly, the shadowy flow of funds at the University of Iowa Foundation, where Stead’s wife happens to be a member of the board.
In September of 2015 the alliance of Stead, Rastetter, Robillard and Harreld looked unstoppable. Deeply enmeshed in, if not controlling all of the centers of power — the UI Foundation, the Board of Regents, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and, for the first time, University of Iowa administration — there seemed no limit to the damage those men could do in furthering their narrow, self-interested agendas. Yet a scant year and a half later that alliance is fragmenting, leaving only Harreld as a remnant of its prior influence. (It is of course possible that was the plan all along. Use a serendipitous moment of concentrated power to inject Harreld into the heart of the University of Iowa, where he would then remain, acting on orders even as the other three turned to conquering new horizons.)
Whatever the intended scheme back in 2015, and however those four multi-millionaires thought they were going to collectively or individually use the University of Iowa to meet their own ego needs, one of the things Harreld’s co-conspirators may have overlooked is that when it’s your name on the door you probably don’t want to be perceived as a tool or an ass. While Harreld did show faint signs of independence from Rastetter shortly after his hire, only during the current academic year did Harreld openly break with Rastetter on hot-button issues like immigration and enrollment. In doing so it can fairly be said that Harreld finally made the Iowa presidency his own, despite the fact that he could never have achieved that position on the merits of his candidacy.
Further fragmenting the bureaucratic status quo in Iowa, after initially pooh-poohing the idea of living abroad, Butcher Branstad reversed course and agreed to vacate the remainder of his sixth gubernatorial term to become the next ambassador to China. As unthinkable as it would have been a year and a half ago, Harreld will also soon be the elder statesman among regent presidents, what with the recent hire of Mark Nook at the University of Northern Iowa, and the more recent resignation of Iowa State President Steven Leath. As for the Board of Regents, between President Rastetter’s forced retirement and Butcher Branstad’s refusal to appoint Regents President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland to a second term, the board overseeing Harreld will not simply be different, but manifestly weaker.
On the UI campus proper not only is Robillard receding, but other prominent defections and retirements are allowing Harreld to consolidate power, again making it clear that he is now in full administrative control of the university. Along with the longtime provost recently resigning to take a job elsewhere, the longtime VP for Student Life also recently retired, and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences — the largest college on the UI campus by far — announced that he will retire in the summer of 2018. In sum, after approximately eighteen months on the job the conspiracy behind Harreld’s fraudulent hire has dissolved, and the bureaucracy he inherited is rapidly evolving to one which Harreld will have staffed himself. Leaving aside his sham hire, whatever grace period Harreld would have deserved if his appointment had been legitimate is now over, and for better or worse he is fully responsible not only for what happens at the University of Iowa going forward, but particularly for the choices he makes. All of which makes Harreld’s reckless decision making over the past two months that much more damning.
J. Bruce Harreld and Transformational Change
The premise of Harreld’s non-traditional (unqualified) candidacy, and of his subsequent non-traditional (fraudulent) hire, was that in an era of perpetual legislative funding cuts, public colleges and universities should be run more like businesses. Not surprisingly, that simplistic conclusion in turn suggests — following a culturally well-worn chain of for-profit logic — that instead of hiring seasoned academic administrators, governing boards should hire seasoned CEO’s. For example — Bill Gates, who was in fact put forward as an illustrative example by arch UI traitor Jean Robillard, during an early phase of corrupting the 2015 presidential search in Harreld’s favor.
Unfortunately, because there were apparently no CEO’s eager to take the Iowa job, Stead, Rastetter and Robillard had to settle for Harreld, who at the time was a remaindered business exec grinding out a six-year hitch as a lecturer at Harvard. Before that, however, Harreld was indeed one of fifteen or twenty second-bananas at IBM, among other career stops where he served as a high-ranking executive without ever actually being the person in charge. At least until he gave up on teaching in 2014 (or teaching gave up on him), and hung out his shingle as a sole proprietor, which he then misrepresented on his resume when he applied for the Iowa presidency.
Click here and you can see Harreld’s candidate forum, which took place only two days before his done-deal appointment. The entire appearance runs about an hour and a half, equally divided between sales pitch and question-and-answer. Harreld’s shtick was that organizations either continue to excel or precipitously decline, but fortunately he also happened to be an expert at facilitating the former and preventing the latter.
Despite overwhelming shock at Harreld’s presence among the four finalists, there were a perceptive few in the UI community who saw the need for someone with Harreld’s keen executive judgment and robust business experience. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 09/03/15, prior to the announcement:
As a footnote to the candidate forums, note that the other three finalists — all of them eminently qualified academic administrators — also grasped the implications of dwindling state dollars. As a footnote to Fethke’s personal commitment to and adoration of Harreld, note that as interim UI president, Fethke unilaterally appointed Jean Robillard as the VP of Medical Affairs without advertising the position or conducting a search.
From a UI press release on 09/03/15, following Harreld’s appointment:
One of the high (or low) points in Harreld’s candidate forum was when he talked about going from “great to greater”. To be fair, however, in his business career Harreld did indeed help Boston Market grow with shocking rapidity, right up to the point at which it went bankrupt because the pace of growth was unsustainable. Still, because Harreld was smart enough to get out early he made out like a bandit, and even managed to remove himself from the shareholder lawsuit that followed.
Continuing, from the UI press release:
Unfortunately, the only national notoriety Harreld has brought to Iowa so far came a month and a half after taking office, when he said someone should be shot if there were unprepared to do their job. Then again, there are another three and a half years on Harreld’s current contract, so Robillard may yet be proven right.
From the Gazette’s Miller, on 09/03/15, after the announcement:
And later:
As regular readers know, the irony is that Harreld’s hire was in itself an egregious betrayal of shared governance. Still, from the get-go Harreld was savvy enough to talk the talk of shared governance, and the only thing the academic hostages on the UI campus could hope for was that he would learn to walk the walk. After a suitable period of acclimation, of course, given that he literally had no prior experience in academic administration.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis Carlson, also after the appointment, on 09/03/15:
And later:
Now, after a year and a half on the job, it is no longer too early to talk about a no-confidence vote for Harreld. If he is failing — and the core standard of Harreld’s success at Iowa is his respect for shared governance — then there is no point in waiting because he’s had all the time he needs to prove what kind of university president he is going to be. Continuing:
Not only was Weber on the search committee, but he has proven to be an unwavering supporter of Harreld’s — very much like fellow committee member and former UI Faculty Senate president Christina Bohannan:
From a related story by the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson, also on 09/03/15:
Whether Marshall knew it at the time or not, one of UI’s “most generous supporters”, Jerre Stead — who was on the search committee, and whose wife was and still is on the Foundation’s board of directors — also most generously facilitated an early secret meeting between Harreld, Robillard, Rastetter and UI Chief of Staff Peter Matthes. Along with being a long-time friend of, and fellow Colorado resident with, J. Bruce Harreld, it turns out Stead also knew that Harreld was a candidate well before the contrary lie he told to the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on the day after Harreld’s sham appointment. Then again, maybe Marshall meant some other most-generous supporters, given that Harreld and Stead had known each other for years, and met at least once, face to face, during the presidential search, so obviously they needed no introduction. (As for Marshall’s conviction that Harreld had the “leadership skills” to help the Foundation reach a fundraising goal that was already 90% completed under Sally Mason, I’m sure Sally Mason appreciated the compliment.)
In the days and weeks following Harreld’s appointment, outrage that the least-qualified and least-respected of the four finalists was chosen over the objections of the vast majority of the UI community gave way to a steady stream of disclosures not only about the preferential treatment Harreld received throughout the search, but about the fact that the final vote had been fixed in Harreld’s favor a month before his appointment. Perhaps not so coincidentally, at the same time op-eds started appearing in the local papers, urging everyone to give Harreld a chance, even if his appointment was a demonstrable sham.
From a Gazette letter to the editor, written by four “independent University of Iowa business professionals”, on 09/14/15:
Echoing that sentiment a month later, here is former search committee member Jeff Courter — who was also the president of the board of the UI Alumni Association when the search started — in a Des Moines Register letter to the editor, on 10/18/15:
From a Gazette letter to the editor a month later — one week after Harreld finally took office — by Tim Terry, on 11/09/15:
Assuming for the moment that higher-education was and still is in crisis, and assuming that a change-agent was desperately needed, and assuming that somehow the perfect change agent just happened to be available to the University of Iowa, what solutions, what road map, has Harreld produced in the year and a half since his supporters and apologists began insisting that everyone give him a chance? The mentoring and coaching period is clearly over, he’s had time to bridge the divide with students, faculty and staff, so where is this transformational vision? Where is Harreld’s strategic plan for solving the crisis in higher education?
And the answer is, there is no plan. Other than perverting the budget process to his own narrow ends, and repeatedly savaging students in order to pad his “strategic” slush fund, Harreld has proposed nothing that others did not propose before him. In fact, at the end of February, after stupefying the UI community by stating on multiple occasions that UI did not need any additional legislative funding, even though the state’s schools have been victimized by funding cuts for decades, Harreld turned around and proposed a thirty-three percent tuition hike over the next five years.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 02/25/17 — coincidentally the birthday of the University of Iowa:
That Harreld proposed a massive increase in tuition at the very moment he was also attempting to steal $4.3M in scholarships from resident students and their families is particularly revealing of his malevolent instincts. The specific offer that Harreld made to the board was not only punitive for students, it was also disingenuous. In exchange for an unprecedented windfall in tuition — which had nothing to do with thinking outside the box — Harreld would devote any subsequent increase in appropriations to resident students, but when was the last time state appropriations were increased to any meaningful degree? In fact, not only is it likely that such increases would never happen, but if Harreld was raking in money from massive tuition hikes, the legislature would take note of that increase in revenue and cut funding even more, leading to no net gain for UI.
Note also that Harreld’s plea to raise tuition to the average of Iowa’s peer group is inane. Not only is there never any accounting for the local cost of living in such comparisons, and rarely any accounting for differences in room, board and fees, but the peer group Harreld cited was originally put together over thirty years ago. (Such relative factoring is also the approach to compensation that higher-ed administrators use to enrich themselves at the expense of the schools they are running into the ground.)
After a year and a half on the job, then, all the while using his super-genius business brain to analyze the problems bedeviling higher education, purportedly thinking outside the box in ways that staid academic administrators can only dream of, the only long-term proposal Harreld has come up with is not only the most inside-the-box solution anyone could imagine in higher education, but the details of that plan embody the worst traits of business. Having already savaged students for $30M in tuition hikes in the summer of 2016 — to purportedly cover what would have been a $750K funding shortfall for UI — and having made a naked attempt to steal $4.3M in student scholarships only one month ago, Harreld is now proposing the largest tuition increase in a generation, backed by a promise he will never have to meet. In short, the only ‘vision’ Harreld has demonstrated as president of the University of Iowa is his repeated identification of students as easily exploited economic hostages.
And yet, new ideas are being proposed by people who are genuinely committed to transforming higher education. As the recent political season made clear, there is an understandable appetite for free public higher education, but that idea is no longer in the development stage. Just this week the state of New York approved a plan to implement free higher education for families earning less than $125K per year. In Iowa, that would equate to roughly $85K, and make a huge difference for those students who can least afford to go to college.
Of particular interest in the New York plan is one specific provision, which exploits a glaring opportunity that has been ignored in the state of Iowa:
As I noted in a blog post last November, not only does Iowa saddle its most disadvantaged students with massive amounts of debt — among the highest in the nation — but that debt compels graduates to leave Iowa in search of higher paying jobs. Missing from the conversation, inexplicably, is the idea that graduates could be incentivized to stay in Iowa by offering a decrease in debt contingent on years of residency. Now, here in the New York plan, we see the same thing in reverse: to receive free tuition, which thus involves no debt, students must stay in New York for several years after graduation.
How has that win-win not been the subject of rigorous discussion in Iowa, particularly given the continual outflow of young professionals? Why are Iowa’s state universities preparing young men and women to be successful elsewhere, instead of encouraging resident graduates — who often already have deep ties to the state — to stick around and go into business or raise a family? At some point, as Iowa trends ever older, it will become imperative to retain young people simply to keep the state functioning — let alone to care for all of those elders — and tying debt forgiveness or free college to post-graduation residency accomplishes that goal.
After a year and a half on the job, however, Harreld’s only contribution to the higher-ed conversation is to streak off in the other direction, massively increasing tuition at a rate that will leave less-advantaged students and families far behind, or burdened with crushing debt. Is that what Harreld was hired to do — to turn the University of Iowa into the rich-kids’ school, while Iowa State and the University of Northern Iowa take on the less fortunate? While that’s certainly in keeping with Harreld’s relentless snobbery about world-class this and that, the real tell is that his plan does nothing for the students who will bear those increased costs. Instead, Harreld’s plan exploits a captive market so he can get his grubby hands on as much unrestricted cash as possible, then fund the university-owned for-profit startups that Rastetter, Robillard and Stead almost certainly hired him to initiate. All of which means, at the level of genuine strategic thought regarding the problems facing higher education, that after eighteen months as president, Harreld has proven to be an abject failure.
J. Bruce Harreld and Shared Governance
Whatever benefit Stead, Rastetter, Robillard and Harreld have derived or will yet derive from his fraudulent hire, from the moment of Harreld’s appointment the cost of that brazen betrayal of the UI community began to mount. While there were people who knowingly and unknowingly applauded that premeditated abuse of power by key members of the board, UI administration, and faculty collaborators on the search committee, they all tended to be narrow-bandwidth types like Harreld himself, measuring personal and professional success only through the lens of revenue generation and profit. More money is better, more money is status, more money is power, more money is justification, more money is vindication.
At the same time, there were many more individuals in the UI community who saw education not as an opportunity for economic exploitation but as a public trust and an end in itself, and it would be gross understatement to say that they were not happy with Harreld’s done-deal appointment. From censuring Harreld for his disastrous resume before he even took office, to protests on campus and repeated calls for an investigation by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), outrage was evident even before it became clear that the search itself was corrupt.
Had the search been closed, as the majority of Harreld’s co-conspirators wanted — and shamelessly argued for retroactively, even after Harreld’s fraudulent hire was exposed in the press — there would still have been shock at Harreld’s utterly unqualified appointment. Fortunately, however, despite a trend in that direction among disreputable governing boards across the country, the 2015 UI search was not closed,. (I’m looking at you, North Carolina, and you, Auburn.)
Even as we now know that Rastetter, Robillard and others perverted the 2015 UI search, using it as mere cover for the process by which they elevated their hand-picked, done-deal candidate to the presidency, that search was nevertheless put forward as open, honest and fair. While objections and protests at the outcome were immediately and persistently dismissed by Harreld’s co-conspirators and supporters, and would soon be trivialized and invalidated by Harreld himself over the coming months — including repeatedly intimating that such individuals were mentally unstable — those who opposed Harreld were initially furious because the board clearly breached its professional obligations to the UI community. Specifically, the cornerstone of goodwill between governing boards and the faculty and staff at any institution of higher learning is the concept of shared governance, yet even in the most forgiving light the Harreld appointment was a betrayal of that acknowledged commitment.
While variously interpreted, here is how shared governance is defined on the University of Iowa website:
And, from the linked “Shared Governance in Depth” page:
Perhaps not surprisingly, at the Iowa Board of Regents — which has been corrupted to its core over the past six years by outgoing President Rastetter — shared governance only merited a single mention over the past year, and that only in the rarely-read five-year strategic plan which was just adopted in 2016 [p. 4]. Unfortunately, as noted in multiple prior posts, of the six criteria listed on that same “Core Values” page, under the heading, “We expect Ethical Behavior”, the board routinely violates the majority of those pledges, and did so with giddy disdain during the 2015 UI presidential search. Which is to say that any representation that the current board actually cares about shared governance is a joke.
Because the search was sold as open, honest and fair, it was expected that feedback from the candidate forums would be factored into the board’s final vote, else why even have the candidates appear on campus? And yet, as was clearly apparent on the eve of the vote, the dislike and disapproval of Harreld was so overwhelming as to make his subsequent appointment a de facto betrayal of shared governance. Even if the board genuinely believed Harreld was the most qualified man for the job because of some momentous sea change in higher education, choosing Harreld over any of the other eminently qualified candidates was a breach of the board’s obligations. (It was later learned that as chair of the search, Robillard also disbanded the committee in contravention of both best and past practices, precisely to prevent the members from performing their expected and exhaustive due diligence on the final four candidates.)
The bureaucratic glee exhibited by the regents on the search committee — of which there were three, including Rastetter — was embodied by the following quote from Regents President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland, from a story on 09/25/15, by the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson:
The short version is that Mulholland honored nothing, because as both a member of the search committee and member of the Board of Regents she knew she was betraying shared governance during the search. (For the long version, see here.) For example, Mulholland, Rastetter and three other regents — meaning a majority of the nine-member board, including two regents who were not even on the committee — not only met with Harreld in secret more than a month before the final vote, but from that point on it was a given that Harreld would be appointed if he could be shepherded through the cut-down process. That in turn reduced the selection of semi-finalists and finalists to the level of administrative fraud, which was an inherent betrayal of shared governance.
In the aftermath of Harreld’s appointment, the corrupt core of the board also tried to shield arch-traitor Robillard and even Harreld himself from complicity in that betrayal, but as ever the facts eventually proved otherwise. Not only did Robillard betray the UI campus as both the chair of the search committee and interim president, but moments after his appointment Harreld stepped up to a microphone and told a premeditated, bald-faced lie specifically designed to obscure the conspiracy that had just handed him the presidency. In every conceivable way, Harreld’s appointment was a betrayal of promises put forward by the Board of Regents at the commencement of the 2015 UI search, including promises premised on prior searches and the cornerstone concept of shared governance.
For Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld at Eighteen Months, click here.
Anyone consider the possibility that IDOU had traitors in their midst?!
Iowans Defending Our Universities is awkward Plutocrat-speak rather than normal English phraseology?
What does anyone really know about wannabe Bard Pectorals one of the founders of IDOU?!
Could be a great way to harvest inside info to manage any Harreld protest actions?
Bard himself says there was a mole named Nicola Jardine or Jardim, but I think something was rotten in Denmark. Or I could just be paranoid?!
This is Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld at Eighteen Months. For Part 1, click here.
From the moment of his fraudulent non-traditional hire not only was it expected that Harreld would solve the great problems facing the University of Iowa — which, after a year a half, he has failed even to begin to do — but regardless of his own complicity, he was also obligated to repair the damage to, and demonstrate his commitment to, shared governance. And everyone agreed that such a commitment was critical to Harreld’s long-term success — including Harreld. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 09/03/15 — the day of Harreld’s appointment:
From Harreld’s “Why I Came to Iowa” press release, on 10/13/15:
From a UI press release on 12/03/15, roughly one month after taking office:
As regular readers know, despite promising to hold three town halls per year, Harreld held only one town hall, then abandoned them thereafter. Worse, in a telling foreshadowing of his disingenuous commitment to shared governance, in advance of that solitary town hall Harreld repeatedly trolled those who had opposed his hire, then used their predictable ire at the town hall to excuse himself from any future commitments. It was a passive-aggressive tour de force on Harreld’s part, intensified by earlier findings from an AAUP investigation which supported those who believed his presidency was illegitimate. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 12/10/15:
While the AAUP report was primarily aimed at the Board of Regents — and, unfortunately, inexcusably forgiving of the central role played by UI traitor Jean Robillard — that investigation made clear that Harreld’s appointment was the result of a premeditated violation of shared governance. As such, Harreld had every motivation to walk the walk regarding his own rhetorical commitment to shared governance, yet again and again over the following year and a half he failed to deliver the goods.
From a UI press release on 01/19/16, at the beginning of the spring term:
After making himself largely unavailable to the press and communicating to the greater UI community through press releases, and repeatedly putting off any personal response to the fraud behind his appointment, Harreld billed his first town hall as a chance to finally have an “open” dialogue four months after taking office. And yet, on the day of the event, Harreld reneged on that commitment and instead put the assembled audience through a tedious harangue before taking any questions, which further angered the crowd.
From the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson, on 03/23/16:
At the same event at which he incited rather than quelled outrage about his appointment, Harreld had the audacity to talk about “shared governance on steroids”. In doing so he clearly hoped his sloganeering would be carried to the UI community by members of press, who would also report on the hostile crowd. In that way, by simultaneously putting forward a pretense of civility and antagonizing the audience, Harreld hoped to publicly discredit those who were most aware of his illegitimacy. Fortunately, however, in the age of the internet it was possible for those in attendance to document Harreld’s hypocrisy.
Continuing, from Charis-Carlson’s report:
As already noted, Mr. Commitment bailed on his promise and never held another town hall. He also never walked the walk on shared governance, thought he continued to use that term to describe the hand-picked committees that serve as plausible justification for whatever decisions he has already made. In fact, only a week after his first (and last) town hall, members of the faculty called Harreld out for his repeated failure to deliver on the promise of shared governance.
From the Gazette’s Miller, on 03/04/16:
Just as Harreld attempted to decrease turnout by scheduling his first (and last) town hall at an inconvenient time, two months later, at the end of April, Harreld tried to jam the entire development process for the school’s new five-year strategic plan into a ten-day window at the busy end of the semester. That as opposed to the normal development for such a far-reaching document, which might take a year or more precisely to ensure that all constituencies have a voice. Disinterested in even the pretense of shared governance, Harreld intended to have the new plan completed and ready for implementation at the beginning of the next academic year.
From the Gazette’s Miller, on 04/27/16:
The new strategic plan was finally released six months later, on 12/06/16, yet still in record time. In the press release hailing that achievement, no mention was made of the fact that Harreld initially tried to rush the entire process with little or no input from the UI community. In fact, quite the contrary:
You can see the final version of the UI Strategic Plan as it was originally presented here. You can see a sexier version of the same plan here. So far, the main benefit of completing the plan in record time seems to be that Harreld and Rastetter have been able to use it as a nebulous justification for proposing massive tuition hikes.
One week after Harreld’s attempt to fast-track the strategic plan was rebuffed, on 05/04/16, we took stock of Harreld’s presidency at the six-month mark, and the results were not encouraging. Among a litany of concerns related to temperament, Harreld backed out of his commitment to hold a second town hall before the end of the year, then attempted to technically meet that commitment by dropping in on a campus discussion at the last minute. Adding insult to injury, the very next day the Daily Iowan dropped an interview with Harreld in which he equated feeling insulted at his first (and last) town hall, with having been victimized by hate.
In June, at its national meeting, the AAUP voted to add the University of Iowa to its list of sanctioned institutions, for “for substantial non-compliance with standards of academic government”. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 06/19/16:
Harreld’s response to the AAUP sanction was to say nothing, and instead rely on the former and current presidents of the UI Faculty Senate to lie about the validity of the sanction. At about the same time, Harreld and the regents conspired to raise tuition by tens of millions of dollars on the pretext of what would have been a $750K funding shortfall for UI. As a result, Harreld raked in roughly $30M that students had no say in because the decision was made during summer break, at which point Harreld steered $11M of that money into a strategic slush find over which he has discretionary authority. (Harreld would later find his voice on the subject of the AAUP sanction, but only to the extent that he demonized the organization by feigning confusion about its role on campus.)
Flash forward to early November and the anniversary of Harreld’s first year at Iowa came and went with scant official notice. Perhaps that’s because Harreld spent two weeks celebrating himself in August, at the beginning of the term, culminating in his official installation as the illegitimate president of the school. Still, others did take note of Harreld’s milestone, including the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, who wrote an excellent profile of Harreld after his first year on the job. Incredibly, however, the transformative business genius refused to be interviewed.
From the Gazette’s Miller, on 11/06/16:
Noting Harreld’s reticence to talk about his successes, two members of the UI faculty took him up on his offer and did so in his place. From their letter to the editor in the Press-Citizen, on 11/30/16:
Flash forward another six months and here we are today, with J. Bruce Harreld having had more than ample opportunity to demonstrate his unambiguous commitment to shared governance. And yet, as of a couple of weeks ago, what we find is exactly the opposite. Harreld clearly understands the concept of shared governance — and just as clearly he despises it.
J. Bruce Harreld and the Alumni Association
Two weeks ago, Harreld suddenly announced that he was merging the University of Iowa Alumni Association with the University of Iowa Foundation. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 03/27/17:
Despite Harreld’s edict, however, not only were there no plans in place to carry out the proposed merger, no such plans had even been discussed. Harreld simply announced that it would happen at some point, based on his judgement of what was in the best interest of the university. Harreld also said the new combined organization would be headed by Lynette Marshall, the current president and CEO of the UI Foundation.
Four days later, on 03/31/17, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller added background to the decision, making it clear that shared governance was the last thing on Harreld’s mind during his decision making process.
Miller further noted that the Alumni Association and Foundation are both separate legal entities from the University of Iowa. While Harreld sits on both boards as an ex officio (non-voting) member, and both organizations have no purpose other than to support the University of Iowa, and Harreld is indeed the illegitimate president of the school, as a factual matter he has no legal authority over either organization. More from Miller:
After a year and a half on the job, and after swearing up and down that he would abide by the principle of shared governance in working with the UI community, Harreld took a committee report that said nothing about merging the Alumni Association and the Foundation, and used it as pretext for ordering the boards to combine their offices. No conversation, no forewarning, no explanation — just a command from a man who literally has no legal right to tell either group what to do.
So what’s going on here? Why is Harreld suddenly so insistent on a merger, when that wasn’t one of the conclusions of the report? Whether the two organizations should become one may be well worth pursuing, but not only was that question not debated by the committee, the fact that it was not discussed means no one — including Harreld — asked that it be considered. Yet Harreld is the guy who put the committee together.
In late September of 2016, Harreld similarly announced that the HR department at UI would be reorganized, based on an extensive report completed by a task force he appointed. The chair of that task force, Cheryl Reardon, was subsequently appointed as head of the new HR department, voiding any requirement for the advertising of that position or the conducting of a national search — both in contravention of preferred UI hiring practices. The obvious difference, of course, between Harreld’s HR ploy and his strong-arm tactics with the Alumni Association, is that HR is part of the university proper, and thus under Harreld’s administrative control.
As to the mechanics of the proposed merger, even a fleeting glance at the Alumni Association bylaws makes two things perfectly clear. First, even if Harreld has the votes on the Alumni Association board, the Association will not be merged with the UI Foundation, it will be dissolved, with the Foundation assuming any relevant responsibilities. Second, when the Association is dissolved, “all resources of the Association automatically shall become the property of the State University of Iowa”.
Why is that important? Because of this, as reported by Miller:
Regardless of the operational validity of combining the two non-profits, Harreld gets to take $6M from the Association and put it in his own presidential UI account, along with the $11M he stashed away after the 2016 tuition hikes, and however many millions he’s managed to skim from the UI budget. And that money is exactly what Harreld is looking for anywhere he can find it, because it is unrestricted. Which is also why Harreld tried to illegally shift responsibility for $4.3M in tuition and fees from the university to 3,000+ students and their families at the end of February.
After repeatedly promising to embrace shared governance and learn everything there was to learn about being a “collaborative” (his word) leader of a billion dollar research university, in the past month and a half Harreld has been burning through any remaining goodwill at a ferocious rate. As if that wasn’t enough, why does UI administration keep allowing Harreld to embarrass himself and the school in ways that almost instantly trigger litigation. Only weeks after having to back down in the face of multiple class-action lawsuits for illegally seizing $4.3M in scholarships, Harreld is now compelling the Alumni Association to seek legal counsel in the face of his edict — and rightly so. If alumni who donated to the Association had wanted their money to go to some other purpose, or into Harreld’s presidential pocket, it stands to reason they would have given to the Foundation or directly to the school. Having had absolutely no warning about his intentions, however, the most recent collected dues and donations will now simply be forfeit to Harreld’s unilateral money grab.
Speaking of legal action, where is the Office of the General Counsel in all this? Is Harreld vetting these idiotic plans through that department, or is he freelancing and leaving them in the dark? Admittedly, the choices aren’t good here — either incompetence on the part of the school’s attorneys, or recklessness on the part of Harreld himself — but none of this meets even the lowest bar of legal competence for an institution of UI’s standing.
Note also the order in which Harreld has been making recent moves at the UI Foundation. Both the Association and Foundation share space in the Levitt Center on the UI campus, though the staff of the Foundation is considerably larger — 223 non-UI employees, to 25 UI employees in the Association. Last fall, after pleading overcrowding at the Levitt Center, the Foundation arranged to lease the Riverside Recital Hall from UI, which was to be converted for that purpose. That $5M+ deal was approved by the regents just this past February, giving the Foundation an additional 14,500+ square feet of office space.
Only after that $5M project was approved by the regents did Harreld suddenly propose merging (read: dissolving and replacing) the Association with the Foundation, which means the Foundation also stands to gain any space in the Levitt Center that was previously devoted to the Alumni offices. Had Harreld proposed the merger (dissolution) first, that would have undercut the rationale the Foundation and UI used to justify the leasing of the Recital Hall. (We will take a closer look at that lease in the next post.)
So where is all of this erratic decision making coming from? Is Harreld desperate? Has he given up pretending that he was hired to do anything other than replicate the Emerging Business Opportunities model from IBM, which is why he’s scrounging for unrestricted funds wherever he can find them? Even when doing so means putting UI employees out of work, upending lives, and proving himself to be the autocratic executive his detractors said he would be when his appointment was announced in 2015?
Well, regarding Harreld’s sudden declaration about the Alumni Association, there may indeed be an imperative at work. From Miller’s Gazette report:
As noted earlier, Regents President Rastetter will no longer be on the board at the end of this month. As it happens, the next regular meeting of the Board of Regents is scheduled for April 19 and 20 in Council Bluffs. Just as Rastetter accelerated the timetable for selecting the search firm that will facilitate the Iowa State presidential search, so he himself could make that determination on the way out the door, Harreld may be in a hurry to take advantage of the fact that he still has majority support on the board.
The agenda for those upcoming meetings was posted yesterday, and while there doesn’t seem to be a line item devoted to the UI Foundation or Alumni Association, don’t let that fool you. As we learned in early December of 2015, when Rastetter pulled a fast one granting the Children’s Hospital naming rights to Jerre Stead, meeting agendas can be easily manipulated when there’s something worth hiding.
Still, Harreld’s bald-faced attempt to merge two organizations which are legally separate from the University of Iowa is not without risks, including risks that the Iowa board of Regents may back away from in a hurry. Consider the following ramifications, from a scathing Des Moines Register editorial this past Friday:
As the Register noted, it may well be that there are advantages to combining the two non-profits. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the report prepared by those two groups — at Harreld’s direction — provides a way forward without selling out the Association or its members. If there has been unwanted overlap between the Association and Foundation, then the simplest solution would involve reestablishing clear lines of demarcation, then letting the seasoned and committed professionals at each organization do what they do best.
From Harreld’s point of view, of course, if not also the point of view of the increasingly powerful UI Foundation, that would be less than optimal, but do we really want the Foundation tail wagging the university dog? Read Harreld’s press-release justification for the merger and you will find him throwing around euphemistic terms like ‘engagement’ and ‘development’, all of which devolve to fundraising. Granted, from the point of view of a marketing weasel — which Harreld was at IBM and seems to be at heart — every interaction that does not lead to a ‘conversion’ is seen as a waste, but is that true? Do alumni want to be hounded for money during every interaction with their alma mater, or is there a place for something else?
Leaving aside motive, and looking at Harreld’s scholarship grab and his unilateral dissolution of the Alumni Association from a bureaucratic perspective only, by any measure Harreld’s machinations in those two instances are the definition of administrative incompetence. Whether you support or oppose those decisions, the way Harreld went about them — including having someone slip text into the UI website to substantiate a non-existent right to void $4.3M in already awarded scholarships — supports the contention that Harreld was the wrong man for the job in 2015. The real nightmare, however, is that whether Harreld lasts another six months or the remaining three and a half years on his current contract, this is as good as it is ever going to get. After a year and a half on the job, J. Bruce Harreld just spent the last month and a half trying to pilfer more than $10M through administrative larceny, and in both instances his actions triggered a public relations backlash and a legal response from his intended victims.
When Harreld was hired there was unanimity on one point. If he did not have the support of the UI community, he would fail. Give him a chance, people said.
What we learned in the first six months of Harreld’s tenure is that he does not have the temperament to be a university president. His pugnacious instinct and combative private-sector style led to one gaffe after another, until Harreld was no longer able to speak to the local press or hold a simple town hall. Over the next six months Harreld floated big ideas like taking money from athletics — which not only never happened, but predictably spurred the Athletics Department to spend like crazy so as to be perpetually broke — yet on closer inspection all of his big ideas turned out to have been previously articulated by someone else.
Over the past six months, with Harreld’s mentoring and coaching capacity long-since realized, not only has Harreld put forward no transformative vision for the school, but even in attempting to demonstrate his vaunted executive judgment he proved himself a fool. Specifically, last December, when it was known that the long-established move-in date for the new Children’s Hospital was going to slip, Harreld went out of his way to explain how such dates ought to be handled, only to get it wrong himself. And that’s despite giving himself three additional months to finish the project, and a three-week target window instead of a specific date.
One and one half years into his tenure at the University of Iowa, what we see from J. Bruce Harreld not only makes clear that he was not and is not the right man for the job, his performance to-date calls into question the very premise of his hire. Instead of building consensus, embracing shared governance and demonstrating ethics, transparency and fairness in his leadership, Harreld acts impulsively, erratically and secretively, and in so doing undermines the very constituencies he purportedly represents. While it’s a given that Harreld’s earliest supporters and ongoing collaborators on campus will never admit their mistake, and will inevitably blame his eventual failure on everyone but Harreld himself, it is clear from Harreld’s repeated unforced errors that those who opposed his appointment have been proven right.
As of today, after eighteen months on the job, not only is J. Bruce Harreld not moving the University of Iowa forward, but contrary to what he said when he was first hired, he is the single biggest obstacle to Iowa’s future success. I have no idea what it takes to initiate a vote of no confidence in a university president, but if that isn’t already being contemplated, it should be. Even if Harreld has been savvy enough to avoid a head-on fight with faculty, between the AAUP sanction and his abuses of power, and repeatedly victimizing the students and now also members of the staff, he is rapidly devaluing the reputation of the school, and it is time for him to go.
I’m having a hard time finding precise timelines. Did Harreld know Richard Mercer, the Republican moneyman and hedge fund manager at IBM?
The obsession with Big Data might fit.
I didn’t know this until I looked up the name, but I think you mean Robert Mercer — the same guy who bankrolled Trump’s PAC during the campaign.
According to Wikipedia, Mercer left IBM in 1993, which was two years before Harreld was hired. That doesn’t mean they didn’t know each other, of course, but there doesn’t seem to be any direct overlap.
One other person that Harreld (or his wife) may have intersected with at some point is SCOTUS asterisk Neil Gorsuch, who was apparently the legal protegee of a very wealthy and reclusive Coloradan, who would also certainly have known Jerre Stead. (Harreld’s wife was an attorney in Colorado for many years, and Harreld was second banana at Boston Chicken — a Colorado company.)
I’m not big on conspiracy theories, but at this point if you told me all of these people used to get together to plot the overthrow of the civilized world, it wouldn’t surprise me.
As you may have heard or read recently, and as discussed toward the conclusion of the previous two-part post, the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, just ordered the UI Alumni Association and UI Foundation to merge. In Harreld’s relatively brief but already checkered stewardship of the university, that was a particularly damning moment because at least one of the boards had no idea such an order was forthcoming, despite having just completed a joint committee report at Harreld’s request. Blindsided by Harreld’s declaration, the Alumni Association — which is staffed by UI employees, but is a separate legal entity governed by an independent board — may seek legal advice on behalf of its 50,000 members and $6M endowment.
As noted in that prior post, while Harreld is the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa, and thus does have authority over the school in that spurious capacity, both the Association and Foundation are separate legal entities. Harreld does have an ex-officio (non-voting) seat on each board, but literally has no legal authority to command a merger. Making matters worse, in arguing for the merger Harreld and his crack staff cherry-picked examples from a number of schools that have gone down that same road, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Only when we look up how UW actually went about orchestrating their merger, we find this:
The UI Foundation board and leadership have not publicly stated whether Harreld’s announcement caught them off guard as well, but there are a number of crony associations which would suggest it did not. The leadership and board of the Alumni Association, however, were not only caught flat-footed, the Association staff are also the ones who will bear the brunt of any changes that are made. In return for moving the functions of the Alumni Association under the authority of the UI Foundation, Harreld has promised only to make sure that affected staff have other “employment opportunities“, which is far less than a guarantee of continuing employment, let alone employment with the University of Iowa.
J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Foundation
Because both the Association and Foundation exist solely to serve the needs of the university proper, it is understandable that most people do not know those organizations are legally separate non-profits. In fact, on public campuses across the country such organizations often do everything they can to obscure their separate legal status, making themselves appear indistinguishable from the institutions of higher education which they serve. Not surprisingly, however, such organizations are also never shy about asserting those very same legal distinctions when it serves their purpose, and quite often that purpose involves keeping secrets on behalf of the university. For example, because the UI Foundation is a private non-profit, it has no obligation to disclose whether or not its board or leadership knew about Harreld’s merger proposal in advance, whether it conspired with Harreld to implement that merger, or whether it has already decided what will happen to the Association’s university employees after the merger.
With regard to the legally separate, private, non-profit UI Foundation, the University of Iowa seems to do a better job than other public schools of maintaining some plausible separation between the two. Unlike Iowa State, for example, where the president is a full member of the board and its de facto leader — despite the ISU Foundation also retaining a six-figure CEO-slash-president to handle day-to-day operations — as already noted, the president at Iowa is only an ex-officio member of the Foundation’s governing board. Unfortunately, of course, that says nothing about any long-standing nod-and-wink tradition that may exist between the UI president’s office and the six-figure CEO-slash-president of the UI Foundation, both of whom profit from any legal plausible deniability.
Because of the inherent secrecy of university foundations, and even public universities themselves, it is often impossible to hold the leadership at UI or the UI Foundation accountable for their actions, let alone for any dealings between the two. Combine the complexity of UI as an organization with Harreld’s persistent predilection for deception, and as noted in multiple prior posts it is impossible to have faith in any financial numbers that are reported, even though UI is a public school. Add the UI Foundation’s omnipresent desire to keep information about donors and donations private, and it is almost never the case that the general public, or even the UI community, knows what is happening behind the parade of pasted-on smiles and cha-ching handshakes.
Recently, at the same time that Harreld was trying to seize $4.3M in already awarded scholarships, the Foundation completed a $1.95B fundraising campaign. In attempting to justify his theft of those scholarships on the basis of legislative funding cuts, Harreld repeatedly asserted that all of the money at the Foundation was restricted to specific causes, when in fact Harreld and the Foundation knew that statement was false. True to form, however, as a distinct and private entity the Foundation had no comment about Harreld’s lie.
For that and other reasons, it should not be surprising that people are often dubious about any dealings between those two organizations, even as such dealing are purportedly always in the best interest of the school. As for the university itself, whether talking about the funding of scholarships or campus projects, UI administrators routinely cherry-pick data, omit critical information, and generally play a shell game with the school’s finances while purporting to be a transparent public institution. Other than Harreld’s repeated lies about tuition and legislative funding, which are relatively easy to expose because there is so much reporting on those issues, it is almost impossible to evaluate even the simplest of financial claims because critical information is always missing.
For example, when Harreld backed out of the agreed-upon deal to build the new UI Museum of Art — which was to have been a public-private partnership (P3) sited on the boundary between campus and downtown Iowa City — it was impossible to know if Harreld’s justification for doing so was valid because the full details of the project were never made public. To be sure, however, Harreld claimed that he cancelled the project not on a whim, but because of his super-savvy business judgment:
As you can see, without specifics it’s impossible to know if Harreld made the right decision. What was the “embedded interest rate implicit”? What was the value of the undeveloped land? What were the specific terms and obligations of the lease? How much would the property have been worth when UI finally took ownership?
The entire premise of J. Bruce Harreld’s illegitimate appointment in 2015 was that as a former business executive he was perfectly positioned to make the most advantageous financial decisions for UI in an increasingly tough funding environment. Sure, Harreld knew nothing about, and — as attested to by his blatant disregard for shared governance in blindsiding the Alumni Association board — clearly still knows nothing about academic administration, but in terms of the bottom line, UI should profit from his expertise. And yet, between egregious tuition hikes premised on a pretext in the summer of 2016, trying to pilfer $4.3M from students and their families in the winter of 2017, and now trying to seize the $6M endowment of the Alumni Association in the spring of 2017, Harreld bears more resemblance to an administrative pirate than a president. Argh.
Again, not only don’t we know any details of the planned merger — or, more accurately, of the dissolution of the Association and the assumption of any remaining responsibilities by the Foundation — but Harreld has acknowledged that he has no plan. Instead, he simply asserts that efficiencies and benefits will accrue from putting the Foundation in charge of all alumni “engagement”, which is the academic term for incessant fundraising. While ruminating about the Foundation, however, I recalled another recent deal that it made with UI, which did include specifics as required by regental oversight. When I went back and looked at the source documents more closely, I realized that for the first time not only could I clearly see the structure of one of UI’s deals, but despite claims about Harreld’s business savvy the terms of that deal did not seem to be particularly advantageous to the University of Iowa. In fact, to the contrary, Harreld seemed to have cut a sweetheart deal which benefited the UI Foundation the most, including potentially leaving UI on the hook for millions of dollars in remodeling costs.
The Riverside Recital Hall Remodel as Project
The basic rule of college and university foundations is that they exist to serve their associated institutions, meaning any funds are to flow from foundations to the schools they support, not the other way around. With regard to public higher education that’s a particularly important distinction, because a good deal of the money involved in running a public college or university comes from state taxpayers. As concerns the state-funded University of Iowa, this rule is codified in the Operations Manual:
4.6 The University of Iowa Foundation
(Amended 11/01; 7/13)
Follow the footnoted links and you enter policy-manual hell, but still — the basic premise is unambiguous. The UI Foundation takes money in and funnels it to the school, not the other way around. As a separate entity — “legally, organizationally, and operationally” — that also means it is up to the Foundation to cover its costs and handle its business and to otherwise make sure it can keep doing the job of supporting the university. It is not up to UI to help the Foundation do its work, or to mitigate the Foundation’s cost of doing that work, because doing so would necessarily mean that money — whether in assets or resources — was was flowing from the university to the Foundation.
In late summer of 2016, the University of Iowa put out a Request For Qualifications to remodel the Riverside Recital Hall, which would no longer be needed as a performance space when the new and much larger, multi-functional Voxman Music Building opened in the fall. From an addendum to the original RFQ:
The first thing to note here, which is so obvious it’s easy to overlook, is that the University of Iowa was not converting the Riverside Recital Hall for general use, or for leasing to the highest bidder, but specifically for the UI Foundation. In a very real sense UI was acting on behalf of the Foundation, even though the Foundation is — legally — an entirely separate organization. (To the extent that the relationship between UI and the Foundation is exclusive, such a deal obviously makes sense in terms of practicalities, but as a legal matter UI is separate from the Foundation.)
Continuing, from the addendum:
As you can see, this is also not a generic remodel. From the addendum it is clear that by summer of 2016 the university and Foundation have already had far-reaching discussions not only about using the Riverside Recital Hall, but about how that space will be remodeled specifically for the Foundation’s needs. There is no mention of any other tenant being considered, or of any advertising or bidding process having taken place.
In October of 2016, the University of Iowa formally approached the Iowa Board of Regents for permission to move ahead with the remodeling, which was required because the cost of the project crossed the board’s $5M threshold for capital improvements. Flash forward to this past February, and the university once again approached the board, this time for permission to move ahead with the bidding and construction process. (That request was taken up at the regent meetings on February 22nd and 23rd, and the minutes show that the request passed. UI Facilities Planning currently shows a pre-bid date of 04/20/17 — meaning now — and a bid date of 05/02/17.)
The Riverside Recital Hall Remodel as Deal
In advance of the February 22-23 regent meetings, two .pdf files describing the Riverside Recital Hall Remodel were included among the posted agenda items. The first and larger of the two .pdf’s detailed specifics of the project, including artist’s renderings of the finished space, and this:
In exchange for UI fronting $5.4M in design and construction costs, thereby converting the former recital hall into “a highly functional and attractive office environment for the University of Iowa Foundation”, the money for that remodel would be “recaptured through a lease with the Foundation”. (As to what the “Treasurer’s Temporary Investment Income” is, I have been unable to find any information about that fund.) A bit later in the same document, we find a more detailed explanation of the scope of the remodel, along with additional specifics about the costs, and the recovery of those costs from the Foundation lease:
A couple of things to note here. First, where it says, “The interior requires a full renovation…”, that’s only true because UI already committed to converting the Riverside Recital Hall into office space specifically tailored to the needs of the Foundation. While the building itself does need some maintenance, the only reason the remodel will cost $5.4M is because UI is turning a recital hall into a snazzy new office building. Also note that three quarters of a million dollars is budgeted for furniture, which is clearly not part of remodeling the building. Another three quarters of a million is also set aside for contingency, making it seem very much as if the University of Iowa is funding not only the preparation of the physical space, but the full project, thus providing a furnished, turn-key solution to the Foundation’s overcrowding problems at the Levitt Center.
Second, note the bit at the end, where it is again asserted that the $5.4M cost of the project will be “recouped through a lease with the Foundation”. In terms of dollars out and dollars in that seems to make sense. UI fronts $5.4M, acts as the project developer, then gets its money back via a long-term lease. And yet, when we look at the smaller of the two .pdf’s, which actually details the lease, that’s not what we find:
Again, a couple of things to note here. First, in further explaining the purpose of the remodel, it is clear that this Foundation annex will not be used for client-facing business, but rather “back-of-house functions”. Yet if you look at the artist’s renderings in the larger of the two .pdf’s [p. 8-16], it is equally clear that the Foundation is getting a very spiffy remodel for the $5.4M that they will purportedly repay UI through their long-term lease.
While it’s hard to know what $5.4M in facility upgrades buys these days, there was a story recently about $7M worth of remodeling and upgrades that will take place at Burge Hall over the next three years, and comparing the two projects is instructive. Where the Riverside Recital Hall is 14,637 square feet, Burge is 350,000 square feet — or 2,400% larger. By contrast, the $7M budget for Burge is only 30% larger than the $5.4M remodeling budget for the much smaller Recital Hall. Or, put another way, the University of Iowa is paying $20 per square foot to remodel the entirety of Burge Hall for the thousand-plus students who live there, and $369 per square foot to remodel the Riverside Recital Hall for 44 employees who handle back-office functions at the UI Foundation.
Second, as to the specifics of the deal between UI and the Foundation there is a lot of information, but note also what’s missing. While the larger .pdf contains two statements about UI recouping or recapturing its $5.4M outlay from the Foundation’s long-term lease, nowhere in the smaller .pdf — which details the lease — does it say UI will be repaid in full. In fact, if we run the numbers included in the smaller .pdf, we find that the terms of the lease do not guarantee that UI will get its $5.4M back. UI will still have a sexy new office suite for itself, or any other customer who might want to lease the property, but as to recouping or recapturing the $5.4M that UI is fronting for the Foundation remodel, that is not assured.
The Riverside Recital Hall Lease in Detail
As noted earlier, while the University of Iowa is a public school, and thus subject to all kinds of mandatory disclosure requirements, it is often impossible to determine even the basic contours of a specific deal. Minimal as the information in the lease .pdf might be, then, it still represents a lode compared to most deals announced by UI. Specifically, from that small document we can pull the following information:
* The size of the Riverside Recital Hall is 14,637 square feet.
* Following the remodel, the UI Foundation will be locked into a ten-year lease, after which the Foundation will have three five-year renewal options.
* When ready for occupancy, for the first five years the Foundation will pay $18,225 per month, or $218,700 per year, to lease the Recital Hall from UI.
* At the end of five years the cost of the lease will increase 2% for the remaining five years of the ten-year lease, and 2% for any five-year option.
When we crunch the numbers we find that over the initial five-year period the cost of the lease will be $1,093,500. After five years the cost will increase 2% to $18,590 per month, or $223,080 per year, Over the second five-year term the lease will bring in an additional $1,115,400.
Whatever you do or do not know about remodeling and leasing office space, the first problem with the particulars of this deal should be obvious. After blowing $5.4M on remodeling and upgrading the Recital Hall for the UI Foundation, with the stated expectation that the full cost of that $5.4M will be recaptured or recouped through a lease with the Foundation, the proposed lease agreement only obligates the Foundation to lease the building for ten years at a fixed cost of $2,208,900. After that initial ten year obligation, the Foundation can walk away from the lease, effectively leaving UI on the hook for the remaining $3,186,100.
Again, UI would still have a very nice building to use or lease, but without the Foundation’s remodeling requirements it is also likely that UI would not have spent that $5.4M at all — or at least not the majority of it, aside from repairs to the roof and normal maintenance and upkeep. Instead, the Recital Hall may have been used for theater, vocal or music practice, or simply mothballed until needed, meaning that $5.4M from the Treasurer’s Temporary Investment Income could have been used for other critical needs. (The idea that a $5.4M outlay from a ‘temporary’ fund will not even be halfway repaid after an entire decade also strains credulity.)
If we extend the Foundation lease through the three five-year options, and increase the lease 2% at each juncture, here’s what we get over the full twenty-five-year term:
1st 5 years: $18,225/mo; $218,700/yr; $1,093,500/5 yrs; $1,093,500 total.
2nd 5 years: $18,590/mo; $223,080/yr; $1,115,400/5 yrs; $2,208,900 total.
3rd 5 years: $18,962/mo; $227,544/yr; $1,137,720/5 yrs; $3,346,620 total.
4th 5 years: $19,341/mo; $232,092/yr; $1,160,460/5 yrs; $4,507,080 total.
5th 5 years: $19,728/mo; $236,736/yr; $1,183,680/5 yrs; $5,690,760 total.
As you can see, only if the UI Foundation sticks around for the full quarter-century will UI recover it’s $5.4M remodeling investment. That would include a little less than $300,000 in paper profit ($5,690,760 – $5,395,000 = $295,760), over the final year-and-a-third or so, yielding a sizzling 0.21% annualized return over that period. That’s assuming inflation plays no part in the financial picture, however, which would of course be against historical norms. (If inflation runs an average of 2% per year over the next twenty-five years, UI would need to be paid $6.9M in lease payments to equal $5.4M in today’s money. And even that fails to account for the opportunity cost of that $5.4M, whether devoted to some other project, or simply invested or put out at interest over that time.)
Our ability to fully evaluate the proposed lease is complicated by the fact that we cannot compare the lease rate per remodeled square foot to the lease rate as the Recital Hall is now. One thing we can say is that the lease rate would not be $0 per square foot, meaning the quoted $14.95 is itself only partly related to the $5.4M remodeling costs. A related problem is that we don’t know how much of the $5.4M in remodeling costs to assign to UI, and how much to assign to the Foundation.
When leasing commercial space the cost of the lease is determined by the ‘rental rate’ of a given facility. By industry convention the rental rate of industrial facilities is generally quoted at a per-month rate per square foot, while office and retail space is quoted at a per-year rate per square foot. So where UI’s lease to the Foundation says the lease rate will be “$14.95 per square foot per year”, in industry parlance that is the rental rate UI will be charging for that space, after the remodeling is completed.
As you might imagine, in any lease in which improvements are made as part of the deal, the specifics of who pays for what can involve protracted negotiations. That includes all of the details about who will actually make the changes, and how the design and construction budget may affect the total price, including the price of the lease payments. Because we only have the broad strokes of the Recital Hall remodel and lease, we don’t know who will be on the hook for change orders or delays, and that only adds to our uncertainty. Still, because we do know the as-is lease rate for the Recital Hall would not be $0, and the fully remodeled price will be “$14.95 per square foot per year”, that allows us to make a few assumptions.
We can get some idea of what rental rates are in and around Iowa City by looking at the listings on this page. Some of the ads are more industrial than commercial, some more retail than office space, but we can still get a sense of what brand-new, custom-designed office space might go for per square foot, and at the very least $14.95 seems like a good deal — particularly given the prime location next to the Levitt Center. As to what the lease price might be without the remodeling, from comparables around Iowa City for low-end office/warehouse space a rental rate of $5 seems low, $10 seems high, so we’ll go with $7.50 — or half the $14.95 remodeled rental rate.
Even if we generously slashed the amount of the remodeling the Foundation was responsible for in half, from $5.4M to $2.7M, that would still be more than the Foundation was obligated to pay over the locked-in ten years of the lease at the $14.95 rental rate. In order to be guaranteed of breaking even for that $2.7M in upgrades, the rental rate would have to be closer to $20 per square foot over that locked-in decade. (14,637 square feet @ $20 per square foot per year = $292,740 per year, or $1,463,700 for the first five year term, or roughly $3M over ten years.)
Again, because we don’t know the specifics of the negotiations that went into the remodeling contract or lease price — or even if any negotiations took place — we can’t fully gauge the propriety of the deal. Still, we do have to two ways to assess the project which give us a strong indication that the deal between UI and the Foundation is favorable to the Foundation, despite the fact that money is supposed to flow from the Foundation to UI. In effect, by remodeling the Riverside Recital Hall for the Foundation, including fronting the cost of all of the upgrades and furniture, UI is providing a considerable subsidy to the Foundation.
For example, imagine that UI was remodeling and leasing the Riverside Recital Hall to a private, for-profit company that also needed additional office space. In that context, it’s not hard to imagine that UI would have argued that as much as $5M of the $5.4M budget was the result of changes requested by the lessee, perhaps eventually settling on $4.5M in order to close the deal. That gives us the following budget:
As for the rental rate, high-end, furnished office space would almost certainly command $20 per square foot or more, producing $292,740 during the first year as compared to $218,700 under the terms of the Foundation lease. It is also unlikely that UI would only increase the rent once every five years. Assuming instead a 2% increase each year, at the end of the first five years UI would have made $1,523,430 instead of $1,183,680 under the Foundation lease. And yet despite all of those changes — decreasing the budget by $1M, and raising the rental rate by $5 per square foot — it would still take take more than ten years for lease payments to equal the cost of the upgrades and remodeling.
In truth, the Foundation lease is not simply a sweetheart deal or even a bad deal, but a shady deal between UI and the Foundation. It is a sweetheart deal because UI is only charging a rental rate of $14.95, on a facility that could probably fetch $7.50 per square foot without any significant alternations, and $20 or more per square foot fully furnished ad remodeled to custom specs. It’s a bad deal because the opt-out after ten years means UI could end up on the hook for $2M or more that was spent on behalf of the foundation, which the Foundation is not obligated to pay back. It’s a shady deal because in the documents which were submitted to the Iowa Board of Regents in order to secure approval, the larger design .pdf states in multiple instances that the $5.4M cost will be recouped or recaptured through a lease to the Foundation, yet there is no language in the smaller lease .pdf which obligates the Foundation to pay that amount.
The fact that the lease contains an opt-out for the Foundation after ten years means the university is exposed to a potential loss on the deal, and that exposure confers a financial benefit to the UI Foundation. There is also no question that the Foundation is being given a preferred rental rate to go along with UI funding the project, the cost of which will be recouped only if the Foundation re-ups for the three option periods and continues to pay on the lease for twenty-five years. Again, that’s a big problem because money — in whatever form — is supposed to flow from the Foundation to UI, yet in the Riverside Recital Hall remodel UI could easily end up subsidizing costs incurred by the Foundation.
The Levitt Center Lease
It may well be that there are financial benefits to the University of Iowa from showing favoritism to the UI Foundation. By subsidizing the Foundation’s operating costs, the Foundation can devote more money to shaking down donors on behalf of the school, which is of course the whole point of the Foundation. Still, any money (or resources) the university uses to decrease the cost of doing business for the Foundation has to come from somewhere, including taxpayer-funded state allocations.
As attested to by UI’s recently concluded $1.95B fundraising campaign, the Foundation is an increasingly valuable resource in the face of dwindling legislative appropriations. Unfortunately, however, blurring the legal divide between UI and its Foundation is not without considerable risk, meaning it is in everyone’s long-term benefit to make sure the lines of demarcation remain clear. Specifically, the UI Foundation should cover its own costs without benefiting from its association with UI, else there may come a time when the courts decide that the Foundation is not a legally separate entity, but part of the state-funded school. That’s a danger because in that situation all of the crony business, backroom deals and outright payoffs that may be funneled through the Foundation would be subject to the same public reporting requirements which apply to the school. And that’s not an idle threat.
As noted in another prior post, in 2005 the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the ISU Foundation was performing a government function in its service to Iowa State, and as a result its records were “‘public records’ subject to examination”. While foundations at the regent schools have figured out ways to evade that ruling in many instances, if it could be shown that the UI Foundation was actually subsidized by UI, instead of standing on its own financial footing, future legal action could collapse any pretense of separation entirely.
Because the Riverside Recital Hall remodel was my first foray into business dealings between UI and its Foundation, I found myself wondering whether the terms of that lease were atypical. To that end I dug through the Iowa Board of Regents website, trying to find similar transactions at the University of Iowa, and lo and behold I found one. Fortuitously, information about the Levitt Center itself — which UI also owns and leases to the UI Foundation, and which the Foundation has purportedly outgrown, necessitating the Recital Hall remodel — was still available.
The Levitt Center for University Advancement was built in 1998, meaning the building itself is still quite new despite the fact that Foundation staff are spilling out of the doors and windows. Sited up the hill from the Iowa River, it escaped the 2008 floods that ravaged a number of campus buildings along the banks, including Hancher Auditorium and the University of Iowa Museum of Art. At 118,348 square feet, the Levitt Center is eight times larger than the Riverside Recital Hall, and currently houses the UI Foundation, the Alumni Association, Alumni Services, Iowa Alumni Magazine and the I-Club offices.
In 2004 the UI Foundation requested that UI ask the Board of Regents to allow for an advanced refunding of the bonds that were originally sold to partially pay for the construction of the Levitt Center. That request was made because it was believed future interest rates would allow the UI Foundation to reduce its lease payments after the old bonds were retired and new debt was issued. From a May 2004 memo from the board office to the board, commenting on the subsequent request for $10M in new bonds to cover and restructure the remaining debt [p. 1]:
While no specific dollar amounts are mentioned, here we have what seems to be the same kind of deal the Foundation just struck for the Riverside Recital Hall remodel, except at a much larger scale. For context, note that the Levitt Center was only partially paid for with debt, donations and other support covering the remainder. Also, note that the Foundation is paying a rental rate based not on a fixed price per square foot as determined by comparables in the local market — or even just a made-up number — but that the rental rate is tied to the cost of servicing the debt. (Thus the desire on the part of the Foundation to reduce those payments.)
From p. 3 of the same memorandum:
As of this year, the Levitt Center lease between UI and the Foundation is expected to run another 29 years. Like the Recital Hall Lease there is an opt-out ten years after the bonds are retired [see p. 7 of this doc], but in the Levitt Center lease it is the Board of Regents which has the right to give the Foundation the boot. Unlike the Recital Hall deal, the Foundation does not seem to have any out prior to 2046.
From p. 4:
Here we learn — perhaps not surprisingly — that the bulk of the money that will be used to make the Foundation’s lease payments, meaning the servicing of any outstanding debt, will come from donations to the Foundation. In the event that such donations do no cover the cost of the lease payments, however, the Foundation will draw on its reserves to remain in good standing as a tenant. What happens after the bonds are paid off, if there are still years left on the lease?
Continuing, from p. 4:
Now, again — I know nothing about commercial real estate, but starting in 2019 it sure looks like the UI Foundation will be renting the entire 118,348 square-foot Levitt Center for $1,000 dollars a year, or a rental rate of $0.0084 dollars per square foot. While the “payable in advance” clause suggests the Foundation may not have gotten everything it wanted in whatever heated negotiations took place, still — $1,000 per year, for an office building this size?
Even acknowledging that the Foundation has to pay for maintenance and upkeep, and in advance, that annual $1,000 payment strikes me as quite a windfall. For comparison’s sake, on the open market UI could probably get $15-$20 per square foot, meaning a yearly lease would bring in somewhere between $1,775,220 and $2,366,960. Or, put another way, each year from 2019 to 2046, the University of Iowa will be subsidizing the cost of UI Foundation office space between $1,774,220 and $2,365,960.
In 2019 there will still be 27 years left on the Levitt Center lease, which currently obligates the Foundation to pay a grand total of $27,000, plus maintenance and upkeep, through 2046. This contrasts with $47,930,940 to $63,907,920 in lease payments that the University of Iowa (or Board of Regents) would receive if the Levitt Center were leased at anything close to its fair-market rental rate. (A related question is whether the UI Foundation sublets space to the Alumni Association, or any of the other organizations in the building, further reducing its costs.)
Finally, a footnote about this, as quoted above from p. 4:
Even as J. Bruce Harreld was attempting to fleece students and their families out of $4.3M in scholarship funds to compensate for unexpected funding cuts, he was squawking incessantly about how the billion-plus dollars in the UI Foundation could not be used toward that end, because every last penny was already committed to some other purpose. While it was clear at the time that he was lying –, as alluded to in a Des Moines Register editorial about that scam — in this board memo we not only find that the board itself expected that there would be “unrestricted net revenues and unrestricted fund balances” at the Foundation, meaning money which could be directed to the Foundation’s Levitt Center lease if need be, but the likelihood of such funds was deemed so high as to constitute an acceptable secondary guarantee of the Foundation’s ability to pay.
When business-genius and illegitimate UI president J. Bruce Harreld blew up the P3 deal for the new UI Museum of Art, he purportedly did so because he did not like the “embedded interest rate implicit”. Whatever that project might have cost UI, however, it’s hard to imagine the university would have been fleeced any worse than it will be — or the regents will be — by charging the Foundation $1,000 per year to lease a 118,348 square-foot building for the next 27 years. By any fair-market measure, the rental rate/lease payments for the Levitt Center over that time should bring in $45M to $60M or more, which means the deal the Foundation struck has nothing to do with fair-market value.
Legally, Organizationally, and Operationally Separate
What should be clear from this post is that money is not simply flowing from the Foundation to UI, as it should, but also in the other direction. Giving the Foundation an insanely cheap rental rate of less than a penny per square foot on the Levitt Center, starting in 2019, means the millions that would have been generated by leasing that space at fair-market value will have to come from somewhere else. Conceivably, such a deal could call into question the tax status of the Foundation, or leave the Foundation open to taxes and penalties on anything from unreported income to bartered services, because that rental rate is a literal gift. (It is also possible that any lease payments which were or are tied to servicing the debt were or are below the fair-market rental rate for office space equivalent to the Levitt Center.)
Unfortunately, once you start looking into the cozy relationship between UI and the UI Foundation, the purported separation asserted by the UI Operations Manual quickly fades. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/31/17:
As noted earlier, foundations often go out of their way to represent themselves as a de facto part of the college or university they serve. There seems to be a kind of nod and wink about such administrative deception, yet that is also not without risk. Present yourself in a particular light for long enough, and one day a court may rule that you have legally become what you represented yourself to be, or that you have misrepresented yourself in a way that is actionable.
While the UI Foundation’s 233 staff are not UI employees, if you consult the Foundation staff directory you will note two things of interest. First, only 95 names are listed, meaning a majority of the staff — some 138 souls — are unaccounted for. Second, of the 95 names which are listed, the vast majority — fully 86 individuals, including the president-slash-CEO and all of senior management — have email addresses ending in ‘uiowa.edu’. Only 9 people listed in the staff directory of the UI Foundation have email addresses ending in ‘uifoundation.org’.
Given that no one at the UI Foundation is an employee of the University of Iowa, why do the vast majority of employees at the Foundation — or at least the vast majority of the minority listed in the staff directory — have a University of Iowa email address? Do emails from the Foundation include disclosure about this subterfuge, perhaps in footnoted privacy text? Are Foundation employees obligated to disclose their legal standing in their initial contact, or are they allowed to wait until later, after the hook is in deep? Or maybe they’re not required to mention it at all, as long as the distinction is noted in the teeny-tiny fine print on whatever document the Foundation eventually convinces donors to sign, based in part on that false representation.
Again, from the University of Iowa Operations Manual:
At the beginning of this post we noted that J. Bruce Harreld is justifying his extra-legal merger of the Alumni Association with the Foundation because others schools — among them, the University of Wisconsin — made similar changes, albeit with considerably more finesse. Well, let’s assume for the moment that the good people at Wisconsin know what they’re doing, and take a look at what the UW System has to say about maintaining separation between that university and its numerous foundations, precisely so those foundations won’t be ruled “quasi-governmental corporation[s] subject to the open meetings and public records laws”:
Given what we now know about the Riverside Recital Hall remodel and the Levitt Center lease, it is self-evident that neither deal between UI and the Foundation was negotiated at arm’s-length. For the Recital Hall, the fact that the Foundation can walk away after ten years, leaving UI on the hook for millions of dollars in improvements that it would not have undertaken otherwise, is indefensible, if not also the definition of fiduciary incompetence. For the Levitt Center, agreeing to lease the entire building to the Foundation for $1,000 for multiple decades is a flat-out giveaway — a subsidy — that will easily exceed $50M.
At a time when every penny counts to such a degree that the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, was recently caught trying to steal $4.3M in scholarship money from students and their families, Harreld is obligated to show that all of his dealings with the UI Foundation are comparable to arm’s-length transactions with any other private business. What is the fair-market lease price for the Riverside Recital Hall without any improvements? How does a rental rate of $14.95 per square foot for custom-designed, high-end, furnished office space compare to rents in the private sector? Will UI be putting the furniture out for bid, or will this be another one of those crony no-bid UI furniture contracts? Who agreed to give the UI Foundation an out on the Recital Hall lease after ten years, when less than half of the cost of the remodeling will have been recovered, recouped or recaptured? And as long as we’re on the subject, what is the ’embedded interest rate implicit’ in that deal, and who’s paying it?
As for the Levitt Center lease, what would the competitive rental rate be for 118,348 square feet of prime office space, in a twenty-year-old building situated near a brand-new, cutting-edge auditorium, and a lovely city park? While UI can opt out of that lease, it can do so only ten years after the bonds have paid off [p. 7], which would be 2029 at the earliest — and then only after giving three years’ notice. For that locked-in decade, UI will be obligated to lease the entire Levitt Center to the Foundation for $1,000 per year, which is clearly not fair-market value.
On that point, why isn’t Harreld pressing the Foundation to voluntarily void that lease? If he can force the Foundation and Alumni Association to merge without any legal standing to do so, based on a plan that does not yet exist, for reasons which the university has categorically stated have nothing to do with financial savings, why isn’t Harreld going all-out to secure the $15M to $20M that UI will lose during that ten-year moratorium? And while he’s at it, why doesn’t Harreld void the Riverside Recital Hall remodel before that project is bid, which he clearly does have the authority to do? He could then cut a new, Wisconsin-style arm’s-length deal with the Foundation, including omitting the Foundation’s ten-year opt-out, so it cannot leave UI on the hook for millions of dollars.
Because it was almost certainly overlooked in the crush of trial and tabloid news this week, I want to flag a story from Tuesday that will become increasingly important in the months and years ahead. Belying its apparent banality, this particular story gives us the first visibility we have had into J. Bruce Harreld’s grand plan for the University of Iowa, which in turn tells us a great deal about the motives of the small cabal of co-conspirators who engineered Harreld’s fraudulent hire in 2015. Not surprisingly, Harreld’s initial move involves putting together what appears to be a credible deliberative process, in much the same way that the fake $300K search which led to Harreld’s sham appointment seemed legitimate at the time.
The story in question was posted by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 04/25/17. Titled “University of Iowa officials eyeing campus reorganization”, it is the kind of dry, process-driven story that makes most people’s eyes glaze over, but that’s not Miller’s fault. From Harreld’s perspective that catatonia is one of his goals — to make any inquiry into his actions so boring as to provoke active disinterest, while still seeding the public, and in particular the UI community, with a vague sense that a reasonable, fair, and even objective process is underway.
From the lede to Miller’s piece:
There are three things to note here, along with a fourth that we will address in a moment. First, if you search Miller’s report you will not find J. Bruce Harreld’s name mentioned anywhere — not even in passing. Instead, the driving force for the re-imagining of UI’s academic structure appears to be Provost P. Barry Butler, which in turn gives Harreld plausible deniability going forward. Or at least it would have given Harreld cover, except a little over a month and a half ago Butler left Iowa after thirty years to take a job anywhere else, and the only person senior to Butler on the UI org chart is — you guessed it — J. Bruce Harreld.
Second, the UI campus reorganization is being investigated by a “small group of deans”. Not all of the UI college deans, because apparently getting twelve or thirteen people together would be impossible, but just a small, select group. Third, the charge for the investigation was made “earlier this year”, meaning either January, February or the first two weeks of March, because after that Butler was gone.
While there is indeed a protocol for launching such inquiries at a university, and the provost is often the point person, it should be equally obvious that the impetus for such a review came not from Butler but from Harreld, who was hired over Butler and dozens of other qualified candidates precisely to press such an agenda. Even if that weren’t the case, however, with Butler gone it is crystal clear that whatever happens will be at Harreld’s behest. And yet…it is not merely simple logic that tells us Harreld is driving this initiative, but also recent history.
It is now late April, with the end of the spring semester and the academic year only a few weeks away. Literally one year ago to the day, the University of Iowa was forced to announce that it was backing off another bold initiative from the provost’s office, which in that case concerned the development of the new five-year strategic plan. Instead of initiating a process of information gathering and debate that would typically last a year or more, the process was suddenly reduced to only a few weeks of information gathering, with little or no debate. Worse, that abbreviated outreach was scheduled at the busy end of the year, when no one on a college or university campus has free time — and any provost would know that. Not surprisingly, if you search Miller’s report on that story you won’t find Harreld mentioned there either, yet there is no question that fast-tracking the strategic planning process was entirely his doing.
Now, a year later, at the same busy point in the academic calendar, we get news of yet another far-reaching initiative, again purportedly driven by the provost. While this new plan does show that Harreld learned from his strategic planning stumble, despite the longer time frame and considerably greater stakes the decision making process will involve considerably fewer individuals. As as result, and as was the case with the strategic plan, when the final report is completed and placed on Harreld’s desk it will contain all sorts of rhetoric that panders to various constituencies, while miraculously emphasizing key points that just happen to align with Harreld’s agenda. (See also the disastrous Faculty Senate ‘white paper’ on raising Iowa’s college rank.)
As to who will determine the final recommendations that Harreld receives, the fourth thing we need to note about Miller’s report on Tuesday is that nowhere does Provost Butler state that he chose the four deans who will lead that review. Instead, and as with the charge that Butler passed to them, it can fairly be assumed that Harreld picked each member of the task force himself, thus ensuring that a majority will tee up the dirty work he was hired to do. So who is in this “small group of University of Iowa deans”?
From Miller’s report:
Gardial we know, of course, because she was on the search committee that made sure Harreld was one of four finalists passed along to the Iowa Board of Regents, where the vote had already been fixed in Harreld’s favor. Both Gardial and Scranton are also in Harreld’s wheelhouse by academic profession, with Gardial’s business college reflecting Harreld’s long experience in the private sector, and Scranton’s engineering college reflecting Harreld’s training as a vile Purdue engineer. (Go Hawks!) Note also that by complete coincidence both Gardial and Scranton represent the two colleges that made out like extra-special bandits during Harreld’s egregious 2016 tuition hikes. (Harreld allowed both the business and engineering colleges to implement potentially discriminatory differential tuition increases, over and above the baseline increases for other students.)
The only thing I know about Keller is that he tried to do the right thing by way of the grad students who work on campus, right up until Harreld, the Board of Regents and the Iowa legislature crushed him. As for Sue Curry, she hails from the west side of campus — meaning the medical-industrial complex headed by arch UI traitor Jean Robillard, who was the chair of the search committee that made sure Harreld was delivered into the regents’ beckoning arms. With Butler’s departure, however, Harreld seized the opportunity to elevate Curry to interim provost, meaning one of his hand-picked investigative deans is now perfectly positioned to orchestrate the entire process.
In Curry’s place, the dean of the College of Education, Dan Clay, was added to the task force. That is a particularly interesting appointment because while Clay does have history in Iowa City, he was only hired into his current position a little over a year ago, meaning his institutional awareness of what might need fixing is minimal compared to deans who have been around for years. On the other hand, Clay does afford Harreld the following very exciting synergy, as reported by the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 02/28/16:
So, how closely does Clay believe education and business should be aligned? Well, here he is equating public trust with making money:
Speaking of which, if you haven’t read about Clay’s for-profit startup at the University of Missouri, now would be a good time to do so because replicating his stunning success is definitely on Harreld’s to-do list at Iowa. And you don’t have to take my word for that, because Clay himself said the same thing only a couple of months ago, as the guest speaker at the Rotary Club of I.C. (As regular readers know, the Rotary Club is the only place where University of Iowa administrators actually talk about what they’re planning to do.)
From the I.C. Rotary Club meeting minutes for 01/31/17:
By simple head count, then, three of the four deans who will determine the fate of the University of Iowa — Gardial, Scranton and Clay — are already in the tank for whatever Harreld wants them to do, say, recommend or conclude. That means that even if Keller is a decent guy, and determined to put the university’s long-term interest ahead of Harreld’s un-met ego needs, he knows going in that he is going to be perpetually outvoted. Even in the unlikely event of a 2-2 tie, Interim Provost Curry will now cast the deciding vote, and because she hails from Robillard’s medical compound on the west side of campus, and was originally chosen to be one of the four deans on the task force before Harreld elevated her to interim provost, it’s a safe bet that she has already been told how to vote on any substantive issue.
Despite the critical importance of the proposed review, however, notably missing — of course — is the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), who oversees what is not only the largest college on campus, by far, but the heart and soul of the university. Unfortunately, in teaching students to read, write and think for themselves, CLAS consumes all kinds of resources that Harreld would rather reroute to colleges which are more entrepreneurially inclined. That is of course precisely why Harreld was hired, as a result of a fake search engineered by ethically bankrupt administrators like UI’s Robillard and outgoing Regents President Bruce Rastetter. J. Bruce Harreld’s job — his charge — is cutting the financial blood flowing to Iowa’s CLAS heart.
From Miller’s report on Tuesday:
Where Beck says “there is no preconceived notion of structure heading into this review”, she means two things. First, because Beck often has no option but to split hairs in fronting for Harreld’s deceit, she means there is no exact preconceived notion of structure, even as Harreld clearly intends to divert tens of millions of dollars away from educating students to high-risk, for-profit ventures. Second, and relatedly, Beck means no one can prove that Harreld’s provost-driven review will be every bit the sham that his appointment was. And of course Beck is right. Like the lethal administrative clotting agent he was hired to be, Harreld long ago learned to prompt bureaucratic strokes and heart attacks from the sanctuary of plausible deniability.
As noted in various posts over the past year and a half, however, we don’t play those games at Ditchwalk. The question is not whether any and every abuse of power can be proven to a certainty, but whether a given person has proven to be lying trash, and Harreld proved that beyond any doubt only moments after being appointed. In fact, as recently documented in the press, only two months ago Harreld tried to steal $4.M from students and their families by voiding scholarships that he had no right to renege on. At the same time that he was losing on that front — including triggering multiple class-action lawsuits — Harreld announced that he was merging the Alumni Association and UI Foundation, in blatant disregard for shared governance.
Because Harreld is a proven liar — to say nothing of the living embodiment of the conspiracy of lies that put him in office — even if we assume that the specifics of any reorganization have not yet been determined, we know the objective is already set in stone. If you make money for J. Bruce Harreld you will survive and perhaps even reap additional resources — as Harreld just demonstrated by gutting the Alumni Association, then turning the bloody remains over to the metastasizing fundraising operation known as the UI Foundation. If you do not make money for Harreld, then you will either be terminated immediately, or you will be starved of resources until you quit or succumb. The reorganization of departments, schools and even entire colleges simply facilitates and accelerates Harreld’s profit-and-rankings-driven academic cleansing.
There is another long simmering issue that this brings to the fore. Tippie has been trying for years to grab the Pomerantz Center for their own, and boot out the Academic Advising center for whom the building was purpose built and for whom the donors gave their money. They don’t really care where advising goes and at one time proposed they be plopped into the UCC because it was close to the fitness center! Harreld doesn’t even know what Advising does (as he clearly proved at the Lincoln lecture panel)..You will note that TCOB Gardial heads this up, and that one of the goals of the group is “centralizing academic student support services.” AAC is already centralized in terms of where students live and study. What they really mean is move it anywhere else so TCOB can have PC.
I would think the territorial issues on any college/university campus would be perpetual, with everyone trying to grab more real estate and consume more resources simply as a means of perpetuating their own academic species. Given that the Pomerantz Center houses some MBA functions, I’m sure Gardial already thinks of it as hers, and wonders why she can’t simply send the other inhabitants packing. (Much as Harreld just did with the interlopers hogging space in the Levitt Center, thus limiting the UI Foundation’s ever-expanding boiler room operation.)
As for Tippie, which is in the Pappajohn Business Building — (please, no more big-name Iowa donors starting with ‘p’) — I found this interesting, from a couple of months back:
Well, yes — the cost of business is going to be higher if you paint the walls every year or two. (Which, among other things, means you’re either getting bad paint and/or application, or the students are dong things to the walls that they shouldn’t be doing.)
More to the point, it’s worth asking what the actual return is on that higher-than-normal investment, and in particular how well the business college is being run. And on that score I found this piece from only a few weeks ago particularly eyeopening:
Given Gardial’s philosophical belief that college is mostly white college job training for undergrads — thus ensuring a pipeline of relatively cheap trained labor for corporations — I would have no problem imagining a future in which she allowed the grad programs to rot away. She would, of course, blame market forces, as the article in question already does, or encourage Harreld to raise tuition even more to pay for “world-class” business faculty, but as the article notes those people also come at a premium.
What’s funny about all this to me personally is that back in the mid-eighties business schools/MBA’s became all the rage in America, and on the UI campus as well. Thirty years later Tippie is still making the same claims and promises, holding out entrepreneurship as the cure-all for whatever ails UI, but where are the results? The costs are higher, the college itself is in the wrong geographical location for what it’s trying to do and be, and of course ISU is competing with UI in business head-to-head, and has the advantage of being much closer to Des Moines.
Gardial has her protector in Harreld, and not simply because she knows what really happened with the sham committee that abetted his fraudulent hire. Harreld believes that business is heaven and he is Iowa’s savior, and he will do anything to prove himself right, no matter how much he has to raise student tuition to cover that ego-gratifying cost. Which is of course why he put Gardial on the four-dean task force, to make sure resources from gutted programs/schools end up with her.
Don’t forget that the growth of the College of Ed is instrumental in making arguments about UNI’s being vestigial. Until quite recently, UNI was where you went if you wanted to be a teacher in Iowa. Older people will still tell young people considering teaching to go to UNI. Ed at UI’s grown tremendously over the last decade, though, and I believe its program is now larger. So I’m not entirely surprised that Clay’s been brought in.
The other thing, of course, is that it suits the Indiana plan: unstick the liberal arts from everything else, meaning humanities and arts, and shove them in a closet, trying to turn the rest of the place into a technical college.
It’s very midwestern, very literal, very Babbitt. And to be fair Stanford isn’t doing any better in what it’s turning out: sure, its engineers are superior engineers until they have to deal with humans, and then they’ve got all the sophistication of seventh-graders who can’t find a lunch table. All they have to take for lib arts is philosophy that confirms them in their Randian robot dreams.
I’m sure people around here would go for it. The problem is that a lot of their young people actually come here to escape this crushing unimaginativeness, unthinking cruelty and general thoughtlessness about the world. They come for an education in lit, history, classics, all the stuff their parents think (wrongly) is useless. They pay for it themselves, just to get away. But they can’t pay to go any farther than the state border. That’s the real problem.
Meanwhile, Advising could get moved into the river for all I care. Never seen such a useless outfit. Consistently wrongheaded. Steers trusting kids into walls. Impossible to persuade them that courses don’t do what they’re telling the kids they do.
Oh, and look at me. I really have been here too long. Look at that, I’m every bookseller in every Lewis novel ever. My.
As you know, I think this move is well underway at Iowa. (And for people who don’t know, not only was Harreld trained as an engineer at Purdue, but in initially addressing the UI community about the origins of his candidacy, Harreld intimated — falsely — that Purdue President Mitch Daniels nominated him for the Iowa job.)
It’s the STEM push by any other name. Focus on training students not to think, but for job markets that exist now, but may be gone in less than a decade. At which point you can get rid of those older workers and hire a new crop of cheap, just-out-of-college labor.
As for advising, I don’t know what they’re doing these days, but if you asked me to pick the three most important people in my own collegiate past — meaning overall, and not just faculty — one of them was an advisor who had a profound effect on me, despite a relatively limited amount of contact.
You raise a good point. The Iowa Board of Regents has been sabotaging UNI for years now, including under former president Allen’s leadership with the demolition of the Malcom Price Lab School. (And of course Allen was just made interim president at ISU, at full freight, despite having been out of Iowa for years.)
With Dan Clay’s recent hire as dean of the UI College of Education, and his heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship, UI is not only competing to supply teachers to the in-state job market, but in many ways attempting to eclipse what UNI is doing. Which is of course what prompted this from only a couple of days ago::
It’s a fair point. Why have UI and ISU been allowed not simply to poach UNI’s territory, but encouraged to do so? (Gutting Price Labs was a big step in that direction, because it removed UNI’s competitive edge.)
With Katie Mulholland off the board as of Monday, UNI is now even more exposed. All three of Mulholland’s degrees are from UNI, and as the co-chair of the UNI search committee she clearly steered away from the carnage she helped unleash by abetting Harreld’s fraudulent hire at Iowa. Regent Johnson (the ‘student’ regent, who attends UNI) is still serving, but she doesn’t have the moxie to go up against the professional destroyers on the board, and I don’t expect her to.
The deck has clearly been stacked against UNI, and unless the competing programs at UI and ISU are curtailed, I don’t know how the university itself survives over the long haul.
The trial in which former University of Iowa Associate Athletics Director Jane Meyer is suing UI on a variety of fronts has gone to the jury. From HawkCentral’s Mark Emmert, on 04/14/17:
From the reporting so far, I think it is going to be very hard for the jury to find UI guilty on the gender or sexual orientation charges. The judge’s instructions will be key, of course, as will the specifics of the statutes in question, but from the outside looking in UI did a good job of lining up a string of gay and straight women to testify on Barta’s behalf. If UI is found guilty on any charge I suspect it will be for unequal pay, if not also the retaliation charge — particularly after UI and the regents failed to respond to Meyer’s written concerns about gender inequity in UI Athletics.
Whatever the legal outcome, and whatever the implications for Barta and UI going forward to Griesbaum’s trial in June, in this post I want to point out that we have already learned something important about what happened to Jane Meyer. While that insight may not be legally damning, it does make clear that Gary Barta is a miserable man to work for once he decides he doesn’t like you. Out of respect for the standard of reasonable doubt, however, I won’t ask you to take my word for that, but will simply lay out my argument and allow you to come to your own conclusion.
A Timeline of Torment
As regular readers know, there can be a vast gulf between abuses of power which are and are not actionable. For example, when former regents president Bruce Rastetter, current high-ranking UI administrator Jean Robillard, and mega-donor alum Jerre Stead conspired to run a $300K fraudulent search at taxpayer expense, in order to appoint J. Bruce Harreld as the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, they apparently broke no actual laws. Their corruption was exposed only months later, they still profit administratively from that crime every day, and yet according to the letter of the law, they are free to exploit that abuse of power because legally they have done nothing wrong.
Because bureaucracies exist first and foremost to protect themselves, and do so reflexively in large part because everyone in the employ of a given bureaucracy understands that their pay is also hush money, it is entirely possible that UI and Barta will be exonerated of all charges in the Meyer trial. That does not mean, however, that Gary Barta did not abuse his authority over Jane Meyer in order to make her life more difficult, if not to actually drive her from Athletics. Once you give an individual authority over others, it can be very tempting for that individual to use their authority to punish people they do not like, and the longer that individual remains in power the more adept they will become at doing so.
With regard to UI Athletics, from an extremely helpful Daily Iowan timeline we know that UI had “separate men’s and women’s athletic departments” until 2000. In that year, after the legendary “Dr. Christine Grant retires from her position as women’s athletic director at the UI”, “the men’s and women’s athletic departments merge.”
Also in 2000, “Bob Bowlsby is appointed as the UI athletic director”, then “Tracey Griesbaum becomes the UI’s head field hockey coach.” In 2001, “Jane Meyer is hired as the senior associate athletic director, which was the No. 2 position in the athletic department at that time.” Flash forward to 2006 and Bowlsby leaves for to become the AD at Stanford, at which point “Gary Barta is hired as the UI athletic director.” And then this:
Between 2006 and 2012 Barta fires three women’s coaches: “Women’s volleyball coach Cindy Fredrick” (2007), “Women’s golf coach Kelly Crawford” (2011), and “Rowing coach Mandi Kowal” (2012).
As a man, one of the things I (almost) never have to worry about is whether people around me are treating me a certain way because I’m male. If I experience negative feedback, or if I’m confused about something that happened to me, I can usually be confident that what I’m sensing is the result of something I said or did, as opposed to generic bias against my gender. Unfortunately, in most professions and even most cultures that’s not the case for women, and particularly not the case for lesbians. When something happens to you as a gay or straight woman, you really will have legitimate cause to wonder if what happened was the result of the choices you made (or did not make) as an individual, or bias against your gender and/or sexual orientation.
For that reason and more, even after their relationship was disclosed and cleared by UI, Jane Meyer and Tracey Griesbaum chose not to officially notify AD Gary Barta of that relationship. From Meyer’s testimony two weeks ago, as reported by HawkCentral’s Emmert, on 04/20/17:
Jane Meyer wanted to “become an athletic director at a major-conference university”. For that reason, she not only had to worry about positioning herself for that opportunity in a professional context, she had to be careful about her private life in a way that straight women (and men) in UI Athletics — or gay women (and men) who did not aspire to such advancement — did not. More to the point, because Barta was her boss, and thus a critical link in the chain of her professional aspirations, Meyer had every incentive to do everything possible to make sure he would not oppose her either on a professional basis, or because of her same-sex relationship to another individual in the Athletics department.
Likewise, in order to understand the choices that Gary Barta made it matters whether he knew that Meyer was in a relationship with someone else on his staff, and we will answer that question in the next section. In this section we will continue following the timeline of events in UI Athletics from Jane Meyer’s perspective, in order to better understand how two aspects of her life — her professional aspirations and her relationship with Tracey Griesbaum — converged in a single fateful day.
From the DI timeline for 2014, following the termination in January of yet another female head coach — “Volleyball coach Sharon Dingman”:
Assuming for the moment that in May of 2014 Gary Barta is oblivious to the fact that both Meyer and Griesbaum are lesbians, let alone that they are in a committed relationship that has already been sanctioned by the University of Iowa, it nonetheless remains true that in the span of only a few weeks Barta draws an administrative bead on two critically important aspects of Jane Meyer’s life. First, he announces that he is creating a new position in the department which will effectively demote Meyer, which threatens her goal of becoming an AD herself. Second, Barta not only requests an “independent review” of Griesbaum’s field hockey program, which obviously puts Meyer in a difficult position because of her affection for her partner, but Barta also instigates an investigation intro Griesbaum’s private life, which represents multiple threats to Meyer even though she is doing nothing wrong.
Even if we assume that Barta was oblivious to the relationship between Meyer and Griesbaum, however, and that he only instigated the field hockey investigation in the best interests of the student athletes at the University of Iowa, he did make a telling mistake with regard to the deputy-director position he created. From the Gazette’s Erin Jordan, on 04/21/17:
According to Barta, Jane Meyer had a “my way or the highway” attitude, and after he informed her that she would not be considered for the position he was creating their “working relationship changed forever”…”because of a change in her attitude” (emphasis mine). While no one has questioned Barta’s right to create a new administrative hierarchy, even if his purpose was to demote Meyer without going through the hassle of firing her, it’s one thing to enact that plan and let it play out, and quite another to specifically tell Meyer — in advance — that she would not be considered for that new position.
Why did Barta do that? Why did UI AD Gary Barta make a point of telling Jane Meyer that he was preemptively ruling her out as a candidate for that job? Given state and federal EEOC guidelines, was Barta even allowed to say that? And even if the answer is yes, what was the real-world effect of telling Meyer she would be excluded in advance? If that did in fact change their “working relationship” forever, because of a change in “her attitude”, who instigated that change in her attitude?
I know very little about the craft of administration. One thing I do know, however, is that the simplest way for Barta to fill the new deputy director position was to advertise the job and choose the best applicant. If Barta had reasons for not wanting to hire Jane Meyer, even if those reasons were invalid he could simply have considered her application like all of the others, then passed her over. In fact, doing so would have given him cover he may now wish he had, but in May of 2014 that’s not what he decided to do. What he decided to do was tell Meyer, to her face, that not only was she going to be knocked down a peg, but he would not consider her for the position even if she applied.
Through May, June and into July of 2014, then, not only was Meyer worried about the fate of her partner as a coach in the department, but Meyer had to live with the fact that she was being shut out of the possibility for advancement. The reason Barta now gives for refusing to consider her application is that she had a bad attitude, yet Barta himself went out of his way to antagonize Meyer by pointedly telling her he would not even consider her candidacy regardless of the quality of any other applicants.
From the DI timeline:
Whether you are gay or straight, if you are a woman working in a field traditionally dominated by men, in which gains in gender equality have been hard to come by, and you find out that the person who was hired over you is not only a man, but that man will be paid significantly more than you, alarm bells are going to go off in your head. And that’s before you learn that the person being hired happens to hail from Gary Barta’s alma mater, where Barta played quarterback for four years, or that the hire is a clear violation of the 2000 Merger Memorandum, which made gender equity a centerpiece of prior administrative consolidation.
On the positive side, the other critical issue Meyer had been living with for three months was finally resolved at the beginning of August, and the news was good:
After suffering the premeditated if not mean-spirited indignity of being passed over in advance, and the insult of watching a man be hired into a superior position in violation of the 2000 Merger Memorandum, Jane Meyer got her first real relief at work when she learned that her partner’s coaching career was no longer at risk. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Griesbaum was cleared of any wrongdoing at work or in her personal life, three days later Gary Barta reasserted his administrative authority with a vengeance:
To say that Barta’s decision came as a shock to Griesbaum and Meyer would be an understatement. Fortunately, because of excellent local reporting on the Meyer trial we have some visibility as to how that news was received, which understandably varies depending on the individual’s point of view. From HawkCentral, on 04/27/17:
After calling for and waiting for a full investigation of Griesbaum’s field hockey program, as well as investigating Griesbaum’s private life — both of which inevitably put stress on Meyer whether Barta knew about their relationship or not — when Gary Barta did not get the results he was looking for he fired Griesbaum anyway, at an additional cost to the school of $200K. Simply reciting the facts of that termination, however, does not do justice to the administrative process that Barta followed. Not only did Barta allow Griesbaum, Meyer and everyone else in the AD’s office to believe that any issues in the field hockey program had been resolved as of mid-July, but he also allowed Griesbaum’s exoneration to be publicized before firing Griesbaum on August 4th.
From the Gazette’s Jeremiah Davis, on 04/27/17:
As it turns out, however, that day was also important for Jane Meyer for another reason. From Hawk Central’s Mark Emmert, on 04/20/17:
Out of all of the days when Barta could have informed Griesbaum that she was being fired, despite having been exonerated by an investigation that he himself called for, Barta chose the exact same day when Meyer would be attending her first — and as it turns out, only — staff meeting with the department’s new and male deputy director. Barta also decided to notify Griesbaum of her termination only an hour or so before what Barta had to know would be a tough departmental meeting for Meyer, not only because Taylor’s presence was an open repudiation of the 2000 Merger Memorandum, but because it was also a reminder that she had been rejected out of hand. As a result of those two converging factors, I don’t think it’s surprising that Meyer did not handle that staff meeting particularly well, as recounted by Taylor himself during Meyer’s trial.
From HawkCentral’s Emmert, on 05/01/17:
From Taylor’s testimony it seems clear that it was not Barta who informed Meyer that Griesbaum had been fired an hour or so before the staff meeting took place, meaning Meyer probably learned that shocking news from Griesbaum herself. Instead, it seems Barta’s intention on August 4th was to officially notify the other administrators of Griesbaum’s termination at that staff meeting, after the fact of her firing. Whether that was the normal protocol in such situations has not been reported, but the timing is obviously interesting. On the exact same day that Meyer had to suffer the indignity of a staff meeting with Barta’s new hire, only an hour or so earlier Meyer was also hit with the news that the same person who refused to consider her for the new position of deputy director, who then hired a man into that position in violation of a prior memorandum, had just fired her partner without cause.
What Gary Barta Knew, and When
Gene Taylor’s claim that Meyer was upset that she had not been told “before the others” has not been corroborated in any reports I have read, and I have read everything I can get my hands on. While it is possible that Meyer did make such a statement, it would seem to be at odds with Meyer’s determination to keep her relationship with Griesbaum private. It is also possible, of course, that Taylor was informed about the relationship between Meyer and Griesbaum prior to taking office, or perhaps even prior to being hired, just as it is possible that Barta told Taylor about the impending termination of Griesbaum while leaving Meyer in the dark.
Setting Taylor’s testimony aside, a few things should now be clear. While the sexual orientation of Meyer and Griesbaum may have been an issue for Barta or others at UI, the critical factor with regard to the August 4th staff meeting was not their sexual orientation but the fact that they were in a relationship. The reason that’s important is because if Barta genuinely did not know that Griesbaum and Meyer were involved, then we could chalk up the convergence of all of Barta’s actions on that day to bad luck for Meyer. On the other hand, if Barta did know that Griesbaum and Meyer were an item, and he fired Griesbaum only one hour before Meyer had to attend her first meeting with Taylor, and he intended to announce the news of Griesbaum’s firing in that meeting, that would mean Barta intentionally made it all but impossible for Meyer to maintain her composure in that staff meeting, particularly in front of his new hire.
It follows from their gender that if Meyer and Griesbaum were in a relationship, it would have been a same-sex relationship. While that does have relevance to the court proceedings, as just noted the critical question is not the sexual orientation of Meyer and Griesbaum, but the fact that they were involved. On that point, at the start of the trial and in prior reporting, Gary Barta was adamant that he did not know Meyer and Griesbaum were involved until almost three months after August 4th.
From the ever-helpful DI timeline:
From an AP article by Ryan Foley and Luke Meredith, also on 10/30/14:
We will come back to Altmaier shortly, but note here that parents of multiple field hockey players were apparently aware of the relationship between Meyer and Griesbaum, making any claim by Barta that he was oblivious all the more unlikely.
Continuing, from the AP:
From the AP on 04/24/17:
Clearly there is a disconnect between Barta’s actions and his subsequent assertions about Meyer and Griesbaum. If Barta really did not know that Meyer, an administrator in the AD’s office, and Griesbaum, the head field hockey coach, were in a relationship, then on what basis did Barta ask for an independent review in May of 2014, which included determining whether there was a “prohibited relationship between Tracey Griesbaum, Head Coach of FH, and an Athletics administrator”? Did Barta think Griesbaum was involved with some other ‘Athletics administrator’?
Setting aside whether Gary Barta committed perjury at the beginning of the Meyer trial, here is more of Barta’s testimony, as reported by the AP’s Meredith, on 04/22/17:
Again, how is that possible? In a “recent deposition” Barta claimed that he had no idea that Meyer and Griesbaum were an item until after they ‘outed’ themselves in an AP article on 10/31/14, meaning three full months after he fired Griesbaum. In fact, while he was on the stand Barta went so far as to assert that he took their pained disclosure as some sort of personal betrayal — to such a degree that he was “angry” at Meyer and Griesbaum. And yet, while also on the stand, Barta did acknowledge that he had heard rumors about Meyer and Griesbaum, but “never confirmed them”, as early as 2011. (Remember that year.)
From the AP’s Meredith, on 04/24/17, with Barta still on the stand:
Again, note the blatant contradiction. Barta heard “rumors” as early as 2011, but was “not going to go there unless I [had] something to substantiate it”. And yet, as just noted, back in May of 2014 Barta felt sufficiently certain that something untoward was going on between Griesbaum and an “Athletics administrator” that he included that suspicion — if not knowledge — as one of the concerns in the field hockey “review” that he himself instigated. As reported by the AP on 10/31/14, that investigation concluded “that there was no prohibited relationship between Griesbaum and an “Athletics administrator”, meaning even if UI investigators did not inform Barta about the identity of the administrator in question, he already had confirmation in May of 2014 that whoever Griesbaum was involved with, that relationship was not an issue.
In the context of the Meyer trial, why did Barta again try to claim that he had no idea Meyer and Griesbaum were in a relationship until the end of October of 2014, only to begrudgingly admit that he had heard rumors of their relationship as early as 2011? As for claiming that he did not want to “go there unless I have something to substantiate it”, what other possible reading of his suspicions about Griesbaum’s private life — and the private life of an administrator on his staff — could there possibly be, except that Barta did in fact try to substantiate that relationship by investigatory means? (Had the investigation turned up anything improper, Barta would have necessarily learned the identity of the “Athletics administrator” as a consequence of any disciplinary proceedings affecting his department, meaning Meyer would have been “substantiated” as Griesbaum’s partner.)
I don’t know what linkage Meyer’s attorneys were trying to make, but if we set aside the legal issues, the reason Barta does not want to admit that he knew about Meyer and Griesbaum prior to terminating Griesbaum in 2014 — if not as late as 10/31/14 — is clear. If Barta knew that Jane Meyer and Tracey Griesbaum were a couple on August 4th, 2014, that would make him a monster for calculatedly subjecting Meyer to the double-barreled insults she endured on that day. Specifically, only an hour or so before Barta knew that Meyer would have to participate in her first meeting with Gene Taylor, thus suffering that indignity, he fired Griesbaum, then proceeded to drop that news on everyone else during the staff meeting.
What kind of a leader — what kind of a person — would do that to a subordinate? Even if Barta didn’t like Meyer, if he knew she was in relationship with Griesbaum, and by the weight of evidence he clearly did know, then he set her up to take a massive emotional blow just before her first staff meeting with Taylor. Not surprisingly, Jane Meyer did not handle that sequence of events very well, but not because she was inherently quarrelsome or insubordinate. She didn’t handle it well because her monstrous boss put her in a position that almost no one would have been able to handle with grace, then he barricaded himself behind a roomful of subordinate witnesses. (In the trial, Barta even went so far as to claim that he showed restraint by not firing Meyer on the spot.)
Now, if you are still on the fence about whether Barta knew about Meyer and Griesbaum in early August of 2014, we return to the aforementioned Elizabeth “Betsy” Altmaier, who was the faculty athletic representative at UI for a decade, ending in 2011. Altmaier is interesting for a lot of reasons, including strong opinions about a number of issues related to the Meyer trial. She is also interesting, however, for the very fact that neither the plaintiff nor the defendant called on her to testify.
Then again, with even a little digging it is not hard to see why. Not only was Altmaier hostile to the Meyer-Griesbaum relationship despite prior sanction by UI, but she was all-in on Griesbaum’s firing. By the same token, however, she had no problem ripping Barta for his failings, including those that led to a secret $42K payout to an injured field hockey player. Regarding the narrow question in this post, however, we have this, from the Des Moines Register’s Bryce Miller and Jason Clayworth, on 12/07/14:
Leaving Mason’s duplicity aside, in 2011 Betsy Altmaier told Gary Barta that Meyer and Griesbaum were in a relationship. Altmaier did not report a “rumor” or “innuendo”, but instead told Barta flat-out that Meyer and Griesbaum were involved. Even if Barta doubted her at the time, however, we have plausible confirmation that he received that message because he recently stated, under oath, that he had heard “rumors” about Meyer and Griesbaum going back as far as 2011. Three years later, in 2014, we also know that Barta believed “rumors” about Griesbaum and an “Athletics administrator” had sufficient gravity to warrant an independent investigation by UI, yet after the conclusion of that investigation he went back to claiming that he did not know about Meyer and Griesbaum until after they disclosed their relationship in late October of that year.
What Gary Barta Did to Jane Meyer
The most interesting aspect of testimony from the witnesses called by the defense, as reported in the press, was the repetitive whining from head coaches who felt that Jane Meyer did not give them what they asked for or expected. Even allowing for cherry-picking among the hundreds if not thousands of individual tasks that Meyer was required to complete in erecting and remodeling athletic facilities, there was a perpetual refrain that Meyer failed to deliver what those coaches wanted. One relevant question, however, does not seem to have been directly addressed.
People are always fighting for resources, both externally and internally, in any organization, and the athletic department of a major university is no exception. Space is always in short supply, equipment always needs upgrading or replacing, and perhaps not surprisingly the sports that pay the freight (football and basketball, in a good year) resent the sports that lose money (wrestling and everything else). Because the sports that make money also happen to be male sports, there tends to be unspoken (and spoken) resentment about women’s sports, because the funds that support them could be spent competing against the top football or basketball programs, or improving the “fan experience” at those revenue-producing venues.
All of that means that the people who have to say no to the various factions in any athletics department will inevitably ruffle feathers along the way, and that will probably be particularly true when the people who are being told no are male, and the people who are saying no are female. Again, in testimony after testimony, Iowa coaches complained bitterly about relatively trivial matters, particularly in the context of their own competitive highs and lows. Repeatedly, Jane Meyer was singled out as the one person who failed them over and over again, yet it was never made clear who had the responsibility for staying within the budget on a given project. In administering UI Athletics, who had to say no?
If Jane Meyer was that person — perhaps in part because Gary Barta did not want that role — then it stands to reason that she would have made a few enemies along the way, particularly among prima donna coaches who believe they deserve whatever they ask for. And that’s before we consider the possibility that as the person who had to say no, Meyer herself may have been bad mouthed behind the scenes by others in the athletic department, who either wanted her to fail, or sold her out in order to ingratiate themselves to those same coaches.
From HawkCentral’s Mark Emmert, on 04/28/17:
Who was it who told Ferentz that Meyer was the roadblock? Or better yet, who would Kirk Ferentz have called in order to find out who the roadblock was? If Ferentz never actually spoke with Meyer directly, how does he know so much about her failings?
Continuing, from Emmert’s report:
Here we have a wrestling coach accusing Meyer of “inserting herself as an expert”, who somehow saw no contradiction in attempting to solve the problem himself by “drilling two holes in the floor”. Notwithstanding the local building code, there would of course have been related issues having to do with drainage for the entire structure, which the wrestling coach was probably not familiar with himself, but that didn’t keep him from complaining. And I suspect Meyer got a lot of that in her work.
Did Barta have Meyer’s back when she had to say no, or did he sell her out? Was Barta willing to be the bad cop, or did he want to be the good cop? I don’t know, but we can gain a little insight into Barta’s mode of interaction from a story by the Press-Citizen’s Josh O’Leary, on 02/11/15:
Once you start tugging at Gary Barta’s credibility — as opposed to his legal culpability — little things suddenly stand out. For example, Barta claimed that he initiated the investigation into the field hockey program because of complaints from student athletes, yet that investigation also included the question of a “prohibited” relationship between Griesbaum and an “Athletics administrator”. As was demonstrated repeatedly during the Meyer trial, Barta failed to investigate similar complaints by student athletes in other sports, raising the possibility that Barta’s main reason for launching the field hockey investigation was outing Griesbaum and Meyer, not protecting student athletes.
While all complaints of abuse should be investigated, it’s also worth noting that in the larger context Gary Barta makes his money — in the mid-six-figures, at minimum — largely from the sport of football, which we now know causes brain damage in young men as a matter of routine. If we lived in a culture that truly valued health and safety, and if all of the people who coach or administer football were protectors instead of exploiters, then football would already have been outlawed. But obviously that’s not the case. (As for wrestling, I was once told by a long-time sports reporter, who covered a big-time university for decades, that if people really knew what happened to collegiate wrestlers — including what they went through to make weight — the sport would be banned.)
Title IX is a real thing. It came about because men and women were not treated equally, particularly in male-dominated, resource-competitive collegiate athletic departments across the country. As a woman in the Iowa Athletics Department, Associate Athletics Director Jane Meyer would not only have been aware of Title IX, she would have been aware of continuing efforts by athletic administrators across the country — many of them male — to evade Title IX. As a result, it’s not hard to imagine that Meyer was concerned about some of the changes in the UI Athletic Department, including the wholesale firing of women’s coaches, and Barta’s betrayal of the 2000 Merger Memorandum.
Bias against gays and lesbians is also a real thing. It can be overt, as when gays or lesbians are murdered, or it can be subtle, involving slights that can never be proven, but which nonetheless have an effect. As a lesbian, Jane Meyer would not only have had her share of life experiences involving bias against her sexual orientation, as a result she would have been a fool not to consider whether her sexual orientation was a factor in the events that played out at UI, including her effective demotion with Barta’s hiring of Gene Taylor. And of course those suspicions would have been heightened when investigators — acting at Barta’s behest — repeatedly asked her about her relationship with Griesbaum, even after Meyer and Griesbaum had cleared their relationship with the university.
Wondering can produce amazement or torment. If you love someone and they die, that’s tragic. If you love someone and they go missing — whether in a war zone or on vacation — your mind may never find peace no matter how much time passes. Even when you are sure beyond any doubt that the person you love is dead, the fact that you have nothing tangible to base that belief on will leave you in emotional and psychological limbo.
Jane Meyer had good reason — culturally, professionally and personally — to wonder if her gender or sexuality played a role in what happened around her and to her. In May of 2014, however, Gary Barta poured gasoline on those embers of uncertainty by launching an investigation not only into the coaching career of her partner, but into their relationship. For three long months Meyer lived with uncertainty as to the outcome of those parallel inquiries, along with knowledge that Barta passed her over in the lighting-fast job search that led to Gene Taylor’s hire.
I think those three months did real damage to Meyer, and I think Gary Barta wanted those three months to do damage to Meyer. When Sally Mason asked Gary Barta when he first knew about Meyer and Griesbaum, Barta lied to her for the same reason he lied at the beginning of the Meyer trial. When the report ultimately exonerated Griesbaum as a coach, and cleared Griesbaum and Meyer in terms of their relationship, Gary Barta wasn’t satisfied. Instead, he decided not only to fire Griesbaum, but to do it in a way that would traumatize Meyer as much as possible, perhaps in the hope that she would take the hint and get out of his happy-happy joy-joy workplace. And his plan worked. Knowing full well that Meyer and Griesbaum were in a relationship, Barta dropped a bomb on both of them on August 4th, 2014, and in that moment Jane Meyer broke down.
I think Meyer’s lawsuit against UI and Barta reflects her own uncertainty about what happened. I also think she has every reason to wonder what happened to her, and why. The jury will determine, legally, whether her gender or sexual orientation played a part in what happened, but as noted at the beginning of this post, all kinds of abuses of power take place below a legal threshold, and it may be that everything that happened to Jane Meyer falls in that category. But that doesn’t mean Gary Barta did nothing to Jane Meyer.
Of the many gay and straight women who testified for the defense, I think most if not all of them genuinely believe that gender and sexual orientation played no part in Barta’s treatment of Meyer. To a woman, however, I also believe every one of them has been in a situation where they wondered if their gender, if not also their sexual orientation, was a factor in events in their own lives. And if that is the case, that means every one of those women knows the damage that Gary Barta did to Jane Meyer when he launched the field hockey investigation in May of 2014, and made Meyer (and Greisbaum) wonder what was happening — and what was going to happen to them — for month after month.
That Barta decided to fire Griesbaum, without cause, at a cost to the school of $200K, even after Griesbaum was cleared by a thorough independent review, only added to Meyer’s misery. That Barta chose to do so on the same day that Meyer had to sit down at her first staff meeting with Gene Taylor only added to her misery. And yet unlike Griesbaum, Meyer still had to come into work and take orders from the man who investigated her and her partner, who fired her partner, and who hired Gene Taylor after first making it clear that he would not consider Meyer for that job. And still, day after day, for another three months, Jane Meyer went to work and did her job.
From HawkCentral’s Mark Emmert, on 04/20/17:
I don’t know what the jury will decide in the Meyer case. I do think, however, that I can say two things with some confidence. First, even if he broke no laws on August 4th, 2014, the way Gary Barta treated Jane Meyer on that day defines him as a miserable human being. Second, between the Meyer trial and the upcoming Griesbaum trial, the testimony in the Meyer trial makes it clear that this was the easy one. In fact, depending on the outcome of the Meyer trial, it would not surprise me at all if the State of Iowa, representing the university, attempted to settle before trial.
Update 05/04/17: In a pleasant surprise, the jury found for Meyer on all five counts, and awarded her $1.4M. (It is impossible not to read that as an indictment of Barta, which means he has suddenly become a massive liability for the University of Iowa.)
So many things here that are irritating to the point of infuriating.
One, my understanding is that all these nominal adults are engaged in teaching a handful of young people to push balls around on very expensive fields. Is that right? And for this they’re all being paid gargantuan salaries. Fancy college-of-medicine doctor salaries. Is that also correct? Because obviously what they do is as important as saving ************* lives and teaching young people to do that, too, am I getting this right?
Two, when other universities have high-profile lawsuits going on, they seem to have to do with things like, I don’t know, who actually invented a thing that changed the course a biological science and should get all the credit and monney. This ********? Is about some overaged children’s-game enthusiast all torqued off because there’s girls in his clubhouse, also because it turns out he has to treat the girls like people, also because he has to stop behaving like a particularly odious eleven-year-old ca. 1971 when it comes to the word “lesbian”. It’s also about a collection of other nominal adults behaving exactly like unpleasant fourth-graders with something to hide.
THIS IS WHAT WE SPEND LAWYER MONEY AND DAMAGES ON.
And at the end of the exercise, the university hasn’t even got the decency to say, “That was utter ******** and we apologize to the people of Iowa, whose money we just **** all over. We intend to make it up to them by having our next sports contracts be commensurate with the importance of the jobs at a university, and as a guide we will look to the salaries and hourly rates paid coaches at the local high schools and recreation centers. Again, we are deeply sorry about all this.”
I’m glad Jane won. I’m also wondering where in hell she got the idea that anyone should be paid anything resembling six digits for, of all things, coaching *any sport on the planet*. I really want to know what kind of person looks at the students going deep in debt for an education and says, “Yes, I think that university should pay me nearly $200K for teaching some of those kids to hit a ball with a stick real good.” I’d ask the same question of Barta, of course, but we already know he’s barely human, so there’s nothing to expect there. Jane gives every appearance of being an actual person, so I’d very much like to know why she thinks there’s anything reasonable in that kind of pay for that kind of job at that kind of university where we have, for the love of god, a food pantry for students who can’t eat as often as is healthy because they don’t have money left after paying for tuition and books and all the rest.
I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people around here.
I don’t have a problem per se with collegiate athletics in the non-profit/amateur tradition. Maybe I should, and maybe I would if I looked at the cost of fielding a rowing team, soccer team, field hockey team or wrestling team. Just the travel expenses alone are obviously prohibitive, but so are all sorts of perks given to staff and faculty, to say nothing of every college’s perkurbating administrators.
The salaries you note are clearly not sponsored by non-profit/amateur athletics, however, but for-profit/semi-professional athletics, meaning specifically NCAA football and basketball. Both sports function as the equivalent of baseball’s minor leagues, except the collegiate athletes at major schools often play on a national stage, and quite often drive massive amounts of revenue to those institutions. (Put March Madness up against the start of MLB, and that pro sport would be reduced to ratings ashes.)
Looking at football in particular, that sport is wildly popular across the spectrum — from high school to college to pro — yet nowhere is the rot more apparent than in the power-conference college game. Not only are athletes exploited for their labor, but the risk of injury is potentially (and routinely) lethal, and yet at many schools the football-centric athletic department actually wags the academic dog.
As noted in multiple prior posts, UI is fortunate that it keeps its athletic and academic books separate. As noted in tweets yesterday, by all rights any payments to Meyer, Griesbaum, or their attorneys for abuses in the AD’s office should come out of the athletics budget, whether directly, or paid for by wealthy donors pumping money through the back door at the UI Foundation. (I’m sure there are plenty of donors who are eager to put all this distasteful business behind them and get back to the rousing business and highly profitable business of reducing young men’s brains to mush.)
As for the pay in the UI AD’s office, it reflects the fact that Iowa belongs to one of the ‘Power 5’ conferences, and as a result it benefits greatly from television revenue. Again, to the extent that the books are kept separate, I don’t care what they pay out, but on the face of it, yes — it’s absurd. Only if you divorce UI athletics from the aims of higher education, and lump it in with the world of entertainment, does the pay make any sense, and yet even then it’s more than a little obscene. (For example, UI’s strength coach, Chris Doyle, who once put thirteen kids in the hospital, makes more in base salary than the fraudulently appointed president of the school, J. Bruce Harreld — who is himself wildly overpaid.)
There are of course sexy disciplines in every profession. For example, I was interested to read this in a New Yorker piece titled, “The Heroism of Incremental Care“.
Still, when you’re doctorin’ it’s assumed that you might also make someone well, or at least alleviate their pain. The pretense of UI Athletics is that it exists for the student-athletes, but in reality it exists for the same reason any other entertainment business exists — to attract attention, for a price. Whatever Meyer or Barta or anyone else wants to do with their life is fine with me, as long as they’re not hurting anybody. As we learned yesterday, however, Barta was actually hurting someone, and he may well find himself out of a job as a result. (I say ‘may’ because if the Leath/’planegate’ debacle is any guide, then just before the Griesbaum trial gets underway it will be announced that Barta is taking over at Ole Miss, and getting a $100K salary bump to boot.)
I really do admire people who go into under-served and under-compensated professions because they have the passion and will to do so, and chief among those callings I would cite most teachers and caregivers, who are treated like dirt but our celebrity-and-cash-obsessed culture. On the other hand, if Jane hadn’t been making the money she was making, then the headlines wouldn’t be getting as much attention for that $1.4M award, so maybe there’s a silver lining in there somewhere.
Finally, were UI only facing the Meyer suit and its aftermath, I have no problem imagining that they might try to fight it out on appeal, with some sort of claim that they were dong so to save that $1.4M for starving students. It’s even conceivable Barta would be able to keep his job, maybe with a pay cut compensated for by back-door money through the UI Foundation. With the Griesbaum trial still upcoming, however, and two separate federal gender discrimination investigations — covering the entire department — yet to conclude, I don’t know how UI can keep Barta around and risk losing again, let alone going 0-6 on discrimination cases.
It just don’t wash.
If you’re fixing tickers, and figuring out ways for people to breathe despite allergens, and checking over babies knowledgeably, then you know what, you should get paid a lot. You’re performing a serious service for humanity, and frankly both your training and your job often suck. Your job’s also high-stakes. Yes, pay you money.
If you’re teaching law, logic, science, writing, literature, history, any of these things that form the foundation of a civic mind, you too are doing valuable service. Pay you money. Not multiples of what it takes to live reasonably well, but money.
If you’re running 20-year-olds around a field so they can play a game they’ll mostly be too old and injured for in seven or eight more years, and it’s a game, and not a form of art, then I don’t really understand what exactly you’re on about beyond recreation for a few. And that’s a nice thing, but it’s not a $200,000 thing. And if you’re a grown person toting around your win record at games played by these 20-year-olds, and you regard this as your major achievement in life, I begin to think there’s something wrong with you, particularly when your sport is not a popular spectator sport. I don’t really see the difference between what you’re doing and, say, street miming, or running a niche little acro-yoga circus. If your sport *is* a popular spectator sport, well, that’s very nice for you, and presumably the gate can pay you and the other people putting on the show. Should it pay you $4M? Not unless you’re going to buy some land and build your own stadium etc. If you’re doing this at a state university, it should make you a nice living, and then the money should go to the university.
If you’re working at a private university for the children of the wealthy and they feel like retaining you for $200K to teach their children to hit balls with sticks, okay. That’s obscene, but okay. If you’re working at a state university where the kids are sleeping in lounges and have to rent books, then no. It shouldn’t even cross your mind to accept that kind of money. You should have the sense to say, “That’s a little crazy, please stop that. This is a university. The point is that we make it possible for kids from all over the state, rich or poor, to go to school and without becoming indentured servants along the way. Here’s what it costs to live nicely here. You can pay me that and I’ll count myself lucky. Stop being an idiot and put the rest of the money toward scholarships or generally lowering the cost of attending this place.”
The fact that obscene money for coaches at state universities is currently the done thing does not change that.
The only difference between big-time collegiate sports (and attendant athletic-department salaries), and street miming or acro-yoga, is whether TV revenue factors in. If TV is involved, then the money immediately goes out of whack relative to real-world pursuits, simply as a function of the medium itself. Take a backyard sport, figure out how to package it for TV, and you’ve got yourself a money-maker just as if you came up with a great idea for a dramatic series or a game show or a spellbinding infomercial.
Snowboarding was a doofus/stoner sport until the ‘X Games’ came along. What are the ‘X Games’? Well, the whole concept is a knockoff of the Olympics, and it was invented by ESPN. Because ESPN could guarantee eyeballs, advertisers flooded the doofus/stoner space, instantly generating crazy money for a select few participants. (The same thing happened with skateboarding and BMX.)
What’s most interesting to me about the situation at UI is that because the accounting ledgers are separate, the relationship between the academic university and its sports-entertainment division is almost entirely legal. It wouldn’t take much to cleave the whole enterprise off as a non-profit (or even a for-profit), then have that legal entity lease the UI name/logo for a pricey fee, plus the stadium, etc.
That in turn could be the first in a number of similar actions in which the parasite-ridden College of Liberal Arts and Sciences unburdened itself of UIHC and the College of Medicine, or of Tippie and its white-collar job training programs. At which point we could see what was left, then determine a fair price for tuition for students who want to learn how to think for themselves. That tuition, in turn, would provide a living wage for staff, faculty, and minimal administrators who were themselves devoted to that cause.
Nope again. We subsidize a liberal arts education because it’s a social good producing citizens who can read, think, write, and speak well, who have some sense of history, and who are equipped to function in jobs requiring, say, reading, thinking, writing, and speaking well.
There is no such benefit to subsidizing amusement. If we’re going to send 20-year-olds into practically-pro sports careers wearing school uniforms, for the grand sum of tuition/fees/board, then (a) they can be paid out of revenues, and (b) beyond reasonable nice-living money for the coach, the remainder should be going to subsidize the educational mission of the university, which is…a university.
Essentially, if you want to use the university name so that you can have a semi-pro teaching/playing career, you may, but the money beyond something rather modest will go exactly where it ought to go: the license-holder, meaning the university.
I see no reason for the university to get into the business of pro-stadium/facilities building for this enterprise. It’s already got a business. Should a football-mad donor want to spend the money…well, too bad, because that’d violate Title IX, unless he also wants to donate for lovely facilities for women’s sport.
In any case, we’re now miles away from my original point, which is: what kind of person says to a public university where poor kids drop out for lack of ability to pay tuition: “Hi! I’m here to teach a few people to hit a ball with a stick real good. $200K sounds fine, thanks, I will sign right here.”
Over the past year and a half the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, has followed a predictable pattern. As was the case immediately after his appointment, when he went dark for several months before resurfacing on the day he took office, Harreld disappears into the depths of UI administration for weeks or months at a time, only to suddenly breach and loose a blast of marketing hype from his blowhole. For most of the past eighteen months the words ‘world class’ were a particularly persistent bellow, befitting both Harreld’s rank snobbishness and his emotional need to rationalize slumming at UI.
At this time last year, Harreld’s incessant calls for ‘world-class faculty’ and ‘world-class education’ reached a crescendo as he sought to justify tuition hikes that were completely out of scale to what was, and seems all the more now, a minuscule legislative funding shortfall of less than $1M to the university. Now, in the run-up to yet another new round of last-minute tuition hikes this summer — albeit this time premised on substantial legislative funding cuts — Harreld has pivoted from his ‘world-class’ mantra to pleading poverty relative to other schools in Iowa’s academic ‘peer group’. (Formal requests for the latest round of tuition hikes will take place at the June meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents. Those requests will then receive almost certain perfunctory approval at the board’s telephonic meeting at the beginning of August.)
Harreld’s rhetorical shift is a clever twist as such things go, because unlike his ‘world-class’ mantra, the idea of a peer group implies that there is an objective means of making apples-to-apples comparisons between colleges and universities. And yet, when you dig into the whole premise of a UI peer group, let alone the peer group Harreld most commonly cites, what you find — perhaps not surprisingly — is yet another Harreld lie in service of Harreld’s anti-student agenda. It’s not the education at Iowa that Harreld aims to improve, but the status — the prestige.
Harreld’s UI Peer Group Pitch
In an upcoming post we will take Harreld’s recent DI interview apart line by line, but for now consider this offer of proof from UI’s Chief Marketing Weasel, meaning Harreld himself:
Again, compared to a meaningless term like ‘world class’ this is obviously a big step forward. Instead of hype, here we have the concept of a quantified national peer group backed by “some data”. Yes, Harreld always cherry-picks any data he produces, leaving out critical information, but for the moment we’ll overlook that disturbingly consistent tendency.
Back in February, during the Board of Regents meetings on the 22nd and 23rd, there were two key issues in play. First, there was the announcement of what seemed to be sudden, unexpected state-wide funding cuts, which later turned out to have been in the works for months behind the scenes. At the same time, Harreld had also just announced that he was rescinding $4.3M in previously awarded scholarships, which it subsequently turned out he had no legal right to do.
As a result, Iowa was hit with multiple class-action lawsuits in a matter of days, and caved almost immediately when it was made clear that Harreld was attempting outright theft. It should also be noted that at those February regent meetings — which were conducted under the authoritarian auspices of disgraced and recently replaced regents president Bruce Rastetter — Harreld was not asked a single question about his nefarious scheme by any member of the board. Instead, the mute, lockstep regents unanimously approved Harreld’s caper without any regard for the students or families affected.
In that context, now consider what UI had to say, in part, to the Iowa Department of Management (DOM) about those semi-surprise funding cuts, as reported by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 02/24/17:
In a report by the Des Moines Register’s William Petroski a few days earlier, on 02/20/17, we find the disgraced former Iowa State president, Steven Leath, parroting the same ‘peer group’ rationale:
In a report by the Press-Citizen’s Jeff-Charis Carlson, on 03/03/17, Harreld finally gave up any pretense of caring about students and their families, and instead went for broke by proposing tuition hikes as far as his beady, for-profit eyes could see:
In that same piece we also got the following from Rastetter, who apparently saw no contradiction in supporting Harreld’s radical and abusive scheme, while simultaneously laying claim to multiple years of flat tuition as a cornerstone of his administrative legacy at the board:
In another upcoming post we will dig into the entirely separate sham that Harreld is perpetrating by attempting to justify tuition increases based on a sham strategic plan that he premised on a sham budgeting process that he rigged shortly after his sham appointment. For the purposes of this post, however, we will remain focused on Harreld’s claim that Iowa lags woefully behind its peer group in tuition, which in turn negatively affects the quality of the institution. Not surprisingly, Harreld pounded that very point in his recent DI interview, tossing out endless numbers — “data” — to make his case:
As you can see, from Harreld to the former president at Iowa State, to the former president of the Iowa Board of Regents, to the majority of the current board, everyone agrees that tuition needs to go up, up, up for no other reason than the difference in tuition between Iowa (or Iowa State) and its peers. But who or what constitutes “that group”, which Harreld insists UI is “competing with”, which obligates Iowa to increase tuition 5%, 6%, even 8% per year? (As to what “competing” means, we will simply ignore that for the weasel-speak it is.)
Thankfully, if you click the video link in the quote above from Miller’s Gazette’s story, you find the answer contained in a breezy, 2:26, grade-school-level explanation of the University of Iowa’s $3.8B-as-in-billion budget. Specifically, at the 2:02 mark the following information begins to flow onto the screen, culminating in this image:
[For a full-size version of the same image, click here.]
As you can see, that graphic corroborates both a number of Harreld’s comments in his recent DI interview, as well as statements made by UI to the DOM, as reported by Miller. There is a peer group, and relative to that peer group — at least with regard to tuition — Iowa is clearly lagging.
Specifically, as submitted in “response to a request from the Iowa Department of Management”, Iowa’s peer group consists of 17 public universities: 13 of 14 Big Ten schools (Northwestern, as a private school, is omitted), plus Arizona, North Carolina, Texas and UCLA. Except…because J. Bruce Harreld can’t do anything without stretching the truth, omitting information, switching facts or just flat-out lying, we find a contrary statement from Harreld himself in his recent Daily Iowan interview:
When UI submits “data” to the Iowa Department of Management about its “peer group”, you would think it would include accurate information. Yet in the still taken from the UI video, Purdue is clearly included. In fact here is the narration that goes with that image, which removes any ambiguity about whether those 17 schools are or are not Iowa’s peer group:
How is it, then, that after UI defined its peer group as seventeen schools including Purdue, only a few days ago Harreld asserted that the UI peer group does not include Purdue? (As a Purdue grad you would think Harreld would have a pretty good handle on whether the Boilermakers are or are not in Iowa’s peer group, but clearly that’s not the case.)
The explanation most consistent with Harreld’s character would of course be that he lied — either to the DI reporters, or, earlier, to the DOM. On the other hand, it would be a weird lie even for Harreld, because the truth is nobody cares about Purdue. Assuming for the moment that Harreld is right, then, and Purdue is not in UI’s peer group, could the person or persons who made up the video have included Purdue by mistake?
Then again, if a mistake was made, it’s a mistake that Harreld himself — or at least his ghostwriter at the UI Office of Strategic Communications — also made a little over a year ago. From a press release on 06/23/16, in which Harreld argued for his first round of ‘world-class’ tuition hikes:
Here we not only have Harreld including Purdue, but also Northwestern, which is part of the Big Ten, but is not included in the 17-memember peer group in the video. So which is it? Was Harreld correct a year ago, that Purdue is part of UI’s peer group? Or is he correct now, when he told the DI that Purdue is not part of that group?
Well, as it turns out, if you search for “University of Iowa” and “peer group”, the very first hit takes you to a page on the UI Provost’s website titled University of Iowa Peer/Comparison Groups. And on that page you will find not one, not two, not three, not four, but five different groups that the University of Iowa compares itself to for various reasons.
From that page, in order, those five peer/comparison groups are:
We will come back to the AAU shortly, but as to resolving our current conundrum about Purdue, this obviously gets us nowhere. Not only does the graphic in the UI video show only 17 schools instead of 62, but if you look up the schools in the AAU, Purdue is one of them. Ergo, AAU schools cannot be the peer group Harreld was talking about in the DI interview.
You probably know about the Big Ten. What you may not know is that the Big Ten is an athletic conference, not an academic organization or peer group. As you may or may not also know, while the Big Ten originally included a very sensible 10 schools, including Iowa, there are now 14 schools under the Big Ten brand. We will identify the individual Big Ten schools shortly, but for our immediate purposes we can also eliminate the Big Ten Conference as Harreld’s peer group because Purdue is one of the original members of the Big Ten conference.
Because Purdue is part of the Big Ten it is also part of the CIC, which means the CIC is not the peer group Harreld mentioned in the DI interview.
From the name alone this grouping seems promising. Add in the attempt to differentiate between schools based on criteria other than athletics, and the “UI Peer Group” seems to portend much-needed rigor.
Because Purdue is excluded from the “official UI Peer Group”, this must be the same “peer group” that Harreld referenced in the Daily Iowan interview. While we will address concerns about the UI Peer Group in the remainder of this two-part post, for now at least we have answered an important question — and in so doing have also pinned Harreld down. As to where the 17 schools shown in the UI video came from, here is the last of the five peer/comparison groupings listed on the UI web page:
The graphic in the UI video shows 17 schools. If we remove the only private school (Northwestern) from the 14 members of the Big Ten that leaves 13 schools. Adding the “four non-Big Ten universities that are part of the official UI Peer Group” brings us to 17 total, matching the number of schools in that graphic. Looking through the schools listed in the graphic we can also confirm that Arizona, NC, Texas and UCLA are present, that Northwestern is excluded, and that the other 13 schools are all members of the Big Ten. We can also confirm that the Regents Comparison Group (RCG) is not the peer group Harreld mentioned in the DI interview, because once again the RCG includes Purdue.
So there we have it. Not only was Harreld referencing the 10-member UI Peer Group in his recent DI interview, but the 17-member peer group shown in the UI video is the Regents Comparison Group. Whether the Iowa Department of Management or anyone else cares which peer or comparison group UI uses at any give time I do not know, but it would obviously be helpful if they were differentiated. (As to whether the RCG was included in the UI budget video because it was specifically prepared for the Board of Regents, given the video’s brevity and comprehension level that would be my guess.)
The Premise of the UI Peer Group
It may very well be useful to define a peer group so there is some way of comparing one institution to that of similar institutions across the country, or even around the world. The devil, of course, would be in the criteria that were used to define those peers, because if you got that wrong then all of your conclusions would also be wrong. So what are the criteria for inclusion in the UI Peer Group, and why are those criteria particularly relevant (or not) to the question of tuition hikes at UI?
The first criteria, as stated on the UI web page, is that each member of the UI Peer Group is a public school, while the second and last criteria is that each member campus must have a “large science center”. Starting with the 9 public members of the original Big Ten (Northwestern excluded), and removing the two universities without large science centers (Michigan State and Purdue), we end up with 7 Big Ten schools. To that we then add four universities from around the country that are both public and have large science centers, and that brings us to 11 schools in the UI Peer Group.
But wait a minute. The UI web page says, “the 10 public university members of the official UI Peer Group are”, then lists the 10 schools. Well, the confusion here is that unlike the listing of the Big Ten schools on that same page, in the UI Peer Group the University of Iowa is omitted, meaning there are actually 11 schools in that group, not 10.
As to why Harreld specifically cited the 11-member UI Peer Group in arguing for massive tuition increases at UI over the next half-decade — as opposed to referencing any of the other UI peer/comparison groups — there doesn’t seem to be a particular justification. Yes, the UI Peer Group is “official” in some self-appointed sense, but the criteria for inclusion have only to do with being publicly funded and having a large science center on campus, not with any of the factors one might think of as relevant to the cost of attendance. And yet, in the Daily Iowan interview and elsewhere, Harreld repeatedly points to the low cost of attending Iowa relative to schools in the UI Peer Group as probative “data” that UI’s tuition is objectively too low. And of course that is the whole point of the graphic from the UI video, which shows tuition at Iowa lagging behind all of the schools in the Regents Comparison Group.
There is another problem with Harreld invoking the UI Peer Group, however, and this one is fatal. From the UI web page, describing that comparison group:
To see why this is so damaging, consider the following quote from Harreld, which comes to us from the same recent DI interview. In this instance Harreld is talking about a task force he instigated through former UI provost P. Barry Butler, which will eventually allow Harreld to cut and gut the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences budget, diverting its resources to crony administrators and for-profit initiatives at other colleges on campus:
Actually, the question is why J. Bruce Harreld would cite a 20-year-old org chart as justification for hacking up the university on one hand, while embracing a 30-year-old peer group as justification for massive tuition hikes on the other. The answer, of course, is that J. Bruce Harreld is lying trash and can’t be trusted. Even though the peer group he cites to justify his massive increases in tuition is half again as outdated as the campus structure he intends to reconfigure based solely on age, he will go right on using that peer group as long as it serves his purpose. (Were the UI Peer Group did not giving him the justification he seeks, he would of course claim that 30-year-old group was also badly overdue for an update.)
Again, the premise of Harreld’s argument, and by extension, of the tuition graphic in the UI video, is that Iowa’s tuition should be higher simply because the tuition of other schools is higher. There is no data presented which explains why tuition varies from school to school — just a flat assertion that because other schools are charging more, UI should charge more. From the recent DI interview:
Harreld is correct. When you compare Iowa’s tuition to that of the other 10 members of Iowa’s 30-year-old UI Peer Group, Iowa is at the bottom. We know that even without an accompanying graph because all 11 schools in the UI Peer Group are represented in the graphic from the UI video, and Iowa is clearly at the bottom of that graphic.
What we do not know is why Iowa is still being compared to those 10 schools in that 30-year-old peer group, as opposed to any number of other schools around the country which might be more representative of Iowa’s standing — particularly if additional factors, including factors relevant to the cost of tuition, were included in the selection criteria. As it stands, Harreld’s entire argument for massive increases in tuition is, literally, statistical. Because Iowa is below the average, Iowa must therefore raise its tuition to that average.
That is of course not how pricing works. Even in real estate, after you pick out a few comparable — meaning peer properties — you have to take specifics into account for each property in a given market at a given time. Whether you’re the buyer or the seller, that is the whole point of searching out new comparables for every potential sale. If anyone claimed to know what a given property was worth based on 30-year-old comparables — or even 3-year-old comparables — they would be laughed out of the room.
Establishing any basis for comparing resident (or non-resident) undergraduate (or graduate) tuition first requires finding appropriate comparables, then taking any additional unique factors about Iowa into account. In his recent DI interview Harreld went full-on weasel about all kinds of numbers and metrics, but the premise of his argument was inherently flawed because the UI Peer Group is 30 years old. The only that comparison group tells us as currently constituted is that it supports Harreld’s statistical argument for raising tuition, not that it has any real-world utility in making such determinations.
Unfortunately, this leaves us with two new problems. First, we don’t know if the schools in the UI Peer Group are valid for comparing tuition, with a particular focus on resident undergraduate tuition. Second, other than the cost of tuition we do not have any meaningful criteria by which to rank schools, which might in turn give us insight into whether the tuition being charged at Iowa is appropriate relative to its peers.
While I do not know how Iowa managed to go 30 years without updating its peer group — which, apparently, was unaffected by widespread adoption of personal computers, or, a decade later, the internet — as Harreld likes to say, we are where we are. What we clearly need in all respects is more recent data, if not also more relevant data, to help us understand how Iowa compares to others schools. Fortunately, we can find both by looking at one of the other peer groups on the UI web page. Even better, Harreld himself validated that peer group in his recent DI interview.
Updating Iowa’s Peer Group
On the web page listing Iowa’s peers we noted that there are five comparison groups. The only stated criteria for inclusion in the 30-year-old UI Peer Group is public standing and the presence of a “large science center” on campus — neither of which seem to be particularly relevant regarding the cost of resident undergraduate tuition. One or both of those criteria may be valid, but that validity is not self-evident, nor do those two criteria seem sufficiently discriminating.
Of the four remaining comparison groups we already discounted the Big Ten as an athletic conference. While the Committee on Institutional Cooperation may call itself the “academic Big Ten”, since it is only differentiated by the inclusion of one private school — the University of Chicago — that doesn’t advance our cause. Likewise, because the Regents Comparison Group comprises all of the public Big Ten schools, plus the four non-Big Ten schools in the UI Peer Group, that doesn’t help much.
The one comparison group on the UI web page which is genuinely different from all of the others, particularly in scope and scale, but also in membership criteria, is the American Association of Universities. Here again is the terse description for that organization:
Because the AAU is comprised of 62 schools, that gives us some confidence that we can escape the influence of the Big Ten, which also represents the majority of schools in Iowa’s 30-year-old peer group. The fact that the AAU is defined by research also gives us some confidence that we might add more relevant and recent data to the peer-group conversation, to say nothing of any subsequent conversation about the cost of tuition. As to what defines the AAU as an organization, we have this from the AAU’s Who We Are web page:
Pretty good, right? No mention of sports, no public-school bias, and the AAU is concerned about research and education, which are both core components of Iowa’s mission. (Yes, the AAU is cheating a little bit because “discovery” is redundant to research, but we’ll chalk that up to enthusiasm.)
What we are looking for is some rational basis for charging students x dollars for y product, as against Harreld’s plan of simply whining about tuition being below average, based on a 30-year-old peer group which is bound together by nothing more than public status and having a “large science center” on campus. Speaking of which, how is “large” defined? Is that in square feet? Number of buildings? Number of staff? Number of faculty? Number of tenured faculty? All of the above?
As to how schools gain membership in the AAU there are two answers to that question, both of which can be found on the Membership Policy page. The broad answer appears in the first paragraph, and sets the hook:
Now, if we know nothing else about human society, we know that the term ‘by invitation’ sets hearts aflutter. While virtually no one would voluntarily join the Association of Toilet Cleaners, let alone publicize that fact, if membership was invitation-only people would be bribing their way in. (If there is an Association of Toilet Cleaners, no offense.)
The more specific answer to the AAU membership question begins with the second paragraph and runs the rest of that long page, including multiple sections and sub-sections, phases and indicators, clauses and conditions:
Again, this seems promising. Instead of a couple of cronies fixing the membership however they want, there is a membership committee, and there is a process of periodic reevaluation. And then there’s this, from the third paragraph:
Again, this is good. Unlike the fossilized UI Peer Group, the crack AAU Membership Committee cleans house with regularity, kicking deadbeats to the curb and welcoming in new schools that have risen from the mire to merit inclusion. And yet…. it’s not as if institutional ego plays no part, as evidenced by the fourth paragraph:
Translation: not only is AAU membership by invitation only, but it is intentionally exclusive. No educational riff-raff, just the creme-de-la-crop. And one look at the alphabetical membership list – emblazoned with logos no less — makes that clear. Harvard, Yale, and right there with them, the University of Iowa! (Admit it, you’re getting goose bumps.)
The downside, of course, is that it must hurt like hell to get tossed out of that snooty little club, meaning current members would probably do almost anything — including, say, imposing multiple abusive tuition hikes on their captive student population — to secure the funding necessary to remain in that heady mix. If you’re not already in the AAU that’s bad enough, but to actually have your AAU chevrons ripped from your sleeves, then find yourself tossed out in the academic street with the also-rans and (oh god) for-profits, must be the stuff of administrative nightmares. And particularly so for those individuals who are more interested in keeping up appearances than giving back to the next generation.
As to how often the AAU updates its membership, while there may be plenty of evaluation cycles when no changes are made, one way we can gauge that process is by noting when new schools have been added or dropped. (The hope, of course, is that such changes occur more often than every 30 years.) Unfortunately while you might think the AAU would keep a historical record of membership changes over time, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Perhaps the AAU prefers not to acknowledge associations that ended in bitter disappointment, or perhaps the AAU is being kind by shielding schools that were shunned, but in either case, as far as the exclusive, invitation-only AAU is concerned, you’re either in or you don’t exist. (To be fair, institutions which have been dropped may prefer to expunge that indignity from their histories as well.)
Fortunately, we still have Wikipedia, which tells us three things. First, despite periodic reevaluation of its membership, the list of former AAU members is extremely short, comprising only four schools over the organization’s 117-year history. Second, the majority of those schools left voluntarily, before they were given the actual boot by the membership committee. Third, the most recent change in AAU membership occurred in 2011, when Syracuse withdrew voluntarily rather than be expelled, leaving Nebraska — or, officially, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln — as the only school in AAU history to have its membership “discontinued”.
Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and the AAU
While Nebraska is currently a member of the Big Ten, at the time of its removal from the AAU it was only just. In 2010 Nebraska accepted an offer to leave the Big 12, and officially joined the Big Ten in 2011. From the NU Wikipedia page:
So just before Nebraska was kicked out of the AAU it was allowed into the Big Ten, in part because of its century-long membership in the AAU. Only months later, however, in 2011, the AAU removed Nebraska from its membership rolls for failing to meet its criteria for inclusion. And of course in terms of geographic proximity, no Big Ten school is closer to UN-L than the University of Iowa, which itself used to anchor the western fringe of the Big Ten conference.
Relative to the current situation at Iowa, this is but the first of many ‘small world’ aspects to its own AAU membership, which may in turn heighten any potential threat to its inclusion in that exclusive, invitation-only club. For example, the current president of the AAU is Mary Sue Coleman, who was not only president at Michigan, which is also in the Big Ten, but prior to that was president of the University of Iowa from 1995 to 2002. In fact, only a few months ago Coleman dropped by the UI campus as part of a barnstorming tour for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
During that visit Coleman participated in a panel discussion on funding and other exciting topics with, among others, the illegitimate and incoherent Iowa president, J. Bruce Harreld. While Harreld argued that UI is a whiny little baby that needs to grow up and quit begging for government funding, while also arguing that UI should start its own PAC in order to generate more legislative funding — which would be illegal — Coleman suggested that a better approach might be to fight light hell against the state legislatures that are killing public higher education. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/09/17:
While no discussion of Iowa’s AAU standing was reported, and Ms. Coleman was in town under the auspices of the American Academy, it’s not hard to imagine that Harreld may have had questions about whether Iowa might be at risk for removal. If not necessarily out of genuine concern, then at least out of a desire to use that information to panic the Iowa Board of Regents, thus securing permission to strip-mine money from Iowa Students and their families, instead of fighting like hell for legislative funding. Then again, if the Nebraska story is any guide, perhaps there is some increased basis for concern at the end of each decade.
With Harreld having been fraudulently appointed in 2015, and having begun his unprecedented, undeserved, guaranteed five-year contract at the end of that year, his tenure will — hopefully, at the latest — run out in 2020. Given Harreld’s inveterate snobbery, ego needs, and fraternal tendencies, having the AAU shun Iowa under his watch would be a grievous wound, aside from any actual effect on the school. So perhaps Harreld and even the Board of Regents are a bit skittish about that onrushing decennial marker, which is now only a few years away.
There is also good reason to believe that the deluded call by former regents president Bruce Rastetter, in late 2014, to loft Iowa into the upper ranks of national universities — which Harreld aggressively adopted as his own charge — may have been motivated to some degree by Iowa’s AAU membership. From the Faculty Senate Working Group’s final propaganda report on that matter:
Here we learn two important things. First, while the AAU does not add or remove members very often, it reviews membership annually. That in turn does not mean schools are even put on notice each year, but some sort of review does take place. Second, that annual review involves, among other things, the measurement of external funding.
While questions about the specific criteria which are used to establish and maintain AAU membership are important, equally interesting is the fact that on some level that same criteria may translate into a ranking of sorts. If you hit all the criteria you end up toward the top, if you’re weak on some metrics you fall in the middle, and if you are weak on all, or on the most important criteria, you may be at risk of falling out of that hallowed organization. And yet, if you try to find out how the AAU quantifies its membership criteria, or how AAU schools are ranked, not only will you come up empty, but the AAU actively denies that it ranks its member schools.
We know that as a factual matter because of the University of Missouri, which is of course also in close geographic proximity to Iowa, as well as a fellow member of the AAU. From the Columbia Daily Tribune’s Ashley Jost, on 07/29/14:
The question of whether or how a given school ranks among its AAU peers necessarily devolves to the criteria used to make that determination. If the criteria are binary — meaning they are either satisfied or not — then membership is simply determined by checkboxes. On the other hand, if some or all of the criteria are quantitative, then any variation in those numbers would inherently produce rankings for each such criterion, as well as an overall rank. Unfortunately, at some point the latter scenario seems to have come to dominate at the AAU, with all the risks that follows from rankings. Worse, in yet another example of what turns out to be completely routine hypocrisy in the purportedly open, honest and transparent world of higher education, the AAU and most of its members have adopted a code of silence regarding its rankings, thus setting the stage for all of the abuses of power that inevitably flow from secrecy.
So there you have it. What some daft university administrators erroneously think of as a “ranking”, is in fact merely a list of “eight membership indicators” which are “weighted differently”. (It must be very frustrating to the AAU when otherwise well-educated folk confuse those concepts.) Still, as Ashley Jost pointed out a few days earlier, on 07/27/14, in a prequel to her report on 07/29/14, those (non-)rankings also carry a different kind of weight:
Has anything changed since 2014? Does the AAU still rank its members internally? And most importantly, if the process is secret, how can we ever possibly know where Iowa ranks?
Well, as it turns out, J. Bruce Harreld answered all of those questions and more in his most recent Daily Iowan interview, on 05/08/17:
From the DI transcript it seems clear that Harreld did actually show Iowa’s secret AAU rankings to people who were not authorized to view that information, so as you read this Harreld may well be on the run from the AAU Secret Police. In any event, however, the AAU rankings clearly do still exist, and Iowa’s trend in those rankings is not good. (Not good!)
So what does this all mean? Iowa’s AAU rank is apparently slipping — at least according to Harreld — but how does its AAU rank relate to the tuition Iowa should charge? If Iowa is in the bottom quartile, why shouldn’t tuition at UI be cheaper than the tuition at AAU schools which rank higher? In fact, how could we ever determine the appropriateness of Iowa’s tuition relative to its ancient 11-member peer group, to the 14-member Big Ten, or to the 17-member Regents Comparison Group (RCG), without factoring in the AAU rankings for all of those schools?
While those are all good questions, because the AAU rankings and their weighted criteria are secret, again we cannot make those critical comparisons. Fortunately, however, what we can do is approximate the AAU rankings thanks to this quote from Jost’s piece on 07/29/14, which she also referenced in her 07/27/14 prequel:
As it turns out, not only can we compare research funding between AAU schools ourselves, from the same exact data source the AAU uses, but because it is now three years after Jost’s reporting the data available is also three years more recent.
For Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Peer Group Tuition Lie, click here.
This is Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Peer Group Tuition Lie. For Part 1, click here.
AAU Rank by National Science Foundation Data
If you don’t know anything about the National Science Foundation (NSF), join the club. Until I started writing this post I had only heard of the NSF in passing, and one of the most important things I did not know is that the NSF is part of the federal government:
The total amount of research money tracked by the NSF in any given year is impressive – $69B in 2015 alone – but that money is divided among a great many schools. While the competition for research funding, including but not limited to NSF grants, tells us which schools are doing the most research, it also allows us to make apples-to-apples comparisons between schools on that basis. That’s particularly useful in the context of this post, because in annually ranking its member institutions, the AAU reportedly gives the greatest weight to total research funding, which the NSF defines as a “total R&D expenditure” for each school.
You can see the most recent NSF data, for 2015, here. In correlating that data with the 62 AAU institutions of higher learning, we will necessarily exclude the two Canadian schools – McGill University and the University of Toronto – because the NSF table does not track their funding. For the 60 U.S. members of the AAU, the following list ranks each school by total NSF R&D expenditures for 2015. Included after each name is that school’s NSF rank among AAU schools, its rank among public or private schools, and its rank, if any, among the 11-memeber UI Peer Group (UIPG), the 14-member Big Ten (B1G), and the 17-memeber Regents Comparison Group (RCG). Also included for context (*) is former AAU member, University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
1 The Johns Hopkins University
[AAU (1), Private (1)]
2 University of Michigan
[AAU (2), Public (1), UIPG (1), B1G (1), RCG (1)]
3 University of Washington
[AAU (3), Public (2)]
5 University of California, San Diego
[AAU (4), Public (3)]
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison
[AAU (5), Public (4), UIPG (2), B1G (2), RCG (2)]
7 Duke University
[AAU (6), Private (2)]
8 Stanford University
[AAU (7), Private (3)]
9 University of California, Los Angeles
[AAU (8), Public (5), UIPG (3), RCG (3)]
10 Harvard University
[AAU (9), Private (4)]
11 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
[AAU (10), Public (6), UIPG (4), RCG (4)]
12 Cornell University
[AAU (11), Private (5)]
13 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
[AAU (12), Private (6)]
14 University of Minnesota
[AAU (13), Public (7), UIPG (5), B1G (3), RCG (5)]
15 Columbia University
[AAU (14), Private (7)]
16 Texas A&M University
[AAU (15), Public (8)]
17 University of Pennsylvania
[AAU (16), Private (8)]
18 University of Pittsburgh
[AAU (17), Public (9)]
20 The Ohio State University
[AAU (18), Public (10), UIPG (6), B1G (4), RCG (6)]
21 Yale University
[AAU (19), Private (9)]
22 The Pennsylvania State University
[AAU (20), Public (11), B1G (5), RCG (7)]
23 University of California, Berkeley
[AAU (21), Public (12)]
24 Georgia Institute of Technology
[AAU (22), Public (13)]
25 University of Florida
[AAU (23), Public (14)]
26 University of California, Davis
[AAU (24), Public (15)]
27 Washington University in St. Louis
[AAU (25), Private (10)]
28 University of Southern California
[AAU (26), Private (11)]
29 Northwestern University
[AAU (27), Private (12), B1G (6)]
30 The University of Texas at Austin
[AAU (28), Public (16), UIPG (7), RCG (8)]
31 Vanderbilt University
[AAU (29), Private (13)]
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
[AAU (30), Public (17), UIPG (8), B1G (7), RCG (9)]
33 Rutgers University–New Brunswick
[AAU (31), Public (18), B1G (8), RCG (10)]
34 The University of Arizona
[AAU (32), Public (19), UIPG (9), RCG (11)]
35 New York University
[AAU (33), Private (14)]
36 Emory University
[AAU (34), Private (15)]
37 Purdue University
[AAU (35), Public (20), B1G (9), RCG (12)]
38 Michigan State University
[AAU (36), Public (21), B1G (10), RCG (13)]
43 University of Maryland, College Park
[AAU (37), Public (22), B1G (11), RCG (14)]
46 Indiana University Bloomington
[AAU (38), Public (23), UIPG (10), B1G (12), RCG (15)]
49 The University of Iowa
[AAU (39), Public (24), UIPG (11), B1G (13), RCG (16)]
52 The University of Chicago
[AAU (40), Private (16)]
53 University of Colorado Boulder
[AAU (41), Public (25)]
55 Case Western Reserve University
[AAU (42), Private (17)]
57 Boston University
[AAU (43), Private (18)]
59 The State University of New York at Buffalo
[AAU (44), Public (26)]
60 California Institute of Technology
[AAU (45), Private (19)]
62 University of Virginia
[AAU (46), Public (27)]
66 University of Rochester
[AAU (47), Private (20)]
67 Brown University
[AAU (48), Private (21)]
70 University of California, Irvine
[AAU (49), Public (28)]
71 University of Oregon
[AAU (50), Public (29)]
75 The University of Kansas
[AAU (51), Public (30)]
77 Iowa State University
[AAU (52), Public (31)]
79* University of Nebraska
[AAU (53*), Public (32*), B1G (14), RCG (17)]
81 Princeton University
[AAU (53), Private (22)]
85 University of Missouri
[AAU (54), Public (32)]
89 Carnegie Mellon University
[AAU (55), Private (23)]
95 University of California, Santa Barbara
[AAU (56), Public (33)]
96 Stony Brook University
[AAU (57), Public (34)]
121 Tulane University
[AAU (58), Private (24)]
125 Rice University
[AAU (59), Private (25)]
161 Brandeis
[AAU (60), Private (26)]
From all that, here are three things to note. First, of the 38 schools at the top of the NSF funding list for 2015, 36 are members of the AAU; of the top 60 schools, 45 belong to the AAU. Second, the University of Iowa ranks 49th among all colleges and universities in total NSF R&D expenditures, 39th among AAU members. Third, among the 34 public AAU schools, Iowa is 24th in NSF funding.
In contrast to the ranking of Iowa’s tuition relative to various official peer or comparison groups, which we looked at in Part 1 of this post, Iowa does not rank at the bottom of the 60 U.S. AAU members for NSF R&D expenditures. In fact, whether we compare all 60, or only the public schools, Iowa seems to rank at or near the top of the first tertile. Furthermore, if we average the NSF R&D rank for all 60 AAU schools we get 42, putting Iowa, at 49, very close to that average.
To make Iowa’s position relative to its other official comparison groups clearer, we will now remove every AAU school that is not a part of the UIPG or B1G, giving us a much shorter list of 17 schools, which is also very close to the 17-member RCG. (In the UI RCG, Northwestern is excluded as a private school and Nebraska is included as a member of the Big Ten. In the list below, Northwestern is included as a member of the AAU, while Nebraska is excluded because it lost AAU membership in 2011.)
2 University of Michigan
[AAU (2), Public (1), UIPG (1), B1G (1), RCG (1)]
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison
[AAU (5), Public (4), UIPG (2), B1G (2), , RCG (2)]
9 University of California, Los Angeles
[AAU (8), Public (5), UIPG (3), RCG (3)]
11 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
[AAU (10), Public (6), UIPG (4), RCG (4)]
14 University of Minnesota
[AAU (13), Public (7), UIPG (5), B1G (3), RCG (5)]
20 The Ohio State University
[AAU (18), Public (10), UIPG (6), B1G (4), RCG (6)]
22 The Pennsylvania State University
[AAU (20), Public (11), B1G (5), RCG (7)]
29 Northwestern University
[AAU (27), Private (11), B1G (6)]
30 The University of Texas at Austin
[AAU (28), Public (16), UIPG (7), RCG (8)]
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
[AAU (30), Public (17), UIPG (8), B1G (7), RCG (9)]
33 Rutgers University–New Brunswick
[AAU (31), Public (18), B1G (8), RCG (10)]
34 The University of Arizona
[AAU (32), Public (19), UIPG (9), RCG (11)]
37 Purdue University
[AAU (35), Public (20), B1G (9), RCG (12)]
38 Michigan State University
[AAU (36), Public (21), B1G (10), RCG (13)]
43 University of Maryland, College Park
[AAU (37), Public (22), B1G (11), RCG (14)]
46 Indiana University Bloomington
[AAU (38), Public (23), UIPG (10), B1G (12), RCG (15)]
49 The University of Iowa
[AAU (39), Public (24), UIPG (11), B1G (13), RCG (16)]
Though this much shorter list of AAU schools has nothing to do with tuition, as was the case with the tuition-centric graphic in the UI video, Iowa once again ranks dead last. The only reason for that fall in relative standing, of course, is that we limited the NSF rankings to those AAU schools which are also members of the UI Peer Group, the Big Ten or the Regents Comparison Group – meaning, as regards tuition, that we may now have good reason to view the constraints of those groups with suspicion as well. Still, were we to graph the above list of 17 schools, the result would look very much like this tuition graphic from the UI video, though the order of the other schools would differ:
[For a full-size version of the same image, click here.]
Despite the fact that Iowa ranks last in NSF R&D expenditures among schools in the UIPG, and second-to-last in both the B1G and RCG, there are important differences. As noted, the average NSF R&D rank for all 60 U.S. AAU schools is 42, with Iowa relatively close at 49. The average NSF rank for the 17-member RCG, however – which excludes AAU member Northwestern and includes non-AAU Nebraska – is 30. The average NSF R&D rank for the full 14-member Big Ten, both Northwestern and Nebraska included, is 26. The average NSF R&D rank for the 11-member UIPG, of which all schools are AAU members, is 23.
The concerns here should be obvious. First, the smaller or more exclusive each UI comparison group becomes, the less likely Iowa is to be representative of that group in terms of NSF R&D expenditures. Second, in his recent DI interview Harreld managed to choose the one peer group – the UIPG – which is least representative in terms of NSF R&D expenditures among the five comparison groups that UI uses. Third, while Harreld insists that Iowa’s lagging tuition in itself justifies massive, long-term hikes, the fact that Iowa’s NSF rank lags all other schools in the very peer group Harreld favors suggests that Iowa’s tuition should be lower than all of those other, higher-ranked AAU schools.
To be clear, we have no substantive basis to draw any direct comparison between Iowa’s bottom-of-the-barrel tuition rankings and Iowa’s bottom-of-the-barrel ranking relative to NSF R&D expenditures, as detailed above. Between uncertainty about the years being compared, the wide variability of the tuition rankings and NSF rankings for schools other than Iowa, and the fact that we are considering only one of eight weighted indicators the AAU uses to determine their own double-secret rankings, there are simply too many unknowns. (The very fact that Nebraska, with an enrollment of 26,000 and an NSF R&D rank of 79, was kicked out of the AAU, while Brandeis, with an enrollment of 6,000 and an NSF R&D rank of 161, remains, should make it crystal clear that there is a great deal more going on in the AAU rankings than we know.)
I do think it is possible, however, to make two useful observations about the fact that Iowa ranks dead last in the UIPG for both resident undergraduate tuition and NSF R&D expenditures. First, by virtue of Harreld’s argument that campus reorganization should be undertaken at Iowa simply because it has not been done for 20 years, there is no justification for using the 30-year-old UI Peer Group as a gauge of tuition or any other metric. Second, apart from the age of the UIPG, the fact that it shows the greatest variance between Iowa and the average for NSF R&D expenditures for that group, should also make clear that there is no justification for using the UIPG as gauge of any metric, including tuition. And yet, in justifying his rapacious tuition hikes, the one comparison group that J. Bruce Harreld puts before all others, with unerring accuracy, is the UIPG.
The UI Peer Group Tuition Lie
If this post proves nothing else, it has already proven that there is no basis for using any of the five UI peer or comparison groups to determine the appropriate level of tuition at Iowa. Even if we only look at the 60 U.S. members of the AAU – by far the largest of those groups – and the only group in which Iowa is not also a laggard when taking NSF research funding into account, that tells us nothing about tuition. It is possible, of course, that tuition does factor into the AAU rankings in some way, but we have no visibility into the AAU’s ranking methodology. (That U.S. News is more forthcoming about their rankings methodology than the AAU should also give us considerable pause.)
To get around this problem we can create a hybrid AAU peer group at the intersection of NSF R&D expenditures and tuition, but we have to be careful about the criteria for inclusion in that group as well. For example, would could select either the 11 or 17 AAU schools (or any other number) which are closest to Iowa in terms of NSF R&D, but that particular grouping would include private colleges and universities, making tuition comparisons difficult. (Where most state schools subsidize tuition for resident students, private schools often have a flat cost that ignores residency.)
We can solve that problem by limiting inclusion in our new peer group to public AAU schools, which has the additional advantage of mirroring one of the two core criteria for the UI Peer Group that Harreld prefers. As for the number of schools in our new group, the tuition graphic from the UI video has 17 members, which gives us half again as many schools as the 11-memember UIPG, so that seems like as good a number as any. One obvious problem with comparing our new peer group to that tuition graphic is that only 3 out of 17 schools show a specific dollar amount for tuition, but we can get around that limitation by keeping the schools in the graphic, while replacing all of the dollar amounts that we reference from here on out with tuition from the same consistent data set.
Here, then, is the annual resident undergraduate tuition for the 17 schools listed in the UI video graphic – which comprise the Regents Comparison Group – using the most recent data from U.S. News’ 2017 college rankings. For consistency the schools are still listed according to their NSF R&D rank, but the bracketed ranking information has been replace with the annual cost of tuition for resident undergraduates:
2 University of Michigan $13,856
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison $10,488
9 University of California, Los Angeles $12,836
11 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $8,834
14 University of Minnesota $13,790
20 The Ohio State University $10,037
22 The Pennsylvania State University $17,900
30 The University of Texas at Austin $9,806
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign $15,698
33 Rutgers University–New Brunswick $14,372
34 The University of Arizona $10,872
37 Purdue University $10,002
38 Michigan State University $14,070
43 University of Maryland, College Park $10,181
46 Indiana University Bloomington $10,388
49 The University of Iowa $8,325
79* University of Nebraska $8,628
The average for all 17 schools is $11,770. While tuition does not seem to be closely correlated with NSF R&D expenditures, there is in fact a demonstrable decrease in tuition as NSF R&D also decreases. Specifically, the average tuition for the top 9 schools is $12,612, while the average tuition for the bottom 9 is $11,422.
As was the case with the tuition graphic in the video, the highest-priced school is still Penn State ($17,900), the lowest-priced is Iowa ($8,325), and the difference between them is more than $9,000. Iowa is also more than $3,000 below the average cost. Even if the sparse data in the tuition graphic is a year or two old, overall the tuition range as determined by the RCG seems to be holding steady, and, as Harreld has repeatedly noted, Iowa is last.
One obvious question is whether the wide range in rank of NSF R&D expenditures, from Michigan at 2 to Nebraska at 79, skews the tuition average higher. To correct for that we will now ignore consider the 17 public AAU schools which rank closest to Iowa in terms of NSF R&D:
24 Georgia Institute of Technology $12,212
25 University of Florida $6,389
26 University of California, Davis $14,046
30 The University of Texas at Austin $9,806
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign $15,698
33 Rutgers University–New Brunswick $14,372
34 The University of Arizona $10,872
37 Purdue University $10,002
38 Michigan State University $14,070
43 University of Maryland, College Park $10,181
46 Indiana University Bloomington $10,388
49 The University of Iowa $8,325
53 University of Colorado Boulder $11,531
59 The State University of New York at Buffalo $9,770
62 University of Virginia $15,722
70 University of California, Irvine $14,750
71 University of Oregon $10,762
While the range between the high tuition (Virginia, at $15,722) and the low tuition (Florida, at $6,389) has shifted lower, the gap is still a bit more than $9,000. Likewise, the average tuition for all 17 schools is $11,700, or only $70 less than the RCG average. Even though we used NSF R&D rankings as our selection criteria, then, and we chose the 16 schools closest in that ranking to Iowa (11 above and 5 below), we did not see a meaningful decrease in tuition relative to the schools in the tuition graphic/RCG.
If one thing does stand out in the above list, however, it’s Florida’s rock-bottom resident undergraduate tuition, which at $6,389 is a full $2,000 lower than Iowa. If Harreld is right – if Iowa needs to raise tuition simply to compete against its peers, and Florida is an AAU peer –how do we explain the low price of Florida’s tuition? One possibility, of course, is that Florida’s tuition is low because of dominant in-state factors, as opposed to competition with other schools or peer groups, and that in turn raises an obvious question. What are Florida’s comparison schools?
From the University of Florida website, here are Florida’s AAU Peer Institutions as of 2012, again ranked according to NSF R&D, and including the most recent cost of resident undergraduate tuition:
2 University of Michigan $13,856
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison $10,488
11 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $8,834
16 Texas A&M University $10,176
20 The Ohio State University $10,037
22 The Pennsylvania State University $17,900
23 University of California, Berkeley $13,509
25 University of Florida $6,389
30 The University of Texas at Austin $9,806
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign $15,698
46 Indiana University Bloomington $10,388
Here the range of tuition is greater, with a high of $17,900 for Penn State and a low of $6,389 for Florida yielding a spread of more than $11,000. As for the average tuition, however, at $11,552 it is fairly consistent with the average we found for both the UI RCG, and for the 17 public AAU schools which rank closest to Iowa in terms of NSF R&D. Because of Florida’s rock-bottom tuition, however, where Iowa lagged behind those other averages by about $3,000, Florida lags behind the average cost of tuition at its AAU Peer Institutions by an eye-popping $5,000.
If Harreld is right, that Iowa’s lagging tuition among its peer or comparison groups is great cause for alarm – if not also ample justification for beating the hell out of students and their families with 5%, 6% or even 8% annual tuition hikes for the next five years – you would think the University of Florida would be verging on institutional collapse, if not also in danger of being tossed out of the AAU. And yet that does not seem to be the case. Despite charging almost $25% less than UI, and almost 50% less than the average of its AAU Peer Institutions, I can find no reports of Florida raising its tuition $5,000 over the next five years.
Two other aspects of Florida’s AAU Peer Institutions are also worth nothing. First, of the 10 schools listed, 7 are also listed among the 10 schools in the UI Peer Group on the UI website:
2 University of Michigan $13,856
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison $10,488
11 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill $8,834
20 The Ohio State University $10,037
30 The University of Texas at Austin $9,806
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign $15,698
46 Indiana University Bloomington $10,388
Second, as with UI, Florida is not listed among its own peers, meaning both lists actually include 11 members, and both 11-member lists include only members of the AAU. From that unlikely coincidence it seems very likely that what Iowa calls the UI Peer Group could just as easily be called Iowa’s AAU Peer Institutions. Both groups have 11 members, all members belong to the AAU, and the two lists have 7 members in common.
Is this 10-or-11-member peer grouping consistent across all AAU schools, or even across all AAU schools in the UI Peer Group? Well, some AAU schools, such as Iowa State, seem to follow the same plan, though ISU’s peer list includes ISU among the 11 AAU schools listed. On the other hand, some AAU schools don’t even list comparison groups (I’m looking at you, UCLA), while others list larger groups which are differentiated by various criteria.
There is also some disconnect between which schools consider each other peers. For example, both Iowa and Florida consider the University of North Carolina to be a peer, while UNC mentions neither among its ten public AAU peers, out of fifteen AAU schools total. How can UNC be a peer school of the University of Iowa or Florida, yet neither of those schools are peers of UNC?
Well, perhaps the fact that the UI Peer Group is 30 years old, while UNC’s list was refreshed in 2011, has something to do with it. Still, as a loyal Hawkeye, I find it more than a little insulting that Iowa’s peer group adoration of UNC is unrequited. In fact, between UNC ignoring Iowa and UCLA not even posting a list, Iowa comes off as more than a little desperate to hang with the bi-coastal in-crowd, who apparently want nothing to do with UI.
Academic psychobabble you say? Would that it were! From a fascinating report by Andrea Fuller in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on 09/10/12:
Click here and you can play around with a graphical representation of the CHE data set, which includes the University of Iowa. Like the snob it can apparently also be, in 2012 Iowa considered itself to have 13 peer schools – including, once again, UNC – while 32 clingy, loser schools considered Iowa their peer. As for Iowa’s mutual peers, there were only 8, all of them by now familiar, and all of them members of the AAU. Of those 8, only 2 schools – Michigan St. and Purdue – are not also part of the official UI Peer Group. (That the CHE data set from 2012 differs from the 30-year-old UIPG, once again suggests that the peer group Harreld favors is long overdue for an update.)
2 University of Michigan $13,856
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison $10,488
22 The Pennsylvania State University $17,900
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign $15,698
34 The University of Arizona $10,872
37 Purdue University $10,002
38 Michigan State University $14,070
46 Indiana University Bloomington $10,388
While the NSF R&D rankings are again included for reference, this list comes solely from the CHE data set. Still, when we total the current tuition at all 8 of those schools we get an average of $12,909, which is even higher than the averages we were getting before. So is Harreld right? Is Iowa’s tuition lagging behind some unalterable norm, which would in turn suggest that Florida’s tuition, like Florida itself, is an outlier?
Well, if you stare at all of these numbers long enough, and you try to correlate tuition with any kind of academic ranking, after a while you notice that one of they key factors in the cost of tuition at any school seems to be the state that school is in. For example, Iowa ($8,325) and Iowa State ($7,969) are quite close. Likewise, although Michigan State’s R&D rank of 38 is well below that of Michigan at 2, tuition at those schools is again quite close, at $14,070 and $13,856 respectively.
That obviously makes sense because public schools in a given state are usually overseen by the same governing body, but it also suggests that state economies may have more to do with the appropriate cost of tuition at a given school than any peer or comparison grouping. As it turns out, however, there is another factor that also seems to correlate, but because of both the far-flung membership of the AAU, and the aspirational-if-not needy nature of such comparison groups, it isn’t readily apparent.
The average tuition for the UI Peer Group – which, again, consists of 11 AAU schools, including UCLA, Arizona, Texas and the standoffish UNC – is close to the other averages we have been getting, at $11,357. Then again, those four particular non-Big-Ten schools are also in far-flung states, and it may be that those state economies have an effect on that average. As a check against that we can select 10 AAU Peer Institutions by geographical proximity, which leaves us with only 5 schools that are also in the UIPG:
2 University of Michigan $13,856
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison $10,488
14 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities $13,790
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign $15,698
37 Purdue University $10,002
38 Michigan State University $14,070
46 Indiana University Bloomington $10,388
49 The University of Iowa $8,325
75 University of Kansas $10,549
77 Iowa State University $7,969
85 University of Missouri, Columbia $9,518
The average tuition at those schools is $11,330, which is almost exactly the same as the average tuition we have gotten for multiple other groups of AAU schools. Still, adding the three bottom schools on the list – all of which, incidentally, are or were part of the Big-12 Athletic Conference in its 1996 incarnation – does bring three lower-cost schools into the mix, with equally lower NSF R&D rankings.
If we stay with our geographic focus and shift westward a bit more – dropping the two Michigan schools, and adding AAU Colorado and former AAU Nebraska – we do indeed see a decrease, suggesting some regional bias:
6 University of Wisconsin–Madison $10,488
14 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities $13,790
32 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign $15,698
37 Purdue University $10,002
46 Indiana University Bloomington $10,388
49 The University of Iowa $8,325
53 University of Colorado Boulder $11,531
75 University of Kansas $10,549
77 Iowa State University $7,969
79* University of Nebraska-Lincoln $8,628
85 University of Missouri, Columbia $9,518
The average tuition at those schools is $10,626, or about $700 less than the prior list, and that average is now only $2,300 or so away from UI, instead of $3,000 or more. Admittedly the decrease isn’t a lot, particularly with Illinois still in the mix, but it is a decrease, and the drop seems to be directly related to nothing more than geography. (Note that moving UI’s comparison group west also decreased the rankings of NSF R&D expenditures, which is yet another loose correlation we identified earlier.)
If we stick with our west-leaning geographic focus, and now shrink the scope of our comparison group, the list of peer institutions will necessarily be smaller because there are fewer AAU schools, or former AAU schools, in that limited territory. Still, it is interesting that the following five schools also represent the current or former AAU schools in the contiguous states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri
49 The University of Iowa $8,325
75 University of Kansas $10,549
77 Iowa State University $7,969
79* University of Nebraska-Lincoln $8,628
85 University of Missouri, Columbia $9,518
Call it the ‘West of the Mississippi’ peer group, call it the ‘Central States Region’, call it whatever you want, but note that we end up with four other schools which do seem to be Iowa’s peers in terms of tuition. The average resident undergraduate tuition for those five schools is $8,998, or $9,090 if we omit Nebraska for failing to maintain its sacred AAU membership. In either case, that average is now very close to what J. Bruce Harreld insists is the fire-sale price of tuition at the University of Iowa. Four or five AAU-grade schools, all in the same neighborhood, all charging about the same, and yet Harreld insists that Iowa’s tuition is wildly out of sync with objective reality.
The takeaway from all this is that any time you hear Harreld or anyone else talk about Iowa’s peer group, the first thought that should pop into your mind is, ‘Peer group for what?’ Declaring another school to be Iowa’s peer because it has a large science center on campus, or because it ranks high or even near Iowa in NSF R&D, is fine, provided those criteria are relevant to the discussion. Unfortunately, neither of those factors have anything to do with what the cost of tuition should be in order to deliver the education that Iowa is obligated to provide.
Instead, tuition seems to correlate more with state or regional factors, further exposing the baseless institutional cherry-picking involved in associating one school with another. For that matter, we could just as easily cherry-pick schools based on tuition alone, starting with Florida, thus proving that Iowa should cut tuition year after year. While equally invalid, that criterion would at least have the advantage of being appropriate to a discussion of the cost of tuition at UI.
All of which is to say that when Harreld claims Iowa needs to increase tuition in order to remain competitive with its peers, and its peers are defined either as the RCG in the graphic from the UI video, or as the UI Peer Group in his recent DI interview, Harreld is asserting cause and effect where there is none. In fact, not only is Iowa’s tuition in line relative to its regional AAU peers, plus Nebraska, when compared to those same peers Iowa’s NSF R&D ranking relative is outstanding. Unless all five (or four) of those schools just happen to be equally incompetent about setting the price of tuition, there are clearly regional factors which have as much or more to do with the cost of educating in-state undergraduates as any of UI’s official peer or comparison groups.
As is clearly the case with Harreld, I am sure there are plenty of faculty and staff on the Iowa campus who would be happy to bleed students dry in order to have more money to play with. At some point, however, you would think actual data would be presented which substantiates some connection between the price of tuition at Iowa and a lack of quality in the education that Iowa students are buying with their money. Absent any such evidence, the newly reconstituted Iowa Board of Regents has a big decision to make in the coming weeks. Will they continue to allow J. Bruce Harreld to rip off Iowa students for his own administrative ends, or will they finally put a stop to his larceny?
The Peer Group Lie and the AAU
We will take a closer look at the new Iowa Board of Regents in two upcoming posts, one of which addresses the tuition hikes which are being proposed in response to legislative funding cuts. Leaving aside the fact that UI is actually in great shape because Harreld screwed students out of $25M last summer, there are two important questions that need answering before the board signs off on any hikes. The second question is whether, as Harreld claims, there is any correlation between the tuition charged by the three regent universities and by their official peer institutions. The first question is what those peer institutions should be.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis Carlson, on 10/15/15 — coincidentally, a month and a half after Harreld’s fraudulent hire:
If the idea of an aspirational peer group strikes you as absurd, that’s because it is absurd. More importantly, the idea that some or all of a school’s purported peers might be aspirational, without being designated as such, would seem to constitute willful deception. If a list of ‘peers’ or ‘peer institutions’, or even ‘AAU peers’, contains schools that an institution merely aspires to become peers with, how would anyone know the difference?
As it turns out, if you really dig into the subject of academic peer groups you will find a few – a very few – honest higher-educational brokers who do make such differences clear. For example, recent Big Ten addition Rutgers put out a .pdf in the summer of 2015, which clearly identified its peers and aspirants, which of course furthers underscores the obvious point that aspirational peers are not peers at all. (If aspire to sculpt like Michelangelo or paint like Van Gogh, that’s great, but neither of those artists are your peers.)
So why, when discussing academic peers, is that same, obvious difference not made blatantly clear by many if not most of our revered institutions of higher learning, which otherwise pride themselves on being data-driven and hyper-rational? Even if only to keep weaselly university presidents from deceiving the student paper during an interview, let alone to make sure that abusive tuition hikes are not approved under false pretenses, you would think every governing board would want to be expressly clear about which institutions around the country were actual peers, and which were aspirational peers.
With regard to the University of Iowa, we now face the horrifying possibility that Harreld is trying to fleece UI students not because money is needed to prevent some undefined lapse relative to Iowa’s actual peers, but because Harreld wants to keep chasing Iowa’s aspirational peers. In fact, that latter possibility would seems to explain why the University of North Carolina does not consider Iowa to be its peer, while Iowa continues to include UNC in peer groups which have not been updated for 30 years.
I don’t know if ISU updated its peer group. I do know that Iowa should be forced to do so by the Iowa Board of Regents as a condition of considering any tuition hikes, and that the methodology for inclusion needs to be fully disclosed, precisely to prevent Harreld from cherry picking schools that make his case. This needs to be done because we are now talking – simply because Harreld put the idea in play – about electively increasing the debt load on tens of thousands of students over the next five years, if not the next decade, for reasons that have no established basis in fact.
On the positive side, one thing we can conclude with absolute certainty is that the University of Iowa is nowhere near being kicked out of the AAU, as happened to Nebraska in 2011. We know that because of Iowa’s NSF R&D rank in 2015, we know that because of the prominence of UIHC in all things UI, and know that because of Iowa’s AAU rank among public universities, which has not been disclosed beyond quartiles, but in any event is better than Missouri, which is itself still a member of the AAU.
All of that, unfortunately, is decidedly not the case with Iowa State. In fact, all of the rationales that were apparently used to kick Nebraska to the AAU curb apply to ISU in spades, and then some. From Ashley Jost’s Columbia Daily Tribune piece, on 04/27/14:
Iowa State does have an excellent College of Veterinary Medicine, but no medical school, and like Nebraska the majority of ISU’s research is agricultural. Comparing NSF R&D expenditures from 2015, we also find that Iowa State ranked 77, while Nebraska ranked 79, again suggesting that Iowa State could be sliding toward institutional ignominy. In fact, that may be why interim ISU President Ben Allen had this to say just ten days ago, during his very first day on the job, as reported by the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson, on 05/10/17:
Now, the first thing you need to know about Allen – which is also the last thing you need to know about Allen – is that he is an institutional retread. Not only did he put in almost twenty years at Iowa State, eventually rising to provost, but he was then appointed president of the University of Northern Iowa, where he did so much damage on behalf of the Iowa Board of Regents that he eventually had to resign to avoid a no-confidence vote. As such, you can be sure that what Allen had to say about ISU and the AAU had the board’s blessing at the very least, if it did not in fact originate with the regents.
To Allen’s credit, however, and very much unlike Harreld at Iowa, Allen was as clear as could be about the linkage between tuition and AAU membership. Instead of arguing that some abstract ‘world-class’ benefit would follow from raising tuition to the average of ISU’s peers, Allen made clear – by emphasizing that tuition covers the cost of “providing an AAU-caliber institution”, as opposed to an AAU-caliber education – that because of steady decreases in legislative funding, the students at Iowa State will have to pay the freight for ISU’s membership in the AAU. Not for better facilities or classes, or better faculty or staff, or better dorm food or mental health services, but specifically to cover whatever expenses Iowa State incurs while desperately hanging onto its AAU membership card with both hands.
While honestly stated, however, the problem with that perspective is that it’s bass-ackwards. If Iowa and Iowa State stay true to their public mission, and that happens to merit inclusion in the AAU, that’s great. On the other hand, if Iowa and Iowa State are doing what they should be doing for the students and the state, and that does not meet the criteria for inclusion in the AAU, then those schools should not shift millions of dollars in annual tuition costs onto students and their families simply to maintain that standing.
And yet, that seems exactly what the Board of Regents is poised to do at UI and ISU, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Less than half an hour after I finished writing the first draft of all of the above, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller posted an article on 05/14/17, concerning the regents’ tentative decision to allow the cost of tuition at UNI to fall behind that of the other two schools. While we’ll have more to say about all that in an upcoming post, here I want to focus on a bombshell admission by new UNI President Mark Nook:
As you can imagine, that was probably the last thing J. Bruce “World-Class” Harreld wanted anyone associated with higher education in the state to say, let alone one of the other regent presidents. Explicitly, Nook stated that charging less for tuition at UNI would not diminish the quality of education UNI students receive, because at the regent schools there is no direct linkage between educational quality and the cost of tuition. (Nook said, “…for Iowa students…”, meaning students at any of the state universities.)
Assuming that’s true, that also means any regent tuition hikes – including those at UI and ISU – may not provide a direct, or even indirect, benefit to the students who are forking over that extra money. Those additional funds may be of great utility in other respects, but the students will effectively be subsidizing aspects of the regent schools that do not otherwise pull their own weight. And as interim ISU President Allen recently made clear, one of those extra-curricular objectives is keeping the AAU happy.
This revelation by Nook demolishes the lie that Harreld has been telling for close to two years, which is that paying more in tuition will result in a better education. From the press release Harreld ‘wrote’ last June, on 06/23/16, making the disingenuous case for the unjustified tuition hikes he subsequently pushed through last summer:
Even last year Harreld validated the statements made by Allen and Nook, because the vast majority of the money Harreld pilfered from the 2016 tuition hikes was not spent on improving the quality of the education that students received. Instead, out of roughly $25M in excess of UI’s stated appropriations request, Harreld stuffed $11M – meaning almost half – in a ‘strategic’ slush fund. As with last year’s tuition hikes, the only thing Harreld cares about this year is getting his grubby administrative hands on as much student money as he can, not to offset legislative cuts or because he wants to improve the quality of the education those students receive, but because, among other things, he wants to satisfy the high priests of the AAU.
Making all of this AAU worship even worse is the fact that we do not know why Iowa and Iowa State feel compelled to soak the students in order to fund that association. Because the AAU keeps its rankings and attendant methodology secret, we have no visibility as to whether some change was made to that formula which disadvantages UI and ISU. Are those two schools genuinely falling behind in the AAU rankings for lack of resources, or has the AAU’s mission simply wandered away from those schools over time – as it apparently did with Nebraska (and Syracuse) in 2011?
All of which now brings us to the most important question of all. What the hell do you get for being a member of the AAU? Do you get a yard sign? A window sticker? Discounts at Costco? Does Mary Sue Coleman put you on her non-denominational holiday greeting card list? What are the tangible benefits of membership in the AAU, which make it necessary, or even worth, ripping off students to pay for that exclusivity?
From Tamar Lewin of the New York Times, on 05/02/11, shortly after Nebraska was shunned:
Were I not already aware that former regents president Bruce Rastetter, current VP for Medical Affairs and former interim UI president Jean Robillard, and big-money UI donor Jerre Stead, conspired to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld in September of 2015, the words “no specific benefits” in the quote above would have left me speechless. As it is, when I read that sentence I was still dumbfounded. Membership in the ultra-secret AAU confers “no specific benefits”, and yet as I write this the Iowa Board of Regents is poised to approve a series of large annual tuition increases because doing so will, in part, prevent UI and ISU from falling out of the AAU.
What happens if you do get the heave-ho from the AAU, like Nebraska, and find yourself on the outside looking in? Does your campus shrivel up and die? Do administrators at AAU schools stop talking your calls? We get the answer to those questions from a report – which I encourage you to read in its entirety – by Jillian Deutsch of the Columbia Missourian, almost exactly one year ago, on 05/22/16:
While it has long been clear that Rastetter, Robillard and Stead conspired to run a sham $300K search at taxpayer expense in order to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld, the over-arching objective of that appointment has not been clear. With Harreld’s business background, and his complete lack of experience in academic administration, it was a given that his minders wanted him to run UI like a business, but to what end? Other than gutting the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences to the benefit of other deans, and diverting critical resources to in-house, for-profit startups, what was the grand design?
Well, now we know. Like far too many old men before them, Rastetter, Robillard, Stead and Harreld are not leading the University of Iowa – or, by extension, the Iowa Board of Regents – into the future, they are fighting the last war all over again for nothing more than prestige. Unfortunately, as is often the case, it will not be those old men who pay the literal price for maintaining Iowa’s (or Iowa State’s) AAU membership, but the students, who will themselves garner little to no benefit from that association.
Despite the fact that each is a millionaire many times over, it is the students and their families who will sacrifice tens of millions of dollars over the next five years to satisfy the petty vanities of those old men. The legislature won’t pay for AAU membership, the regents and university administrators won’t pay for it, the faculty and staff at UI and ISU won’t pay for it, but one thing they will all agree on is that the students should pay. At which point the old men and their regental enablers will all pat themselves on the back when the AAU sends word, via encrypted message, that UI (and ISU) are still in the fold.
It should be a crime, but of course it isn’t. It is administrative abuse, and demonstrates a callous disregard for the crushing reality of college debt at a time when a college education is becoming more and more important. Unable to even conceive of independence from the rankings mania that has consumed higher education in America, the Iowa Board of Regents is now set to reflexively compel a generation of young college students – many if not most from the state of Iowa itself – to absorb ever more debt not because doing so will improve their education, but because it will fund the ongoing maintenance of Iowa and Iowa State’s utterly meaningless AAU standing.
The great irony in all this is that the entire premise of J. Bruce Harreld’s fraudulent appointment was that only a business genius could break out of the status quo in higher-ed and forge a transformative vision for the future. Instead, after a year and a half on the job, what Harreld is proposing is the fleecing of 30,000+ captive consumers with year-over-year price hikes, in order to maintain the status quo. (A status quo which, incredibly, confers “no specific benefits” on the University of Iowa.)
There is a bold new way forward, of course, but it requires looking inward, to the core missions of education and research which already define the University of Iowa. What the state of Iowa – what every college and university in the country really needs – is the kind of leadership that would tell U.S. News and the AAU, and any other parasitical validator, to go to hell, then reinvest all of the resources that have been wasted satisfying those self-interested ranking organizations. Instead, what UI got is a cabal of old fools, whose very conception of their own identity requires external approval.
From the earliest moments of his illegitimate presidency, quality was Harreld’s mindless mantra. Not surprisingly, in order to purportedly improve the completely undefined quality of the University of Iowa – which, as we now know, is not the same thing as the quality of the education UI students receive – Harreld has been looking for money anywhere he can get it, including attempting to run off with $4.3M in scholarships that he had no right to seize. No example betrays Harreld’s disdain for Iowa’s students more, however, than the fact that UI students were forced to saddle themselves with an additional fee in order to improve mental health services on campus, which as recently as a year ago ranked among the worst in the Big Ten. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 01/22/16:
J. Bruce Harreld is currently arguing that the University of Iowa, with the blessings of the nine-member, all-volunteer, dubiously informed Board of Regents, should be allowed to brutalize the student body for tens of millions of dollars, the vast majority of which may confer no direct or indirect benefit on those students. Instead of improving critical services or alleviating fees, Harreld intends to use that student money to fund a for-profit shift in research on campus. And of course hidden in all of that spending, Harreld will also blow millions if not tens of millions satisfying the AAU’s “eight membership indicators”, just to boost UI back into the second quartile where it rightfully belongs.
As noted by UNI President Mark Nook, and confirmed by the available academic evidence from those who have studied rankings, any claim that shoveling money at the AAU will benefit students is a lie. In order to acknowledge that reality – and, more importantly, to seize the truly revolutionary opportunity in that reality – Harreld and his co-conspirators would have to be men of courage and genuine vision, but they are decidedly not. They are, instead, very rich, very old men, for whom the only goal is keeping up appearances – of garnering and projecting prestige – regardless of the cost to others.
The winter of 2015-2016 was a heady time for the Iowa Board of Regents. Fresh off a successful $300K, taxpayer-funded fraudulent presidential search at the University of Iowa, which culminated in the illegitimate appointment of J. Bruce Harreld over three qualified candidates, the thoroughly corrupt board — under the thoroughly corrupt leadership of then-president Bruce Rastetter — seemed unstoppable. Between no-bid contracts being handed out to political and business cronies, and multiple former politicians being given cushy, high-paying jobs without having to suffer the indignity of competing for those positions, the once-great higher-ed system in Iowa was well on its way to becoming little more than a patronage slop trough.
On 11/11/15 (as dated by Google search), the University of Iowa put out an otherwise run-of-the-mill press release touting a positive result from the millions of dollars that the regents had recently spent on efficiency consultants. (Consultants who then turned around and scammed the regents for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unsubstantiated expenses.) Titled, University of Iowa Children’s Hospital saves big with furniture purchasing agreement, the press release paid particular attention to the school’s rigorous determination to perform due diligence:
Six months later, however, on 04/26/16, the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson reported that the furniture contract was significantly less advantageous than UI claimed:
The very next day, out of nowhere, Iowa Regent Mary Andringa — who began her six-year term a little less than a year earlier — announced that she was resigning. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 04/27/16:
While Mary Andringa was one of five regents who met improperly with candidate Harreld during the 2015 UI search, and she remains a defendant in a lawsuit about that abuse of power, she was only appointed mid-way through that corrupt search. As a member of the Vermeer family, which has long-standing ties to Governor Terry “Butcher” Branstad’s political machine, and as CEO of Vermeer Corp., Andringa was herself well-qualified to eventually become president of the board. Her appointment was in fact clever positioning on Branstad’s part, because then-board-president Rastetter long hoped to elevate himself into the national political spotlight, particularly by closely associating his brand as an Iowa kingmaker — among a handful of other local titans, including buddy Mike Richards — to the future political success of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.
In that context, Andringa’s announcement on Wednesday, 04/27/16, that she was resigning from the board, was all the more inexplicable. At least until the following day, on 04/28/16, when the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson reported this:
From the Gazette’s Miller, also on 04/28/16:
Even as the surprise Andringa resignation and crony UIHC contract were being simultaneously reported over a period of forty-eight hours, Governor Branstad’s office announced that the sudden vacancy at the board would be filled in short order. Sure enough, on 05/06/16 — meaning just over a week after Andringa’s abrupt resignation — Butcher Branstad appointed long-time big-money donor, political ally, doctor and businessman Michael Richards to fill Andringa’s vacated seat at the board.
Because the legislature was no longer in session, Richards’ appointment was made on an interim basis and he began serving immediately. To the extent that Richards was clearly another crony cog in Branstad’s political machine, it was still assumed that Richards would receive easy confirmation in 2017, when the legislature reconvened at the beginning of 2017. At least that was the assumption, until it was reported that the reason Branstad had been able to make Richards’ appointment at lighting speed was because it was a done-deal from the start.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 06/02/16:
As Miller noted in her story, the vacancy was never posted on the state website, meaning no other citizen candidates had a chance to apply before the position was given to Richards. Not surprisingly, the governor insisted there was no funny business, even as he omitted any mention of Richards’ prior donations to his political career. From the Gazette’s Erin Murphy, on 06/03/16:
While the “godfather” jokes obviously write themselves, the fact that Butcher Branstad stacked the board with yet another crony is par for the course. Even when the political patronage is blatantly obvious, no one gives it a second thought because Iowa has been so thoroughly corrupted over the course of Branstad’s six terms. (Because of that longevity it will also remain corrupt for the foreseeable future, despite the fact that the Senate just voted to ship Branstad to China.)
Leaving aside the corrupt politics, my first thought about Richards’ appointment was that he was being positioned not simply as another stooge vote on the nine-member board, but as a backup in case then-president Rastetter had to resign for reasons ranging from political opportunism to impeding indictment. Like Rastetter, Richards was a well-connected political heavy-weight, and people like that don’t do jobs any flunky can do. Also unknown at that time was whether Rastetter would re-up in the spring of 2017, when his first term on the board was drawing to a close.
The Changing of the Presidents
One of Bruce Rastetter’s great predatorial insights was that once he was appointed to the Iowa Board of Regents, then levered into the presidency by the governor who appointed him — to whom Rastetter had earlier given hundreds of thousands of dollars — he would literally have no oversight. The only substantive check on the power of any regent, let alone the board president, occurs during what is usually a cursory confirmation process in an otherwise jam-packed legislative calendar. And most years, for most appointments, that process results in approval.
However, just as Mike Richards still needed to go through the confirmation process when the legislature reconvened at the beginning of 2017 — because he had been appointed on an interim basis — so too would Rastetter have to go through the confirmation process again if the governor reappointed him. And therein lay a problem, because after six years of beating the Iowa Board of Regents like a crony mule, there were enough members of the Iowa senate who were sick of Bruce Rastetter that he would have had a very tough, very public confirmation fight on his hands. And that’s true even if the governor did what Rastetter long ago paid him to do, which was advocate like a loon on Rastetter’s behalf. (Although the Republican Party currently controls the Iowa Senate, appointees require a two-thirds majority, and Rastetter would almost certainly have fallen short of that mark.)
In May of 2017, three board seats would be open. Two of those vacancies reflected appointments that had run their six-year course: President Bruce Rastetter, and President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland, who was one of the five regents who participated in improper meetings with Harreld in the summer of 2015. The third vacancy was the seat held by Sherry Bates, who had been appointed, and confirmed, to complete a term held by yet another regent who left in the middle of their six-year hitch.
In late January, during a taping of Iowa Press, Rastetter said he was undecided about applying for a second term on the board. By the first few days of February there were twenty or so applications for the upcoming vacancies — including paperwork from both Mulholland and Bates — but Rastetter was not among the applicants. A little over a week later, on 02/10/17, Rastetter officially announced that he would not be seeking another appointment from the very same governor who had previously greased his path to the board presidency.
While a great immediate relief, Rastetter’s departure left open the question of who would assume the presidency. While any member can conceivably attain that position if they have five of the nine member votes, between a credible threat of bureaucratic hostilities from the ruthless governor, and the very real complexity of the position, the board would have looked for established crony leadership. That in turn strongly suggested that President Pro Tem Mulholland would be reappointed by Branstad, then handed the gavel after years of loyal service in Rastetter’s shadow. In fact, the idea that the regents would suddenly be without a seasoned president and president pro tem was almost impossible to fathom.
In mid-February, interim regent Mike Richards received his long-overdue confirmation hearing, which, as promised, included some pointed questions. While Richards’ answers were acceptable — both as to policy specifics, and as to his ability to offer a coherent rationale for his positions — the real news came after his hearing. From RadioIowa’s O. Kay Henderson, on 02/21/17:
Until I read that quote I was certain Richards would be named the next president pro tem, grooming him for eventual ascendance to the presidency, but Richards’ disavowal seemed sincere. Unlike Rastetter, who played coy while counting votes and twisting arms before throwing in the towel on a second term, Richards was declarative. He did not want to be president of the board, and given the workload and obligations of that office it was not hard to see why that might have been the case.
As if all of that wasn’t enough, at the beginning of March came a pleasant and unexpected surprise. In making his appointments for the three open seats, Branstad left Katie Mulholland out in the cold. Instead, two new regents were appointed from the ranks of former state legislators, while Sherry Bates was given a new full term. The governor’s rationale for rejecting Mulholland was that he rarely appointed regents to two successive terms, but that didn’t explain his callous treatment of someone who had been a loyal foot solider for the board, including co-chairing what by all accounts was a clean presidential search at her alma mater, the University of Northern Iowa, in 2016. At the very least, you would think Mulholland would have been given a heads-up to allow her to avoid the humiliation of being passed over, but in submitting her application she was clearly oblivious to the governor’s intentions.
On 03/14/17 Mike Richards was confirmed by the Iowa Senate, 49-0. One week later, on 03/22/17, Regent Bates and the two newly appointed regents were grilled in their own confirmation hearing, and once again — after a few substantive questions were asked and answered — the end result was the same. On 04/06/17, all three appointees were approved 49-0, thus filling out the nine seats on the Iowa Board of Regents.
The one remaining question — which would be of interest in any event, but particularly so in a year in which both the long-standing president and president pro-tem were not reappointed — was who would ascend to those offices. And yet, because of Richards’ stated disinterest in becoming president, the choice was not particularly complicated. Of the other eight members on the board, only Regent Larry McKibben — a lawyer by profession, a former state senator by political inclination, and the board’s chief unapologetic apologist under Rastetter — had anywhere near the requisite background to tackle that demanding job, and as such the presidency seemed to be his by default.
With the new board season set to begin on May 1st, and with only ten days or so left in an April, and in Rastetter’ term, I was not surprised when McKibben announced his candidacy toward the end of a board meeting. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 04/20/27:
Given that no one else had expressed even passing interest in the job, and that the only other person to comment — one-year regent Mike Richards — had taken himself out of the running months earlier, the conclusion seemed foregone. With two years left in his own six-year term, loyalist Larry McKibben was poised to become the next board president. Except…there was also this note at the end of Charis-Carlson’s report:
I don’t know if McKibben was simply not paying attention, or whether he talked to Richards before announcing his own campaign to become president. I also don’t know who worked on Richards behind the scenes between the middle of February and the middle of April, softening up what had been Richard’s hard-line disinterest in the position. What I do know is that the moment I read that Richards had “made no decisions about the presidency”, I thought Richards would get the job.
On a personal level, between Richards and McKibben I thought McKibben was the better choice for students and their families, because I believe Larry McKibben genuinely wants to keep costs down. (In particular, I very much hoped he would oppose J. Bruce Harreld’s utterly indefensible plan to raise tuition between 5% and 8% each of the next five years.) I do not believe McKibben is to be universally applauded for his penny pinching because he applies it indiscriminately, as was the case when he opposed a minimum wage hike at UI, despite the fact that the cost of living in Johnson County is the highest in the state. Given his political background, and his consistent embarrassing defense of all things corrupt at the board — including, particularly, Bruce Rastetter and former ISU president Steven Leath — I had no illusions that McKibben would do the right thing in any other instance, but I did have some hope that he would oppose Harreld’s ritualized financial abuse of students at the University of Iowa.
Like everyone else, I had no visibility into what went on behind the scenes at the Board of Regents between McKibben’s announcement — which could hardly have been a surprise to the other members of the board — and the vote to elect the new president, which took place at the beginning of May. I don’t know how many votes McKibben thought he had, and I don’t know how much effort he put into rallying support, but clearly he was unaware that there was a tide moving against him. Whether McKibben would have won a fair fight or not, I think we can assume with some confidence that the powers that be — meaning, particularly, Butcher Branstad and outgoing regents president Bruce Rastetter — wanted someone else, meaning Mike Richards. And as we now know, they got him. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 05/01/17:
As regular readers know, virtually every decision by the Iowa Board of Regents ends in a unanimous vote, but not because the board is necessarily unified. Instead, at some point the board came to the idiotic conclusion that routinely casting pro forma unanimous votes instills confidence in the result, when in fact it betrays a lack of accountability. Because no one wants to be on the losing side, as soon as they realize that they are in the minority they sell out their convictions and side with the majority in a blatantly false show of solidarity. (The only exception to this rule I can think of — and my memory on the subject is by no means encyclopedic — was Bob Downer’s courageous and prophetic vote against Rastetter’s performance-based funding con.)
Continuing, from Miller:
Keeping in mind that McKibben announced his intention to seek the presidency only ten days or so before the actual vote, how is it possible that he did not know about the “political things” that were taking place behind the scenes? More to the point, after four years of clown-level loyalty on the board, why was he left out of the loop to such an extent that he stepped right into this embarrassing rejection? As with the governor’s rejection of Mulholland’s application for another term, the powers that be seem to have given zero thought to protecting the reputations (such as they are) of people who had been loyal to them. It would have taken next to nothing — the most trivial of courtesies — to prevent Mulholland and McKibben from leaving themselves exposed, yet no one cared to give them a heads-up.
I honestly do not know which is worse — the arm twisting behind the scenes, or the degree to which McKibben then debased himself by covering for the very people who hung him out to dry. In any case, ensuring that Mike Richards became the next regent president meant that Branstad and Rastetter’s crony political agenda would continue, uninterrupted, and that in turn rendered McKibben’s statement that the board needed to be an “apolitical organization” utterly absurd. There is no more politically corrupt institution in the state of Iowa than the Iowa Board of Regents, and Branstad himself is the agent of that corruption. Instead of hewing to the spirit of the statute which requires that the board be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Branstad loaded the board with Republicans, then filled it out with Independents — including some former Republicans who changed their party identification to facilitate that corrupt administrative maneuver.
The very fact that Branstad did not hesitate to plow McKibben out of the way in order to install long-time confidant and big-money donor Mike Richards as president — to say nothing of the fact that Branstad was able to guarantee that Richards had four other votes out of seven available (meaning the seven members other than Richards and McKibben), tells you that Ambassador Branstad will still control the Board of Regents even while abroad. Throw in Patricia Cownie as president pro tem — who hails from yet another political family that has long been part of Branstad’s machine — and once again the politicization of the Iowa Board of Regents was complete. In fact, even after taking a pie in the face from Branstad, there was McKibben providing political cover for the machine that he himself has also clearly sworn allegiance to above all else.
Any claim that rotating Branstad’s next fixer into the big chair at the board will somehow instill public confidence in that corrupt institution is a joke. But that’s Larry McKibben: always looking on the bright side, even when dong so exposes him as a tool. The larger concern, of course, is that Branstad just handed control of the regents from one crony backer to another, meaning we can expect more of the same in the coming years. And yet, in only the past few weeks we do have some evidence that Mike Richards is not cut from Rastetter’s cloth.
When you’re in the corruption business, the last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself. As a result of Rastetter’s arrogance and sloppiness, not only was J. Bruce Harreld’s fraudulent hire exposed in the press, which in turn led to the ongoing sanction of UI by the AAUP, but one of the key players in the Branstad-Rastetter crony machine — former ISU president Steven Leath — had to be eased out of the state after he became a legal liability. Whatever Rasetter hired Harreld to do behind the scenes at UI, Leath was already doing it, but because of Rastetter’s lax oversight the board now has to go through the motions in picking a new president to head up the crony sausage machine at Iowa State. (Branstad and the board have already set the wheels in motion, including making sure that one of the only Democratic regents has a conflict of interest with one of the two chairs of the search committee, who is himself not an academic but a local business leader with deep ties to the Ames community.)
Long story short, Bruce Rastetter messed up a very good thing at Iowa State, and made himself an ongoing target of litigation with regard to the Harreld hire. Installing Richards almost certainly has nothing to do with doing the right thing, and everything to do with making sure the board can continue to do the wrong thing without attracting notice. As Larry McKibben intimated, the first order of business in that regard is reestablishing at least a pretense of credibility, and on that score Richards is well on his way. Whether he cares about the students and families who are funding an ever-greater share of the load for the state’s universities remains to be seen, but we will find out more about all that in a little over a week, when the board tackles tuition for 2017-2018.
The president of the Iowa Board of Regents is, by statute, one of nine co-equal members of that body. By law the board president has very few powers conferred upon that office, and those powers are relatively limited. In practice, however, precisely because the powers of the president are so minimally described, they can — in the hands of a truly malevolent individual — result in autocratic rule, despite the purported statutory equality of the members’ nine votes.
As previously noted, Michael Richards is part and parcel of the Branstad political machine, but that is not necessarily an indictment of Richards. Yes, the fact that he and Rastetter are cronies, and that Richards has long been a confidant to Branstad, are very real concerns, but guilt by association is a dangerous game. Here at Ditchwalk we prefer to wait until someone acts recklessly of their own volition before consigning them to the scrap heap of humanity, and so it will be with Richards. He may simply be a less virulent version of the cultural disease that Rastetter exemplified, but if that is the case Richards will tip his hand soon enough.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — particularly with regard to national politics, in both major parties — just because you’re involved in business or politics, that doesn’t mean you’re corrupt. Everyone has the right to define themselves by the choices they make, and as far as I can tell, one thing Mike Richards does not bear any responsibility for is the $300K, taxpayer-funded fraudulent search that Bruce Rastetter used to foist J. Bruce Harreld on the University of Iowa. Branstad was all-in on the fix, as was Jean Robillard at UI, but in the past year and a half I have not come across Richards’ name in any context even remotely connected to that premeditated administrative fraud.
It is possible — in fact likely — that I simply do not know what everyone else already knows about Mike Richards. When Harreld was announced as the new UI president at the beginning of September in 2015, I not only had never heard of Harreld, I had never heard of Bruce Rastetter. Now, of course, I not only know about the fake search in 2015, and the illegal meetings Rastetter held for Harreld at Rastetter’s place of business in Ames, in order to get around Iowa’s Open Meeting law, I also know about the crony hires at Iowa State, about the crony no-bid contracts at UI beyond the Herman-Miller contract at UIHC, and on and on. To that stink we can also add the hog-lot-grade stench of Rastetter’s involvement in the reprehensible Tanzania energy project, which also involved Iowa State; Rastetter bankrolling a crony land deal for ISU president Leath, which Rastetter then lied about to the public and press; and Rastetter failing to inform the board about Leath’s plane accident in July of 2015, including the fact that Leath failed to inform him until after the board approved Leath’s fat new contract.
Whether Mike Richards and Bruce Rastetter are like-minded in their regental objectives, there is nothing I currently know about Richards which compares to any of that, and I think that’s an important difference. That does not mean Richards cares about the students, faculty and staff at the state’s schools any more than Rastetter did, of course, and it also does not mean Richards cares about education as a public good. In fact, on those points there is a very big red flag in Richards’ bio, which immediately stood out last year when I first read about his done-deal appointment.
Specifically, while every news report about both his original appointment and his recent rise to the board presidency dutifully noted that Richards is (or was) a licensed physician, those stories also mentioned a number of businesses that Richards has been involved with. While medicine is itself a laudable profession, it’s also true that there are plenty of people who go into medicine simply to make a buck, as opposed to caring about the health and welfare of the patients they treat. While it is unlikely that there are many doctors at the extremes, who are either wholly selfless and work for free, or remorseless in their abuse of patients for profit, it is fair to wonder whether a given physician’s motivation for becoming a doctor was, primarily, humanitarian or financial.
Among the various businesses listed in Richards’ official regents bio, we find a carbon-composite equipment manufacturer, a medical services and equipment provider, and a healthcare foundation. There is however, one business that is missing, and that in itself is a concern. If you’re proud of your success then you should be proud of all of your successes, not just the ones that make you look like a suitable front man for the $5B Iowa Board of Regents.
So what business is missing? From the lede to a story by the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 05/06/16 — the day of Richards’ original appointment:
Whatever you think of medicine, and whatever you think of the gaming industry, it should be self-evident that everything medicine knows about gambling would suggest that less is better and none is best. In fact, even if you run a casino with the best of intentions, and you don’t allow smoking or prostitution on the premises, you are, inevitably, providing a service which you know to be injurious to the health of at least some of your customers. And that’s assuming you don’t actually do everything possible to attract gambling addicts or lonely little old ladies who cannot afford to blow their Social Security checks on eight the hard way.
As I noted in a blog post on that same day:
While it probably won’t hurt, the assumption that Richards’ business experience is inherently relevant to the business or mission of the Iowa Board of Regents is false. From Charis-Carlson’s report, here is the basis for Butcher Branstad’s appointment:
And here is what I wrote in reply on that same day:
I understand that there are big-picture concerns at the state’s schools, and that we live in a complex world in which money often rules. And yet, until someone figures out how to prevent Iowa’s universities from being infested with students, the mission of those state schools will remain educating human beings, and it’s hard to see the relevance between Richards’ medical background or business success and that goal. In fact, given that Richards didn’t have any problem being a doctor and a casino operator at the same time, it’s worth wondering exactly how concerned he might be about the students, faculty or staff in his administrative care.
As to Richards’ status at Wild Rose Entertainment, although the press variously reported that Richards no longer seemed to be involved in that business, that’s not exactly what the governor’s press release said at the time of his appointment. As memorialized in a post about Richards at BleedingHeartland, on 05/09/16:
Saying that Richards “previously served as president” is not the same thing as saying he no longer works at Wild Rose, or that he is no longer an equity partner. In fact, if you go over to the Wild Rose website and click on the ‘Leadership‘ page, you find the exact same picture of Mike Richards that appears on his Board of Regents page — right next to Wild Rose Chairman Gary Kirke, with Richards listed as Vice Chairman. If you then click on Richard’s casino bio, you find this text — none of which is included in his bio at the Board of Regents:
It is of course possible that someone simply forgot to update the newly-redesigned regents website, though the copyright date at the bottom of the board bio page is current, meaning someone has been active on that site in at least the last four months. As it turns out, however, in some of the recent reporting about Richards taking the helm at the board, his current, active status at Wild Rose Casino has also been confirmed. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 05/01/17:
You can find similar confirmation in this story from RadioIowa, which also features a hilarious headline given Richards’ status as a well-known businessman and political operative in the state. In any event, the new president of the Iowa Board of Regents is, among many other fine things, the co-owner of a casino company, with all that suggests. It doesn’t prove anything, and we’re certainly well past the days when we have to worry about mob connections and such, but still, the choices we make in life say something about us.
The fact that Richards’ casino ownership is omitted from his regents bio suggests that Richards himself — or someone at the board — believes that association would not be helpful. Doctor? You bet. Commercial exploiter of vulnerable if not broken human beings? Not so much.
For Part 2 of Iowa Board of Regents President Mike Richards, click here.
This is Part 2 of Iowa Board of Regents President Mike Richards. For Part 1, click here.
Just Like the Old Boss?
That Butcher Branstad replaced one political crony with another at the head of the board of regents — while on his way out the door, no less — is not surprising. Neither is the fact that there is very little substantive difference when you stack Rastetter and Richards next to each other. Not only are they both long-time Branstad donors, but they themselves have been thick as proverbial thieves in political circles, backing many of the same candidates at the state and national level.
The fact that Richards is co-owner of a casino borders on caricature, but there is a darker side. The new president of the Iowa Board of Regents makes money when his guests lose. The implication for students at the state’s three universities is obviously not good, and that’s before we get to the recent budget crunch and long-term trends in appropriations.
Will Richards sell the students out — as Rastetter clearly did on his own way out the door — by backing Harreld’s plan for large-scale, year after year tuition hikes? Well, there is some reason to hope. Not necessarily that Richards and the board will do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, but that Richards and the board will do the right thing because it’s in their long-term self-interest.
From all of the above, and other reports over the past month or so, the reason Branstad kicked Larry McKibben to the curb and appointed Richards seems quite plain. After four years of Rastetter running the board like a back-alley dice game, the credibility of the regents had been destroyed. Richards’ job is to reestablish at least a veneer of respectability, if for no other reason than to minimize the recent public, press and legislative scrutiny to which the board has been appropriately subjected. Again, from McKibben, as reported by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 05/01/17:
McKibben is right. The Iowa Board of Regents has a colossal credibility problem, and it is going to take time to heal that damage. That doesn’t mean the board will be any less corrupt, of course — and you would have to be a little funny in the head to imagine it would, after the governor made a political crony and casino owner president of that body. Then again, just cutting out the insanity, menace, flagrant corruption and disregard for citizenship that defined Rastetter’s rule may feel like a fever breaking.
To that end, Mike Richards got off to a fast and laudable start on the day that he was voted president. From the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson, on 05/01/17:
If you drew up a list of all of Rastetter’s administrative abuses, you would find no greater agreement about any one issue than the so-called ‘public hearings’ conducted by the Iowa Board of Regents. Neither public nor hearings, they were instead the Orwellian progeny of a demonic committee, which managed to convert the process of submitting feedback to the board into a choice between silence and self-abuse. Not only were comments videotaped in an otherwise sterile setting, completely apart from any board function, but there was no guarantee that any regent would ever see the submissions. Not surprisingly, few if any citizens subjected themselves to the regents’ bureaucratic invalidation, which the vile board then claimed as proof that the public was not interested in issues before the board.
No single aspect of board policy so fully embodied Rastetter’s hatred of the public, hatred of debate, and hatred of dissent. And yet, the board’s ‘public hearings’ were hardly an aberration. So tightly scripted were Rastetter’s meetings that the other board members often seemed more like mute victims of bureaucratic battery than co-equals. And yet Rastetter himself never had any problem with belittling those other members if they talked out of turn. All of which is why it was both surprising and welcome that Mike Richards, in his very first moments as president, threw that authoritarian process of invalidation in the trash where it belongs.
To be clear, this does not mean that any board decision will ever be affected by public comment. Board meetings – and this was always the case with meetings presided over by Rottweiler — are often nothing more than theater. All of the decisions have been made beforehand, all of the deals cut behind the scenes, then everyone takes their seats for a heavily starched ceremony while the official minutes are taken down. Even if this is merely a cynical public relations move, however, it was desperately needed and long overdue. (It may even be that the board is hopeful that there will be protests or craziness which makes the regents look tolerant and sane in comparison, but whatever the motive, it is exactly the right decision.)
The most pressing substantive issue before the board, of course — and the one that will be front and center during the looming meetings on June 6-8 — is the question of tuition hikes, both in response to recent legislative funding cuts and over the longer term. While both a routine subject for governing boards across the country, and somewhat of a unique situation this year in Iowa, there is a clear consensus that whatever the merits of any hikes, students and their families should not be subjected to tuition increases with little or no warning. On that point, again on the first day of his appointment as president, Richards was at least saying the right things.
From RadioIowa’s Dean Borg, on 05/01/17:
From the Press-Citizen’s Charis-Carlson, also on 05/01/17:
One week after Richards’ appointment we saw another positive change at the board. I actually noticed it as it was happening, and my positive reaction was later confirmed by reporting in the press. Again, this doesn’t mean anything will necessarily change behind the scenes, but if the board is to have even a pretense of validity — if it ever hopes to be taken seriously as a governing body — this change is also critically important.
What I noticed, during the live-tweeting of a special telephonic board meeting on 05/08/17 — which involved consideration of the tuition hikes that will be enacted at the early June meetings — was that individual regents were actually asking questions of the university presidents during the meeting. (See here, here, here and here.)
In over a year and a half of watching how the Iowa Board of Regents (dys)functions, I could not remember ever seeing a single tweet which referenced an on-the-record question by any member other than Rastetter. Instead, under his iron hand, each meeting played out like a scripted diplomatic exchange, where soulless manners were used as an excuse to preclude any visibility into the thinking of the individual members. Still, because I had not ceaselessly followed the live tweets from all meetings — in large part because I learned early on that the @IowaRegents twitter account invariably communicated nothing worth knowing — I thought perhaps I had imagined a sea change where there was none. Then I read this, from the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne, on 05/08/17:
Continuing the good news, the new committee assignments — which are, per board policy, made at the discretion of the board president — actually seem to make sense. And on the conflict-of-interest front, Richards even managed to whittle down his potential conflicts over the past year, from a listed ten at the time of his unexpected appointment last year, to five — most of which are trivial.
From the Gazette’s Miller, only a few days ago, on 05/16/17:
If Richards really does see it as his job to re-establish the credibility of the board — whether for genuine good, or simply to facilitate future ills — then compared to the thuggish Rastetter he is off to a flying start. (Admittedly, a very low bar.) To be sure, the June meetings will be a serious test of his new leadership, because the issues in play are genuinely complex. Unlike last summer’s egregious tuition hikes, which Rastetter (and particularly Harreld) pushed through on the pretext of a $1.7M funding shortfall, the cuts to the board at the beginning of this calendar year were considerable.
We will get into the nitty-gritty of the tuition debate in an upcoming post, but suffice to say that if Richards is serious about reestablishing the credibility of the regents, he will have to take a more aggressive stance with the state legislature, while simultaneously shielding students and their families from the ideological toxicity of the politicians who currently dominate that body. As it turns out, however, the upcoming tuition hikes are only the first of two big tests facing Richards, the second of which involves the search for a new president at Iowa State. While the ISU search is itself fraught with complications for Richards — chief among them the fact that retired regents president Rastetter has now taken up station as the ever-watchful Eye of Aldon — it is particularly interesting to consider that search in the larger context of the three state universities.
While reading up on Steven Leath’s recent state-sponsored relocation to Auburn, I chanced on a factoid which may or may not be true, but which struck me as plausible. From the Hunt Scanlon Media website, on 03/24/17, in an article about search firm R. William Funk & Associates:
Former-former ISU president Gregory Geoffrey served for eleven years, from 2001-2012. When Geoffrey retired, Steven Leath was not only hired to replace him, but newly minted board member Bruce Rastetter — who had already been elevated to the position of president pro tem, thanks to paid-for arm twisting by Butcher Branstad — was part of that search committee. Former-former University of Northern Iowa president Ben Allen served for seven years, from 2006 to 2013, before resigning just ahead of a full-fledged faculty freakout. William Ruud was hired to replace Allen in 2013, which is the same year Rastetter became president of the board, apparently fulfilling Branstad’s obligations to his single-biggest donor at the time. And of course former UI president Sally Mason retired in 2015 after eight years on the job, only to be replaced by a remaindered business executive named J. Bruce Harreld that same year — as a direct, premeditated result of a fraudulent search which was personally orchestrated and overseen by Rastetter, who was himself once again a member of the search committee.
In what still ranks as a higher-ed mystery in Iowa, Bill Ruud was never offered a new contract at UNI when his initial three-year deal ran out. In effect, Ruud was let go in the spring of 2016, albeit through the kind of passive-aggressive, disorientating bureaucratic ploy that was Rastetter’s stock in trade. In a pathetic attempt to convince the AAUP that the Board or Regents had learned its lesson from the corrupt 2015 UI search, a competent and reasonable search was undertaken at UNI, which resulted in the appointment of Mark Nook in December of 2016. At about the same time, Steve Leath, in his fifth year at ISU, decided to move on to Auburn, for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with his serial abuses of power at ISU Flight Services, which were abetted and covered-up by Rastetter.
Pulling back now and looking at the big picture, it seems that Mr. Funk was correct — at least regarding university presidents in the state of Iowa. Prior to Rastetter’s descent on the board, the regents managed to hire presidents who served for eleven (ISU), eight (UI) and seven years (UNI). After Rastetter’s arrival, the new presidents only managed to survive for five (ISU), three (UNI), and so far two years for the current elder statesman of regent presidents, the illegitimate J. Bruce Harreld at UI. For the three presidents selected prior to Rastetter joining the board the average tenure was 8.7 years. For the three presidents selected during Rastetter’s black reign — only one of whom remains — the average tenure is 3.4 years. (For the tenure of Leath, Ruud and Harreld to reach 8 years on average, Harreld will have to remain president at Iowa until 2031.)
Doc Richards’ Credibility Cure-All
While I have serious doubts that the Board of Regents — and, more importantly, the business and political cronies who hold sway over the ISU search committee — will avoid temptation and hire a respectable university president at Iowa State, if Richards wants to reestablish credibility in the board there is no other option. Screw up that hire, and regardless of the success of the 2016 UNI search, no one will believe that the board under Richards is anything but more of the same. Assuming that Richards’ takes his charge to restore respectability seriously, and that he has enough juice — either himself, or through the still-functioning Branstad machine — to compel a legitimate search at ISU, then in confronting the near-term tuition problem and the ISU presidency, Richards will have dealt with two very big problems.
Assuming further that Richards intends to clean up the mess that Rastetter left in every other respect, there is no formulation of that agenda which does not lead, eventually, inevitably, inexorably, to the sham president of the University of Iowa. This guy:
Compared to all of the other corrupt acts and abuses of power that took place during Rastetter’s six-year reign of bureaucratic terror, there was and is no greater stain than the conspiratorial, premeditated, fraudulent hire of J. Bruce Harreld. Flying airplanes into the ground and buying property on the sly and giving politicians cushy jobs when they decide it’s time to get paid for their votes are all small potatoes compared to hijacking the top administrative post at a billion-dollar research university. From that position of power Harreld can and will continue to do damage for years to come, even as the people who conspired to appoint him retire or move on. Unless, of course, someone in a position of even greater authority than Harreld decides that it’s time for a change.
Even now, the official line from the university is that whatever happened during the 2015 UI search, it wasn’t the fault of anyone at Iowa, and it certainly wasn’t Harreld’s fault because he was a candidate. As regular readers — and UI’s Jean Robillard, Christina Bohannon and Thomas Vaughn, among many others — know all too well, however, that claim is a lie. As the chair of the 2015 search committee, eventual interim-president, and current UI VP for Medical Affairs and self-appointed Dean of the College of Medicine, Robillard was an unrepentant traitor to the school, and Harreld himself was intimately aware of the preferential treatment he received throughout the search. As a result, the sanction levied by the AAUP in the aftermath of that administrative heist names not the board — as many have tried to falsely suggest it should have — but the university.
Whatever anyone believes Harreld has accomplished to the good in his first eighteen months on the job, it remains factually true that he is the living embodiment of the corruption that led to his illegitimate appointment. He did not, and could not, rise to the position he now holds on the merits of his own candidacy. If you find him amiable in person that’s great, but that’s not why he’s being paid $800K per year on an unheard-of initial five-year deal. He’s being paid to lead the university in every aspect, and yet, as noted in a recent report by Eric Kelderman for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harreld can’t even talk to the press.
As often happens when the fix is in, in the aftermath of Harreld’s sham hire the fixers implored everyone to give him a chance. They did that not because Harreld deserved a chance, but because they knew that would buy Harreld time to ingratiate himself with the ‘right people’ on campus, and sure enough he found his admirers and supporters and sycophants. And yet even if we ignore the genesis of Harreld’s illegitimate appointment, and limit ourselves only to concerns about his work product, it should be self-evident that Harreld himself has repeatedly undermined the credibility of the Iowa Board of Regents by his own actions as president.
Two debacles over the past few months stand out, and they are by no means aberrations. First, we have the recent verdict, and subsequent settlement, in two separate but related gender-discrimination lawsuits emanating from the UI Athletics Department. While Harreld was not the target of those suits, and the abuses of power for which UI was found wholly guilty in the first suit, and agreed to settle in the second suit, predate Harreld’s presidency, only two months after taking office Harreld gave the perpetrator of those abuses — Athletics Director Gary Barta — a massive new contract, despite knowing that there were serious legal issues in play. (There are also two related ongoing federal investigations as well.)
As if that wasn’t enough, last year at about this time, in a television interview, bro-culture ambassador J. Bruce Harreld allied himself with Barta in spectacularly improper fashion. From that interview:
Flash forward to today, and J. Bruce Harreld is looking at $6.5M heading out the door at UI Athletics because of Gary Barta’s “world class” administration, of which Harreld is “really, really proud”. To that, UI and the Board of Regents will also now add the cost of a comprehensive, university-wide employment practices review, which Harreld belatedly called for after losing the first trial. That review will in turn precipitate multiple new rounds of reporting on both the root cause and rolling results of that review, extending the public relations nightmare for a year or more.
For a man who touts himself as a master of strategy, the question here is obvious. If only to avoid looking like a blithering idiot — let alone give the Board of Regents cause to question his long-term viability — why didn’t Harreld wait until after the court cases were disposed of to renew Barta’s contract, or to declare his undying professional and personal love for Barta? Because unfortunately, J. Bruce Harreld has the judgment and temperament of a back-slapping fraternity brother at a time when the world expects — and the Iowa Board of Regents should demand — considerably more.
From the excellent reporting on those two court cases it is clear that the resounding verdict in the first trial compelled UI’s settlement in the second trial. It is also clear that both court cases were a public relations disaster for the university, if not also for Barta and Harreld personally. Still hanging over the school is whether Harreld will now terminate the contract of his buddy Barta, given that Barta — as a UI administrator — was found guilty of multiple counts of discrimination against female employees.
Adding administrative insult to injury, it was also reported after the first trial that Barta and UI withheld key information from the plaintiffs about an ongoing UI audit. This was done not only to bolster the credibility of a key male witness, who was a former UI Athletics Department administrator, but also to help that same administrator — who was also a former administrator at Barta’s alma mater, NDSU — land a high-profile job at Kansas State. Following a separate but concurrent audit by the State Auditor, charges may yet be filed against the former employee who prompted the audit, further perpetuating this series of self-inflicted public relations disasters for Barta, Harreld, UI and the Iowa Board of Regents.
Of particular relevance to this post, what we do not have visibility to is how Harreld characterized the first lawsuit to the board, both before and during the recent trial. Did he tell them it was in the bag, only to be left holding the bag himself? How involved was the board in the legal strategy adopted by the Iowa Attorney General’s office, which represented the university? Was the board apprised of the very real risk of a loss, or were they blindsided? Could the university have settled for significantly less, and if so, why was a settlement not attempted? Was that Harreld’s call? And perhaps most importantly — did Mike Richards favor a settlement?
As for the second debacle, several months prior to the Athletic Department’s legal rebuke, Harreld managed — all by himself — to spawn multiple class-action lawsuits against the university. He managed that unique trick by unilaterally voiding $4.3M in already-awarded scholarships, thus foisting those costs onto the students and families who had been granted those awards. As detailed in a prior post, this was not an accident or an error in judgement, but a premeditated attempt by Harreld, as the president of the school, to steal $4.3M that did not belong to him. An attempt, it should also be noted, which met with unquestioning approval from the Rastetter-led Board of Regents.
In only a matter of days Harreld was forced to reverse course, but in that short window of time a very interesting fact was reported in the press. Although UI attempted to prove that their right to renege on the scholarships was valid by referring students and their families to text on a UI web page, it turned out that the text in question had been surreptitiously added to the web page in question in mid-January — meaning well after, and in some cases years after, those scholarships were awarded. While the identify of the person who added that text was never reported, nor was it determined whether that person acted alone or at the direction of someone else, the University of Iowa, at the direction of J. Bruce Harreld, actually did try to cheat citizens of the state out of money they had coming to them.
For these and other reasons related solely to Harreld’s performance as president, there is almost no chance that Mike Richards will be able to reestablish the credibility of the board as long as Harreld remains at Iowa, let alone heal the divisions which are still clearly in evidence on that campus, if not actively growing in light of recent legal findings against the school. If we turn that equation around, however, we find that the quickest way for Doc Richards to resolve the AAUP sanction against Iowa would be to convince J. Bruce Harreld to resign and return to Colorado, where he can spend all the time he wants with co-conspirator Jerre Stead, who just has to be perpetually thrilled to be associated with Harreld’s legacy. Were the board to run a new, clean, open and fair search at the University of Iowa, with heavy faculty representation on the search committee, and a doctorate and twenty years of academic administrative experience as the floor for applicants, Richard would not only garner a great deal of goodwill in the state, but nationwide..
At the same time, encouraging Harreld to step aside might also go a long way to satisfying the outstanding court case against past regents Bruce Rastetter, Mary Andringa and Katie Mulholland, and current regents Larry McKibben and Milt Dakovich, for violating Iowa’s Open Meeting law during the 2015 UI search. Were those five plaintiffs to be found guilty, the fact that two of them are still on the board almost certainly means they would have to resign, which would in turn precipitate even more bad press. And of course there’s also the possibility that one or more of those defendants might screw up during a deposition, and actually implicate themselves or others in outright criminal fraud related to Harreld’s shame hire.
Hypothetically, then, if Richards did decide he wanted to make a change in the presidency at Iowa, how might he go about doing that? Well, it goes without saying that everyone would want to avoid even more bad publicity at the board and the university, so Richards would have to have some compelling reason for getting Harreld to leave, as opposed to firing Harreld with or without cause. (And of course firing Harreld without cause would leave the board on the hook for the remainder of his unprecedented five-year, $4M contract, which Rastetter had the foresight to grant.)
Earlier in this post I took pains to note that whatever else might be right or wrong about Mike Richards, as far as the Harreld hire goes Richards seems to have no connection whatsoever. And as it turns out, that’s an important distinction when we get around to talking about the various crowbars which might be used to dislodge Harreld and replace him with a real university president. As long as Rastetter was president of the board that meant Harreld was protected by Rastetter, but because of Harreld’s awareness of Rastetter’s central role in the illegitimate 2015 search, it also meant that Harreld was protected from Rastetter. If Rastetter tried to push Harreld around, Harreld could always threaten to spill the beans about the details of their secret meetings, including details about meetings, phone calls or other communications that we still don’t know about.
In fact, we saw this same exact scenario play out with Steven Leath, who gave Rastetter a shot across the bow in the middle of ‘planegate‘ by exposing a lie that Rastetter told about their crony land deal. While I don’t know what other dirt Leath might have been privy to about Rastetter, or the degree to which Leath was willing to go down fighting, after that warning, Rastetter and the entire corrupt apparatus of state government did everything possible to make sure Leath was never charged for repeatedly violating state law. Unfortunately for Harreld, with the changing of the presidential guard at the board, he has nothing on Richards that he can use to keep himself in office, or even to make sure he gets paid on the way out the door.
As to what Richards could do to convince Harreld that it is time to move on, if the board is not already aware of who specifically added that surreptitious text to the UI website — in service of Harreld’s bid to fleece thousands of Iowa students and their families out of $4.3M — I think that might be a good place to start. A credible Iowa Board of Regents certainly would not want one of its own universities, let alone one of its own presidents, perpetrating fraud against the citizens of the state, yet the evidence seems quite clear that someone did exactly that at the University of Iowa. Whether that in itself constitutes a prosecutable crime, it would seem to rise to the level of a fireable offense, particularly if Harreld ordered that action himself.
On Tuesday through Thursday of this week, June 6-8, the roving Iowa Board of Regents will conduct regularly scheduled meetings, this time on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa. While there is a good deal of routine business to attend to, one issue that was not expected to be on the agenda this summer was another round of tuition hikes. After last summer’s trumped-up tuition increases — in which all three universities used a $1.7M regents-wide appropriations shortfall as a pretext to rip off students to the tune of millions of dollars — the board implemented a so-called “2-plus-2 plan” with backing from now-ex-governor Terry “Butcher” Branstad. In exchange for a guaranteed increase of 2% in appropriations for the 2017-2018 school year, the board agreed to ‘only’ increase tuition 2%, thus purportedly allowing students to plan their own budgets with confidence.
Because the state of Iowa is run by deranged politicians, however, that plan came apart even before it could be enacted. Not only was the 2017-2018 budget wrecked by a badly-botched estimate from the three-member Revenue Estimating Conference, but the damage was so extensive that legislators had to take back appropriations during the middle of the 2016-2017 academic year. As a result, instead of a 2% increase in appropriations for 2017-2018, and a consequent 2% increase in tuition, the board is now poised to enact tuition hikes of 5% at a minimum, with some students and degree programs seeing even greater increases.
In stressing the need to hike tuition this year for real, as opposed to last year’s opportunistic and disingenuous gouging of students and their families, the Board of Regents also acknowledges that such last-minute increases cannot continue. In particular, new Regents President Mike Richards is rolling out a tuition task force to initiate what will almost certainly become a hotly contested political process which produces nothing of substance. (Note that the board is putting the tuition-hike cart ahead of the task-force horse this week, thus preventing itself from learning anything useful before wantonly raising tuition.)
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 05/01/17 — the day of Richards’ appointment:
Despite getting off to a strong start in other ways, casino tycoon Mike Richards is clearly not interested in doing the bureaucratic soul searching necessary to stabilize tuition within the context of state government. Unfortunately, that also means Richards is not interested in steadying the larger higher-ed ecosytem in Iowa, which his predecessor — Bruce Rastetter — did everything possible to destabilize. For proof of this willful negligence, we have only to look at the tuition hikes which are about to be jammed through in purported response to macroeconomic factors which Richards does not want the task force to discuss. Effectively equating his alleged fiduciary duty with “the whole social compact of everything”, Richards intends to put a PR band-aid on the gaping wound that is higher-ed appropriations in Iowa, as opposed to delving into the cause of the continual blood loss at the governmental body which he now leads.
Despite Richards’ preemptive abdication of responsibility for issues which are inherently within the purview of the board, if not central to the pricing of tuition, we are not prohibited from delving into those same issues. The most critical factor in doing so, however, is that we must be clear about the questions we are asking, so at each step in the process we do not confuse the issues in play. The second-most critical factor is having access to good data, which you would think would be plentiful because of the board’s taxpayer-funded status, but you would be wrong about that..
In fact, one of the things the Iowa Board of Regents does almost as a matter of routine is make it impossible to find clear, concise information on subjects like the cost of tuition. You can find gobs of complex tables which drill down endlessly into minutia, but if you want a single, regularly updated graphic, which shows tuition hikes over the past ten or twenty years, including dollar amount and percentage change, forget it. After looking at board documents for a year and a half, I can say with some confidence that the board secrets and obfuscates such information precisely because doing so grants the board the right to cherry-pick facts as it sees fit.
Being clear about what is and is not at stake during this week’s meetings, as well as over the long term, is also important because it allows us to detect administrative weaseling, which once again brings us to J. Bruce Harreld, the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa. When it comes to raising tuition on the students at UI, every set of facts, every proffered projection and every conception of what Iowa is and should be inevitably prompts Harreld to call for massive year-over-year increases. As often happens when an individual is spending other people’s money, Harreld insists that Iowa deserves — and must be — nothing but the best.
From the moment of his sham hire Harreld has talked about the University of Iowa becoming, and in some cases already being, “world class”. Unfortunately, what was sold as Harreld’s transformative capacity for engineering that rarefied status turns out to be anything but. Instead of bucking the status quo in higher education, as his co-conspirators promised when they jammed him into office over three qualified candidates, Harreld is following in the well-worn administrative tradition by attempting to fund his ego-driven pipe dreams with thousands of dollars in tuition hikes over the next five years. (To be fair, in seeking to raise money by any means necessary Harreld actually did buck the status quo earlier this year, when he engaged in borderline criminal conduct by reneging on $4.3M in scholarships that the university was legally obligated to provide.)
As for Harreld’s ability to accurately identify “world class” aspects of higher education, at roughly this time last year Harreld decreed that the Iowa Athletic Department, under the direction of long-time Athletic Director Gary Barta, was indeed “world class”. As recently reported, however, in settling two gender-discrimination lawsuits — after badly losing one of those suits in court — Harreld’s world-class Athletic Department was just posterized to the tune of $6.5M. As a result, UI will also have to shoulder the cost of a campus-wide employment-practices review, and unlike the $6.5M in settlements that money will come out of the General Education Fund, not the separate athletics ledger.
As if that wasn’t enough, we also recently learned that a former employee in Harreld’s world-class Athletic Department made off with thousands of dollars in goods and services, while working under the direct supervision of Gene Taylor, Barta’s number-two administrator. Curiously, Barta’s world-class Athletic Department failed to notify the gender-discrimination plaintiffs about the ongoing audits in that case, perhaps because knowledge of those audits would have undercut the credibility of one of the Athletic Departments’ star witnesses. That star witness — Gene Taylor — was not only a factor in the gender discrimination suit that UI lost, and a former employee of Gary Barta’s alma mater as well, but Taylor recently managed to land himself a new, high-profile job at Kansas State without disclosing the fact that an employee under his direct supervision wandered off with a bunch of world-class Athletic Department loot.
The last person who will ever lead Iowa to world-class status in anything, other than bad press,. is J. Bruce Harreld. More to the point, however, not everything at Iowa, or maybe even anything, needs to be world class in order for UI to be an excellent school. What Iowa needs to be good at is providing the education it promises to deliver in exchange for the tuition it charges. Because of the accrediting process, Iowa does not need to compare itself to other institutions in order to know whether it is meeting that basic contract. It also does not need to compare itself to far-flung academic peers in order to set the price for the education it provides.
I don’t know where Harreld got the idea that he could gouge students with endless tuition hikes simply by pointing out that Iowa costs less than other schools, but one of the things you learn from watching governing boards hire crony administrators is that they constantly justify raising the rate at which said administrators are paid by pointing to market trends. And that’s true even if an administrator comes to the job with no academic administrative experience, a sketchy job history, and a ratty three-page resume complete with typos, errors and self-aggrandizing omissions. No matter who gets hired, the governing boards at colleges and universities all seem to use the same market matrix to determine the going rate for crony administrators, whether that salary is deserved or not.
The problem with porting that same rationale over to the tuition paid at state schools is that there is no equivalent national market for in-state students, who make up the great bulk of the enrollment at those institutions. Unlike, say, a remaindered business executive who is eager to test out his pet theories on an unsuspecting college or university, who can sell one or more of his multi-million dollar houses and relocate to the campus he intends to victimize, residents students are locked in to that state market. Whatever tuition costs at one of the three state universities in Iowa, there are no Iowa residents who can opt to pay resident tuition in other states without setting up residency for a year or more. (As noted in an earlier post, one notable exception is South Dakota, which recently and cleverly extended in-state tuition to Iowa residents as well.)
To see Harreld’s tuition grift in all its glory, imagine for a moment that the $200K in deferred compensation that Harreld gets every year was tied to keeping tuition low. Although that goal is antithetical to Harreld’s drive to raise tuition thousands of dollars over the next few years, he could put up the exact same graphics he’s using now, which show Iowa lagging behind all of the other schools in its 30-year-old peer group, and claim success. That Harreld intends to raise unrestricted funds by any means available was made clear with his scholarship scam, but as to any substantive basis for doing so the best he can offer is ‘world-class’ snob appeal, or comparisons with other state schools that is inherently meaningless.
In the context of this week’s tuition hikes and the task force to come, there is a lot to chew on and plenty to spit out. In order to proceed in an orderly fashion we will start small and build from there, until we have addressed the following issues. First, in this post we will take a close look at the proposed 2017-2018 tuition hikes, and ask what the appropriate increase should be to offset the recent legislative funding cuts.
Second, in the following post we will take a broader look at the tuition landscape in Iowa for the next five years or so. Assuming that the state economy will not be in perpetual freefall, what should tuition policy be in relatively stable years? What should the goal be with regard to tuition, particularly for resident undergrads?
Third, in the next post we will also kick around some of the meta-issues which contributed to the need for tuition hikes this year, which have precipitated the general decline in state funding over the past few decades. Given that it is the dominant players, why is it so difficult for the state to provide stability in the higher-education market? The Board of Regents has an effective monopoly on universities in the state, yet somehow it cannot control the price of its own product. Why not?
The 2016-2017 Mid-Year Budget Cuts
The question before us now is how much the Iowa Board of Regents should raise tuition this week, to compensate for both the mid-fiscal-year cuts that were enacted at the beginning of this calendar year, and for similar expected reductions in the coming academic cycle. (To help keep everything straight, remember that the fiscal year for the state of Iowa, and thus also for the Board of Regents, runs from 07/01 through 06/30 of the following year. Although we are only five months into calendar-year 2017, we are only weeks away from the end of Iowa’s 2017 fiscal year, also known as FY17.)
In answering this question we are not only going to ‘be like Mike’ and ignore “the whole social compact of everything”, we are going to ignore how we got to the numbers we are working with. Whether tuition was or is fairly priced, underpriced or overpriced is of no concern. We will simply take the budget numbers that exist, imbue them with a sense of validity which do not deserve, and go from there.
Notably, however, the issue at hand — how much the board should raise tuition in order to compensate for the recent cuts — is not the question the board has been debating behind the scenes, prior to this week’s meetings. For the regents, the only question they’re trying to answer is the same question which is at the core of every single decision J. Bruce Harreld has made during his illegitimate tenure at Iowa. How much can we get away with?
It’s not wrong, of course, for the regents to be a little shell-shocked by the unexpected cuts that took place earlier this calendar year, right in the middle of FY17, let alone to wonder what horrific budgeting error might cripple the state next year. Even if you’re incompetent, cold-hearted or thoroughly corrupt, that doesn’t mean you want to be victimized, or even inconvenienced, by other individuals who are incompetent, cold-hearted or thoroughly corrupt. On the positive side, whereas many of the actual living, breathing citizens who were injured by Butcher Branstad’s cratering of the state economy have no recourse but to suffer, or conceivably even die, the board is in the rather enviable position of being able to take money from private citizens in order to make up any shortfall.
To see how the board might respond to this year’s cuts, and to the threat of more in the coming fiscal year, imagine that you are expecting $100, which you need in order to meet your costs for a fixedperiod of time. You’ve budgeted correctly, you’re doing everything right, but suddenly you receive news that you will only receive $80, leaving you $20 short. What are your options?
As you probably know even if you don’t have a Harvard MBA, you can cut your costs, you can replace the missing revenue from some other source of funds, or you can do both in some combination. For example, if you cut your costs $10, and you borrow $10 from a friend or a bank, then you can meet your obligations. Where you originally needed $100, now you only need $90, which you have from the $80 you were expecting plus the $10 you scrounged.
One problem we face in talking about tuition is that quite often the regents and the universities refer to percentages rather than actual dollars. While percentages have their place, as you probably know they are also inherently prone to weaselly abuse. For example, if you start with $75 and end up with $100, that’s a 33.3% increase. On the other hand, if you start with $100 and end up with $75, that’s a 25% decrease. In each instance the change is the same — $25 — but the percentage change is different.
To such annoyances we can also add the problem of compounding percentages, which happens when two percentage increases are added one after the other, resulting in an amount greater than if those percentages were combined and factored only once. For example, if you raise the price of a $100 item 2%, then raise the price again 3%, you end up with $105.06, as contrasted with $105 if you had raised the price 5% in a single go. At small values the difference is negligible, but at larger values, or spread over great multiples — such as tens of thousands of students on a college campus — the difference may be considerable.
Finally, even after we get the dollar amounts or percentages squared away, context still matters. For example, it’s very easy to think of $100 as chump change compared to the overall cost of tuition, or — if you’re a high-six-figure administrator — as effectively meaningless relative to the entire budget of your university. And yet, if you’re the one who has to come up with that $100, and you’re working minimum wage, you’ll have to work an extra 17 hours or so just to put that $100 in your pocket. (Or, if you can’t get those hours, or perhaps even find a minimum-wage job in a tight labor market, you’ll have to cut $100 somewhere else.)
Context matters even more in terms of percentages, where the critical question is always percentage of what? If you are due 1% of the profits from a movie, is that gross profit or net profit — because if it’s net profit you are never going to see a dime. Likewise, it matters a great deal whether a percentage reflects hard dollars or a budget projection, let alone a projection which is itself predicated on percentages. All of which is to say that even when you’re staring at what look like hard numbers — whether dollars or percentages — critical context may be overlooked.
We are now at the part of this post where we should be wading into the facts as we know them, but when it comes to financial matters in state government nothing is ever that easy. With specific regard to the Board of Regents, there is a standing legislative appropriation in the hundreds of millions of dollars, to which the board then adds supplemental requests on an annual basis. Those requests may be honored, ignored, or — as was the case with the original FY17 budget — partially fulfilled by the state legislature.
In those rare instances where the government truly botches one of its core financial metrics, however, as was the case with the wildly errant REC estimate this past year, there is a fourth option. That option involves not only refusing to honor any requests for supplemental funding, but actually taking back money that was already allocated. Known as a ‘clawback’, such cuts can impact not only supplemental funding but standing appropriations, which may in turn impact the budget in subsequent years.
After all of the budget-cutting dust settled in the first few months of this calendar year, and multiple rounds of cuts were pushed through the budgetary meat grinder, the consensus was that the regents took a $20.7M hit, broken down as follows: UI $9.2M; ISU $9.0M; UNI $2.5M. As it turned out, however, not only were the initial budget cuts compounded by additional smaller cuts, but a month or two later those numbers still weren’t right, and the state took back even more.
From RadioIowa’s Dar Danielson, on 05/05/17:
We can confirm that the Iowa Board of Regents took a $30M hit with recent reporting from the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier’s Christina Crippes, on 05/31/17:
As to how much of that $30.3M each of the three regents universities was responsible for, that’s exactly the kind of information you would think the regents would leave lying around on the their snazzy new website, but if it’s there I couldn’t find it — and I looked. (In fact, with regard to the recent clawbacks I couldn’t find any information at all.) Where I did finally find those numbers was in reporting from papers which are local to each school.
From the WCFC article quoted above:
From the Ames Tribune’s Austin Cannon on 05/16/17:
From the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne, on 05/08/17:
Totaling all of those cuts we get $3.3M (UNI) + $11.5M (ISU) + $15.5M (UI) = $30.3M.
While such mathematical precision among multiple sources is a minor miracle in itself, note that there is still some uncertainty about what this all means. Was that $30.3M cut from the original FY17 baseline, or does that include the $6.3M supplemental that was originally appropriated — meaning the cut to the standing appropriation was only $23M? And the answer is: I have no idea. I’m sure somebody knows, but that is exactly the kind of information the regents do not seem to make readily available, as simple — and obligatory — as such disclosures would seem to be.
For the purposes of this post we will assume the worst, which is that the original $6.8M supplemental appropriation was wiped out, then $30.3M in clawbacks were also applied, reducing the standing appropriation by that amount. Whether it would then be accurate to say that the regents’ budget was cut $30.3M or $36.6M is still unclear, but because all of these numbers are really annoying we’re just going to skip that and move on. (As we will see, it doesn’t really matter in either case.)
As to how much we should raise tuition to compensate for those cuts, the situation is still not as clear as it seems. Were those mid-year cuts only applicable to FY17, with FY18 appropriations bouncing back, it’s possible that any decrease could be absorbed through equivalent spending cuts on the three regent campuses. As noted above, when you find yourself short you have to reduce the amount you require or find more money. Because the regent universities cannot simply manufacture additional revenue in the middle of an academic year — say, by hitting up a bank or a rich friend for a loan — their only option was to find sufficient cuts as quickly as possible. Or at least that’s what two of the schools did. As previously noted, the third university took a somewhat unique approach to resolving its sudden cash crush.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 02/25/17:
Because the shiny new president at UNI, Mark Nook, and the badly dented ex-president at Iowa State, Steven Leath, both have backgrounds in academic administration, it apparently never occurred to them to screw students and their families out of the money they needed to cover the gaping holes in their budgets. By contrast, because J. Bruce Harreld had logged nary a minute in academic administration prior to being handed the job he now holds — not at a university, college, community college, high school, junior high. elementary school, preschool or daycare — he was not saddled with antiquated notions like ethical behavior. Instead, informed by long experience in the private-sector, Harreld reacted to the budget cuts like a piranha with rabies, sinking his teeth into the nearest source of revenue he could find.
As we now know, Harreld’s transformative plan to save UI money by voiding $4.3M in scholarships was not simply predatory, it was illegal. And that’s leaving aside the attempted fraud that was committed, when someone surreptitiously added text to the UI website to deceive students and their families into accepting that collective obligation. Fortunately it only took a few days for UI to abandon its plan in the face of multiple class-action lawsuits, at which point — amazingly — Iowa suddenly found that much money and more by rummaging around in its couch cushions.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/26/17:
After pleading poverty like a stuck pig for months on end, Iowa ‘found’ $4.9 in leftover flood money that it could throw at its budget hole. And yet that’s not particularly surprising, because among the three state schools Iowa is by far the largest in terms of its total budget, including the amount of money it receives from the state. Despite having more inherent flexibility in how to respond, however, out of the three schools ISU and UNI did their best to shield the innocent students, while Harreld’s first instinct was to prey on the students and hoard that flood money for his own ends.
The Pending 2017-2018 Tuition Hikes
Given that all of the regent universities (eventually) managed to absorb the mid-year budget cuts for FY17, it’s fair to ask why tuition hikes are now on the table. The answer is twofold. First, because the cuts in the FY17 budget went beyond the supplemental request in appropriations, impacting the underlying standing appropriations, the regents feel — as the regents often feel — that they are ‘owed’ that missing $30.3M. In fact, if the board doesn’t get more money from the state every year, that in itself is seen as a loss, while an actual loss is seen as apocalyptic.
The second answer, which is infinitely more valid in theory and somewhat more valid in practice, is that the cuts to the board’s standing appropriations are expected to be recur in FY18, and perhaps also in FY19. Whether you think that’s likely or not probably depends on whether you side with Butcher Branstad, or with the self-interested university presidents. From the Gazette’s James Q. Lynch, on 03/28/17, here’s Branstad looking ahead after coming to grips with the heavy cuts:
Now here’s how J. Bruce Harreld — the board’s presidential whineleader — characterized the future to the student reporters at the Daily Iowan, on 03/06/17, prior to the additional $10M clawback:
Whether Branstad is right that the budget will recover in 2019, or Harreld is right that the state’s standing appropriations will be cut “every year going forward” for all time, for FY17 the state’s schools did receive less money than they did in FY16. It is also projected that there will be less money for the regents in FY18 as compared to that FY16 baseline, but the amount of those cuts has yet to be determined. Where the universities were expecting x dollars this year and next, and hoping for x+y, instead they’re getting x-y, which means — at least from what we know so far — that the impulse to raise tuition this week is not entirely irrational.
In fact, the board intended to raise tuition anyway, so the question we’re really asking is how much more of an increase is needed to compensate for the mid-year cuts. While subject to change, again the plan for FY18 (and FY19) was that if the state legislature bumped appropriations by 2%, the board would ‘only’ raise tuition by 2% in each of those years. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 08/30/16:
As to where the regents got the idea that the state legislature would have $12.8M to fork over for 2017-2018, I have no idea. As far as I can tell, that’s another example of how people create budgetary fantasies out of thin air, after which they pretend there was some basis or validity for that assumption. For example, in the year prior — 2016-2017 — the board originally requested a combined $20M for the three state schools. Complicating matters further, before the legislature got to its final, drop-dead appropriation for FY17, Butcher Branstad penciled in $8M for the regents instead of the requested $20M. That in turn prompted now-ex-regents-president Rastetter to proclaim that unless the state legislature came in somewhere between the governor’s low-estimate of $8M, and the regents high-but-not-as-high-as-they-really-wanted $20M request, the regents would be forced — forced! — to raise tuition.
As we know, the legislature came in with $6.3M instead of $8M, meaning they were $1.7M short of Rastetter’s don’t-make-me-raise-tuition threshold. As promised, Rastetter turned the presidents loose on the students, not only allowing the three schools to make up their individual share of that $1.7M shortfall, but a great (great) deal more. At UI specifically, the proportionate share of that shortfall was roughly $1M, but the tuition hikes Harreld requested, and the board approved, were considerably greatly.
How much greater? When all was said and done, J. Bruce Harreld raked in a whopping $27.2M in new tuition on a $1M shortfall relative to the governor’s line item, or a $3.2M shortfall relative to his original $4.5M supplemental request for FY17. $27.2M!
Put another way, regardless of what happened at Iowa State and UNI — and as we will see, ISU made out like a bandit as well — the FY17 tuition hikes at UI alone brought in $7.2M more than the regents’ original $20M supplemental request for all three schools. And unlike this coming fiscal year, that was in a year in which the legislature did initially provide a less-than-hoped for increase in state funding, over and above the standing appropriation.
That the same board of regents which brutalized students with tuition hikes last summer is now embarking on a tuition task force does not inspire confidence. Nor does it inspire confidence when anticipating this year’s emergency tuition hikes, which actually seem to be — at least broadly — a rational response to this year’s cut in allocations. Which once again brings us back to just how much those tuition hikes should be.
Revisiting the 2016-2017 Tuition Hikes
To fully grasp the cynicism of the tuition hikes last summer, meaning for the 2016-2017 academic year just ended, note that even as they were rocking the students with abusive increases, the regents took credit for saving the students money. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 07/18/16:
As to where that $300 figure for resident undergrads came from, the most likely explanation is that the regents first calculated what they thought they could get away with, then they added another $50 to cut at the last minute, making themselves seem responsive to student concerns. Note, however, that while all of that was being prominently discussed, the university presidents variously imposed additional hikes including differential tuition, increases for upperclasspersons in bachelors programs, and increases for non-resident and graduate students — all over-and-above the $250 increase aimed at resident undergraduates.
Instead of acknowledging that the FY17 tuition hikes allowed UI to bank $27M, which is more than enough to compensate for the school’s clawbacks — and that UI will do so again in FY18, even if no new hikes are imposed — Harreld is pushing for a 5% increase this year, and for 5% – 8% hikes for the next four or five years. In fact, despite having just raised a massive amount of new revenue, Harreld is pretending that those FY17 tuition hikes never took place. From the 03/06/17 DI interviewquoted above, here is an extended version of Harreld’s quote:
Note that Harreld takes great pains to talk about how UI is being driven “back to 2014 sort of funding levels”, meaning state appropriations, but what he does not say — what he cannot say — is that the tuition hikes that were approved in the summer of 2016 more than make up for the mid-year cuts in FY17. By the same token, while he’s perfectly willing to assert that the cuts as currently budgeted will affect UI “every year going forward”, the last thing he wants to acknowledge is that the same holds true for the $27M in tuition hikes. Those were not one-time hikes, those were permanent, which means Iowa will add $27M “every year going forward”.
In a perfect world the Right Honorable Iowa Board of Regents would point out this willful deception for the benefit of the students and families it purports to serve. Unfortunately, the board was not only all-in on the egregious and unjustified tuition hikes last summer, it didn’t even object when Harreld’s tried to steal $4.3M by sticking scholarship recipients with tuition they were not obligated to pay. (When that nefarious plan was approved there were literally no questions asked.)
Instead, the board has teed up a 5% increase for FY18 as if that is wholly justified by the facts, when half of the relevant facts are missing. Where the board should provide the public and press with information about year-over-year changes in both appropriations and tuition, revenue from the FY17 tuition hikes is omitted. Fortunately, although the numbers are scattered, we can put together a snapshot of what really happened in FY17, which will in turn demonstrate why neither Harreld nor the board wants to talk about last summer’s tuition hikes.
On top of the combined $30M in mid-year clawbacks, let’s assume that the supplemental increase the regents originally requested for FY17 — $20M above the standing appropriation — was legit, and not just another number pulled out of the board’s you-know-what. The state legislature initially came up with $6.3M of that requested increase, but as we now know that partial funding was wiped out by the clawbacks over the past few months. If we combine those two numbers — $20M requested above baseline, plus a $30M cut below baseline, we get a whopping $50M reduction in legislative spending compared to where the regents wanted to be for FY17. Not surprisingly, that steep drop is now being used as justification for another round of large-scale tuition hikes, yet everyone making the argument for those hikes is assiduously avoiding one incontrovertible fact. In the summer of 2016, the Iowa Board of Regents approved tuition hikes for FY17 which more than offset the eventual decrease in funding that year. By the same token, because the tuition hikes are ongoing, those same hikes will also more than offset the anticipated decrease in funding for FY18.
Here are the facts — or as near as I can come given the sketchy-if-not-intentionally-omitted information at the board and its three universities.
From Nick Fisher of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, as reprinted by the Quad City Times, on 08/12/16:
After the FY17 tuition hikes were approved in the summer of 2016, UNI expected to receive an additional $5.6M in new revenue for the 2016-2017 academic year.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, as previously noted, on 07/14/16:
As a result of the FY17 tuition hikes, for the 2016-2017 academic year the University of Iowa expected to add $27.2M in new revenue.
From Anne Krapf, writing for the Inside Iowa State website, on 07/21/16:
Here we not only learn that Iowa State expected a staggering $32.6M in new revenue from the FY17 tuition hikes, but we find incidental confirmation that reducing the proposed $300 hike for resident undergrads by $50 was little more than a stunt. (That the person who purportedly proposed that token change — stunt master extraordinaire Larry “Hallelujah” McKibben — will chair the board’s tuition task force is yet another indicator of what we can expect from that deliberative process.)
If we now total the revenue generated by the FY17 tuition hikes at all three regent universities, we get: $5.6M (UNI) + $27.2M (UI) + $32.6M (ISU) = $65.4M. $65.4M!
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that can’t possibly be right, because if the Iowa Board of Regents brought in a combined $65.4M in new revenue as a result of the FY17 tuition hikes, you would have heard something about it. Well, I would agree with you, except I’ve read everything I can get my hands on and I have yet to find that total reported anywhere. And by ‘that total’ I mean that even if $64.5M is wrong, I have never seen a document which purports to show any value for the combined haul from the FY17 hikes. Maybe I missed it — maybe it’s on billboards all over the state — but I have never seen it.
As it stands I have no basis for doubting the reported numbers, which means the Iowa Board of Regents really did raise $65.4M in new tuition revenue during the 2016-2017 academic year. Yes, there were cuts, but those cuts were on the highly publicized appropriations side, which tells us nothing about tuition revenue. $65.4M is also clearly a bigger number than $50M, meaning even if we accept the worst-case budget scenario that the regents can claim for FY17, not only did the board come out $15.4M ahead even after the cuts are accounted for, but the two largest schools — UI and ISU — both received significantly more in new tuition than they lost in appropriations.
As for UNI, which is not only the weak sister of the state’s three schools, but has been routinely abused by the regents over the past decade, only President Mark Nook can make a valid case for raising tuition this year, based on what happened in FY17. If we again assume a worst-case scenario, and total UNI’s original FY17 supplemental request, UNI’s FY17 tuition hikes, and UNI’s subsequent FY17 clawbacks, that school does suffer a loss for the 2016-2017 academic year, which might also recur in FY18. (Deleting the $2.8M supplemental request, plus another $3.3M in clawbacks, leaves UNI with a $6.1M loss, which would not be offset by $5.6M in new revenue from its FY17 tuition hike. On the other hand, if the numbers are not worst-case, then UNI does not suffer a loss in FY17.)
The Regents Are Telling Harreld’s Lie
The premise going into this week’s board meetings is that the regents, through no fault of their own, took as much as a $36.8M beating in FY17. In order to make themselves bureaucratically whole, the regents’ only recourse is to replace that money by reaching deep into the bank accounts of students and their families. As we now know, however, that sob story only accounts for the loss on the appropriations side, which was more than offset by tuition hikes that put the regents $15.4M ahead at a minimum. Even if only by chance, for FY17 the regents not only covered their clawback cuts, they effectively granted themselves the $20M supplemental request they initially made that year.
If the Board of Regents really was a credible governing body, and not an active agent of abuse of Iowa’s students and their families, the regents would tell ISU and UI to make do with the tuition they have, while allowing UNI a modest hike. In fact, if the board as a whole did nothing this week, and the same $30M in clawbacks hit the standing appropriation for FY18, the board would come out ahead even more than in FY17, because the FY17 tuition hikes are now baked into the cake. While the regents originally requested a $20M supplemental increase for FY17, for FY18 the regents only requested $12.8M over the pre-clawback FY17 baseline — provided they were allowed to increase tuition 2%. If we add the $12.8M that the board won’t be seeing this year to the same $30M hole in the standing appropriation for FY18, we get a still-sizeable but smaller $42.8M loss. On the tuition side, however, the board will still rake in another $65.4M from the FY17 tuition hikes, meaning $22.6M more, as opposed to $15.4M — and that’s before we factor in the additional 2% bump.
For FY18, then, the board will be ahead $22.6M, in addition to the $15.4M (at a minimum) which was pocketed in FY17. Despite that rosy picture, the board’s tuition hike for FY18 has now ballooned to 5%, further increasing the board’s windfall. From the WCFC article quoted earlier, by Crippes, on 05/31/17:
Add $25.7M to the $22.6M that the board will be ahead if it does nothing, and at the end of this week the board has every reason to believe that it will be $48.3M in the black, at a minimum, despite two years of unexpected clawbacks. Note also that while $25.7M is nothing to sneeze at, and remembering that percentages are inherently suspect, if that’s the expected total from a 5% across-the-board tuition hike, we can now see the FY17 tuition hikes for the wholesale abuse they truly were. With some wiggle room, the hikes last summer may have represented — collectively — a 12.7% increase in tuition revenue. ($65.4M / $25.7M = 2.54 * 5% = 12.7%)
In implementing the rapacious FY17 hikes, the board concealed its windfall by focusing press coverage on a $300 increase for resident undergrads, which it then made a big show of decreasing by $50 as a disingenuous show of good faith. Behind the scenes, however, the board allowed the universities to variously increase tuition in a multitude of ways, massively increasing the overall take. As a result, the $25.7M in new FY18 revenue that is expected from the 5% tuition hikes will be in addition to the worst-case-scenario profit of $15.4M from FY17, which will also carry over. Meaning at the end of the 2017-2018 academic year, the Iowa Board of Regents is currently projected to be net-ahead $41.1M, despite not receiving its $12.5M supplemental request, and losing $30M in cuts to the standing appropriation. To all of that we can also add the possibility — as admittedly projected by the same kooks who got the budget so wrong this past year — that those deep cuts in appropriations will be partially or completely restored in FY19 or FY20, while the massive increases in tuition revenue will continue.
I don’t know if the new regents president, casino-owner Mike Richards, is serious about reestablishing even a veneer of credibility at the board. If he is, then after firing Harreld at Iowa there is no more important step he can take than being honest about tuition hikes. Even if my numbers are off — even way off — there should have been no reason for me to write this post. All of the numbers quoted above, which represent the most basic numbers you can imagine in terms of the regents’ bottom line, should be publicly available in snapshot form, but they are not.
By some method an appropriations baseline was established for FY17. We now know that after initially supplementing that base appropriation with $6.3M for FY17, the legislature took that back and more. We also know that for FY17 the regents enacted tuition hikes at all three schools, yet unlike the clawbacks, the total amount of revenue generated from those tuition hikes seems to be — literally — a closely-guarded state secret.
The FY17 clawbacks and projected FY18 cuts are being used as justification for the tuition hikes which will undoubtedly be approved this week. At the same time, there has been no discussion of the amount of revenue that was generated by the FY17 tuition hikes, which will also be generated in FY18 and — quoth Harreld — “every year going forward”? The reason for that is that the Iowa Board of Regents does not want to talk about the revenue it has generated and will generate, because doing so would expose the board’s poverty claims as Harreld-esque deception.
What the board wants is not honesty or fairness, but more money, and the best way to make the case for higher tuition for FY18 is to ignore the revenue windfall from its indefensibly abusive tuition hikes last summer. The very fact that the board’s proposed FY18 hikes are uniform across all three schools, while the funding cuts were not uniform, tells us that the board is not enacting new tuition hikes in response to specific reductions in appropriations for those institutions And of course there will be no suggestion that the tuition hikes which are about to be enacted should be rescinded, or future hikes tabled, if state appropriations return to the FY17 baseline or greater. (If the state suddenly increased appropriations $100M per school on an annual basis, the board still wouldn’t reduce tuition.)
The only mystery about the pending tuition hikes is one that the Iowa Board of Regents created. At the very least, before any new hikes are enacted, the board should be compelled to produce the complete set of numbers for FY17 — meaning both the cuts on the appropriations side and the increase in revenue from tuition. By refusing to talk about both revenue streams the board is engaging in a shell game in which students and their families are the inevitable losers. For that reason, the idea that the board’s tuition task force will plot a credible road map for the future, or that the five year plans submitted by the university presidents will be anything but a perpetuation of this bureaucratic abuse, is a delusion. We will expose the magnitude of that delusion in the next post.
In the previous post we looked at the tuition hikes and higher-ed de-appropriations which occurred in Iowa during fiscal year 2017 (FY17), which began on 07/01/16 and concludes at the end of this month. Although tens of millions of dollars in state funding was suddenly yanked back in mid-year, by chance the Iowa Board of Regents inadvertently covered those unexpected losses — and then some — by enacting rapacious tuition hikes last summer. During regularly scheduled meetings this past week, the board levied even more tuition hikes premised on those FY17 legislative clawbacks, with no disclosure of the massive amount of new revenue the board received from the hikes which were implemented in the summer of 2016.
Following two consecutive summers of last-minute tuition hikes, the board is now covering its ass by launching a Tuition Task Force to belatedly look at how to make future hikes more predictable. While new Regents President Mike Richards has already signaled that the board will not delve into the complex dynamics which determine the cost of higher education, and the board admittedly has no ability to prevent the kind of failed budget estimate that led to the FY17 clawbacks, there is nothing preventing the regents from being honest with the people of Iowa. As a self-interested body it may not be surprising that the board has been less than forthcoming about its bottom line, but that willful obfuscation undercuts the board’s credibility on every front. Worse, if it can be shown by simple arithmetic that the board’s plans going forward will not only not work, they will make the problem the board is attempting to solve even worse, then the nine citizen-volunteer regents — these people — are going to end up with very expensive eggs on their faces.
Even if you pay no attention to the issues of the day in higher education, you have probably heard that appropriations to state schools in Iowa have been falling for decades, with a consequent and frequent ratcheting-up of tuition to compensate for that loss in state support. That trend also seems to hold across the country, with state colleges and universities nationwide seeing less in appropriations, which in turn drives up the cost of tuition, which increases student debt. In fact, if you perform even the most elemental search on the subject, you will find graph after graph displaying the same two crossing lines, as appropriations drop and tuition climbs over time. (You can see a recent, UI-specific example here, which we will come back to later.)
One concern about such graphs, however — which we touched on in the previous post — is that they almost always present appropriations and tuition as a percentage of the overall funding picture, rather than actual dollars. As it turns out, that’s a potentially deceptive factor in any conversation about tuition, because if you moderately increase appropriations while also massively increase tuition, appropriations will still fall in percentage terms. For example, if appropriations rose from $100 to $125, while tuition rose from $50 to $150, in percentage terms the state support would plummet precipitously from 66% to 45%, even as the actual contribution from appropriations increased.
Having paid little attention to such issues myself, including during my own college education at the University of Iowa, when I finally joined the perpetual higher-ed conversation over a year and a half ago — following the fraudulent appointment of J. Bruce Harreld as president at UI — my perception of the state of affairs mimicked conventional wisdom. The ogreish Iowa state legislature, dominated by crony business interests and haters, was determined to cut funding to the academic freedom fighters at the state’s three schools. While there is an anti-educational strain in the Iowa state legislature, however, and that body is currently dominated by fundamentalist and libertarian ideology, I recently came to realize that there is a contrarian theory which may also explain the tick-tock dynamic between funding cuts and tuition hikes.
Which Came First: the Cut or the Hike?
No one doubts that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between changes in state appropriations and changes in college tuition, but conventional wisdom dictates that the former always causes the latter. Because schools need a certain amount of money to pay the bills, when state support drops, tuition ratchets up to account for that decrease. The same thing happens with government revenue more broadly, of course, such that sufficient fiscal pain will inevitably compel politicians to raise taxes at the state or national level, despite personal or political leanings. (Even in Kansas, which was overtaken by psychopathic libertarian ideology in 2012, the statehouse just reasserted that truth. Iowa, which has had similar political leadership of late, could well be next.)
We can have all the conversations we want about the appropriate size and role of local, state or national government, but in any given moment math trumps ideology. As we just saw in Iowa, when you don’t have the money to pay the bills, something has to give. Unfortunately, when the now-ex-governor and state legislature set about covering a $250M hole in the state’s $7B budget, the state’s three universities were hit particularly hard. Another substantial shortfall and attendant cuts have already been factored in for FY18 as well, meaning absent the political will to raise taxes, the only way for the state’s universities to protect themselves from yet another fiscal beating would be to raise tuition in response.
Except…as noted, the rapacious tuition hikes which were implemented last summer provided more than enough new revenue to compensate for the unexpected FY17 cuts. As this past week’s tuition-hike non-debate also showed, the board is so eager to keep last year’s substantial gains that it just hit students and their families with another round of tuition hikes, this time using the clawbacks as pretext. Last year’s massive hikes were also justified on the basis of an appropriations shortfall — which may actually have been engineered for that purpose — but in that case appropriated funds were not taken back. Instead, the state simply refused to grant all of the supplemental funding the board requested. After the state fell $1.7M short of an arbitrary $8M threshold established by ex-regents president Bruce Rastetter, he happily took the legislature’s $6.3M, then gave the university presidents permission to savage the students for a collective $65M more. ($65M!)
Because this summer’s tuition hikes seem infinitely more justified in comparison, we will momentarily set aside the bureaucratic heist that took place last summer and focus on the relationship between the funding cuts earlier this calendar year, in mid-FY17, and the FY18 tuition hikes which were enacted this past week. In that constrained context it seems undeniable that the cuts precipitated the compensatory hikes, which fits with conventional wisdom. There is a fixed dollar amount that must be available to pay the system-wide regent bills, a chunk of that funding disappeared this year, and is expected to be missing next year as well, so tuition was increased to make up for that loss. Budget cuts (cause), prompted tuition hikes (effect).
If we pull back from the specifics, simple math bears out that cause-and-effect relationship. For example, if it costs $100 to run a university, but only $90 is available from appropriations, then tuition revenue will have to increase $10 to meet that number. But notice what happens if we raise tuition first. If appropriations are $100, and the university decides to increase tuition $10 to get ahead, what will the state do in response? Will the state say, sure — you can now have $110, instead of the $100 you need? Or will the state cut the school’s funding $10, providing only $90?
If that’s too abstract, let’s keep it simple but make it personal. Imagine you have a friend or family member who desperately wants to go to school, but for whatever reason they do not have, and cannot borrow, the necessary funds. Because you care about this person, and because you believe in the value of a college education, you offer to provide — as a grant — the $100 that it will cost to cover tuition each year, even though you will have to stretch your own resources.
Now suppose you subsequently discover that the person you’re helping has been spending $10 a year of frivolities, instead of contributing that $10 to their own education. Are you going to be happy about that, or might you feel that the person you were helping was taking advantage? More to the point, are you going to keep forking over $100, or are you going to cut your contribution to $90 for any remaining academic years?
While this may all seem academic (har!), let’s consider a similar scenario in which the state funds 100% of the cost of an education, while students pay nothing. What happens if the governmental body which delivers that education decides to also impose tuition or fees? Because that revenue will be added to the school’s bottom line — meaning, in effect, that the school would be turning a profit — it would not be unreasonable for the state, which has myriad obligations to meet, to reduce it’s contribution in kind, so as to be able to use that money elsewhere.
Whatever a public college or university should be in all its aspirational glory, or even mundane utility, at any given moment the financial question is always the same. Each school’s costs must be balanced by some mixture of appropriations and tuition, with perhaps some percentage of charitable giving thrown in. In theory a school could be entirely state-funded and free of any costs — meaning tuition, but also fees, room and board, and on and on. (On the other hand, I don’t think a state school could contribute no government support and still be a state school, but we’ll contemplate that koan later.) In practice, of course, all state schools meet their financial obligations through some combination of appropriations and tuition, and most people agree that there is some interdependence between those two sources of revenue.
In this basic equation — the balancing of costs on one side, against tuition and appropriations on the other — we see that the ubiquitous and apparently probitive ‘x’ graphs, which everyone interprets as proof that decreased funding (cause) leads to increased tuition (effect), also tell us nothing about what may be happening at a particular school. To see why, imagine a state college scraping the bottom of the barrel in every way, which nonetheless has falling tuition — perhaps because prospective students are enrolling elsewhere en mass. For that school, which at any given juncture could be taking in enough money to pay its sub-par if not sub-standard costs, the ‘x’ graph would look like a trend-busting miracle. The appropriations line would tick up, the tuition line would tick down, and at as a result that institution of higher learning would look like a sweet deal.
Conversely, of course, it is entirely possible for a state school with relatively low appropriations and relatively high tuition to deliver a solid education. If needs-based financial aid helps offset the overall cost of tuition, fees, and room and board, it is even possible for that same school to be a good value for low-income students. On an ‘x’ graph such a school would look like it was headed for the rocks based on its appropriations and tuition percentages, yet the degrees conferred would be excellent, and for many students the total cost would be significantly less than the sticker price..
As for the relationship between cause and effect, consider again the extreme case of an entirely state-funded school, with no cost to the students of any kind. If that school decided to raise extra money with tuition or fees, the legislature — having many other budgetary responsibilities to meet — might well reduce that school’s standing appropriation by a like amount. If that sequence of tuition hikes (cause) and funding cuts (effect) were to continue, the resulting ‘x’ graph would be indistinguishable from the ‘x’ graphs which purport to show that cuts in funding are driving increases in tuition. Meaning all such graphs — while perfectly accurate as to some correlation between changes in appropriations and tuition over time — say nothing about whether cuts in funding or increases in tuition are cause or effect. It could be one, it could be the other, or, more likely, such graphs depict a combination of both cause-and-effect relationships.
As we will see in a moment, this is not simply a theoretical exercise. The fact that appropriations and tuition move in sync regardless of which is cause and which is effect has serious implications for state colleges and universities everywhere. Those implications are particularly profound for the University of Iowa, however, which is poised to implement a five-year plan that could — paraphrasing the immortal hype of illegitimate president J. Bruce Harreld — take the school from great to crater.
J. Bruce Harreld’s Disastrous Five-Year Plan
Having been jammed into office as a result of a fraudulent $300K taxpayer-funded search, and having been sold to a shell-shocked UI community as a transformative visionary, and after blathering on and on for a year about making everything at UI world-class, and raising Iowa’s national collegiate rank to top-tier, Harreld the strategy guy finally unveiled his grand plan for the university. His big idea — which no one ever thought of before in the entire history of higher education, because academic administrators are dolts, and only private-sector entrepreneurs can understand these things — is to hit UI students with massive tuition hikes year after year after year.
After soaking the students for $27M last summer, and another $16M or more this summer, Harreld’s five-year plan is to raise tuition 5% to 8% per year — or about $3,000 all told — until Iowa’s tuition is at the average of its 30-year-old so-called peer group. Having recently exposed the dubious nature of peer groups in general, in this post it is also important to note that such peer groups are determined by criteria which often have little or nothing to do with the cost of providing an education to students, and that’s particular true for research universities like Iowa and Iowa State.
To such absurdities we now add yet another in the context of Harreld’s five-year plan. While Harreld and the regents have repeatedly pointed to various bar charts which show Iowa lagging behind its peers in resident tuition, and Harreld’s aim is to raise Iowa’s tuition 33% to the average of those other schools, no one has addressed the obvious fact that most of those schools will also be increasing their tuition at the same time. Maybe not uniformly, and certainly much less aggressively, but still — as the tuition at those schools rises, so too will the target that Harreld is trying to hit.
Even if only as a result of tracking inflation, by the time Harreld gets UI to whatever the peer average for resident tuition is now, that will no longer be the average — meaning he will have to continue raising tuition to chase down that arbitrary mark. Moreover, since it is unlikely that any of the schools in Iowa’s peer group well ever lower their tuition to the average that Harreld aspires to, let alone for the same reason, there will always be positive price pressure driving Iowa’s peer average ever higher. (That last point also demonstrates how disingenuous Harreld is being in choosing that target, because if Iowa’s resident undergraduate tuition was above the peer average he would never suggest — as his logic would dictate — dropping it to that number.)
The core problem with Harreld’s radical plan is not simply its arbitrary justification, however, but the real-world impact that such an initiative will have on the university’s bottom line. Which is to say that it will not have anywhere near the positive impact Harreld claims, and could conceivably prompt serious problems with Iowa’s balance sheet going forward. To see why, ask yourself again how likely it is that the Iowa legislature will allow Harreld to keep all of the funding UI is currently receiving, while raking in an additional $100M or so simply because he decides to increase the price of tuition.
Even if we ignore the fact that the state is a financial wreck as a result of the failed policies and fiscal mismanagement of former governor Terry “Butcher” Branstad, it is unlikely that the Iowa legislature — or any state legislature — would fund that kind of financial buildup without drawing down its own support. Add in Iowa’s teetering economy, however, with financial strain taking a toll throughout the state, and it is literally not possible — it cannot be imagined — that the cost of tuition at UI will rise $3,000 over five years, while state funding will continue to rise or even stay steady.
Note also that Harreld’s bold move will require that the board break with longstanding precedent in a number of ways, which will in turn destabilize both the regent schools and the greater Iowa higher-ed ecosystem. One key change the regents will have to make, in order for Harreld to implement his pointless if not perilous plan, is to decouple the cost of tuition at all three schools. Instead of being co-equal institutions, the state’s three universities will occupy different price points in the higher-ed market, which will create problems in itself. Because the Board of Regents is ever helpful when it comes to fleecing students however — and particularly resident undergrads — the process of decoupling is already well underway, despite the fact that the Tuition Task Force only kicked off last week.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 05/14/17:
In anticipation of the Tuition Task Force, everyone involved has vowed to “look at everything” to such a uniform degree that the mere invocation of that commitment has been exposed as nothing more than a sales pitch. And yet that revelation shouldn’t be surprising, given that one thing the board assiduously refuses to “look at” is the mountain of new tuition revenue the schools began raking in during FY17, following last summer’s hikes. Clearly the regents should look at everything, including in particular the risks associated with allowing J. Bruce Harreld to destabilize long-standing tuition policies, simply because his deep-seated ego needs weren’t being met as back-bench Harvard lecturer.
Continuing, from Miller’s piece:
There is no doubt in my mind that Nook is right. I do not think there is a substantive difference between the quality of the education students get at each of the state’s schools. Some departments in common may be better than others, some teachers are certainly better than others, but overall the quality is equivalent and good.
But note what Nook is not saying. He is not saying UNI will cut the cost of tuition, just that UNI will become cheaper by comparison when Harreld goes nutso at UI and ISU follows suit, albeit perhaps to a lesser degree. Also note that despite the price increases at Iowa and Iowa State, those hikes will not lead to an improved education at those schools, which again echoes Nook’s point. The increased costs at UI and ISU will simply cover the higher “cost to deliver a course” at those schools, including research activity that the AAU requires for membership, amenities that make for a more enticing student “experience”, salary increases or deferred compensation for the administrators who engineered the tuition hikes, and slush funds in the tens of millions of dollars at the sole discretion of the university presidents, which can be used to fund for-profit start-ups in partnership with corporations. In no sense is Nook intimating that costing less in relative terms will decrease UNI’s quality, only that it might appear so with prospective students who have been culturally trained to falsely equate quality with price. (As noted in a recent post, UI’s AAU membership is not at risk, but because of quirks in the AAU’s internal ranking system, Iowa State could be headed for expulsion.)
In fact, here is J. Bruce Harreld, in a rare moment of inexplicable candor, corroborating Nook’s perspective. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 06/10/16:
Tuition for resident undergrads at UI is currently about $9,000. Harreld’s plan is to raise tuition $3,000 over five years, which will necessitate hikes from 5% to 8% depending whether this year and last factor into that timeline. Because there are no projections for the U.S. economy which put inflation anywhere near those numbers over that time frame, that means Harreld is planning to raise tuition beyond the cost of educating the students who will shoulder that increased burden. Or, to put it another way, all of the extra money students will be paying for their degrees will not be spent on the education they receive, because those costs are already covered. That loot may improve research at UI, or the facilities, or the teacher’s lounge, but as to any direct benefit to the students, even Harreld himself acknowledges there will be none.
In the same Charis-Carlson story, Harreld also admitted — albeit as a rhetorical footnote — that talk about falling appropriations is only relevant in percentage terms:
More than anything Harreld wants to say that state funding is dropping in absolute terms, but he’s knows that’s not true. He wants to outright lie, but like the marketing weasel he is, he instead leads with the idea that states and the feds “have been actually backing off their funding”, then tacks on the “in their percent” qualifier as a fine-print footnote. As it turns out, however, it is that “in their percent” qualifier which actually invalidates J. Bruce Harreld’s entire five-year plan, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves….
Back to Nook and UNI, from Miller’s piece:
Proving that UI has not cornered the market on weaselly university administrators, here we find crafty new-ol’ President Nook engaging in a bit of rhetorical deceit himself. After graciously allowing UI and ISU to raise the price of tuition to fund non-educational components of their institutional missions — while keeping tuition at UNI the same, or, more likely, simply raising tuition at a slower rate — Nook turns around and asks for more state funds to make up for that paper loss, which he himself created by agreeing to decouple UNI’s tuition from that of its sister schools. And yes, I know what you’re thinking. Where does the Iowa Board of Regents find these guys? Do all university presidents in Iowa trace back to the same used car lot?
But it gets better. On paper, if Nook wants more state money than the other two schools, all he has to do is keep tuition flat, because in a few years UNI will be getting more money as a percentage of state appropriations, even if he does absolutely nothing. But of course that’s not what Nook is thinking, because what he wants is more actual dollars, not a greater percentage. So in exchange for holding tuition flat, or raising it less than the other guys, Nook is now lobbying for more state funds in actual dollars, which would of course have to come from somewhere.
While some mix of appropriations and tuition is necessary to fund each school, there is one critical difference between those two sources of revenue. With regard to tuition, there is no theoretical cap. UI or ISU could raise tuition to infinity and beyond, and all that money would go right in the till as long as students continued to enroll. On the appropriations side, however, as we just saw with the FY17 clawbacks, there is a fixed amount of money available for the entire state, and a finite share of that total to be divided between the state schools at any time. Give one school more dollars from that finite share, and there will necessarily be fewer dollars for the other schools.
What Nook is proposing, then, is that in exchange for being the low-cost-but-same-quality option among the state’s three universities, UNI should get more of the finite share of state appropriations than it has gotten in the past. Certainly not more than UI or ISU in absolute terms, because UNI is considerably smaller, but a greater percentage of the state’s higher-ed appropriations, for doing nothing except allowing UI and ISU to raise their prices. Fortunately, because tuition hikes at UI and ISU will almost certainly have a diminishing effect on state appropriations at those schools, that means more of the finite legislative share that is currently devoted to higher-ed will be available to UNI. All Nook has to do is convince the legislature to give him that money, as opposed to shunting it off to other departments in state government.
Now, if you’ve been reading Ditchwalk about the Harreld hire, all of this talk about shifting appropriations between the state universities may sound vaguely familiar, for good reason. The net effect of allowing UI and ISU to raise tuition more than UNI will actually be a back-door implementation of Rastetter’s failed performance-based funding plan. That plan, which still echoes in the bloated enrollment at UI and, in particular, at ISU, would have tied a percentage of state funding to enrollment of resident undergrads. Had it been implemented, the plan would have shifted tens of millions of dollars, by law, from UI to UNI and ISU. Because Harreld’s five-year plan merely requires a decoupling of prices at the state schools, however — which the regents themselves have the power to implement — all of that will happen simply as a result of allowing UI, and to a lesser extent ISU, to increase tuition.
As a percentage of total state appropriations, the amount that UI and ISU receive will almost certainly decrease, and may even decrease in real dollars. That in turn means even if UNI’s appropriations stay the same, as a percentage of that new smaller total that school’s legislative take will increase. Ideally that’s not what Nook wants — he’d rather have those extra dollars for himself — but if the overall share of state funds for higher-ed is going to decrease, and the best that Nook can do is keep from losing state funds while the other schools shift more of their costs to students, he’ll take it.
The big reason behind that acceptance is that shifting more of a school’s budget onto the backs of students and their families means increased exposure to risks associated with the higher-ed marketplace. By making the University of Iowa the high-cost option — or, more bluntly, the snob school — while using the increased tuition revenue for purposes that have nothing to do with the education of the students who are paying that freight, UI not only increases competition based on price, but that increased cost will necessarily slow or even decrease enrollment. That it turn means UI will have to raise tuition on the remaining students to keep the same number of dollars coming in, where even a sharp dip at UNI would pose less of an immediate threat because appropriations account for a greater share of base revenue.
To be clear, in raising prices Harreld may also hope to stem the enrollment tide that began with the failed performance-based funding plan, but that will only work as long as a sufficient number of students agree to pay the increased cost. If there is a substantial drop in enrollment at Iowa there will be no option but to raise prices in order to avoid deep financial cuts that the state will not step in to prevent. (If you believe such drops are rare, they may be, but after protests at Missouri in late 2015, freshman enrollment at that school has crashed by 35% in only two years.)
Raising prices on a product or service in order to fund expansion or growth, or to achieve some nebulous improvement in quality, entails obvious market risk. If you bring in new funding and devote that money to new initiatives, and that money subsequently dries up — perhaps because you priced yourself out of your market — you are in for a world of hurt. Not only will your new initiatives fail, but you may have crippled your ability to fund your core operations. To that risk we are now adding an additional risk in the higher-ed space, which is that increasing the cost of tuition will prompt a decrease in appropriations, meaning even if students continue to enroll at that increased price point, there may never be an increase in total revenue.
That is in fact the implicit premise of this post: that at a state school you can never, ever get ahead by increasing the cost of tuition. On paper you will indeed be raising more tuition revenue, but in reality the state will reduce its contribution in kind — and again, why would it not? The explicit expression of that premise is that there is a fixed cost to running a school at any point in time, and while states often give schools significant leeway in how to spend their money, if a school is suddenly receiving more revenue from tuition, the state is going to shift an equivalent amount of appropriations elsewhere on the eminently sensible basis that the school’s costs are being met. Even in the most forward-thinking, education-positive state, there are dozens of worthwhile facets of government that always need more funding, meaning it is unlikely that any state would elect to fund a school’s growth at the expense of other pressing needs. If a school brings in extra money via its non-profit, money-laundering foundation that’s one thing, but when it comes to precious tax dollars, if tuition goes up, appropriations will inevitably come down in percentage terms, but may even decrease in absolute terms.
The obvious question, of course, is whether this contrarian dynamic between tuition hikes as cause and decreased appropriations as effect actually exists. It makes sense in theory, but does it actually happen? Well, as it turns out, not only do I think it does, I think it just did.
The State Giveth and the State Taketh Away
In late autumn of 2016, less than six months into FY17, the keepers of Iowa’s state budget realized there was a problem. They didn’t talk about it publicly at the time, and wouldn’t for months, but an erroneous estimate was destined to leave the state well short of the revenue target that had been penciled in for the year. Budget cuts would certainly be necessary, but the extent of the cuts would not be known until early 2017.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 01/03/17:
One week later, Butcher Branstad began swinging his cleaver. From Miller, on 01/10/17:
As you can see — and as predicted by the conventional wisdom that increases in state tuition are caused by cuts in appropriations — talk immediately turned to new tuition hikes to make up for the de-appropriations in FY17, as well as additional related cuts to the FY18 budget. What eventually became the 3% hike that was enacted this past week was in addition to a 2% hike that was already approved for FY18, as part of the board’s ‘two-plus-two plan‘ to take the surprise factor out of tuition increases. Instead, for the second summer in a row, the regents just levied another round of last-minute tuition hikes which will take effect in August, when rates for the 2017-2018 academic year will be 5% higher, at a minimum, for most students.
Having had its well-intentioned ‘two-plus-two plan’ reduced to bureaucratic pulp in less than six months, the ostensible goal of the board’s Tuition Task Force is to look at every possible way to make increases in tuition more predictable, which will aid everyone from students to administrators in planning ahead. Note, however, that making tuition increases predictable has nothing inherently to do with keeping costs down. In fact, as noted, the regents already seem predisposed to approve significant ongoing tuition hikes at UI and ISU.
For FY17, the final total for the mid-year clawbacks was $113M. Of that, $30M — or a whopping $27% — came from de-appropriations at the Board of Regents: $15.5M from UI, $11.5M from ISU, and $3.3M from UNI. While the schools still raked in $484M from the state, covering that unexpected $30M hole involved a lot of scrambling, and, in Harreld’s case, attempted larceny. Whether the magnitude of the cuts was appropriate, or the disparity of the cuts between schools betrayed some latent hatred of UI, it does seem that the budget shortfall (cause) precipitated the additional 3% hike (effect). But is that right? Do we know that to a certainty?
Here again is a key quote, from Miller’s report on 01/03/17:
As the FY17 budget shortfall and subsequent cuts unfolded in the press, I interpreted Butcher Branstad’s decision making through the lens of his prior actions as governor. Which is to say I assumed that he was simply venting his ideological wrath against the Board of Regents in order to protect property tax credits, tax cuts for corporations, etc. Although Branstad is himself an alumnus of the University of Iowa, regarding that school specifically he never missed an opportunity to belittle the faculty, so when given the opportunity to also take a pound of budgetary flesh I had no doubt he would.
The problem with that enjoyably petty theory is not that it hinges on Branstad’s antipathy toward Johnson County, Iowa City or the University of Iowa, which is demonstrable, but that it fails to account for additional relevant information. Factoring that information in, on the other hand, paints a decidedly different picture of Butcher Branstad’s motive for taking his cleaver to the regents’ budget in the face of a $113M mid-year shortfall, and also goes a long way to explaining why the legislature went along with those targeted whacks. (In Iowa, as elsewhere, the legislature sets the spending priorities by law. Because the governor has a line-item veto, however, the governor has greater control over the budget.)
If we embrace the conventional wisdom that funding cuts beget tuition hikes, what we know so far seems to make sense. The regents lost $30M mid-year in FY17, they will lose tens of millions in FY18 as well, and as an understandable consequence the board has been forced — forced! — to raise tuition to compensate for those losses. All told, the 5% hikes enacted this week are expected to generate about $26M for FY18 and every year thereafter, which will account for most of the expected losses in FY18, and perhaps additional cuts in FY19 or FY20 if the budget shortfall lingers. (Note, however, that while $26M has now been added to the regents’ bottom line in perpetuity, no one at the board has proposed rescinding those hikes, or using that new revenue stream to delay future hikes, once the state budget is back in the black.)
If Branstad’s malice is not solely to blame for the clawbacks then we are looking for some additional (and hopefully more rational) explanation for that $30M in mid-year cuts. Because the FY17 shortfall was very real, however, we will not assume that the regents should have escaped unscathed, but merely attempt to account for the outsized degree to which the board was targeted, while three quarters of the state budget was held harmless. Fortuitously, having posited, by pure chance, a contrarian theory to the conventional cause-and-effect relationship between cuts and hikes in this very post, all we have to do is plug the facts as we know them into that theory, and see if a plausible explanation emerges.
The contrarian view says that funding cuts to state schools are triggered by tuition hikes, because legislatures are inherently prone to transfer funds that are no longer critical to areas of higher need. (Whether that higher need is political or practical, moving money around is pretty much legislators do.) In terms of the mid-year FY17 clawbacks, then, if the contrarian theory has any merit, what we should find when we look back in time are tuition hikes which factored into those subsequent cuts — at least in terms of their magnitude. If there were no recent tuition hikes by the Board of Regents, then the contrarian theory is clearly wrong, and Branstad really is just a jerk.
As noted in the first paragraph of this post, of course, and as referenced endlessly in prior posts, the board did approve tuition hikes in the summer of 2016. Those hikes took effect for FY17, which is the same fiscal year in which the clawbacks took place. If we factor that massive bump in revenue into subsequent events, we see that only six months or so after the state universities began raking in an insane amount of additional tuition, the state’s budget shortfall ended up taking $30M off the regents’ table. And yet, by simple math, we can see that despite all of the howling and wailing about losing that $30M, that still leaves the regent schools with an additional $35.4M they would not have otherwise had for FY17. And of course that $65.4M will be added to the collective till every year going forward, along with the $26M from this summer’s hikes, producing $91.4M more than the regent schools generated from tuition revenue in FY16. ($91.4M!)
Taking this new information into account, the fact that Branstad and the state legislature specifically targeted the regent schools with aggressive clawbacks takes on new meaning. Where most other aspects of the state budget cannot simply raise new money by soaking citizens — because that usually requires enacting a tax or fee by law, which also increases political vulnerability — the members of the Board of Regents, who are appointed to senate-like six-year terms, can simply decide that they want more money, then take it as a matter of voice-vote policy. One minute tuition costs x, the next minute it costs x+y, and the regents laugh all the way to the bank.
In what was a very real fiscal emergency (which may have been preventable, but we’re not going to get into that), tuition hikes do seem to have played a crucial role in the budget cuts that followed. Instead of hitting every department proportionally, Brastand and the legislature targeted one specific area of the budget that had just received, and indeed was receiving at that very moment, and will continue to receive in the future, a massive infusion of outside cash. As a result, not only was the regents’ budget for FY17 cut retroactively, but funding for FY18 and future years was also cut, and there are currently no plans to put that money back into the regents’ budget.
Despite what is expected (or at least hoped) to be a relatively short-term drop in state revenue, the governor and legislature decreased overall regent funding on a permanent basis, which is exactly what the contrarian model of cause and effect predicts. Because of a tuition hike in the summer of 2016, which brought in a pile of new money, the state has now cut the amount of money that it will give to the regent schools. While the cumulative $91.4M windfall from new tuition revenue is not widely known — indeed, I did not know the extent of it until I dug into the numbers while writing the last post — one thing you can be sure of is that the budget elves on both sides of the aisle, and the trolls in the governor’s basement, knew exactly how much new revenue the regents were getting, down to the penny.
We now have two competing explanations for the FY17 budget cuts, which mirror our competing theories about the cause-and-effect relationship between appropriations and tuition hikes. The conventional explanation is that the FY17 cuts — which arose from legitimate need, but targeted the regents specifically — caused the FY18 tuition hikes that were just passed. That explanation fails to account for the tuition hikes in the summer of 2016, however, and leaves us with only Branstad’s mean streak as a possible motivation. (Making that scenario even less likely, the board president at the time was one of Branstad’s most generous political backers, and a long-time political crony.)
The contrarian explanation is that the FY17 tuition hikes not only led to the outsized FY17 clawbacks, but to a permanent reduction of state appropriations going forward. That would also mean that the just-approved FY18 tuition hikes were gratuitous instead of necessary, and that it is the Board of Regents, not the governor or the state legislature, that is routinely roughing the students up for more lunch money. And of course the math bears that out. Even without the FY18 hikes last week, the state schools would be net ahead after the FY17 cuts, but that wasn’t enough. Given the opportunity to soak the students again on a pretext, the board did not hesitate to hit every campus with another 3% hike.
I leave it to you to decide whether the magnitude of the mid-FY17 clawbacks was a consequence of Branstad’s bile, or the result of the regents raking in a stealthy $65.4M in new tuition revenue during that same fiscal year. If you are open to the latter possibility, however — meaning, in some instances, that a tuition hike may precipitate a cut in appropriations — we return now to another question we posed earlier. What is the likelihood that J. Bruce Harreld will raise resident undergraduate tuition $3,000 over the next four or five years, to around $12,000, and the Iowa legislature will let him keep all of that money? And remember: not only will the state’s elected officials and staffers know he is raking in money hand over fist, but by Harreld’s own admission almost all of that money will be pure profit, over and above the inflation-adjusted $7,000 that is necessary to actually provide each student’s education.
Wait — before answering that question, let’s do a little ball-park math and put a number to Harreld’s prospective haul. If there are 30,000 students at Iowa (there were 33,334 in 2016-2017, but that may be a peak), and we increase tuition $3,000 per year, that will add $90M in new tuition revenue to UI’s bottom line. (That $90M is to UI specifically, as differentiated from the improbably coincidental $91.4M figure earlier, which applied to all three state schools.)
Do you think the recently appointed governor, ‘Casino Kim’ Reynolds, or whoever the governor is when that money comes pouring in at UI, will simply look the other way and allow Harreld to keep all of that cash? Or is the state going to see that massive windfall as a citizen-funded higher-ed subsidy, which then allows some or all of an equivalent $90M in state appropriations to be spent on other things?
The idea that tuition hikes allow legislatures to cut funding may seem odd at first — it did to me — but if you dig long enough you’ll find other people who have raised the same possibility. For example, here’s a quote from an Atlantic article on higher education as a public good, by Mikhail Zinshteyn, on 11/22/16:
In the context of the board’s Tuition Task Force, whether higher-ed is a public good or not lands squarely in the “whole social compact of everything” that the new regents president, ‘Casino Mike’ Richards, is not interested in discussing. I think it’s a relevant issue, and I believe higher-education is a public good, and a critical one at that, but reasonable people can take the opposite view. In fact, just last week, in an effort to educate themselves about the complex issues facing the task force, the regents passed over all of the esteemed professors and administrators at Iowa’s state universities in preference of paying an academic who holds the opposite view to speak to those issues. But I digress….
To imagine that Harreld will be allowed to bank $90M in additional revenue in a single year, let alone year after year, while the state maintains or even increases its contribution to UI — even if only to keep pace with inflation — you would also have to believe that state legislators from the other 98 counties in Iowa will be down with that. For some reason, however — call it a hunch — I don’t think the same bright legislative lights who want to allow concealed weapons on campus, who want to ban tenure, who want to cut state funding over grief counselors, who want to impose a “partisan balance” when making hires, and who want to follow the national trend of turning higher-ed into nothing more than STEM-centric white-collar job training, are going to sit back and allow J. Bruce Harreld to stockpile all that cash. Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe all of the tuition hikes throughout history have been compelled by funding cuts, but I don’t think so.
What I believe is that the mid-FY17 cuts that we just saw, in their magnitude, were a direct result of last summer’s massive tuition hikes. Because that new revenue is now permanent, and indeed the schools are net-ahead, that in turn suggests that those state cuts will never be reinstated. Likewise, not only could additional cuts be forthcoming because of the FY18 tuition hikes that were just passed, but any future increases in tuition — including the massive influx of revenue from Harreld’s proposed year-on-year hikes — will be mitigated by consequent cuts in state funding as well. At a private university J. Bruce Harreld might get away with raising tuition 33%, but at a state school it is never going to happen.
For Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce click here.
Well, that’s just the thing, particularly once you pay attention to the decline in scholarship dollars, meaning real price goes up up up.
In-state: the bottom 2/3 to 3/4 of the in-state students will get heavy wooing from community colleges and for-profit onlines, not to mention family who think it’s stupid to go to college in the first place when you can go be an electrician for $17/hr. The top quarter or so will jump a little higher for the high-fin-aid private schools elsewhere.
Out-of-state: baby pls. $47-50K for this. I don’t think so, I don’t care how dumb you are and how rich your daddy is.
International: well…it depends. The experience for the international students isn’t great, regardless of how admin propagandizes itself. And if UI really does start hacking away at the grad programs the way admin keeps talking about, that’s going to change its standing internationally. Done carelessly, that’s big trouble, considering int’l students pay over $100M/yr in tuition.
Part of the problem is that once you have a rep as “way expensive for what you get”, it takes several years to shake it. So if you crater enrollment by raising the price too high, you’re going to be scrambling with giveaways for years to try to recover your market.
What I see is that people will make a college choice on the basis of $500/yr. I don’t think there’s a lot of wiggle here.
A question I haven’t seen addressed — consistently haven’t seen addressed — is that of debt service, and how we’re continuing to pay for that.
I honestly have no idea if anyone is really thinking Harreld’s plan through, including Harreld. It’s almost fantastical in its assumptions, yet the board is clearly taking his plan to raise tuition 33% in five years seriously.
That leads to the even worse thought, which is that the board is actually listening to Harreld, thinking that he must know something about such things given his business and educational background, when he knows nothing about such things. His only plan so far, and his only plan into the future, is to take more money from the students, in exchange for world-class platitudes.
The only glimmer of hope I have is that Richards — whatever his faults — lives in the real world. After six years of Rastetter concentrating power at the board, Richards seems to be signaling a move back toward more authority for the university presidents, but of course in Harreld’s case that’s not actually a good thing.
One thing that might short-circuit Harreld’s intended tenure, however, would be flatly rejecting his 33% plan and telling him he can’t have money to fund for-profit start-ups at a state school. I’m not against such things per se, but they should emerge organically, not as a result of Harreld hanging out a shingle as an incubator, then funding UI’s contributions with appropriated student money.
Yeah, the for-profit startups have been a pipe dream here for decades. There are good reasons why it doesn’t happen and why it’s unlikely ever to happen:
1. We’re in the middle of nowhere. I know that makes the backs go up and the bristling happen. However, it’s true. There’s no industrial corridor here beyond miles and miles of farm in all directions. Boosters like to imagine that there’s an industrial corridor, but that’s because they don’t know what one is, let alone why it’s necessary for a non-retail startup.
2. Because we’re in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by giant farms, rather than miles of various-sizes industry, we don’t have a lot of people around here who know how to make non-retail startups actually start up and go. Having an idea or a cool thing is necessary but nowhere near sufficient to getting anything going.
3. Because we’re in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by non-industry, and low on people who know how to do these things, we don’t attract hot-shit entrepreneurial faculty. It’s just not what we do here. We’re a state university in a state that’s highly suspicious of higher ed, where people assume faculty are slacking whenever they’re not teaching. In 25 years here I think I’ve met a total of three faculty members who aren’t altogether at sea when the talk turns to markets. Like real markets they might actually have to sell things in, not economic-theory markets.
I once went to a VC talk here where the guy was very nice, understood who he was talking to, and was straightforward. He told the assembled faculty that they already had jobs, professoring, and that they were good at this. The likelihood that they wanted to give up professoring to be CEOs was almost nil. The likelihood that they had anything a VC might want was also almost nil. The likelihood that they wanted to be *involved* with VC was almost nil. But if they really thought they had something huge, and they could explain realistically how it meant money soon, then okay, drop a line.
I mean to the extent that these charades buy time for universities, okay. But I think this is just another round of dummkopfs hearing that universities are good for economies (they are) and not being able to see how it works (slowly and consistently by producing workers worth hiring and citizens who can do better than patronage for a form of government) and getting impatient because they can’t see the genius ideas turning into money before their very eyes.
Actually, if they really wanted to do something useful and income-producing here, they’d start a School of Customer Service. Everybody knows customer service sucks universally and that it’s a massive shock to get a good CSR. If you taught wonderful customer service and paired it with, say, telecom and healthcare, and marketed the shit out of your wonderful Customer Service school. you’d sell grads faster than you could mint them. They’d be off managing customer relations all over the place to some wonderful standard — CSRs who were not only polite, quick, and attentive, but would help a customer articulate what he was after and hunt down a way to get it. I think we’d be very good at it.
I like the Customer Service Rep idea, and not just because I’m sick of all of the bad customer service. What seems to go over the heads of the biz folk and the STEM nuts is that something like the Writers Workshop succeeds because it defined and refined a methodolgy for passing along non-formulaic information.
There are no rules, but here’s how you get the answer….
I’m also leaning more and more toward scraping all of the accreted crap off the Liberal Arts college at the core of UI and going from there. For example, Tippie could become a private academy, complete with gladiator combat against competing business schools. (Think of the streaming rights.)
As for Harreld and his big ideas, I’m reminded of this:
That was exactly one year ago today.
This is Part 2 of J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce. For Part 1, click here.
J. Bruce Harreld’s Public Sector Blind Spot
Having been fraudulently appointed to the position he holds with no prior experience in academic administration at any level, only a year and a half later we now have instant-expert J. Bruce Harreld’s prescription for what ails the University of Iowa in particular, and higher education in general. After surveying the landscape with his keen private-sector eye for business, Harreld has noticed that the percentage of state support for public schools has been dropping, while the percentage of revenue from tuition has been rising. Never one to miss a trick — and despite recent evidence to the contrary at UI — Harreld asserts that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between those changes, such that tuition keeps rising because of cuts in state funding.
As we learned in Part 1 of this post, however, the cause-and-effect relationship between funding cuts and tuition hikes in any instance, or even as general rule, is unclear. What is clear is that Harreld is desperate for any excuse to raise tuition at UI, and recent and historical decreases in funding — whether actual cuts, or simply slower relative growth — provide him with plausible justification. Not necessarily a legitimate reason for raising tuition, based on facts and data and demonstrable need, but a reason Harreld can sell.
To a less-sophisticated observer it might seem that the most effective solution to the co-dependent problem of decreased state funding and rising tuition — which in turn inevitably leads to increased student debt — would be to relentlessly exhort the state legislature to drive appropriations back up. Such a squeaky-wheel campaign might not work, but then again it might, and at the very least would seem to be worth trying. Because J. Bruce Harreld is a business genius, however, not only has he not pressed the legislature for more money, but on multiple occasions he has specifically stated that the University of Iowa does not need more state funds. More money overall? Yes, and lots of it — but not more money from the state.
Now, you may be thinking that arguing for increased tuition based on decreased state funding, while simultaneously refusing to argue for more state funding, makes no sense, and of course you would be right. The most charitable explanation is that Harreld unilaterally disarmed on the appropriations front in the hope that doing so would convince the state legislature to write or revise actual laws, which will then allow him to turn the State University of Iowa into a for-profit research incubator. That is of course not the job of the president of the University of Iowa, but again, Harreld is a business genius from the private sector, and as such is not beholden to rational constraints.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 02/22/17:
Having cut off his public-sector-funding nose to spite his private-sector face, Harreld now has a problem. Where can he find the necessary seed capital to start all of his for-profit, extra-educational research projects? And of course the answer is as plain as the missing nose on his face: soak the hell out of the captive UI students by raising tuition through the roof. Not just a few hundred dollars here or there, either, but a bold, visionary, 33% hike over five years, from $9,000 to $12,000 per year.
As noted in Part 1 and in earlier posts, however, this bold new plan isn’t actually new. No only did Harreld soak the students with a massive tuition hike in the summer of 2016, reaping $27M in new tuition revenue, but in the middle of the 2016-17 academic year he tried to deceive students and their families into forfeiting $4.3M in scholarships that UI was legally obligated to pay. And of course less than two weeks ago Harreld pushed through another $16M in tuition hikes for next year, meaning tuition for many UI students has already gone up 10% or more even as Harreld has yet to implement his 33% increase. In that larger context, proposing that the students at Iowa be annually victimized with 5% to 8% hikes for the next half-decade isn’t so much a bold new five-year plan as it is a continuation of prior board-sanctioned abuse.
To put the scale of last year’s hikes-which-shall-not-be-mentioned in perspective, where UI generated $27M alone during FY17, the combined haul for all three state schools from this year’s hikes — which will take effect during the 2017-18 academic year — is projected to be $25.67M, or a million-and-a-half less. As just noted, those new hikes will generate an additional $16.5M at Iowa, while ISU will net $7M, and UNI $2M. Combined, then, Harreld is now generating a whopping $43M in new annual tuition revenue compared with FY16. More importantly, despite Harreld’s incessant whining about the mid-year FY17 cuts, or about shortfalls in requests for supplemental funding, UI would still be net-ahead with last year’s hikes alone.
In a recent post I noted that it is almost impossible to find clear visualizations of even the most basic information concerning higher-ed spending in the state of Iowa. Every once in a while, however, you get lucky, and that’s the case with the bar chart on p. 10 of this .pdf file. Helpfully titled “STATE OF IOWA FY 2016 YEAR-END REPORT ON GENERAL FUND REVENUES AND APPROPRIATIONS” — as opposed to something like SIFY17-YER/GFRA — the entire document is uncommonly informative. (The color key for the graphic in question is too small to be useful, but the light-blue shading represents higher-ed spending, the red denotes Medicaid. Note also that in marked contrast to far too many higher-ed graphs and charts, the units are in dollars, not squishy percentages.)
While the amount of appropriations for higher-ed visibly shrinks and grows over the ten-year time-frame of the graph, it does so within a fairly narrow window relative to the rest of the state budget, and that’s true regardless of any other changes in expenditures. In fact, in FY12 something called ‘Property Tax Replacement’ suddenly appears, then grows bigger and bigger over the following four years, while higher-ed spending stays about the same. (What is property tax replacement? Well, it seems to be pretty much what it sounds like. Because the state went nuts and cut property taxes beyond all reason, it has to provide cash to municipalities to replace some of what they lost. And yes, that sounds like a lot of work for nothing, but that’s Iowa government.)
According to the bar chart, and despite claims that appropriations are crashing, at the end of FY16 the state of Iowa was devoting as much or more to higher-ed appropriations as it had during each of the preceding six years. And that was true even as new big-ticket budget elements were competing for state funds, and Medicaid was consuming more and more of the total. All of which once against suggests that the now-cash-strapped state legislature will not keep shoveling the same amount of money at the regent schools if they elect to aggressively increase tuition revenue. And that’s particularly the case at UI, where J. Bruce Harreld will conservatively bank another $90M per year on top of the $43M already added, for a minimum annual haul of $133M by the time his five-year plan has been fully implemented.
Maybe the legislature or regents will move some of that ‘found’ money to ISU or UNI, maybe some of it will go to rich cronies or poor cronies, but the odds are that UI is going to face anything from a discontinuation of supplemental funding to outright cuts as a result of that flood of new revenue. Given that raising tuition will almost certainly have a negative impact on state funding, then, and could conceivably be revenue neutral over time, why is Harreld proposing this shift? Why is he exposing UI to a great deal of market risk from which the school is currently sheltered?
From all of the above I see two possible answers. First, Harreld may have been hired to break with the tradition of pricing all of the state schools the same, thereby fulfilling Rastetter’s performance-based funding plan via the back door. That would actually be better, in fact, because changes in state support would not be codified in law, but would instead be at the control of the regents going forward. If the board wanted to shift more of total state appropriations to UNI or Iowa State, all they would have to do is allow Harreld to raise the price of tuition and presto: instant plausible justification. (As detailed in Part 1 of this post, UNI President Mark Nook is already pushing for additional state funding using that exact rationale.)
Increasing tuition will also price more and more students out of the University of Iowa, which is already a problem given the cost of living in Iowa City and Johnson County. That will in turn force more low-income students to go to ISU or UNI, although that influx could be very lucrative for cronies in those real estate markets. One cynical benefit of attracting more rich kids to UI is that family income positively correlates with student success, which in turn positively correlates with a school’s national college rank. Iowa State and UNI will suffer for the same reason, but of course that’s not J. Bruce Harreld’s problem.
(By allowing for divergence in the price of tuition among the state schools, there may be a small number of high school grads in Iowa City, and perhaps also in Ames, who are priced out of the university in their home town, which they would otherwise be able to attend by living at home. Unfortunately, because the cost of room and board would be added when relocating to Ames or Cedar Falls from IC, or to Cedar Falls from Ames, those students may be unable to attend any of the state’s schools.)
If it is the case that Harreld is intentionally destabilizing the relationship between the state’s three universities, then it follows that he is also aware that long-term increases in tuition will eventually lead to decreased state funding. The second possibility, however, is that Harreld is sincere in wanting to turn UI into a snob school, and is completely oblivious to the reality that his five-year plan to massively increase tuition will result in little or no permanent gain, precisely because the vast majority of state legislators will not fund that growth. If he can squeeze more money from the students — as he has now shown a willingness to do on three separate occasions, one of which actually involved breaking the law — then UI obviously does not need that same amount of funding from the state.
Given those two options, and those are the only two options, the weight of evidence strongly suggests that Harreld really is oblivious to the fact that his plan will never come to fruition. Ironically, the main reason for that obliviousness is that Harreld hails from the private sector, which is purportedly his strength. Not only did Harreld have no experience in academic administration when he was hired, but more importantly he had no public-sector experience to draw from. That put him at sharp odds with university presidents like Mitch Daniels at Purdue and Margaret Spellings at UNC, who have their own failings, but who did spend decades working in government before taking the reins of a major public university.
While Harreld has been endlessly hyped as the business genius who single-handedly saved IBM from the administrative chore of reorganizational bankruptcy, the truth is that he came to UI after six years as a part-time lecturer at Harvard. Yet even that exposure to academia has little applicability to UI, because while Harvard is one of the priciest of America’s snob universities, and may have been the template for Harreld’s dream of Iowa becoming a ‘Midwest Ivy‘, Harvard is a private school. When it comes to pricing the cost of an education at a private institution of higher learning, there are indeed market dynamics which are applicable to IBM widgets or Boston Market roasted chickens, or the products and services of any other private venture Harreld has been involved in. When it comes to pricing the cost of a public-sector education, however, Harreld is out of his element.
To understand why, all you have to do is imagine IBM or Boston Market or even Harvard trying to compete on price, while also satisfying the whims of elected politicians. I’m not talking about regulatory oversight, I’m not talking about pacifying shareholders or politically connected angel investors, or cutting backroom deals for tax breaks or kickbacks or both. I’m talking about having to sit down with a Houseful of wild-eyed governmental radicals who are your full partners, who have a thousand different competing ideas about what to do with the money they’re giving you and any money you make, who are looking for the slightest excuse to send some or all of that money elsewhere. (Like, say, to their own counties, or to appease mobs of angry constituents who may be headed to the polls, pitchforks, torches and all.)
Private-sector business are, largely, privately funded — that”s the whole point. If you want to play with taxpayer funds then you are beholden to the politicians who provide that funding. That is in fact why UI and the other regent schools often rush to explain that money they may indeed be pissing away is not taxpayer money, because otherwise they know there will be hell to pay. At a public school you may still face stiff competition in your market, but when it comes to pricing tuition you cannot simply consider market forces, you must also take the appropriations process into account. Unfortunately, until he was quite literally given the presidency at UI — ironically, as a result of a fraudulent, $300K, taxpayer-funded search — Harreld never had to do that.
Even if we posit a temperamentally neutral legislature which acts only to maximize benefits from taxes, it should be self-evident that if UI raises a massive amount of new money from the private sector, via the imposition of tuition hikes, that will be a green light to send an equivalent amount of appropriations elsewhere. To believe otherwise we would have to conceive of state funding as legally compelled regardless of any other available funds, yet from the FY17 clawbacks only a few short months ago we can see that’s not the case. While the state currently sees fit, for whatever reason, to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the state schools on an annual basis, it is not obligated to continue to do so.
Many Iowans also have a long-standing cultural antipathy to the University of Iowa, and perhaps not surprisingly their elected representatives tend to share that anti-UI bias. Even former regents president Rastetter, himself a UI alum — though now wholly devoted to Iowa State for a variety of crony reasons — enjoyed trolling UI while he was president of the board. (The fullest expression of Rastetter’s contempt for UI, of course, is that he was both the administrative architect and concierge of the fraudulent search which led to Harreld’s sham appointment.)
Whether painting UI as liberal or heathen or both, there is a vein of hostility toward the school which routinely makes itself known though antagonistic legislation. To that we can add legitimate complaints from many rural communities and counties regarding the staggering amount of tax money that is sent to UI, which in turn nourishes Iowa City and Johnson County. For towns and counties struggling to pay for basic services, or even to stay afloat, sending taxes from local citizens to one of the better-off counties in the state seems like the insult it actually is. And that’s before we factor in all of the liberal, heathen activity that goes on there.
Despite playing a positive role in the state in many ways, there is a vein of arrogance at UI that allows it to step into such memes on a regular basis, further antagonizing citizens and legislators across the state. For example, while the athletics department is self-sustaining, and does not profit from state appropriations, it does not help that the biggest headline last month was the announcement that UI was settling two gender discrimination lawsuits to the tune of $6.5M. Even if that money is not coming from state coffers, it is a lot of money, and it is headed out the door because of rank administrative abuse and incompetence at that liberal, heathen school. (A consequent campus-wide study of UI’s employment practices will be paid for out of the school’s taxpayer-supported general fund.)
How many communities — to say nothing of the legislators representing those communities — would like a brand new, $10.8M clubhouse at their local golf course? Well, here’s UI President J. Bruce Harreld, from a DI interview on 09/07/16, lobbying for same after being on the job for all of twenty months:
Sure enough, less than a year after that quote the Iowa Board of Regents just approved construction of a brand new, $10.8M clubhouse. Again, none of that money will come from the state, but the very fact that the board has to grant approval makes it state business, which in turn makes it grate on the nerves of those state legislators who are fighting like hell for a million here or a million there. At the same time that Harreld is snapping his fingers and building himself a new $10.8M clubhouse because the old one was “antiquated”, the state is reeling from a serious economic hit which closed or cut dozens of important programs that would have survived if $10.8M had been available. (Harreld’s claim that UI is “one of the few Big Ten schools that only have one golf course” is also a lie.)
Given such context, I cannot fathom any scenario in which Harreld raises tuition $3,000 per student, generating a minimum of $90M in new revenue each year, and the state legislature just keeps shoveling the same amount in appropriations at UI. Maybe I’m missing something because I’m not a business genius, but after looking at what just happened with the FY17 clawbacks, it seems inevitable that any attempt to drastically increase tuition at any of the state schools will simply accelerate the rate at which appropriations are curtailed.
Unfortunately, when you consider all of the constituencies involved, there is only one that will benefit from rejecting Harreld’s five-year plan, and that’s obviously the students. If you’re on staff at UI, or on the faculty or an administrator, or you’re part of the business community, even if appropriations drop as tuition rises, you’re not going to lose any money. In fact, if you’re clever or ruthless or both, while that change is taking place you might be able to suck up to Harreld and get him to shift more of that non-taxpayer money your way, meaning you would actually profit. As for the Board of Regents, more tuition dollars allows for more flexibility, including the back-door workaround for performance-based funding. And of course the legislature would gladly allow Harreld to raise tuition to infinity, at which point they could cut funding to whatever minimal amount still allowed them to claim UI as a state school.
Finally, note that because of the egregious hikes last summer, and this year’s smaller but still-sizeable 5% hikes, students who enrolled at Iowa for the fall of 2016 were not only hit with substantial surprise increases twice in 326 days (07/18/16 and 06/08/17), but under Harreld’s plan they will face hikes of that much or more for the remainder of their studies. And yet, at the time they enrolled I’m fairly confident no one informed them that the price of tuition could rise by 33%, or 43% when taking those two increases into account. Because those students have little or no option to go elsewhere in mid-degree, however, Harreld can, with some confidence, simply ignore any muffled complaints emanating from beneath his heel.
J. Bruce Harreld and the Accessibility Con
Powerlessness is not the same as obliviousness, however, which is why every now and then a few students pipe up about the abuse being foisted upon them. Tuition hikes are an obvious concern, but so are abusive lending practices and abusive for-profit schools, including the beacon of unrepentant fraud that was Trump University. Then again, when the people doing the abusing are elected officials and their crony appointees — as we have seen up close in Iowa, and are witnessing now in the nation’s capital — even collective action will probably not be enough to stem the tide of abuse.
The only real antidote to such problems is to have a ready pile of cash on hand. You’ll still get fleeced buying whatever degree your abusers are selling, but you won’t have to pay interest charges and service fees for the privilege. Then again, even the most cynical of exploiters recognizes that there must be some mechanism by which low-income students can aspire to a high-cost, debt-encumbered degree, otherwise there won’t be enough consumers to then purchase high-cost, debt-encumbered houses, cars, boats and airplanes.
Higher-education as a predatory industry — in both the public and private spheres — solves this problem rhetorically by talking about accessibility. You may think you can’t go to college, but pretty much everyone with a financial interest down the line will tell you that you can, if only because there needs to be a steady flow of new students or the whole higher-ed grift will collapse. (As with any annual migration, predators can pretty much just lie around until the next herd comes through, provided the next herd does come through.)
As I was working on this post, the ever-slippery J. Bruce Harreld made it clear that he understands the risk of turning Iowa into the state school for rich kids — which is, objectively, what he is doing. If you have a Harvard MBA you cannot raise tuition 33% in five years, then claim you did not know that doing so would drive away students of lesser means. That would be okay at a private college of course, but at a public school which is paid for, at least in part, democratically collected state taxes, it’s one thing to build yourself a privately-funded $10.8M clubhouse because you didn’t like the way the old one looked, and quite another to insist that all of the work-study caddies who will carry your bag — because you have a bad back — be of a certain social standing or breed.
In an effort to put a benevolent facade on his larcenous five-year plan to fund for-profit research with the bank accounts of students and their families, Harreld orchestrated a PR push over the past two weeks which is designed to portray UI as sensitive to the needs of those students who will be punished most when that plan is approved. On this past Wednesday, the Iowa Now site posted a ghost-written press release under Harreld’s name, which painted a stirring historical portrait of the importance of accessibility in higher education. As far as I can tell, the entire piece was written to promote the notion that UI has “$72 million in undergraduate scholarships”, while omitting any mention of the fact that the UI Foundation is sitting on $2B. And yet, despite the high-flying rhetoric, which included wrapping himself in the flag by ghostwritten proxy, Harreld committed to no specifics. (In that $72M total, it is also highly likely that Harreld is counting the $4.3M in scholarships that he tried to renege on earlier this year.)
Bracketing Harreld’s propaganda were stories in the Daily Iowan on Tuesday and Thursday, both by Marissa Payne. The Tuesday story largely concerned an apparent decline in debt at the regent schools, as financial aid has reportedly increased, yet as Payne noted, the claimed correlation was not iron-clad. And then there was this interesting tidbit:
Out of $2B in assets, student financial aid from the UI Foundation represents an anemic 2.6% of that gaudy total. And of course $52M is $20M short of the $72M that Harreld touted in his ghost-written piece the next day. Then again, Harreld did not claim that all of that was coming from the Foundation, or even that all of that money would be used for need-based aid. In fact, as noted, he didn’t really say anything of substance, even as his ghostwriter went to great rhetorical lengths to champion the unfunded cause of accessibility.
Payne concluded her Tuesday piece with a mention of new UI Student Government President Jacob Simpson, who had made a smart plea at the recent regent meetings, which will of course be ignored by Harreld and the board:
Simpson is correct that without specifics about how Harreld’s massive new tuition windfall will be spent, UI students will have no way of knowing how they are being fleeced. Unfortunately, having so far refused to divulge what he is doing with the millions in tuition that he has already diverted into a discretionary presidential slush fund, there is no chance that Harreld will commit to any expenditures which are not compelled by the legislature, or by donors with sufficient heft to make him keep his word. Which is of course why Harreld is implying that there will be some correlation between increased tuition and more financial aid, while putting forward no actual plans in detail.
Thursday’s DI story — the day after Harreld’s PR epistle — introduced the rest of the newly elected ‘Bridge’ administration: Vice President Lilián Sánchez, Chief of Staff Lindsey Rayner, and Senior Financial Officer Jeremy Vogel. Along with expressing concerns about affordability in Payne’s piece, the Bridge team talked about cuts to RVAP and other programs, and about making the campus and greater UI community safer for all students. Most impressively, however, Simpson’s Bridge administration committed to walking the walk on transparency:
Despite the fact that the Iowa Board of Regents is a +$5B enterprise, you can kill yourself trying to find a simple graph which shows changes in appropriations and tuition, in dollars, over time. And yet, on what must be a shoestring budget, the UISG Bridge administration will not only put out monthly reports on its own spending and funding requests, they are putting together a funding manual to explain the process to everyone. And while they’re doing all that, Harreld will put out more ghost-written press releases which provide no actionable information or disclosure.
Now, I don’t know whether those bang-bang-bang stories on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were somehow orchestrated through the UI Office of Strategic Communication, so as to provide a frame for Harreld’s ghostwritten post, but I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s a tight string of consistent messaging about how accessibility and affordability are priorities for everyone, including Harreld. The main concern, of course, would be that Lyin’ Bruce Harreld is engaging in — and making the student paper, and officers in the student government, a party to — a deeply cynical attempt to proactively pacify the students who will be most negatively affected by promoting unsubstantiated claims that increases in tuition will lead to more need-based aid. Because as it turns out, that’s an extremely difficult promise to keep at a state school in Iowa.
At private colleges and universities, not only can those schools charge whatever the market will bear for their products and services, the money they take in belongs to them, not to any government entity. For example, Harvard may have a lofty reputation, but as a legal entity it is little different from any other corporation. Whatever Harvard wants to do with its profits, it does not have to run those plans by the governor, the legislature or even the taxpayers, to make sure that its objectives will survive the sausage making that is electoral politics.
That’s a critical distinction, because another rhetorically loaded but factually accurate way to describe need-based financial aid at a state school would be ‘wealth redistribution’. Take in money from rich students, launder it through a public college or university — minus a hefty service charge, of course — then give some of that money to students of lesser financial means, even if only to help you sleep on your bloated administrative salary at night. Given Iowa’s cultural leanings, however, and particularly of late, that also exactly the kind of liberal, heathen idea that might go over like a lead balloon with some state taxpayers.
In fact, in what is now being treated like ancient history, the Iowa Board of Regents confronted that very issue waaaaaaaay back in 2012. That was the fateful year when both the general public and a number of easily agitated state legislators became aware of the shocking, clandestine, long-standing bureaucratic scam by which the regents had been setting aside some of the money paid by students of greater means, in order to provide state-sponsored financial aid to low-income students.
From Mike Wiser, writing for the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, on 03/20/12:
[Historical footnote: Jeff Kauffmann is the father of Buttercup Kauffmann, because of course.]
A little less than one month later, an expert on the subject was brought in to present to the board, but by then no one was paying attention to the complexities of the issue. From the Ames Tribune’s Hannah Furfaro, on 04/14/12:
Facing a public relations wildfire, the Iowa Board of Regents — under the steely leadership of President Craig Lang and President Pro Tem Bruce Rastetter, who had earlier been jammed into those offices by a Butcher-Branstad-led coup — folded like a cheat tent. From Anne Krapfl, writing for the Inside Iowa State website, on 06/07/12:
From Krapfl on 11/01/12:
Proving that bureaucracies are inherently resistant to change, however, the tuition set-aside refused to die. From the Iowa State Daily editorial board, on 02/20/13 — which also showed how the program could be used to pit students against each other, thus dividing and conquering that potentially problematic constituency:
Looking momentarily ahead to rejoining the conversation about Harreld’s five-year plan at Iowa, there was also this:
Finally, from the Gazette’s Diane Heldt, on 06/28/13, we get the conclusion to the tuition-set-aside saga, along with a bonus explanation as to why non-resident students became so critical to the state schools:
Today, less than five years later, the board and state schools are once again proposing the same sort of wealth redistribution that blew up in their faces in 2012, and yet that isn’t even the focus of their initiative. The main debate is about raising tuition through the roof — or, more accurately, about how to get away with raising tuition through the roof despite obvious and sensible objections. The promise of a tuition set-aside, or, alternatively, the specter of wealth redistribution, is merely a selling point of that scheme.
Really? The same financial-aid mechanism that politicians, taxpayers and resident students went ballistic over less than five years ago, is now supposed to make Harreld’s five-year pillaging plan more appealing? Then again, to be fair to Harreld, that’s not actually what he himself has proposed. The similar-but-different plan recently put forward by UI Professor Christopher Morphew does fall along those lines, while perhaps not surprisingly, Harreld’s plan is not simply worse, it is also a scam in its own right.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 02/28/17:
Notably, in Harreld’s cynical con, he promises to devote exactly none of UI’s massive new tuition windfall to financial aid for Iowa residents, let alone to need-based aid. Instead, the only promise he’s willing to make is that after he is given permission to strip-mine money from students and their families, he will devote any new appropriations to some manner of financial aid. But of course it’s likely that appropriations will actually decrease once the legislature realizes it can cut Iowa’s funding, thus leaving UI with the same total revenue overall. (I don’t know if higher-ed funding was cut when the set-aside was scrapped, but it’s worth noting that the Property Tax Replacement program first appears in 2012, which is also when the cranks in the legislature suddenly noticed what was in fact a long-standing, well-publicized financial aid program.)
As should hopefully be clear by now, there is no tuition-based or appropriations-based solution to the problem of need-based aid that does not walk the regents right back into the wealth redistribution issue, precisely because Iowa and the board are state institutions. Even the semi-radical ‘free college’ programs recently announced by New York in April and Michigan a few days ago would never get off the ground in Iowa, because at root they are premised on means-testing.
While Harreld is a carpetbagging dilettante, and had no awareness of higher education in Iowa prior to looking up the UI on Wikipedia before his disastrous 2015 candidate forum, at the very least you would think the badly scorched Board of Regents would have some lingering institutional awareness of that obstacle. While regents serve six-year terms, however, by chance all of the current regents were appointed after the set-aside debacle — though three of those appointments were just after. In fact, one of the three 2013 appointees, Larry McKibben, was also a former state senator, so he would have been aware of the tuition set-aside fight. (As noted in a quote above, outgoing Executive Director Bob Donley was also on staff in 2012, and would thus be a repository of that institutional knowledge.)
Adding insult to irony, Regent McKibben is now chairing the Tuition Task Force, so you might think he would apprise the other regents, and particularly the university presidents, that need-based aid may not go over so well with his ideological compatriots in the statehouse. And yet, for some reason I’m already convinced that no one is going to point out the still-reverberating echoes of the tuition set-aside purge, because doing so might derail all of those juicy tuition hikes. Speaking of the devils, here are both McKibben and Harreld, just two weeks ago, pretending that the tuition set-aside set-back never happened.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 06/09/17:
Once again, here we find J. Bruce Harreld, the president of the University of Iowa — a multi-billion-dollar, AAU-sanctioned, world-recognized research university — in full weasel. Read his quote once and it sounds great. Read it again, with an eye to where all of the financial aid for first-generation and low-income students is coming from, and you see the deceit.
What does Harreld mean by “consistent with that increase”? Consistent proportionally, in the current ratio of tuition to both merit-based and need-based aid? More importantly, regardless of the amount, where is that money coming from? Back in February, Harreld was only willing to spend increased appropriations — which will never appear –on financial aid, not any of the revenue from his precious tuition hikes.
Has Harreld changed his tune? Is he now willing to fund more financial aid from those hikes, in order to gain approval for that massive windfall? When he acknowledged “a larger financial burden ‘on an awful lot of people'”, it sure sounds like that’s what he’s saying, but he didn’t actually say that. In fact, as ever, he didn’t say anything specific. All Harreld said is what Harreld always says — a mouthful of nothing, garnished with lies.
These are the questions that the officers of the new UI Student Government, and reporters at the Daily Iowan, need to ask. How much money is Harreld talking about, and where is that money coming from? Is Harreld willing to use some of the new tuition money for need-based aid, because if that’s the case, that’s a wealth-redistribution scheme. If that’s not the case, then where is all of that new financial support coming from, not only to help low-income students pay for school, but to pay for the additional burden of Harreld’s 33% hike?
The question of accountability is critical. If Harreld is not compelled to put his plans forward, in detail, then he will simply do whatever he wants. Even if he is put on the record, there is no guarantee that he will keep his word. Again: when the FY17 cuts hit the other two schools, they protected their students as much as possible. Harreld’s instinct, however, was to protect his slush fund, and instead try to shift $4.3M in financial aid onto the backs of students and their families.
Harreld did not do that impulsively, either, but only after a steady PR offensive like the one he is now initiating on the subject of accessibility. Given that Harreld went so far as to order someone to belatedly add text to the UI website, in that hope that unsuspecting students and their families would then assume that $4.3M burden — even as he knew the university was obligated, by law, to provide that aid — the only assumption anyone should make is that Harreld cannot be trusted on any issue.
Momentarily setting aside concerns about the tangential issue of financial aid, particularly for low-income students, consider the larger problem with Harreld’s plan to raise tuition through the roof over five years, which will likely be mimicked to a lesser degree by ol’ regent crony and interim ISU President Ben Allen. (More on Allen’s plans for ISU here, here and here.) While everyone but the students will be for Harreld’s plan, including particularly the state legislators who will have license to cut appropriations, there is one way the whole scheme can go south.
Here again is the quote I flagged above, from the Iowa State Daily editorial:
Despite all of the false claims and disingenuous promises swirling around Harreld’s five-year plan, not even Harreld — and this is saying something — has the audacity to claim that he needs to raise tuition 33% over five years to pay for the cost of instruction. As noted in Part 1, that cost has been relatively stable for a decade and a half, if not longer, and the tuition students pay already covers that cost. Even adjusted for inflation over five years, tuition at UI will come nowhere close to the windfall Harreld intends to generate, which means Harreld is asking students and their families to subsidize the cost of non-instructional aspects of the school.
Cash-strapped or not, how do you think that pitch is going to go over with taxpaying (and voting) Iowa families, once word gets out? Prices are going up 33% at UI, perhaps a bit less so at ISU, simply because those schools want more money to play with. Because if the 2012 set-aside setback is any guide, even if legislators would love to stick students and their families with those costs, they’re going to get an earful from those very same people, particularly around election time. On the other hand, if any of those same legislators are looking for an issue to run on in 2018, then preventing Harvard MBA Harreld and the lawless regents from brutalizing Iowa families — let alone funding who-knows-what at that liberal, heathen temple in Johnson County — looks like a safe bet.
Even if Harreld is planning to funnel millions or tens of millions into a wealth redistribution scheme for needy students, that only makes his plan that much worse, including for the students who receive that aid. Telling someone their tuition has to go up in order to provide them with financial aid is a lot like telling someone their village had to be burned in order to save it from the enemy. Even if things weren’t great before, it’s hard for the people on the receiving end of such generosity not to think that life would have been better if everything had just been left well enough alone.
For Part 3 of J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce, click here.
Whatever happened to that indentured-servitude plan his buddy Mitch liked? You know, you sign away some share of your future income to a bidder who’ll front you the difference between loans and COA for I forget how many years. I keep waiting for that one to make another appearance.
That’s some freaky convergence right there….
Only an hour or two after I posted Part 2, I found myself thinking about music and acting contracts, and how they often equal indentured servitude. (And now I’m laughing because I’m seeing Prince with <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=prince+slave&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjoz6WUvNLUAhVj4oMKHZ_aAy4Q_AUIBigB&biw=1024&bih=614"'Slave' on his face.)
Anywho….it’s surprising that some mainstream school hasn’t made the same argument about student debt. “We made you who you are! You owe us!” And then they collect a percentage of what the students makes for the next x years. Plus dishing out regular beatings.
See here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/why-one-university-is-sharing-the-risk-on-student-debt/519570/
This is Part 3 of J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce. Part 1. Part 2.
Two weeks ago, for the second time in less than a year, the Iowa Board of Regents used a pretext to push through last-minute tuition increases at the state schools. Having plundered student bank accounts twice in short order, thus prompting more scrutiny than it can withstand, the board is now attempting to distract the public from those abuses by initiating and conflating two parallel and largely hollow administrative inquiries. First, the board launched a grandly titled Tuition Task Force, which — despite purportedly putting “everything on the table” — has only one, narrow stated objective: to determine how to implement tuition hikes more predictably, instead of at the last possible minute using whatever feeble pretext might be handy.
The second inquiry — what a degree from each of the state schools should cost, which you would think would be a core concern of any Tuition Task Force — is being left to the university presidents to answer, largely for reasons of plausible deniability. Despite having total control over the state schools, and despite four solid years under former regent president Rastetter’s iron-fisted control, the board has now tasked the regent presidents with presenting their own five-year tuition plans. (Those plans will be developed in concert with the board behind the scenes, if they haven’t been already, then rolled out as part of regent theater at the regularly scheduled board meetings in September.)
Both undertakings are happening at the same time, and at the direction of the Board of Regents, but they are distinct. The Tuition (Scheduling) Task Force will determine when hikes take place, while the presidents will determine how much to screw students out of with each primly ordered increase. Speaking of which, here is new Regents President ‘Casino Mike’ Richards, positioning the board as a mere vessel for the rapacious presidential tuition hikes to come:
While we have to wait for the five-year plans from Iowa State and the University of Northern Iowa, at the University of Iowa the precocious J. Bruce Harreld put his five-year plan in play months ago. Calling for a 33% increase in the price of tuition over that time frame, in addition to 10% or more that tuition has already increased under his leadership in the last 340 days, Harreld claims that Iowa must be brought up to the average for Iowa’s 30-year-old peer group, for no other reason than to meet that number. Where you might think people would object to such price gouging, however, that’s one of the great bureaucratic advantages of saying that an issue is being studied. You compel everyone to wait for a decision to be made, at which point it is usually too late to organize and oppose the final determination, which was intended all along. And of course if people still do object, you can invalidate their complaints by pointing out that the issue was being debated for weeks or months, so why didn’t they speak up when they had the chance?
It may also be that Harreld’s stated plan is in part a feint. He asks for 33%, then, when the board forces him to settle for 25%, the regents look like they were doing their job, while Harreld still walks away with tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money, which he is free to spend as he chooses. There will still be no valid reason for that increase, of course, but compared to 33% it won’t look crazy. (As regular readers know, the regents themselves conducted a similar self-serving scam in the summer of 2016, when Regent Larry McKibben lauded the board for diminishing an across-the-board $300 increase to $250. Most of the combined $65.4M haul that the regent schools took in from those hikes had nothing to do with that particular rate, but that $50 decrease made for great headlines. And as noted earlier in this multi-part post, Regent McKibben is now the chair of the Tuition Task Force.)
Even recent comments from concerned legislators, as reported in the press, read as if they are playing an expected role as opposed to presenting any substantive objections to Harreld’s radical 33% plan. As we will see, however, there are specific arguments which could be used to puncture Harreld’s scheme, yet predictably no one is talking about those issues. Instead, what we’re witnessing politically is simply a continuation of the tsk-tsking that has been the norm since J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of UI. (To be sure, legislators on both sides of the aisle will come out against Harreld’s plan if the public raises a ruckus, but in terms of opposing Harreld there is no committed political leadership.)
To see why there should be vehement opposition to Harreld’s plan, or any fractional implementation, all you have to do is crunch basic numbers. Increasing tuition $3,000 per year, from $9K to $12K, means an undergraduate degree will cost an additional $12K for students who get out in four years. ($3K x 4 = $12K.) Since many students take five years or more to graduate, however, the additional cost will be $15K or more.
Instead of getting a four-year, AAU-caliber Iowa degree for $36K in tuition, in a few years, thanks to Harreld’s plan, students will be paying $48K for the exact same degree. And again, that’s assuming those students get out in four. If it takes five years to get a degree, that’s another $12K for the fifth year, or $60K total — and that’s just tuition. Add in room and board, and even a basic liberal arts degree ends up costing more than $100K under Harreld’s plan, while delivering no compensatory benefit for the increased cost. Students will pay more simply because Harreld wants to charge more.
If you asked most students, or any of their financial backers, if they would be willing to eat an additional $12K to $15K just to please Harreld and a small group of administrators, faculty and staff at the liberal, heathen University of Iowa, you probably wouldn’t get a lot of affirmative replies. While most people agree that a college education is valuable, if not ever more so as the United States divides itself into haves and have-nots, and most people agree that accumulating some debt in pursuit of a college degree is acceptable, the basic dynamics of supply and demand suggest that consumers will not pay more simply because someone decides to charge more.
In exchange for the new, much-higher price at UI, Harreld has already stated that students will receive no compensatory benefit because the cost of delivering the education they receive is already covered. Like the huckster he is, however, that trivial detail won’t stop Harreld from aggressively pushing his plan, including implying that more need-based aid will be available as a result of his hikes. As noted in Part 2 of this post, just last week a string of stories by the Daily Iowan and the Iowa Now site addressed the critical question of accessibility. That’s an important factor, because raising tuition at UI means those students with the least amount of money will be priced out of the market, resulting in an institutional bias toward wealth. (Not that UI doesn’t already have that problem, but in Harreld’s case it would be laid bare.)
My awareness of last week’s press offensive was heightened by an article in the May/June issue of Iowa Alumni Magazine, which arrived the week prior. The March issue (there was no issue in April) was the best effort in years, so when the new issue arrived I was interested to see what the editorial staff had done for an encore. Was the magazine finding itself, or was the March issue a fluke?
Unfortunately, between the March and May/June issues, Harreld announced his unilateral decision to euthanize the Alumni Association and transplant its remaining organs into the UI Foundation. That decision also clearly leeched into Iowa Alumni Magazine, which now seems destined to be a PR rag as opposed to a celebration of the school and its spirit. Specifically, not only was there a short piece about the forced Alumni Association merger (p. 8), which whitewashed Harreld’s autocratic decision making, but there was a four-page feature article (p. 26-29) juxtaposing issues of affordability with Iowa’s pressing statistical need to increase tuition by leaps and bounds.
Contrasting the story of a first-in-her-family student of modest means with the unprecedented fiscal plight of UI, that article routinely omitted critical information in making the case for Harreld’s impending hikes. Case in predictable point, the article presented the most recent tuition hikes as necessary in light of the mid-FY17 clawbacks, while making no mention of the $27M in new tuition that Harreld reaped in that same year. (I do not fault the authors of those propaganda pieces for the resulting copy, because I do not think they were given a choice between being honest or doing Harreld’s bidding.)
Consistent with Harreld’s messaging, the article repeatedly made the case that simply because Iowa’s tuition is below the average for its self-appointed and largely meaningless peer group, tuition should be markedly increased. Unlike Harreld’s peer data, however, which included all of the schools in that group, the Alumni Magazine article cherry picked two schools which made the pending increase seem relatively tame:
While I was pleased to see that my own $90M estimate was on the mark, note that the average resident tuition for Ohio State and Wisconsin — both around $10K — will not get you to that total. In order to get there you have to raise tuition at UI not $1K or $1.5K per year, as the data for those two schools implies, but $3K, from $9K to the peer-group average of $12K. (And of course, as noted in Part 1 of this post, by the time UI reaches that number, that average will also have increased, giving Harreld further justification for raising rates again.)
Almost like a point-by-point summation of Harreld’s politicking to-date, the article notes but does not explain Rastetter’s about-face support for Harreld’s tuition hikes, then paints UI Professor Morphew as also being in agreement, provided UI takes the additional step of using some of the new tuition revenue to fund need-based student aid. Nowhere, of course, is there any mention that such a set-aside was just rejected by Iowans in 2012, as also noted in Part 2 of this post. The article then closes with three-paragraphs highlighting the successes and adventures-to-come of the UI student in question, making it seem very much like need-based aid will materialize, even though the method of delivery is never explained.
Oh — and one more thing. The student who was featured in that Alumni Magazine article was UISG Vice President Lilián Sánchez, who was also mentioned in a DI article last week. While I applaud her success, and I do believe her courage and hard work will have a positive generational effect in her own family and beyond, it’s also important for Sánchez to make sure she doesn’t end up being used by the same man who tried to illegally shift $4.3M in previously awarded scholarships onto students and their families, simply because he didn’t want to fork over an equivalent amount of money from his discretionary slush find. Because no matter how much money Harreld takes in, and how much money he agrees to throw at financial aid in exchange for that massive, annual, $90M windfall, almost every student on the UI campus is going to end up worse off financially.
The Proof That Harreld Will Never Produce
Watching J. Bruce Harreld, the former head of global marketing for IBM, infect every aspect of the University of Iowa with his antipathy for the truth is more than a little nauseating. Getting rid of the Alumni Association consolidates Harreld’s hold on messaging at UI, which is already perilously close to orchestrated deceit. (Harreld himself cannot sit for an interview with members of the mainstream press, because there are too many questions he cannot answer without implicating himself.)
As is often the case, however, it is not what Harreld is saying that is important, but what he is not saying — what he is omitting from the conversation. Despite being up front about his plan to raise tuition 33% at UI, Harreld has so far avoided the one question everyone should be asking. In fact, take a moment and ask yourself — what is the first thing you would want to know if Harreld came to you with this plan, or any other?
The premise of Harreld’s fraudulent hire was that there is an unfolding crisis in higher education, and that crisis required appointing someone from outside academia. Leaving aside the sham, $300K taxpayer-funded search which installed Harreld in office, and ignoring the six years Harreld spent as a remaindered business executive lecturing at Harvard, even if we give Harreld all the credit he thinks he deserves for his work at IBM, he should still be making a fact-based, reasoned argument for the tuition hikes he is proposing. Instead, Harreld is conducting a marketing campaign comprised of a single simplistic graph of the average tuition at Iowa’s research peers, the promise of “democratizing higher education, and heartwarming success stories which will be significantly less likely after his plan takes effect.
Despite selling himself as a ‘data freak‘, the only data Harreld has presented concerns Iowa’s tuition relative to a 30-year-old peer group which is itself completely irrelevant to the question of cost. Were Harreld attempting to make a scholarly case for his tuition hikes, as opposed to a slick sales pitch, the first thing he would do — the first thing he would be expected to do — would be to present historical information about other state colleges and universities which have implemented similar plans. Even in attempting to gin up support for raising Iowa’s college rank, in an otherwise ridiculous ‘white paper’, the UI Faculty Senate took history into account. So where is Harreld’s historical data in support of his radical plan to raise tuition 33%? He has an entire Office of Strategic Communications grinding out propaganda for the cause, he has more librarians and researchers at his disposal than he can use, and yet he has not put forward a substantiated case backed by the kind of basic historical market research that he was taught to compile when he was earning his vaunted Harvard MBA.
The very fact that this question has not been asked underscores the chasm of credibility that exists between academics and academic administration. For every faculty member studiously combing through the historical record for useful information about the human experience, there is an administrator making up a justification that will suffice in that moment. Where is the data on public schools that have raised tuition 33% over five year or so, let alone done so in exchange for no tangible benefit to the students paying that increased cost? Harreld may be right that promising world-class attributes — meaning snob appeal alone — will suffice in terms of compliance, but where is his evidence that the resulting price increase will not trigger the negative outcomes we have already discussed?
It may well be, of course, that in the entire history of public higher education no one has ever implemented such a plan. It is not hard to imagine that people who are first and foremost concerned with educating students would be reluctant to turn said students into cash cows for their own corrupt administrative ends, but that way lies murky questions of motive. All we want to know is whether whether there is any precedent for such a radical course of action. Then again, it would seem self-evident that such plans are not commonplace, let alone inevitably successful, because otherwise such solutions would have met with widespread acceptance long ago.
That Harreld has not pointed to any precedent, let alone recent precedent, let alone successful recent precedent, should give everyone pause. When a self-professed ‘data freak’ presents no relevant data in support of his plan, it is not unfair to assume that perhaps there is no relevant data. That may in turn explain why Harreld is leaning so heavily on a single bar chart showing Iowa’s tuition relative to its 30-year-old, research-oriented peers, because it’s the only data he has.
Precisely because there does seem to be a consensus that higher-ed is facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis in Iowa, if not also across the country, it does not seem to have occurred to members of the Board of Regents or state legislature that they have the right — if not the obligation — to ask Harreld how such radical plans have fared in the past. And yet, with regard to that consensus, we also find no substantiating historical context. Crisis compared to what? If the internet has proven anything, it is that human beings are hardwired to validate their own transient existence by proclaiming every unfolding event as the most important of its time. While there may indeed be fiscal problems to solve in higher-ed, given the apparently unprecedented nature of Harreld’s proposed solution, where is the evidence that UI is facing an equally unprecedented threat?
The University of Iowa was founded on February 25, 1847, and has been in continual operation ever since. Wherever you would rank 9/11 and the Great Recession among historical trials that America has withstood, unlike most businesses currently in existence, the University of Iowa also withstood World War II, the Great Depression, World War I and the American Civil War. If I had to guess, I would say that it did so largely by focusing on stability, as opposed to making radical moves premised on nothing more than a flimsy three-page resume and a penchant for fraud.
To be fair to Harreld, however, he is not the only weasel in the current non-debate about tuition at the state schools. The Board of Regents is also very good at making itself look reasonable and rational while avoiding information that runs counter to its cause. For example, in order to appear diligent, the board just paid University of Georgia Professor Robert Toutkoushian — who has done research on the economics of higher education — to present at the last meeting. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 06/01/17:
Whether Toutkoushian only told the regents what they wanted to hear, or the regents told Toutkoushian to give them only the information they were paying for, Harreld’s ultra-thin justification for raising tuition 33% was validated. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, from her piece on 06/09/17:
As you can see, Toutkoushian merely echoed what Harreld has been saying, which has nothing to do with whether the current or future cost of an education at Iowa is appropriate relative to the quality of the education being delivered. Again, because Iowa’s peer group is self-selected, because it is 30 years old, and because it is predicated not on education but on research and AAU membership, where Iowa’s tuition ranks relative to schools in that peer group is an economic non sequitur. Maybe Toutkoushian will provide a follow-up report to the board with more detail, but in all of the reporting I read I did not see anyone ask about historical precedent for Harreld’s plan, or even question the basis of comparing tuition and fees versus other cost metrics.
That last point is particularly important, because as everyone knows tuition is only part of the total cost of obtaining a college degree. Some schools — and I do not know if Iowa is among them — may even keep tuition artificially low as an inducement to enroll, then make up for that loss through room and board. Not surprisingly, Harreld never mentions other cost metrics because those metrics do not help his cause.
While I would like to take credit for recognizing the total-cost dodge that Harreld has been pulling for months, it only dawned on me after I found this document on the UI website. Titled IPEDS Data Feedback Report 2015, it includes some nice graphs comparing UI to Iowa’s semi-official 16-member peer group. Of particular interest are two graphs on p. 4 which show Tuition and Fees, and Average Net Price of Attendance.
As you will see if you follow the link, the Tuition and Fees graph is what you might expect after all of Harreld’s whining: Iowa markedly below the average for its peers, around $2.5K cheaper. If you look at the Average Net Price of Attendance, however, for the first two years Iowa was actually above its peer average by a few hundred dollars, only to then drop $1.5K during the 2013-2014 academic year. Did some crafty UI administrator game that ranking, thereby making UI look cheaper? The methodology below the graph suggests that increased student aid may have contributed to that decrease, but in any case it’s worth finding out. (When everyone agrees that prices are gong up, up, up, it’s a little sketchy to see a university suddenly become markedly cheaper.)
The obvious point here is that even if we accept the constraints of Harreld’s argument in favor of hikes — that tuition must go up simply because it is below a peer-group average — he is still cherry picking his data. There is no effort to have a fully informed discussion, there is only a grift. Even if UI is cheaper than its peers in terms of Average Net Price of Attendance, the gap is not as large as the one Harreld can claim if only Tuition and Fees are taken into account, so of course Harreld picks the data that makes his case.
Having never heard of IPEDS before, I went to the website and learned that the acronym stands for Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. IPEDS is a tool of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the U.S. government. The website itself is a little wonky, but the idea is excellent. Even better, if you want to look through the last twelve years of Iowa’s IPEDS reports yourself, you can do so as follows:
1) Go here.
2) Click on ‘Data Feedback Report’ (fourth option down).
3) If there is any info in the web form when it appears, click ‘Start Over’.
4) Type ‘University of Iowa’ in the form, then select the school when it appears.
5) Click ‘Data Feedback Reports’ under the ‘Main Menu’ button.
If you do all of that a menu should pop up allowing you to look at any of the UI reports from 2005 to 2016. As a stat, the Average Net Price of Attendance first appears in 2010. As for the comparison groups they seem to vary over the years, but as noted in a prior post, Iowa has multiple official peer groups.
For the most recent report in 2016, which includes the 2014-2015 year, the Average Net Price of Attendance at UI is only about $1K less than the average of 10 AAU peers, while the difference between tuition and fees is very close to the $3K that Harreld is using to justify administrative grand theft. Meaning the simplest balm for Harreld’s incessant claims would be for someone to show him that second graph, thus disabusing him of the notion that the cost of an education at Iowa is wildly out of phase with the cost of an education among Iowa’s peers.
To be fair to Harreld, however, we already know he is willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to fund his for-profit pipe dream at UI. Of greater concern is that nowhere in the reporting about the presentation by the expert in higher-ed economics does that expert seem to have pointed out that there can be a marked difference between tuition and total cost of attendance. There isn’t even an indication that the board itself is aware of such differences, which by rights you would think the highly paid if not overpaid crack board staff would have alerted the board to at some point.
In a recent post looking at the absurdity of Iowa’s 30-year-old official peer group, of which there are, again, multiple versions ripe for the cherry picking, I proposed a smaller peer group of four schools based on public status, regional proximity and AAU standing — though one of the schools was kicked out of the AAU in 2011, on an agricultural technicality. While Harreld is trying to convince everyone that Iowa must raise its tuition $3K per year over five years, just to be at the average of a much larger, less representative peer group — which, I kid you not, includes multiple schools which do not consider Iowa to be their peer — the tuition at those four nearby schools is considerably closer to the tuition Iowa is charging. (The number preceding each school is that school’s National Science Foundation research rank. The tuition rates are from the most recently reported year in the U.S. News college rankings. The asterisk denotes that UNL is not an AAU school).
As you can see, the range of tuition significantly is smaller, and Iowa is hardly out of step. To check that data, I used the IPEDS site to create a small report using the same peer group, focusing only on Tuition and Fees and Average Net Price of Attendance. (You can see that report here.)
As you might expect, for the four years reported for Tuition and Fees — 2012-13 through 2015-16 — the gap between Iowa and its four peers is significantly lower than Harreld’s $3K chasm. One particularly oddity, however, is that Iowa’s tuition grows only $47 over that four-year span, from $8,057 to $8,104. Even though inflation was low during those years, it wasn’t that low, so what might explain that tuition stagnation?
As regular readers know, those are the years that former regents president Bruce Rastetter kept tuition artificially flat. He did so to position Iowa State, and, to a lesser extent, UNI, to make out like bandits when his performance-based funding plan passed into law — which it never did. While Iowa’s tuition did fall farther behind as a result, as the IPEDS report show, the final gap in 2015-2016 was still only $900 or so, not $3K.
For the three years reported for the Average Net Price of Attendance — 2012-13 through 2014-15 — we see the same sudden change noted earlier. In 2012-2013 the average net cost of attending UI is almost dead-on the comparison group average. In the following two years, however, UI’s net price drops about $1,500, suggesting either a massive infusion of new student aid or a gaming of the reported data. (2012 is also when the regents had to back away from their long-standing tuition set-aside, so perhaps that change had some effect on the reported numbers.) In any case, the gap between Iowa and its regional peers is still considerably closer than $3K, and would also have been adversely affected by Rastetter keeping tuition artificially low.
Harreld’s Persistent Proportion Problem
Once the reality sinks in that Harreld is trying to sell a lie instead of make a case based on facts and evidence, you see his handiwork everywhere. For example, I must have looked at the following compelling ‘x’ graph twenty times over the past year or so, but I only took a really close look this past week. (The graph in question comes from an Iowa Now article on last summer’s tuition hikes, which was published on 07/20/16. If the version below is a bit mushed, you can see the original by clicking that link, or here.)
While the time scale seems to be proportional, leading to an almost perfect ‘x’ of declining appropriations and rising tuition, when you look closer it is clearly not. The scale moves from 1981 to 1991 to 2001 in increments of two hash marks for each ten-year span, then takes ten hashes to get to 2011 — meaning the first five increments are five years each, while the following increments are one year each. Not surprisingly, that makes the left half of the ‘x’ graph look very ‘x’-like, instead of being drawn out over a much longer period, as it actually was.
From 2004 to 2009 the percentages stay remarkably flat, with appropriations still slightly greater. Then, suddenly, from 2010 to 2012, we get a sharp reversal, after which the percentages stabilize again for the next five years, bringing us to last summer. As to what sparked that sudden reversal of percentages, there is one obvious explanation.
The Great Recession, which took solid hold in 2008, not only wreaked havoc on employment, but propelled a massive wave of college enrollment across the country. As a result, not only did schools have to expand, but many chose to do so aggressively. In that context, the most critical aspect of understanding that 2010 to 2012 reversal is that the graph depicts percentages, not dollars. Factor in a sharp increase in total tuition revenue because of an increase in enrollment, and even if appropriations stayed flat, or rose to a lesser degree, you would expect to see the same change in gen-ed percentages that you see in that graph — a sudden, sharp shift in the relative standing of tuition and appropriations.
To drive this point home, note that you can generate an almost perfect ‘x’ graph without ever cutting appropriations. It’s not a particularly realistic scenario, but it’s also not entirely absurd. For example, if you start at 70% tuition and 30% appropriations, and you increase tuition by 1 unit each year, while multiplying appropriations by approximately 1.56 units, in ten years you will have increased both tuition and appropriations, but the percentages will fall to 60% and 40% respectively. Do the same thing for another ten years and you’re at 50% for both, and the progression continues from there. (Again, percentages are tricky things, and in the hands of a lying weasel they may even be used for nefarious purposes.)
We can fill in some of the blanks about what happened at the University of Iowa, and at the regent schools overall, by looking at two posts on Bleeding Heartland. Written by Austin Frerick on 04/19/16 and 07/28/16 — meaning before and after last summer’s egregious tuition hikes — the posts do an excellent job of documenting Iowa’s change in appropriations over a recent fifteen-year period. (Even better, the graphs are in dollars instead of percentages, and some are in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars.)
Of particular interest is Graph 2 in the initial Frerick post (you can see a copy here), which shows that state appropriations in Iowa have indeed fallen when adjusted for inflation. The decrease is nowhere near as aggressive as the concurrent increase in tuition, however, and despite the overall down trend the state did significantly increase support right after the Great Recession began, when it would have been most needed. Note also that starting in 2012, and running through 2015 when J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed, state appropriations were once again increasing.
Even if we assume that changes in appropriations come first, with changes in tuition following in response — and to-date I see no evidence to support that conventional assumption — how do we explain the fact that tuition hikes are routinely out of scale to cuts? If schools cared about students and about student debt, you would expect a 1:1 ratio of cuts to hikes. As we will explore in more detail in Part 4, however, that’s not what happens. Instead, somewhere in the dynamic between appropriations and tuition, opportunism rears its ugly head.
In fact, we can blow holes in the premise that appropriations trigger commensurate hikes in tuition simply by looking at what Harreld did in 2016, and what he’s proposing to do in the future. In 2015 there was no actual cut in appropriations — merely a shortfall in the board’s supplemental funding request. Yet even though appropriations actually increased by $6.3M in FY16, covering the 2015-2016 academic year, Harreld pushed through an additional $27M in tuition hikes for FY17.
Now, in the summer of 2017, Harreld just pushed through another round of tuition hikes premised on very real cuts, yet those cuts were more than compensated for by the $27M in hikes that were realized during that same fiscal year. If Harreld really was trying to balance the books he would not have raised tuition again, ergo Harreld is not trying to balance the books. For confirmation of that intent all we have to do is look at Harreld’s five-year plan, which is entirely out of scale to any projected cuts in appropriations. Faced with permanent cuts which were already compensated for by last summer’s tuition increase, Harreld is now proposing an additional 33% increase in tuition, which will bring in an eye-watering $90M in new revenue.
In what conceivable sense can either of Harreld’s two summer tuition hikes, let alone his proposed five-year tuition hike, be described as proportionate to cuts in appropriations? And the answer is that Harreld’s tuition hikes have nothing to do with funding cuts, which is precisely why he keeps pointing to the fact that UI lags behind the average cost of tuition relative to its self-selected, aspirational, 30-year-old peer group. Even Harreld could not possibly sell his 33% tuition hike based on prior cuts, because any such cuts have already been compensated for by his prior hikes. In fact, the only cuts Harreld could even point to occurred a few months ago, after a stretch in which there had not been an actual cut in state appropriations since 2012
Any implicit or explicit claim by Harreld or the board — or by any expert, paid or otherwise — that UI must raise tuition 33% in response to past, present or future cuts in appropriations, is a lie. Any claim that UI must raise tuition 33% in order to deliver the education it is obligated to deliver is also a lie. The only reason Harreld wants to raise tuition 33% over five years is to generate a mountain of cash that he can spend on other things. (As noted in Part 2, it is inevitable that Harreld’s five-year plan will precipitate cuts in appropriations, which he will then use to retroactively justify his hike.)
Making matters worse, Harreld is proposing to drastically increase the cost of a degree at Iowa just as the influx of students from the Great Recession is coming to an end. The state schools have also increased enrollment by poaching from the intrastate higher-ed ecosystem, but even the university presidents at UI, ISU and UNI all admit — contrary to Rastetter’s assertion — that they cannot grow themselves out of revenue problems. To that we can also add the very real potential of poaching from outside the state of Iowa, as neighboring states seek to buoy their own falling enrollment numbers. (We will also take a closer look at that threat in Part 4.)
As it stands now, there is no data, no evidence, no academic study, no rigorous statistical proof, no nothing which shows that Harreld’s plan to exploit students and their families is necessary. It’s a money grab, pure and simple — a private-sector funding of public-sector, for-profit business ventures, which has nothing to do with educating the students who will pay that increased cost. But that’s not the worst of it.
The worst of it is that this plan is coming from a man who needed the conspiratorial might of the former president of the board of regents, and the former interim UI president and chair of the 2015 search committee, to lever himself into office. The same man whose first official act, only moments after being appointed, was to lie about the origins of his candidacy to the press, the UI community and the people of Iowa, in order to protect his co-conspirators. The same man who recently tried to swindle students and their families out of $4.3M in scholarships that UI was legally obligated to pay, because he didn’t want to dip into his discretionary presidential slush fund to pay down the FY17 clawbacks.
The man who is driving this idiotic plan is liar, a cheat and a fraud, who could not have been appointed to the job he now holds on the merits of his own candidacy. And yet even now the board is poised to allow that man to begin siphoning $90M a year from student bank accounts, in return for which those students will receive no compensating benefit. All of which is why the board has already absolved itself of any responsibility for the magnitude of the hikes that it will eventually approve. The board’s only obligation is to schedule those annual financial maulings so they do not come as a surprise.
For Part 4 of J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce, click here.
The harder he keeps going on this, the easier it’ll be for me to make the case for the kid’s going to college abroad, and starting a new life in another country.
On a related note, to get an accurate picture of what students are paying, you need to look at student fees. These are approved in the spring, do not have the notice requirement, and get no publicity. Over time, they have increased astronomically. Students (even students in the professional schools who derive almost no benefit from the services) pay a fee for the placement office, a hefty fee for the wellness/rec building and a “building” fee ($56 a semester last time I checked) and an “art” fee ($9 a semester last time I looked). These numbers are outdated because I haven’t paid tuition (or fees) since 2014. There are also, of course, big fees for technology and student health. These aren’t included in the tuition numbers or comparison tables. You should take a look at the student fees which are on the registrar’s page on the university website. I think it’s deceptive that they aren’t included.
Hi Ann,
You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that I have been reluctant to get into the question of fees for just the reasons you suggest. Trying to understand the fees levied against a college student is like trying to understand a data plan for a wireless carrier. It all looks sensible up front, but the fine print is a pricey labyrinth of clauses and conditions.
About a year ago there was an announcement about a plan to bundle a whole bunch of disparate records fees into a single charge, yet that in itself betrayed the scope of the problem. If that was just for paperwork, imagine how many other bundles might be needed.
To all that we can also add what are effectively degree-specific fees, although they are called ‘differential tuition’. I’m not sure why UI prefers to take that money in under one label or another — in high school there was a shop fee, for example, which made sense — but I’m sure there’s some advantage to it. (Meaning financial advantage, but only for the school.)
I think the big clue for me about how all the small money adds up came from the FY17 tuition hikes, which were sold as a $250 increase per student, down from a proposed $300. That’s when differential tuition was also added, and other increases for non-residents, etc., resulting in a whopping $65.4M in new tuition revenue at all three schools combined. Throw in any fees that were increased or added, and I would have no problem believing that the regents walked away with $75M that year, and that they will do so every year hence.
Thanks again for the reminder….
This is Part 4 of J. Bruce Harreld and the Tuition Task Farce. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
When is a Task Force Not a Task Force?
One of the things I have learned over the past year and three-quarters, while following the bureaucratic exploits of former president Bruce Rastetter at the Board of Regents, and fake president J. Bruce Harreld at the University of Iowa, is that the announcement of any official plan of action is simply theater — and that includes search committees, task forces and the like. Corrupt administrators know the result they want in advance, they pack their committees or task forces with cronies who will produce that result in a context that seems to impart credibility, and out plops the desired result. (I realize that this insight speaks mostly to my naivete, and how badly lagging I am in appreciating the dark arts of administration.)
Harreld’s fraudulent hire stands as the crown jewel of this sort of abuse, but to that you can add Harreld’s unilateral decision to feed the Alumni Association to the UI Foundation, and of course the four-dean task force which is, at this very moment, pretending to conduct a fact-finding study which will then be used to support changes to UI that Harreld already plans to implement. (To Harreld’s credit, for the purposes of plausible deniability he pawned off the formation and population of that task force on former provost P. Barry Butler. To Butler’s credit, after three decades of loyal service at Iowa, he went right out and got himself a job somewhere else, leaving Harreld holding that volatile bag.)
All of which is to say that whatever political necessities or public relations concerns prompted the formation of a Tuition Task Force at the Iowa Board of Regents, the members of that task force already know the result they’re looking for. Even the initial expert that the board hired fell in line with preconceptions of what the conversation should be about, referencing cherry picked stats in lockstep with Harreld. Notably absent was any discussion of the difference between tuition and total cost of attendance, or any statistical evidence correlating Iowa’s status as a national research university with the cost of delivering an education at that school.
In reality, those two core aspects of Iowa’s mission — research and education — may be almost entirely separate when it comes to the cost of funding those objectives. It is to the advantage of UI administrators and their kin across the country to blur such distinctions, of course, because the research mantle can be used to add a premium to tuition, thus funding research on the backs of students who are largely extraneous to that pursuit. In terms of the cost and quality of the education being delivered, however, there is no evidence that national research status correlates more closely versus factors such as regional location or state economics..
This theatricality in service of predetermined bureaucratic intent reminds me of two related applications of that same methodology. First, just as administrators never empanel a committee which could go rogue and produce a conscientious, fair and independent result, courtroom litigators are taught never to ask a question which they do not know the answer to. Second, such conclusion control is also useful in the craft of storytelling. So much so, in fact, that some writers plot in reverse precisely to avoid the horror of writing a story which diverges from their original intent. (Even authors who write as an exploration, with only a general sense of their intended destination, still learn that there are some questions better left unasked. Let the wrong line slip from a character’s lips, and at best you may need another twenty pages just to provide a plausible answer, and at worst the very conception of the work may be irretrievably altered.)
Even if the Tuition Task Force tackles only the narrowest of questions — meaning how to introduce predictability into the foregone conclusion that tuition will now be raised year after year — there will still be relevant factors the task force cannot address because the resulting conversation would be impossible to control. Likewise, by the very nature of constraining the conversation to the issue of scheduling, the task force will omit issues that should be on the table if there is to be any hope of a lasting effect, which is another way of saying there will be no lasting effect. The end goal of the Tuition Task Force is to validate the board’s new multi-price tuition regime at the state’s three schools, not to explore critical issues which have so far been successfully neglected.
The primary obstacle to regularizing the process of raising tuition at the regent schools is glaringly obvious. Because the Board of Regents has exposure to the state budget, and because the state budget in any given year can be wildly off the mark or negatively impacted by extraneous macroeconomic forces, or both, there is always the potential that the best-laid plans will end up in the crapper. Case in point: FY17 and the ‘two-plus-two’ plan to raise tuition 2%, in exchange for only demanding a 2% bump in appropriations. While valiantly conceived, that scheduling plan barely got out of the gate before the state budget fell apart. All it took was one failed REC estimate by the state and the next thing you know the regents were shoveling money back to the legislature scoop over spade. (Speaking of things the board does not want to talk about, remember also that the regent schools also pocketed $65.4M in new tuition revenue in FY17.)
From the point of view of the regents we can think of such events as black swans, but acknowledging that chaos exists does not help students, families or even the state schools plan ahead. Unfortunately, nothing short of a spirited conversation with the governor and legislature will change the board’s exposure to such risks, and because the board is a crony political body such a conversation is never going to happen. Sooner or later the budget elves in state government are going to blow it again, and the regents will pay the price, but the regents will do nothing to prevent it. (One of the highlights of the post-clawback conversation was reading David Roederer’s crony explanation for what caused the crippling shortfall in Iowa’s budget, when Roederer was one of the people who got the REC estimate spectacularly wrong. As ever in Iowa, provided you are part of, and loyal to, Butcher Branstad’s now-legacy political machine, there is no price to be paid even for spectacular demonstrations of incompetence.)
Just two weeks ago the Iowa Board of Regents raised tuition a grand total of 5%: 2% as agreed upon late last year, and another 3% because of the FY17 clawbacks earlier this year. As noted above and in previous parts of this extended post, however, the haul from last summer’s hikes-which-shall-not-be-named must also have increased overall tuition revenue more than 10%, which raises an interesting question. Why is state tuition allowed an end-run around the legislative process?
I don’t now why the world ‘tuition’ is used to describe the money paid for an education, but okay — somewhere in human history that linguistic practice took hold. If we swap out the word ‘tuition’ for ‘tax’ or ‘fee’, however, we get a much better appreciation for what actually happens when the Board of Regents raises prices, and what happens is that people get royally screwed by a body which is neither elected nor representative. It is assumed that the board is comprised of kindly citizen volunteers who care about students and their families, but there is no statutory mechanism by which students and families have recourse when that turns out not to be the case.
The nine members of the Board of Regents are the functional equivalent of appointed state senators, serving six-year terms not in service of their constituent electors, but in service of the governor and his or her political machine. What Harreld is proposing cannot be called an increase in ‘tuition’ in even the most charitable sense because tuition pays for an education, and as Harreld himself has acknowledged, the price of the education that UI delivers is already covered at the current rate. Instead, what Harreld is proposing is a $3K-per-year fee — a markup, a surcharge, a compulsory academic gratuity — in exchange for nothing of any value.
The very fact that the governor and state legislature can offload responsibility for setting the state’s ‘higher-ed tax’ or ‘higher-ed fee’, which directly affects 75K+ students and their families every year, means those elected offices are sheltered from accountability for the board’s decision making. Unfortunately for those 75K+ students, however, and unlike the procedural obligations facing the governor’s office or the legislature, the regents are able to raise massive amounts of new revenue with little or no public comment or debate. Propose a half-cent fuel tax dedicated to keeping roads passable year around and hand-to-hand partisan warfare will break out in the statehouse. Even if the new tax makes sense — even if the public supports it — anti-tax advocates will parachute in from around the country, supporters will cry foul, and after a long, bruising, and very public battle, the tax will either be cut in half again or tossed altogether.
On the other hand, if you want to raise $90M every year going forward at the University of Iowa alone, all you have to do is get five votes from a governing board that Butcher Branstad had the foresight to pack with political cronies. Seriously — try to think of any legislative equivalent to what the regents are getting ready to push through. You’ll hear no end of tsk-tsking from both sides of the legislative aisle when the board sticks it to the students once again, but in all likelihood no one in the legislature will do anything to derail any hikes because that increase in revenue gives them the opportunity to cut appropriations in response.
Students at UI will end up paying a $3K surcharge for the same education they’re getting now, while the state of Iowa, via the kindly Board of Crony Appointees, transfers $90M from the bank accounts of those students to J. Bruce Harvard’s slush fund. (Talk about wealth redistribution.) And yes, students at UI are always free to go elsewhere — like, say the more affordably priced ISU or UNI — but what happens if the board prices students out of the education they’re looking for? The current plan is to allow UI and ISU to leap ahead in pricing, while UNI creeps up from the current regent-wide rate, but if UNI doesn’t confer the degree you’re looking for, you may not be able to attend any of the state schools.
I have no doubt that at some rudimentary level the regents have considered how changes in tuition may affect enrollment at each of the state schools, but they can only perform such calculations based on data already collected. Unfortunately, one big problem with data from the past decade is that it includes the tidal wave of new students who enrolled in the wake of the Great Recession. That wave started to recede at two-year schools in 2012 and 2013, so it’s fair to assume that it began to recede at four-year schools in 2014 and 2015.
Coincidentally, during 2014 and 2015 in Iowa, former regent president Bruce Rastetter sparked an enrollment arms race among the state schools by proposing and pushing his performance-based funding plan. That plan prompted ex-ISU president Leath in particular to warehouse resident undergrads wherever he could, further distorting the board’s enrollment data. (Ironically, that plan was also the origin of the $4.3M in scholarships that Harreld recently tried to renege on. After Rastetter forced UI President Sally Mason’s to sign on to his plan, those legacy discounts were offered to entice more in-state students to UI. Because of the way the performance-based plan worked, those legacy students would have routed more state appropriations to UI, thus defraying the cost of that aid, but when Rastetter’s plan died in the statehouse the offsetting appropriations never arrived.)
With campus housing now maxed out at the state schools — even with the addition of new dorms — and the enrollment tide reverting to the mean, how smart is it for Harreld, and perhaps also interim-President Allen at Iowa State, to precipitously raise tuition? Is that what they teach about supply and demand at Harvard? And speaking of Harvard…you can see the bottom-line effect of falling enrollment in the rising discount rate at the nation’s private schools. Fewer students in the marketplace mean higher discounts to keep seats filled, particularly after schools built up their campuses while enrollment was on the rise. For public schools in Iowa, however, discounting is problematic even in the best of times because it equates to wealth distribution, meaning the only mechanism by which the state universities can compete is through the price of tuition. And by compete I do not mean among far-flung research peers scattered across the country, but against in-state alternatives and schools in neighboring states.
Unfortunately, the whole question of competition is also outside the stated purview of the Tuition Task Force, and that’s a potentially catastrophic mistake. As noted in a recent post, one thing that could go very wrong would be for more of the surrounding states to follow South Dakota’s lead in granting in-state tuition to residents of Iowa. Speaking of which…did you know that Nebraska, just to the west, is really hurting? Did you also know that most of the Nebraska state schools are in the eastern part of that state, while there are no state universities in the western half of Iowa? (Iowa State is in the middle east-to-west, just to the north of Des Moines.)
Now that Nebraska knows how successful South Dakota’s program was, what is there to stop Nebraska from offering the same deal to students and families in Iowa — which might be particularly appealing to the western half of the state because of driving distance or political culture? Even better, as soon as UI and ISU aggressively raise their rates, Nebraska can follow with more moderate increases and still be the better bargain. Sure, Nebraska got kicked out of the AAU a few years back, while ISU is hanging on and UI remains in good standing, but undergrads don’t care whether their college or university is sucking up to the AAU. (They might say they care, but if you gave them a discount in lieu of any AAU association, they would kick the AAU to the curb.)
What about Missouri, to the south? Still a proud fringe member of the AAU, freshman enrollment crashed 35% over the past two years, leaving that system desperate for cash. Did you know that all of Iowa’s state schools are on or north of Interstate 80, which bisects the state latitudinally? How smart would it be for Missouri to offer resident tuition to Iowa students, who will be getting the crap kicked out of them by the unelected nincowpoops who bought into J. Bruce Harreld’s get-great-quick plan? (Travel through southern Iowa and you will find very strong cultural ties to Missouri.)
The unintended consequences of raising tuition at UI and ISU do not stop there. Not only is the state of Iowa granting a market advantage to surrounding states, but there will be increased competition between the regent schools. While it seems to make sense that UNI should cost less because it is smaller and not research-oriented, once again — as new president Mark Nook explained — those criteria have nothing to do with the cost or quality of the education being delivered. Look past the marketing hype that each state school uses to sell itself and you find more similarities than differences.
For example, most people in Iowa think of UNI as a ‘teacher’s college’, because it trains many of the teachers who work in community school districts across the state. What many Iowans may not know, however, is that UI also has a teacher’s college on its campus. In fact, the UI College of Education just recently hired a new plane-flyin’ entrepreneurial dean — Dan Clay — to revolutionize that college. (After provost Butler left, Clay was appointed as one of four marionette deans who are plotting Harreld’s reorganization of the university around profit-making instead of education.)
If you want to be a teacher, are you going to spend an extra $12K-$15K to get the exact same degree at UI, or are you going to go to UNI and save that much or more? (The answer is so obvious it makes me wonder if Harreld is trying to kill the UI College of Education, so he can devote those resources to other schools.) And remember — UNI may be smaller, but it’s still a university. We’re not talking about a sleepy college with an enrollment of 2,200, we’re talking about roughly 12,000 students in multiple degree programs, some of which also overlap the other state schools. (The UI College of Education was also the only college on campus to receive no additional funding for faculty salaries, as reported last week.)
If ISU is smart — and I have a feeling their five-year plan will be not-too-hot-and-not-too-cold smart, just like Bear Rastetter wants it — they will aim for lesser hikes, not only ensuring a steady supply of resident undergrads well into the future, but specifically pricing their engineering and business degrees below those at UI. Does Sarah Gardial, dean of the Tippie College of Business — which has issues of its own — know that price competition with ISU is on the docket at the Board of Regents? She did get a significant bump from the imposition of differential tuition, and Harreld just gave her college $500K for salary increases, but in a few short years the degrees she is selling may be prohibitively expensive when compared to the business and engineering offerings at ISU and UNI.
As you can see, there are a lot of questions that should be asked before the Iowa Board of Vengeance throws over decades of stability in a desperate attempt to steal more money from students and their families. Because ignoring all of those issues won’t cost the regents a cent in the short term, however, all of those questions will be ignored. If tuition is increased dramatically in a very short amount of time, and the intrastate and regional market for higher education is destabilized as it inevitably will be, the bill for that disaster will come due long after J. Bruce Hamster and the current members of the Board of Rodents have moved on.
Solving a Problem By Making it Worse
It is an undeniable truth in Iowa and across the country that the percentage of appropriations at state schools has fallen off relative to tuition. One particularly relevant question that the regents will not look into, however, is what that really means. Why is that happening? Even assuming that appropriations are always cut first, triggering an increase in tuition — which is an assumption, not a truth, and was demonstrably not the case in the summer of 2016 — why has that been happening everywhere? Why aren’t there a few outlying states bucking that trend, which would then legitimize the overall complaint?
As previously discussed, percentages are funny things. If a state is providing half of the money for a school, and the other half comes from tuition, that’s a fifty-fifty mix. If tuition doubles, however, then appropriations will only constitute a third, even as the amount of appropriations remained unchanged. Keep increasing tuition, over and over again, and the percentage from appropriations will continue to shrink, but because the amount of appropriations remains unchanged the percentage will never equal zero.
At some point in such a progression, however, when the state’s contribution has fallen to a negligible percentage, the legislature might just say to hell with it and stop funding that particular school. I don’t know how that would work, or if anything like that has ever happened before, but I don’t think anyone would say it was the wrong idea. The school would be self-sustaining on tuition revenue alone, it would probably be grouchy about all of the governmental paperwork, and appeasing a bunch of elected representatives or a governmental board would be of little interest.
In Part 1 of this multi-part post we surmised that a state school could not remain a state school if the state appropriated zero dollars, but how much is required? If the legislature sends twenty bucks in dimes once a year, does it still retain control of that institution? How about a thousand dollars? A million? Ten million?
At a state college or university, what is the threshold contribution necessary — either in percentage terms or real dollars — to retain governmental status and control? At a research university like UI or ISU, that question is complicated by the dual nature of the institution. What is the state actually funding, and what is tuition paying for? Does tuition cover the cost of delivering an education, while state appropriations are devoted to research? Or are those core missions funded in proportion from both appropriations and tuition?
As previously noted, not only has the cost of delivering an education been relatively fixed over the past decade and a half, but given the current price of tuition at UI, it would seem that core mission is being entirely covered by the tuition students contribute. That would mean not only that all of the state’s appropriations are already being used for other things, but that Harreld’s $3K surcharge would also be entirely devoted to non-educational purposes, despite coming wholly from students.
As you can see, the ambiguity of the budgeting process and the multi-dimensional role of UI and ISU provides administrators ample opportunity to obscure what actually happens with all of the money being spent. If the current price of tuition at UI does indeed cover the cost of providing an education to students, then it wouldn’t be wrong to describe UI as a privately-funded liberal arts college wrapped in a state-funded — and apparently struggling — research institute. All of which raises another interesting question.
The gap between the percentage of appropriations and tuition at UI, and at the other state schools, may continue to increase, but because the percentage of appropriations will never fall to zero the state will always be able to claim ownership. In terms of actual dollars, however, all you would have to do to cut state appropriations to nothing would be increase tuition enough to cover the state’s contribution. So…how much higher would tuition have to go at UI to take the entire school private — meaning both the education and research components? What is that number?
As you can see from the lovely pie chart on this page, appropriations at UI are currently 31.5% of the general education fund, tuition is 62.5%, and the remaining 6% comes from recycling bottles and cans. Making this pie chart extra-special, however, is that unlike the garbage numbers Harreld prefers, which always reference percentages in isolation, the percentages on that pie chart are accompanied by dollar amounts.
Specifically, 31.5% in state appropriations to UI represents a $232.2M contribution to the gen-ed fund, and the 62.5% of revenue from tuition equals a $459.8M contribution from students and their families. Add those two numbers together and you get $692M, plus $44.1M (6%) from “other income” (don’t ask), gives us a grand total of $736.1M for the UI General Education Fund for FY17. (Those numbers do not include the clawbacks in mid-fiscal-year, but do include the $27M tuition hikes that were implemented in the summer of 2016. You can confirm that $27M tuition increase — which neither Harreld nor the board will ever acknowledge — by looking at the revenue from tuition on the FY16 pie chart.)
Tuition at UI largely falls into two main categories — resident undergraduates, who currently pay about $9K per year, and nonresident undergrads, who pay more than three times as much, at about $28K. For the 2016-2017 academic year (aka FY17) total enrollment at the University of Iowa was 33,334. Dividing $459.8M in FY17 tuition by 33,334 students gives us an average tuition, per generic student, of $13,793, which we can then use to answer our question.
After the Board of Regents gives Harreld permission to pull an ascot up over his face and implement five years of progressive stickups, tuition revenue at UI will increase another $90M, to a total annual haul of $549.8M. If we divide that amount by the same number of students — which is a reasonable assumption given that Harreld intends to hold enrollment steady — the average tuition per generic student rises to $16,493, or a bit less than the $3K increase we are anticipating. Note, however, that in adding $90M on the tuition side, we could also knock off $90M in appropriations and still be revenue neutral, and that would leave us with only $142.2M in appropriations from the state.
Between tuition and appropriations our total take would still be $692M, but significantly more weighted toward tuition. If we then decided we just wanted to get rid of the remaining state contribution, all we would have to do is divide that total — as opposed to tuition only — by 33,334, giving us an average tuition of $20,759, or only $4,267 more than what the average student will be paying after Harreld’s five-year plan is implemented. If we wanted to, we could raise tuition a bit more to account for the 6% of miscellaneous gen-ed funding, at which point we would effectively be running a private university on public property. (Since the state probably wouldn’t get a very good price for leasing all of those campus buildings to other tenants, I’m sure a reasonable lease agreement could be worked out, which would be pure profit for the state, and only require a relatively small tuition increase.)
Whether you take all that in jest or not, even if we limit ourselves only to Harreld’s proposed 33% tuition hike over five years, that increase will equate to roughly 41% of the remaining appropriations equity that the state has in UI’s gen-ed fund. At that point, the total haul from tuition alone ($549.8M) will account for 79.5% of the combined haul ($692M) from appropriations and tuition in FY17. (See — aren’t percentages fun?)
Harreld’s entire pitch — insane as it is — is that he is going to raise tuition $3K per student on the tuition side, while the state keeps throwing the same money at UI despite that new annual windfall. As detailed earlier in this multi-part post, however, there is no chance that the state will keep contributing appropriations at the current rate while Harreld banks an additional $90M per year. Meaning even as Harreld is adding equity on the tuition side, the state will be cutting its equity stake on the appropriations side, thus reducing Harreld’s gains. Harreld may get close to the current average cost of tuition for whatever peer group he is flogging at the moment, but money is going to be headed out the door on the appropriations side — which leads to yet another interesting question.
When all of the backdoor de-appropriations are said and done, how much of a total overall bump in revenue should Harreld expect for his $3K gambit? As it turns out, there are two ways to calculate that answer based on the information we have available, and both of the answers end up in the same ballpark. First, we can look at what happened only a few months ago, with the FY17 clawbacks. In that instance, Harreld raised $27M in new tuition revenue during that fiscal year, of which the state took back $16M for that year and future years.
From that single reduction in appropriations — which appears to have been motivated by a fiscal emergency, but was at least in part motivated by the cash-grab tuition hikes that the regents pushed through six months earlier — we see that Harreld was allowed to keep about 40% ($11M) of the $27M that he ripped off from students. If we likewise reduce Harreld’s projected $90M take to 40%, that means he will only net an additional $36M or so, while the other $54M will be offset by cuts in appropriations over that time.
Now, if that state reduction seems unlikely, the second way we can answer our question is to look at earlier cuts in appropriations at the state schools in Iowa, or at other schools across the country. Because every time I look at an ‘x’ graph for a college or university which is derived from dollars as opposed to percentages, what I see is roughly a 2:1 trade. Meaning for every $2 in tuition hikes the state legislatures slip $1 off the table, so they can spend that money on something else.
That ratio is a little higher in the projection for Harreld’s five-year plan — 90:54 = 2:1.2 — but not much. For every $2 in hikes, which students will have to pay in full, the legislature can be expected to cut $1.20 in appropriations. You can see the same effect, albeit with even more aggressive cuts in appropriations, by looking at this ‘x’ graph for the six state schools in Kansas.
Because that graph uses dollars instead of percentages, we can see that there is marked decrease in inflation-adjusted appropriations — meaning an actual protracted cut — over the fourteen year period from 2002 to 2016, and that cut equals about $3,750 per student. Over that same time frame, however, the increase in tuition is considerably more, at about $5,500 per student. Again, not a perfect 2:1 ratio, but still in the ballpark at 2:1.36.
The students are royally screwed in all such transactions because they have to pay the full price of each tuition hike regardless of any cuts to appropriations. The benefits of 2:1 swaps for both the schools and legislatures, however, should be obvious. So obvious, in fact, that this simple, mutually advantageous dynamic may explain why tuition is rising and appropriations are being cut at about the same rate across the country. Other than the abuse being heaped on students in the process, there is no reason not to make such funding exchanges because both sides — the schools and the legislatures — profit, and the legislatures most of all.
Even accounting for subsequent cuts in appropriations the schools end up with more money overall, along with a plausible excuse for future hikes. While the legislatures look like the bad guys — in large part because people buy into the conventional wisdom that cuts trigger hikes, as opposed to the other way around — the legislatures are more than willing to take that PR hit because they can spend all of that money, dollar-for-dollar, on other issues. And given that college kids rarely vote in numbers, those other issues are probably more politically expedient and/or volatile, producing an increased political bang for each re-appropriated buck. Everyone talks a good game about keeping student debt, of course, but neither the schools nor the legislatures have to carry that debt, so they don’t care.
Whatever the Iowa Board of Regents allows Harreld to do, whatever Harreld thinks he’s going to get at the end of his five-year plan, and whatever he actually does get, on some basic level, even if the board and legislature allow Harreld to rock UI’s college students with perpetual annual tuition hikes, I think we can agree that there should be some plausible rationale for that abuse. Even con artists have to come up with a convincing lie that the marks will believe or the con won’t work, and I think that same low bar should apply here. There needs to be some plausible justification — some saleable lie — that Harreld’s tuition hikes are necessary for the students, who are of course the marks.
Incredibly, however, if you search this four-part post exhaustively, you will find no such rationale put forward by Harreld or anyone else, and not because I did not adequately represent his plan. While the solution that Harreld proposes is raising tuition at UI 33% over the next five years, the problem Harreld is trying to solve is that appropriations keep falling as a percentage of total funding. Again, currently, state appropriations equaled 31.5% of gen-ed funding in FY17, while 62.5% came in the form of tuition from students and their financial backers.
If we assume — as Harreld assumes — that the state will not decrease its contribution in response to his 33% hike, then adding another $90M to Iowa’s FY17 gen-ed fund gives us $826.1M total, but note what happens to the percentages. Instead of being credited with a 31.5% contribution for its $232.2M, the state will only contribute 28.1% of the total, even though its contribution is unchanged. Likewise, by adding $90M and bringing tuition up to $549.8M, the percentage from tuition rises from 62.5% to 66.5%. Meaning where the gap between appropriations and tuition — which Harreld insists UI must do something about — is currently 31%, after Harreld’s super-genius fix the percentage gap will increase to 38.4%.
Now look at what happens if Harreld goes for $90M in new tuition revenue, but only profits by $36M because the state slips $54M in compensatory cuts out the back door. In that case, the total gen-ed fund would equal $772.1M. Of that, $495.8M would come from tuition and $178.2M would arrive from the state — but again, look at what happens to the percentages. In that scenario, which is the likelier of the two when contrasted with the idea that Harreld will get to keep all of his potential gains, the problem is markedly worse. At $495.8M, tuition would now account for 69% of the total, while appropriations would only account for 24.8%, giving us an even wider gap of 44.2%.
I do not have a Harvard MBA, an MBA at all, or even a solid grasp of mathematics. Based on my liberal arts education from the University of Iowa, however, I am fairly confident in stating the following. If your solution to a problem makes that problem worse, then not only is that not a solution, but you either do not understand the problem you’re trying to solve, or you are lying about what you intend to do. In neither case, however, should anyone pay attention to anything else you have to say.
That the Iowa Board of Regents is paying rapt attention to J. Bruce Harreld’s plan — which is almost certainly the template for the five-year plans at the other two schools, albeit at reduced rates — tells you everything you need to know about how this will all play out. After the Tuition Task Force pretends to take a rigorous look at the extremely narrow question of how to make price hikes more predictable, Harreld’s plan to drastically raise tuition at the University of Iowa will be approved. The board will insist on a small concession here and a meaningless deviation there, making it look like the board is watching out for the students, but as noted earlier that is standard malpractice. In the end the board will accept, without debate, Harreld’s premise that because the percentage of state appropriations keeps falling and the percentage of tuition keeps rising, the only possible course of action is to exacerbate that problem even more. As a result, the students at the University of Iowa will pay $12K to $15K more for their degrees in exchange for no discernible benefit, the Iowa Board of Regents will pat itself on the back for a job well done, and Harreld will laugh all the way to the bank.
Update 06/25/17: I pushed out the post above in the wee hours. This morning I found an op-ed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, written by Gary Fethke, who was an early and strong supporter of Harreld’s. Worth a read.
In two months it will be two full years since J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa, following a sham $300K search conducted at taxpayer expense. If you have been reading Ditchwalk on the Harreld hire, you know that Harreld’s first act, only moments after being appointed, was to tell a premeditated lie to the press, to the UI community and to the people of Iowa, specifically to obscure the conspiracy that facilitated his illegitimate appointment. You also know that two months later, when Harreld finally took office, he completely revised the origin story of his candidacy, and in so doing exposed the co-conspirators who elevated him to that position.
In the intervening months and years we have watched as Harreld’s co-conspirators — former regents president Bruce Rastetter; former UI interim president, former search chair, and current UI Vice President for Medical Affairs and Dean of the College of Medicine, Jean Robillard; and big-money donor/alum Jerre Stead — step back from the spotlight, content to let their crony drone burrow into the administrative apparatus at the university. Over that same time frame, various vignettes have played out with other players in the Harreld hire, yet for the most part the cast of characters always traced back to the original administrative crime, either directly or by association.
What we had not yet seen was the introduction of new players who were motivated not by some association with the corrupt 2015 search, however remote, but wholly as a result of Harreld’s illegitimate presidency. Other than members of the student government, or peripheral members of the faculty and staff who were obligated to flatter Harreld, we had not seen anyone step forward and declare, by virtue of his work product on campus, that J. Bruce Harreld was a great administrator, a great president, a great man. There may be people who feel that way in private, but I do not believe anyone has made such assertions in public.
As of a week ago last Friday, however, we now have that, apparently as an organic outgrowth of his on-the-job administrative guile. Specifically, on Friday, 06/23/17, the Press Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson posted a story about Harreld’s first two years presiding over the UI campus. In recounting the original and ongoing obstacles to Harreld’s acceptance, Charis-Carlson presented several voices with varying perspectives on Harreld’s performance. One voice in particular, however, not only featured prominently in defending Harreld, but proved to be so spectacularly wrong on the facts that even after a week of thinking it through I still struggled to find my way to a benign explanation.
One of the bureaucratic changes Harreld made over the past two years was to establish an ongoing process for introducing and moving initiatives through the administrative pipeline at Iowa. For anyone with experience in software development there is nothing about the procedures that Harreld implemented which is innovative in the least, but porting that methodology to academia was bound to make the normally staid decision-making process more effective. (If you are a process/development nerd, Rapid Development by Steve McConnell is a must-read.)
From Charis-Carlson’s piece:
You can read about the Path Forward process here, about the Operations Team here, and you can see what the Strategy Implementation Team is doing here (click ‘Issues’). Again, if you have even passing familiarity with a Gantt chart you will get the gist of what Harreld implemented right away. However, to academics who may not know that such processes have been mainstream in tech for decades, that process evolution may indeed seem revolutionary.
Continuing, from Charis-Carlson’s report:
Now, as regular readers know, J. Bruce Harreld — the demonstrably illegitimate president of the University of Iowa — is, demonstrably, a liar and a cheat. Again, however, if you did not know that, you might very well make the mistake of extrapolating some larger conclusion about the man based on your own limited personal experience. Which is to say that is entirely possible that McGuire has concluded, solely from his experience with the Operations Team, that Harreld is genuinely interested in collaboration and transparency, when Harreld’s own actions on more than one occasion have demonstrably proven that not to be the case.
Now, were the quote above the sum of McGuire’s opinion it would be easy enough to move on, which is what I expected to do while reading Charis-Carlson’s piece. As it turned out, however, McGuire was indeed quite eager to make a much broader case for J. Bruce Harreld as a great administrator, president and man. Such enthusiasm obviously raises questions about why the current interim director of the UI School of Art and Art History would go to such lengths to vouch for someone who is demonstrably untrustworthy, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
As was the case with Bruce Rastetter two years ago, I had no idea who Steve McGuire was until two Fridays ago. All I knew about McGuire even as I was writing the few first drafts of this post came from Charis-Carlson’s report, and from McGuire’s UI bio here. (Having worked in a bike shop in my youth, anyone who is interested in making hand-made bikes would normally be okay by me.)
Unfortunately, with regard to McGuire’s comment about how “effective [Harreld] is around issues of collaboration and transparency”, we have only to look at recent UI history to see that Harreld is, at best, picking and choosing when to support and thwart collaboration and transparency. Specifically, after asking the UI Foundation and the UI Alumni Association to form a joint committee to explore ways they might collaborate better, Harreld summarily announced — without informing the head of the association or its board that such a possibility was even in play — that the Alumni Association would be subsumed by the Foundation. Whether you support that decision or not, it should be self-evident that Harreld’s decision making was neither collaborative nor transparent, but unilateral and opaque.
Continuing, from Charis-Carlson:
Here, appropriately, McGuire speaks to his personal experience at UI, and how that experience has changed for the better since Harreld became president. There is nothing wrong with such first-person testimonials, of course, provided said first-persons acknowledge the limits of their experience, and how that experience may have diverged from the experience of others. What is not okay — and what is in fact in contravention of the ethos that we might call the ‘scholarly method’ — is extrapolating from specifics to a general case without substantiating any basis for doing so.
In a perverse sense McGuire is correct. Harreld does reach out to people to get their input, after which he makes decisions based on the information he has gathered. Again, however, there’s nothing revolutionary about such a process, even as it does seem to speak to inclusion. The problem in Harreld’s case is that in reaching out he is as likely to be looking for pressure points and vulnerabilities as he is for real dialogue. (Make that more likely.)
Individuals that Harreld engages with may feel empowered simply because he asks for their input, and if they have low self-esteem they may even feel flattered. From Harreld’s point of view more information is always better, and even if no information of tactical or strategic value presents itself, the very process of asking for opinions tends to engender the kind of goodwill that McGuire implicitly attests to in Charis-Carlson’s article. (Other than the potential for tedium there is no downside to feigning “collaboration and transparency” – a lesson Harreld undoubtedly learned in the private-sector.)
As just noted, however, Harreld clearly did not have an honest and open conversation with the UI Alumni Association. Whether he knew what he was going to do in advance and used the joint committee as a pretext, or he used the committee to determine his objective and formulate a plan of attack, from the point of view of key people at the Alumni Association there was nothing collaborative or transparent about Harreld’s actions . What they got, as a result of their good-faith effort to provide information in a collaborative and transparent dialogue initiated by Harreld, was a sucker punch — as Charis-Carlson reported both at the time and in his retrospective on Harreld.
Again, it’s one thing to say, ‘Here’s my limited, personal, positive experience with Harreld,’ and quite another to make a broad, easily disproved claim. So why did McGuire — a trained academic — make such a leap? Well, I have no idea, but in terms of Harreld’s selective incapacity for, or disinterest in, communication, note also that — as was the case with Vanessa Miller’s one-year retrospective in the Gazette — there are no comments from Harreld in Charis-Carlson’s article. Despite raking in $800K per year ($200K deferred) as the public-facing leader of the University of Iowa, because of his liabilities and vulnerabilities Harreld cannot submit to interviews by the local or national higher-ed press.
Instead, as was the case after Iowa was sanctioned by the AAUP for violations of shared governance during the 2015 search, Harreld shoves surrogates out the door to take the heat or shower him with praise, after which the credibility of said surrogates is reduced to ash. In that particular case, Harreld first burned through former search committee member and Faculty Senate president Christina Bohannan — who, fortuitously, subsequently found herself named as the ‘Faculty Fellow‘ in the provost’s office. Shortly thereafter, Harreld added then-Faculty Senate president Thomas Vaughn to the credibility crematorium.
Based on his combined personal experience and apparent ignorance we could probably still excuse McGuire’s comments about collaboration and transparency, but McGuire didn’t stop there. In testifying on Harreld’s behalf, he not only made the leap from personal experience to global assertion, he leapt from issues of collaboration and transparency to the currently trending topic of tuition. Having just worked through a gonzo four-part post on the Iowa Board of Regents’ ongoing Tuition Task Force, however, it is even easier to use readily available facts to refute McGuire’s comments about that subject.
I don’t know what was going on in McGuire’s head when this came out of his mouth, and I’m not interested in psychoanalyzing his motives. Having said that, there are only two broad possibilities. Either McGuire was completely oblivious to the larger context of the tuition hikes which were enacted earlier this month, or he is actively engaging in propaganda in lockstep with Harreld’s own efforts to deceive the public.
If McGuire believes that taking more and more money from students is the only solution to Iowa’s funding problems — as Harreld clearly believes, given that he endeavored to do so on three separate occasions in the past twelve months alone — then he should just say so. As a factual matter, however, the tuition hikes which were just enacted in June, in purported response to the state’s mid-year budget shortfall, were a lie. To the extent that previously appropriated money was recaptured by the legislature during FY17, UI is still ahead tens of millions of dollars when the tuition hikes that were implemented in the summer of 2016 — for FY17 — are taken into account.
To be fair, maybe McGuire is oblivious to the fact that the hikes which were implemented last year brought in $27M in new tuition revenue. That wouldn’t necessarily even be surprising, given that Harreld and the Board of Regents have consistently refused to acknowledge that haul. To set the record straight, heading into FY17 the state of Iowa actually increased baseline support for the three regent universities by a combined $6.3M. Because that increase was less than the $20M in supplemental appropriations that the regents asked for, however, former president Rastetter allowed the university presidents to use that manufactured shortfall to hit the students up for a combined $65.4M in new tuition revenue during the summer of 2016.
That Steve McGuire now credits Harreld with some sort of pioneering effort to make the case for more funds this year, while giving no voice to the abuse of power that Harreld perpetrated last year, entirely discounts McGuire’s opinion on the matter of tuition. If he is uninformed, that’s bad, and raises questions about how and why — as an activist member of the UI faculty — he does not know those numbers. And of course if he himself is intentionally omitting mention of the windfall from the 2016 hikes, that’s obviously worse. In either case, McGuire ends up in sync with the premeditated deception Harreld has been perpetrating on the question of tuition, and Harreld does know how much money he took from students in the past year. Specifically, between the tuition hikes this summer and last, UI will now pull in a whopping $43M in new tuition revenue in the coming academic year, which will more than offset any losses from the state budget debacle.
As regards this, however, even ignorance is insufficient as an excuse:
If not for the edification of McGuire personally, here is reality. Had Harreld decided that the scholarships in question would no longer be offered to new students, no one would have objected to that decision. Not only would that have been Harreld’s right, but those scholarships were an artifact of prior abuses by the Board of Regents, which, several years earlier, sought to impose a new appropriations scheme on the state schools. What Harreld did, instead, was tell a premeditated lie in an attempt to compel thousands of students and their families to assume responsibility for $4.3M in scholarships which the University of Iowa was legally obligated to pay. In no sense was that a demonstration of administrative courage on Harreld’s part, though to be fair to McGuire it may indeed have been a “first” because no other regent president ever had the audacity to actually attempt to defraud his (or her) students.
By contrast, where the presidents at ISU and UNI tried to shelter their students as much as possible from the FY17 clawbacks, Harreld’s immediate instinct was to use that fiscal emergency as a pretext for once again savaging the bank accounts of students and their families. Despite the obviousness of Harreld’s glaring abuse of power, not only did the board do nothing, but it was only the swift and concerted threat of legal action that stopped Harreld in his tracks, else he would have remorselessly perpetrated that fraud. (As noted in prior posts, after Harreld finally relented and reinstated the scholarships, UI suddenly ‘found’ $4.9M in leftover flood money, which it could have used to defray the clawbacks all along.)
At no point, ever, has Harreld “laid at the doorsteps of the regents and the Legislature exactly what the stakes were in terms of resources for the university.” In fact, former regents president Bruce Rastetter quite literally staged Harreld’s first act of budgetary advocacy, only days after Harreld’s appointment in 2015. In that case, Rastetter told a regents’ staffer to withhold any supplemental request for UI, so Harreld could initiate and advocate for that request following the fixed, done-deal vote for president by five members of the board. (Those same five current and former regents are currently being sued for improper meetings with Harreld.)
In the summer of 2016 Harreld used a pretext to hit students with $27M in tuition hikes, this summer he added another $16M premised on the clawbacks, and in-between he tried to steal $4.3M premised on the same FY17 de-appropriations. And this is the same man that Steve McGuire, interim director of the UI School of Art and Art History, cannot say enough good things about.
Harreld’s entire tenure at Iowa has been defined not by uncomfortable or overdue conversations but by lies of omission. Harreld has never accounted for his own sham candidacy and appointment. Harreld has never acknowledged the full, premeditated complicity of UI in the abuses of shared governance which precipitated the AAUP sanction. Harreld has not and will not talk about the $27M in tuition hikes from last year because to do so would blow his rationale for this year’s tuition hikes, let alone the five-year, 33% hike he has on the table at the Iowa Board of Regents. Harreld can’t even sit for an interview with the local or national higher-ed press, and yet somehow, based on apparently limited personal experience, Steve McGuire formulated and eagerly expressed an entirely different conception of the man, which is enough to make one wonder how that came about. (More on that in a moment.)
One of the reasons McGuire’s colleagues might be skeptical about any campus reorganization at UI is that such a process will ultimately be driven by a liar and a cheat. Yes, Harreld stuck Provost Butler with responsibility for initiating the reorganization, but as a savvy liar and cheat that’s exactly what Harreld would do to ensure plausible deniability prior to laying waste with his presidential axe. (Not only did Butler have 30 years under his belt at UI, including later years as provost, but it was only after Harreld took office that the reorganization apparently became a consuming priority. So consuming, in fact, that shortly after it began, Butler applied for a job elsewhere and left.)
As Charis-Carlson noted in his piece, Harreld is currently trying to convince the Iowa Board of Regents to allow him to raise tuition $3K or more per student. That increase would generate an additional $90M or so in annual tuition revenue, or, when combined with the $43M Harreld has already secured, a grand total of $133M at a minimum. In the recent multi-part post on the Tuition Task Force we explored a multitude of reasons why that plan is a disaster in the making, yet the truly amazing part of Harreld’s plan is that he has not put forward any educational justification for why that money is needed. (Harreld also never presented any educational rationale for the hikes last summer, or the recent hikes in June.)
What does Harreld want all that money for? The answer, pieced together from comments by Harreld over the past two years, is that he wants to fund a for-profit business-development incubator through compulsory student investment. The students won’t receive any direct or even indirect benefit for their money, but Harreld doesn’t care about that because Harreld isn’t a university president. He is, instead, a broken down business executive looking to recapture his IBM glory days on someone else’s dime.
As for the campus reorganization, McGuire is once again reassured about Harreld’s motives because of his own rewarding personal experience:
History is quite clear that no matter what threat you pose as a leader, if you make the trains run on time a certain percentage of the population will be perfectly content. The problem, of course, is that we expect — and should expect — college faculty to take a more nuanced view before giving a tyrant a free pass. And yet once again, as happened with the Faculty Senate Working Group ‘white paper’ on Iowa’s college rank, here we find a faculty member happily eschewing every basic tenet of scholarship in preference of full-blown political propaganda. From the end of Charis-Carlson’s piece:
Harreld was “despised coming in” because he was forced on the UI community by a cabal of co-conspirators who betrayed shared governance. Had those people not cheated, Harreld could never have become president on the merits of his own candidacy. Harreld was “despised coming in” because he falsified his resume, then claimed ignorance about the ways of higher education — even as he had just spent six of the previous seven years not as a business executive of any stripe, but as a lecturer at Harvard. Harreld was “despised coming in” because after saying he would not ask for tenure, a tenure provision was slipped into his contract. Harreld was “despised coming in” because he participated in the fraud of his own hire, including secret, preferential meetings which he remained silent about until after he finally took office.
As for Harreld using his “skill and expertise as a businessman”, we saw that in spades in his attempt to stick students and their families with $4.3M that they were not obligated to pay. Then again, this is the same veteran manipulator who acknowledged that he made examples of individuals at IBM through metaphorical public hangings — demonstrating that he had no problem ruining the lives of the few in order to traumatize the many into compliance. (In fact, as noted in prior posts, Harreld seems to enjoy doing things like that.)
On a more sophisticated level Harreld has cultivated collaborators since he was appointed, if not earlier, and as noted at the beginning of this post many of them trace their initial interaction back to the search committee on which all of his co-conspirators also served. And of course there were and are many good and practical reasons for Harreld to form alliances, including having people handy to meet with the press and make his case — particularly when he might be unable to do so himself. In that context, what with McGuire suddenly bursting onto the scene it is again tempting to get into the question of motive, but the truth is I don’t care why he decided to offer himself up as yet another faculty sacrifice in the storied tradition of Bohannan and Vaughn.
There is one related question worth considering, however, and that’s how a rapt Harreld supporter like McGuire found his way to ace reporter Jeff Charis-Carlson for this particular story, because the odds of that happening by chance are slim to none. Most likely, Charis-Carlson put in the usual request for an interview with Harreld, at which point the UI Office of Strategic Communications responded with the usual explanation — that despite being paid over three quarters of a million dollars a year in total compensation, plus free housing in the newly renovated presidential mansion, and a car allowance, J. Bruce Harreld cannot talk to the press without soiling himself. At that point the gears would have started turning internally, grinding through possible surrogates who could be motivated one way or another to deliver Harreld’s usual talking points, albeit from a purportedly detached third-party perspective.
It is possible that McGuire came to all of his stated conclusions by himself, and just happened to be hanging around the water cooler when a surrogate was needed, but his experience seems to have been limited to the Operations Team, not to broader policy questions regarding tuition or scholarships. He could have read about those issues in the press, of course, and chatted about those issues with others, but the degree to which McGuire’s comments dovetail with Harreld’s own view — while also omitting all of the contravening facts noted above — is curious.
I raise the issue not to imply anything specific, but because after I had written the first few drafts of this post my newsprint copy of Iowa Now arrived in the mail. Inside, on pages 6-7 — in the center-fold, as it were — was a nice article about Steve McGuire and his bike-building class. And yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that coincidence is a lot like the coincidence a couple of weeks ago, when the new vice president of the UI Student Government showed up not only in the Daily Iowan, but also in the most recent issue of Iowa Alumni Magazine.
Is someone brokering access to UI publications — or has that always been the case? Do the right thing for Harreld, and you too can be featured in Iowa Now, or the Alumni Magazine? As ever I have no idea how such things normally work, and I am endlessly naive about the idea that people are rewarded on the merits, but such a transactional approach to messaging would fit with someone who used to be the head of global marketing for IBM — as Harreld was.
The Iowa Now article about McGuire and his work as a teacher was sufficiently compelling that it made me want to take Steve’s class. It also didn’t mention Harreld or any of the issues that McGuire talked about in the Press-Citizen, nor should it. Although different in copy, it was very much like several earlier articles and media notices about McGuire’s work on the Iowa Now site, and yet — I still found it hard not to notice that the print version showed up right after McGuire took a star turn defending Harreld in the Press-Citizen. (Because of lead times in print, the Iowa Now article almost certainly went to press before Charis-Carlson wrote his piece — as would also have been the case with the Alumni Magazine article discussed in a prior post.)
The reason I raise the possibility that McGuire was prompted in some way is because not since the first few days of Harreld’s sham hire has anyone — and I mean anyone — put forward the idea that J. Bruce Harreld is a courageous visionary fighting to overcome the dreaded status quo. That was how Harreld was sold before the conspiracy behind his fraudulent hire was exposed in the fall of 2015, but after that no one tried to put that discredited narrative back to work. Until a week ago Friday, that is, when Steve McGuire suddenly appeared spreading the same exact load of manure.
In terms of his experience on the Operations Team, it’s clear that McGuire felt valued and useful, and I have no problem believing that he was doing good things for the school for all the right reasons. Harreld’s presidency, however, is founded on a lie — that he was legitimately appointed — and as president Harreld has proven to be a liar. Admittedly, much of the time Harreld’s lies are those of omission as opposed to commission, but as noted long ago, here at Ditchwalk we don’t distinguish between the two.
One problem with McGuire throwing his support behind Harreld is that Harreld has made it abundantly clear that his only plan is to strip as much money from the students as he possibly can, even if that means piling on untold debt in the process. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that under Harreld’s five-year plan, he will necessarily preclude some students from being able to attend UI at all, meaning he may also preclude some students from being able to take McGuire’s class. Students who write emails to McGuire like this, from the beginning of that Iowa Now article….
I don’t know what McGuire’s answer to such emails used to be, but given that Harreld has already raised tuition twice in less than a single calendar year — representing, at minimum, an increase of 10%, with another 33% increase on the books — he might want to start including a reference to being born rich. Having himself been fraudulently appointed by a small cabal of old, white, male millionaires, and being one himself, we can perhaps excuse Harreld for his merciless focus on frisking the students for every last dime. Even as I am under no illusion that all faculty are wonderful or selfless, however — and trust me; having spent most of my life in a college town, I know they are not — what are we to say of faculty members who support such exploitation? Or is college really becoming something that only the wealthy can afford?
I don’t know how McGuire came to his opinions about Harreld, and for the record I do not care. It’s enough that his admiration and support were blasted to the public by Charis-Carlson’s article, so that damage is done. Still — and again leaving motive aside — there aren’t a lot of options. The most innocent explanation would be that McGuire did not know relevant facts, and Harreld or his go-betweens or collaborators did not volunteer those facts to McGuire. Then again, you would think a faculty member well versed in the deeds of his favorite administrator would know such information, but to be fair, Harreld has been zealous about keeping some key numbers out of the public domain, so it is possible that McGuire simply did not know.
The reality of J. Bruce Harreld’s tenure as president of the University of Iowa is that after two academic cycles his only genuinely transformative act is giving up on even the pretense of administrative decency, so as to repeatedly abuse the most vulnerable constituency on campus. From ceaselessly targeting the student body with tuition hike after tuition hike, to reneging on scholarships through premeditated and illegal deceit, to slow-walking desperately needed mental health hires which could have been funded the moment he took office, to bailing on promised town halls because he did not receive the deference to which he believes he is entitled, to failing to maintain an effective relationship with members of the higher-ed press, in his dealings with the UI community Harreld is the antithesis of “collaboration and transparency”. And yet somehow, a week ago last Friday, I found myself reading an article in which ardent Harreld supporter Steve McGuire asserted the exact opposite, out of either ignorance or abetting malice.
The reason the question of McGuire’s motive is ultimately unimportant relates to the arrogance and self-importance of Harreld himself. Instead of talking about the damage he has repeatedly done to the students, and the damage he still intends to do, we end up having conversations about whether this pugnacious, bratty man — who is a millionaire in his own right, and will be paid a minimum of $4M over five years regardless of the damage he does — is being appropriately respected. Or we end up having conversations about whether faculty members like McGuire, who have a career and a job thanks to both the taxpayers of Iowa and the students who largely fund their salary, finally feel appreciated and empowered themselves.
From the point of view of the beleaguered students at the University of Iowa, it doesn’t matter why Steve McGuire thinks J. Bruce Harreld is a great administrator, a great president, or a great man. The only thing that matters is that the quickest way for Harreld and McGuire and every other vulture on campus to get the most money with the least amount of effort is to tell the helpless students that they have to pay an additional $3K per year for the same education they’re getting now. To be sure, in exchange for granting Harreld permission to commit a financial heist greater than the overt fraud perpetrated by Donald Trump at his now-defunct for-profit school, the Iowa Board of Regents will insist that Harreld make non-binding promises to increase need-based and merit-based student aid, but in the end those will amount to only pennies returned from each cynically purloined dollar.
On the other hand, while McGuire believes Harreld is “winning over larger sections of the university community”, I believe more and more people are realizing that Harreld is a rat. Whether McGuire himself is truly oblivious or not, there are people who know that Harreld’s “decision to withhold scholarships” was not “consistent with reality”, but a premeditated attempt to illegally shift $4.3M in tuition costs to students and their families. There are also people who know — despite the fact that Harreld assiduously avoids acknowledging this fiscal reality — that in FY18, which began only two days ago on July 1st, the University of Iowa will take in $43M in new tuition revenue as compared to FY16. Most importantly, there are also people who know that the quickest way to provide the most relief to the most students with the least amount of effort would be to tell J. Bruce Harreld to stuff his five-year plan to raise tuition 33%.
If I’ve learned anything over the past two years it’s that to far too many people in higher education the word ‘student’ has as much meaning as the word ‘voter’ does to far too many politicians. Students are to be used, to be exploited, to be lied to and to be cheated, and in less than two full years J. Bruce Harreld has checked all of those boxes. While Harreld spent a year or more screeching about the need for world-class faculty, what the students actually need are sufficient competent faculty to teach the subjects they are required to take and want to explore. Faculty who are not distracted or entitled, but who want to teach as much as they want to further their own careers.
It is not the students but the J. Bruce Harrelds of the academic world — the egotistical hucksters, the pretentious admins — who need everything gilded and sparkling with diamonds, all paid for with another tuition-extortion lie. Which is why I continue to hope that at some point the newly reconstitution Board of Regents will decide that Harreld is more trouble than he is worth, and send him packing. Because that, too, would make an interesting story….
During the June 7-8 meetings of the Iowa Board of Regents, new tuition hikes were approved at all three state universities for the upcoming 2017-2018 academic year (FY18). Those new hikes follow even greater hikes that were imposed last summer, for the 2016-2017 academic year just ended (FY17). For two straight years, then, the board has raised tuition at the last minute, only months before the academic years in which those rate increases were to take place, albeit for wildly divergent reasons discussed in prior posts.
In concert with the latest hikes — which the board and universities insist they were forced to implement as a result of cuts in appropriations, despite their deep and abiding concern for the financial welfare of the students — the regents also empaneled a Tuition Task Force to prevent future last-minute hikes. This dedicated fact-finding committee, comprised of four members of the board and launched with equal parts administrative gusto and dubious justification, kicked off its own proceedings during the June meetings by paying for a presentation from an academic expert on the economics of higher education. (We will delve into that presentation in the next post.)
Following the early June board meetings, and in anticipation of information gathering by the task force over the course of the summer, we looked at every conceivable facet of the tuition issue in a gonzo four-part post during the second half of June. While primarily concerned with the machinations of illegitimate University of Iowa president J. Bruce Harreld, who is determined to raise tuition an additional 33% over the next five years, that multi-part post also explored how Harreld’s plan necessarily requires a radical shift in board policy. Specifically, Harreld’s plan for Iowa would require that the regents allow the base rate of resident tuition to vary significantly at the state schools, with predictable negative effects on specific colleges and degree programs at those institutions.
While the regents did initiate the Tuition Task Force, the impetus for staging that bureaucratic roadshow springs largely from Harreld’s grand designs. In fact, taking Harreld’s five-year timeline as a template, the board subsequently imposed that same Stalinesque planning cycle on the other two state schools. As a result, of the four remaining public meetings on the task force schedule, the final three meetings feature the unveiling of new, five-year tuition plans for each the three state schools. (UNI is scheduled first on 08/07/17, followed by ISU on 08/09/17 and UI on 08/14/17.)
In the four-part post in June we engaged in some speculation about the true intent and scope of the task force, in part because of limited information, but also because the information that was available was anything but clear. A little over a week ago, however, more information about the Tuition Task Force was disclosed by the board, including details of the four public meetings that will be held over the next five weeks or so. A week ago Friday, on 07/07/17, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller reported details of the public meeting schedule, including a link to the new Tuition Task Force web page. That page contains a description of the committee’s broader charge, a link to a comment form for public feedback, and a number of links to related articles and reports. (We will dig into all of those links in the next post as well.)
On Saturday, 07/08/17, the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson reported on the upcoming meetings, including mention of key policy issues which we touched on in the four-part post. As noted there and above, the question of allowing the state schools to diverge in their base cost of undergraduate tuition has serious implications, and will be particularly disruptive for schools with redundant colleges. Allowing the state schools to charge different amounts for what are effectively the same degrees also raises the likelihood of creating a class system among the schools, with Harreld (of course) positioning UI as the snob school.
On Monday, 07/10/17, the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne also reported on the upcoming task force meetings. Of particular note in Payne’s piece is the role that the new University of Iowa Student Government is attempting to play in the tuition conversation. (Note also the update at the end of Payne’s report, indicating that the UISG leadership will not attempt to poach Iowa Tuition Grant funding — which is state-funded, need-based aid for private colleges and universities — and will instead advocate for need-based aid derived directly from Harreld’s massive proposed hike.)
In the remainder of this post we will look at the context surrounded the task force, because we now have sufficient information to determine what the task force is (and is not) trying to accomplish. Although the Board of Regents insists that the task force has no preconceptions and will “look at everything”, that is not actually the case. In fact, as noted in multiple prior posts, the last thing the board and its political enablers want is a genuinely honest conversation about the price of tuition at any of the state schools.
The Tuition Task Force Lie
In a recent post I acknowledged that I have long been naive to the black art of administration, including the routine practice of empaneling committees, task forces and the like to produce favorable or even predetermined findings. Doing so not only provides the appearance of consensus in what would otherwise be — and still is — unilateral decision making, but provides the side benefit of making any duped participants feels as if they had a voice in the process. (At least until the fix becomes clear, at which point it is usually too late.)
In that context it is surprising that the Tuition Task Force itself demonstrates that the Iowa Board of Regents does not care about the students at the state schools. The board usually does an excellent job of pretending it cares, and the regents always say the right things about higher education remaining affordable and accessible, and you’ve never seen people wring their hands harder about saddling students with more and more debt, yet all of that rhetoric is merely intended to dupe, co-opt or pacify the students who are being victimized with hikes. Worse, while the regents are always at great pains to blame the state legislature, the federal government, the economy or the business cycle for increases in tuition, as often as not it is the board itself that is preying on the students.
As regular readers know, here at Ditchwalk we don’t care what people say, we care about what they do, and in looking at the conduct of the board what we see over and over again are lies of omission and failures of oversight, which, somehow, always end up costing the students dearly. Whatever the Tuition Task Force is about — and we will answer that question in the next post — one thing the task force is assuredly not concerned with is the welfare of the students at the state schools, economic or otherwise. As shocking as that may seem, we can document the board’s disinterest in three different ways, starting with the state as a whole, then looking at the Tuition Task Force, then finally focusing on J. Bruce Harreld at Iowa.
Despite demonstrable disinterest in the students, however, that does not mean the task force is a bureaucratic waste of time. While the board could care less about charging students a fair price for the education they receive, there are important questions that need answering before the board can gouge the students for more money. That any conception of a Tuition Task Force inherently involves the financial welfare of students merely provides a pretext for discussions that the board is actually interested in having. Tuition is what students pay, so if you’re talking about tuition in any context you’re necessarily talking about the students who fork that money over, and that’s particularly true if you have promised to have a wide-open, no-topics-barred conversation. Unfortunately, at the state, board and school level, at least at the University of Iowa, the last thing anyone involved in the tuition conversation cares about is the students who will be compelled to pay whatever rates the board sets.
A Governmental Conspiracy of Deceit
Depending on your political leanings or what you have read in the news, you may believe that one political party in Iowa is more committed to education in general and to higher education in particular. Regardless of which party you favor, however, if you hold such views those views are provably wrong. In reality, the governmental determination to exploit college students for as much money as possible, while claiming exactly the opposite intent, stands as a rare example of bipartisanship in the state.
On multiple prior occasions we have discussed the first and most obvious example of the board’s disinterest in the welfare of the students at the state schools, but that disinterest is not limited to the regents. Even state officials who are entirely at odds in every other way instinctively gravitate to the same position, because it’s just too damn profitable. Except for the students themselves, it is in everyone’s self-interest to fleece the students at the regent schools because that means more money for everyone to play with. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone.
If you had set out to script a sequence of events by which elected politicians and university officials in Iowa would uniformly reveal their contempt for students at the state schools, you could not have done a better job than the chance events which played out during Fiscal Year 2017 (FY17). Specifically, in the summer of 2016 the Iowa Board of Regents approved a combined $65.4M in new tuition hikes for FY17, based on nothing more than a shortfall in requested supplemental appropriations. Six months later, when a failed REC estimate created a gaping hole in the state budget, the legislature had to recapture funds that had already been appropriated. Even though the regents were hit particularly hard, however, those clawbacks totaled significantly less than the tuition hikes that had been approved six months earlier, meaning the state schools would still come out net-ahead.
How much ahead? From Marissa Payne’s report on the Tuition Task Force, this past Monday:
At $18M, the funding recaptured by the state legislature amounts to less than one third of the $65.4M in new tuition revenue that was generated in that same fiscal year. For UI specifically, while the school lost $9M it also brought in a whopping $27M in new tuition revenue — again three times as much as was returned to the state. And yet, if you scour the reporting on those mid-FY17 de-appropriations, you will find no one — and I mean no one — who mentions that offsetting revenue windfall in the context of the state cuts. (The closest anyone came was UI CFO/Treasurer Terry Johnson, as reported in a 02/15/17 article by the DI’s Payne.)
What you will find if you look at the press reports is a free-for-all of politicians and administrators exploiting the clawbacks for their own ends, even as tens of millions in new student revenue was ignored. The clawbacks in turn also provided a cynical justification for the new round of hikes that were just approved in early June, which took even more money from students and their families. By simple math it is utterly false that total funding to the state schools was reduced, yet everyone involved — and I mean everyone — perpetuated the lie that the clawbacks reduced the amount of money available to each school.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this willful abuse of the students has been abetted at the highest levels of state government. In all the reading I have done, not once have I come across anyone who simply said, ‘Yes, the cuts in state funding are a problem, but we will be raising three times as much in new tuition this year, so there is no concern that these cuts will hurt the schools’. (As noted in the recent multi-part post, it is quite likely that the targeting of deep cuts at the regents in mid-FY17 was actually a result of raising so much new tuition revenue.)
Everyone involved in higher education in Iowa state government was aware of the tuition hikes that were approved in the summer of 2016, yet when the clawbacks hit six months later no one mentioned that massive, offsetting infusion of cash. Whether in league by design or larcenous coincidence, among the key players who had every opportunity to speak up, and thus prevent the latest round of trumped-up tuition hikes from being approved in June, we find the following conspirators:
* Former governor Terry “Butcher” Branstad, who made a big show of advocating for Iowa students and families while selling them out.
* Current governor “Casino” Kim Reynolds, who was in league with Branstad as his Lt. Governor, and is now blazing her own inglorious trail of betrayal.
* Republican state senator Brad Zaun, who introduced a bill last year to ban tenure at the state schools.
* Democratic state senator Herman Quirmbach, who used to chair, and is currently the ranking member of, the Education Committee. Quirmbach also represents the city of Ames, which is home to Iowa State’s 36,000+ tuition-hike victims.
* Democratic state senator Jeff Danielson, who represents Cedar Falls, which is home to the University of Northern Iowa and its 12,000 tuition-hike victims.
* Democratic state Senator Joe Bolkcom, who represents Iowa City and its 33,300 tuition-hike victims.
* Republican Speaker of the House Linda Upmeyer, Republican Representative Pat Grassley, and Republican Representative Bobby “Buttercup” Kaufmann.
* Democratic House members Bob Dvorsky, Mary Mascher and Vicki Lensing, all from Iowa City/Johnson County.
* All current and former members of the Iowa Board of Regents.
* All current and former presidents and high-ranking administrators at the state schools.
Given that most Iowans could subtract $18M from $65.4M and come up with a positive number, what’s going on here? Why is there not a single individual in the public record pointing out that in FY17, the state schools brought in a massive amount of new tuition revenue that was more than enough to offset the FY17 clawbacks? Just one person acknowledging that indisputable fact may have been enough to blow up the completely disingenuous tuition hikes which were just passed for FY18 — but of course the question answers itself. Had any of the above individuals spoken up, there would be less money pouring into the regent coffers, and that would mean more pressure on the state budget. (Even though state funding of the regents is expected to decrease another $10M for FY18, or about $28M below baseline FY16, that’s still less than half the amount of new tuition raised in FY17, and less than a third of the total tuition revenue when the FY18 hikes are factored in.)
It is theoretically possible that the higher-ed press uniformly suppressed such statements from government officials, but having followed the beat reporters in question over the past two years I do no think that is a credible explanation for the lack of disclosure throughout state government or across both parties. The more likely scenario is that everyone involved actively refrained from saying anything to the press about the FY17 tuition revenue because they cannot wait to get their money grubbing hands on as much student money as possible. They don’t care if the justification for a tuition hike is a provable lie, all they care about is new money coming in from non-tax revenue, because that means they can blow more state money on something else. Again, all it would have taken, and all it would still take, is for one person — from either party, or any quarter — to stand up and reveal this shell game, and it would become virtually impossible to keep fleecing the students, as the task force clearly hopes to do.
It Must Have Slipped Their Money Grubbing Minds
The second reason we know that the Tuition Task Force is completely disinterested in helping students is glaringly obvious from the details of the four upcoming public meetings. You can see those meetings listed here on the task force website (scroll down), and if you take even a cursory look you should notice that something is missing. Before giving you the answer, however, let me also predict that your immediate response upon hearing that answer will mimic the thought process of the board itself — unless you happen to be a student yourself. (That’s a hint.)
What’s missing from the four scheduled meetings of the Tuition Task Force, which has vowed to seek answers wherever they can be found, is that there is no scheduled slot for presentations from the duly elected student representatives at each school. And that — the thought that just flitted through your mind — is likely why there is no scheduled slot for student presentations. Because we all know student governments don’t really have a voice in any of the administrative decisions that are made on a college campus, except perhaps on those rare occasions when student leaders step forward out of sheer desperation, offering unconditional surrender in exchange for the help they need. (Hold that thought.)
Still, for colleges and universities it is can be very useful to have student governments on campus, because they can be abused just like committees and task forces. Instead of having to deal with the entire student body, a student government makes it easy for administrators to seem like they are being open and responsive to student concerns, when in fact they are using the student government to ignore student gripes. Whether inviting students to join fake or done-deal committees, co-opting student leaders with access, or using them for propaganda purposes, there are all kinds of ways that student governments can be used to manipulate and pacify the unpredictable and potentially unruly student body on any campus.
In fact, we looked at one such example in the recent four-part post, where we noted that UISG Vice President Lilián Sánchez was featured prominently in an Alumni Association Magazine article. Predictably, that article was all about need-based financial aid, and how there will be so much more for students like Sánchez if only everyone rallies behind Harreld’s plan to increase tuition at Iowa by $3K per year. (What the article left out, of course, is that most students will end up paying much more than they will ever receive in return, if they receive anything at all.)
In response to this glaring and telling omission by the Tuition Task Force, the greater Board of Regents may be preparing one or both of the following excuses as you read this. First, the board may claim that because the task force is meeting in the dead of summer, when students are typically not around, there was no point in inviting the student-government leaders. Leaving aside the fact that holding the public task force meetings when students are not available is yet more proof that the board has no interest in hearing from the students, that excuse still fails because of a courtesy the task force extended to those who were invited to present.
Here is the text describing the first public meeting, which will take place in ten days on Thursday, 07/27/17, in Des Moines:
Not only are student government leaders not invited to present to the task force, despite the fact that other elected representatives were invited, but those who were invited are also allowed to send designees, meaning any student government leaders who were unavailable could have been afforded that same courtesy. Adding insult to injury, not only are student government leaders or their designees precluded from any opportunity to contribute, but in the afternoon session the task force scheduled three solid hours of presentations from various representatives of the business community — none of whom will have to donate blood to pay for the next round of tuition hikes that will be advocated for by the task force.
The second and more likely excuse that the board will turn to is that it was assumed that students and student leaders on each campus would present their ideas during the ‘Listening Sessions’ that will take place at the three subsequent meetings. Each of those considerably shorter public forums will take place on the campus of one of the state schools, during which that school’s five-year tuition road map will be disclosed. Again, notwithstanding the fact that the task force scheduled those meetings and listening sessions when everyone would otherwise be on vacation, there is no dedicated slot for student leaders to respond during those proceedings.
For example, here is the entire schedule for the first of those meetings, at UNI:
The UNI brass gets an hour to drop their secret tuition plan on those assembled, after which anyone who wants to can give up their lunch hour to stand in line and offer an off-the-cuff response. It should also be assumed that any student leaders who do attend will not get an advanced look at the plan specifics, even though the task force and board will have been apprised before it is unveiled. Instead, even though they represent the only constituents who will be negatively impacted, the student leaders will learn the details of UNI’s five-year plan when the public is informed.
By omitting the student leaders on each state campus from a formal role at the public task force meetings, and particularly by refusing to give them time at the first meeting, when the major players will weigh in prior to the final drafting of the five-year plans, the board both invalidates those students leaders and prevents them from presenting a unified front. Even if the UNI student leaders show up at the second public meeting, are the student leaders from ISU or UI likely to attend? Probably not. (Any student leaders who do attend and comment will be just another voice in reply, meaning their statements may be drowned out by news of the plan itself, or omitted from reporting because of word-length limits.)
The reality of being a student leader at one of the regent schools is that everything will be fine as long as you suck up or defer to the university administrators and the board of regents. The moment you think you have a voice, however — or worse, the moment you stand in opposition — you will be cut off at the knees. And you don’t have to take my word for that.
What the Regents Really Think of Student Reps
Here is former Iowa State student government president Cole Staudt, from a statement he released seven-and-a-half months ago, in early December of 2016, after the Board of Regents voted to implement differential tuition at Iowa State:
Again — do not listen to what people say, watch what they do. That is particularly important when it comes to the regents, because the board is staffed with professionals who are paid to lie, obfuscate, dissemble and invalidate. The board is also routinely helmed by political fixers, who are granted the powers of board president not because they are well-versed in higher education, but because they can be counted on to take orders from the politicians who appointed them. Still, at some point the board must act in furtherance of its crony agenda, thus revealing its corrupt motives.
Continuing from Stoudt’s statement:
Whether you agree with Staudt’s position on differential tuition or not, does he seem reasonable in his requests? Does the board seem responsive? Do you feel bad for him?
Well, here’s how the board’s Darth Vader — former president Bruce Rastetter — responded to Staudt in the press, as reported by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on 12/05/16:
Stoudt supported differential tuition based on class standing as opposed to degree path, and if you’re interested you can read more about his thinking in an Iowa State Daily article by Jake Dalby, also on 12/05/16. For his part, Darth Rastetter was crystal clear: the only justification for increasing tuition was a commensurate increase in the cost of providing the necessary coursework for a given degree. Which of course made it all the more surprising that only a few months later Rasetter had the following to say about Harreld’s plan to increase tuition at Iowa by 33% over five years.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 03/02/17:
Four months after insisting that tuition increases could only be justified by the cost of specific degrees, and after using that rationale to publicly ridicule former ISU Student Government President Cole Staudt, Rastetter was more than ready to stick University of Iowa students with massive year-over-year tuition hikes, for no other reason than because Iowa’s tuition is below that of the average for its research-oriented peer group. Not even the most disingenuous claims about the FY17 clawbacks could justify such an increase, so instead Rastetter spewed forth a delirious rationale tied to UI’s strategic plan, which in itself is not a fiscal blueprint. Relative to his “clear and blunt” response to Staudt four months earlier, Rastetter’s support for Harreld’s plan was indefensible, but because coherence has always been the last thing on Rastetter’s mind he saw no contradiction.
In a nutshell, that is what the Iowa Board of Regents and the state universities think of the student representatives at each school. As long as those reps are content with an occasional pat on the head, and otherwise keep their mouths shut, they will be tolerated. Should they actually seek to participate in decision making, however, or advocate for their student constituencies, they will be ignored, frozen out of the administrative process, and, if necessary, publicly rebuked for their callow temerity.
Though Bruce Rastetter is no longer on the board, and the Tuition Task Force ramped up after the reconstituted board met at the beginning of June, the board’s ongoing disinterest in student input is self-evident from the fact that student leaders were given no formal role in presenting information to the purportedly information-hungry task force. So what is a student rep to do? Well, despite being kicked to the curb, student representatives do not have to take a back seat in the tuition conversation.
For example, while no one else wants to talk about the $65.4M in new tuition that the regents raised in FY17, or the additional $26M that the regents will now take in during FY18, it would be easy for the student leaders at all three schools to get that information out on social media, or into the papers at their universities. In fact, as previously noted, the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne just reported — specifically in the context of the Tuition Task Force — that the total amount of appropriations recouped at all three schools was only about $18M in FY17. All someone has to do is point out that tuition revenue for that same period was net-ahead $47.4M, and people may start wondering why the regents just raised tuition again.
The answer, of course, is that they raised tuition not because they had to, but because they could not pass up such a perfect excuse. In FY18 an additional $10M or so will be cut from baseline FY16 funding, but another $65.4M in tuition will come rolling in. Meaning even if the regents had done nothing in June, the schools would still be net ahead $37.4M. Instead, because the regents are corrupt, they ignored the FY17 tuition hikes while simultaneously using the FY17 clawbacks not only as a pretext to raise tuition again, but also to launch the Tuition Task Force, and in so doing formalize and regularize similar abuses over the next five years.
Because the board and university presidents talked endlessly in the press about the FY17 de-appropriations, everyone now knows that money was taken off the table this past year, and that the hurt will only grow in FY18. Because the board and university presidents refrained from talking about the tuition hikes they hit students with this summer and last, however, almost no one knows –and even the student reps at the state schools may not know — that in FY18 the regents will rake in an astonishing $91.4M in new tuition revenue compared with baseline FY16. That windfall means that at the end of the 2017-2018 academic year, the regent schools will be net-ahead $63.4M despite the additional $10M in cuts for FY18.
The board of regents and the university presidents do not respect the student leaders at the state schools, in large part because there is no downside to disrespecting those elected leaders. The student leaders are tolerated because they can be used, but as the Tuition Task Force makes clear the students will never be consulted in any meaningful sense. That could change, however, if the student leaders at the three state schools stopped trying to influence or appease the administrators and regents, and instead informed their respective constituencies that they have already been the victims of concerted deception, which the Tuition Task Force is now empaneled to legitimize and perpetuate. While the FY17 clawbacks were very real, and the additional cuts in FY18 are real, the universities have already raised more than twice the amount of those combined cuts with the FY17 hikes alone, and in FY18 they will add another $26M on top of that. If I was a student at one of the state schools, that’s what I would want to know from my elected representatives.
The Black-Hearted Hypocrisy of J. Bruce Harreld
The third example of the board’s pathological administrative disinterest in the welfare of students at the state schools is one we have previously discussed in multiple posts, and it is easily the most disturbing. Because of enrollment increases over the past five years or so, key student services at all three campuses have not simply been lagging, they have been insufficient to meet demonstrated need. No single service has been under siege more than mental health support, which could conceivably represent the difference between academic success and failure for many students, and even life and death for a few.
The situation was so bad that shortly after J. Bruce Harreld took office at UI, the student government leaders at all three schools spoke out at the state capitol. From the Gazette’s Erin Murphy, on 02/16/16:
What the student leaders did not know at the time, of course, was that the Iowa Board of Regents would push through $65.4M in new tuition hikes that summer, after which the board and university presidents would pretend that windfall did not exist. As a result of that bureaucratic scam, the student leaders were reduced to advocating for a new self-imposed fee to keep kids from killing themselves, despite tens of millions of dollars in new tuition revenue from the very people who needed those service. Had the board funded increased mental health support from the FY17 tuition hikes, students would still have been paying for those improvements, but that wasn’t enough. The board and the university presidents first rocked the students with hikes, then forced them to pay for improvements in mental health care with an additional fee.
Flash forward to today and some of the benefits from that self-imposed fee are finally being felt, but there is a long way to go. From the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne this past Tuesday, 07/11/17:
As for new staff, UI continues to drag its administrative feet despite having just granted itself another $16.5M in FY18 tuition hikes, again taking more money from the very students who need those services:
How bad was the problem at UI? Here’s Schreier, from a report by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on 02/22/16 — three months after Harreld took office, and four months before Harreld pushed through $27M in FY17 tuition hikes for UI alone:
Now here’s Shreier in the fall of 2016, at which point millions of dollars in new tuition revenue was already rolling in. From the Daily Iowan’s Madeleine Neal, on 10/05/16:
However bad mental health services were when Harreld took office, it is clear that he was apprised of the school’s status, including the fact that UI was badly lagging compared to its peers in the Big Ten. Note also that unlike the academic mopes in administration at Iowa or the other state schools, Harreld was a business genius who single-handedly saved IBM from the administrative chore of reorganizational bankruptcy. By Darth Rastetter’s own wheezing testimony, Harreld was hired because he was a whiz at everything from fiscal triage to generating new businesses with other people’s money, yet from the moment he took office Harreld couldn’t even be bothered to move money around to shore up Iowa’s woeful mental health services.
The great hypocrisy in that, of course, is that given Harreld’s baseless mania for raising tuition to the average of Iowa’s research-oriented peer group, you would think Harreld would apply that same metric to other facets of UI. Instead, Harreld demonstrated disinterest in the mental-health crisis on campus, even as he could not wait to use the exact same comparative rationale to raise tuition even more, both last summer and a few weeks ago. But of course funding mental health services is a cost, while new tuition is revenue, and Harreld is all about stockpiling as much money as possible, regardless of the risk to anyone’s sanity.
When the FY17 clawbacks became a reality earlier this year, Harreld’s first instinct was to defray those cuts by illegally reneging on $4.3M in student scholarships. When Harreld had to abandon that plan in the face of multiple class-action lawsuits, he suddenly ‘found’ $4.9M in funding that was left over from the flooding in 2008, then used that money to help cover the unexpected $9.2M hole in UI’s budget. What we know now that we did not know the last time we looked into Harreld’s black heart, is that if Harreld had prioritized the mental health needs of the students on campus as soon as he took office, he could have drastically accelerated the hiring process by putting that $4.9M reserve to work. Instead, Harreld chose to sit on that money even if doing so cost some students their academic standing, their mental health, or even their life.
By the summer of 2016, just over a year ago, Harreld also knew to a certainty that UI would have $27M in new tuition revenue flowing in during FY17. In response to that completely unjustified taking of student funds, which was approved on a pretext by the Board of Regents, Harreld still compelled the student body to inflict another fee on itself to get improved access to mental health services. He did so in utter defiance of his own rationale for raising tuition to the average of Iowa’s research-related peer group, he did so without any concern for the possible real world consequences to the students who were paying that increase, and he did so because he wanted to keep that money for himself — including $11M that he subsequently diverted into a discretionary presidential slush fund.
When you’re young it can be hard to look at an elderly man in a position of authority, who has a Harvard MBA and is pulling down $800K per year ($200K deferred), and accurately identify that individual as a miserable human being. And yet, if we stand back and look at Harreld’s priorities and the lies he has told — at his attempt to defraud students of $4.3M, at the two tuition hikes he has already pushed through, and at the 33% hike he is now demanding — it is impossible to deny that J. Bruce Harreld’s single consistent focus as president of the University of Iowa has been exploiting the student body at every conceivable opportunity.
Students Should be Billed and Not Heard
One thing to keep in mind about Harreld’s abuses at UI, however, is that the Board of Regents is ultimately responsible for every decision he makes, regardless of the layers of plausible deniability that the regents have built into their bureaucracy. In fact, unlike most of the employees at UI, as a regent president Harreld is paid by the board because he works for them. More to the point, with regard to Harreld’s anti-student agenda as just described, the board had every opportunity to intervene, and instead granted its consent.
When Harreld announced at a board meeting that he would be cutting $4.3M in scholarships, not one regent asked a single question about that plan. When Harreld pushed for $27M in new tuition in the summer of 2016, not one member of the board asked if he would use some of that windfall to improve mental health services on campus. (To underscore Harreld’s malevolence, and the board’s complicity, just after his fraudulent appointment in the fall of 2015, but before he took office, the supplemental FY17 request that Harreld submitted to the board was a mere $4.5M. Yet even after he eventually walked away with $22.5M more than requested, Harreld still slow-walked desperately needed hires, and still forced the students to impose a fee on themselves to get the help they needed.)
If there is a silver lining to the board’s passive-aggressive, anti-student agenda, it is that in the past two years the student leadership at all three schools did band together to address a critical issue for their constituents. That they were ultimately forced to self-fund mental health hires even as their schools took in a combined $65.4M in new tuition revenue is an indelible stain on the reputations of the board members and university administrators, but through collective action the students did find a way to take care of their own. In that same vein, if the student leaders at UNI, ISU and UI put their heads together, study the facts of the two tuition hikes that were approved in the past year, and take their case to the students and the press, I believe their concerted action will influence the public and private debates of the members of the Tuition Task Force.
The great black cloud against which that faint silver lining can be perceived is the pervasive and malevolent disregard that the Iowa Board of Regents and the administrators at the state schools have for the welfare of the students, whether mental, financial or otherwise. So entrenched is that disinterest that despite the singularly unique mission of the Tuition Task Force, let alone repeated promises that no stone will be left unturned in seeking answers, the regents could not be bothered to express any formal interest in input from the student leaders at the regent schools. Instead, business leaders get a seat at the table, and state politicians get a seat at the table, while the elected representatives of the students who will pay through the nose are ignored. (I’m not sure which is worse: that the board forgot to extend an invitation, of that it decided to withhold an invitation.)
From all of the above, one thing the Tuition Task Force is definitely not concerned about is looking out for the students. To the extent that the students are necessarily part of the conversation it is only as a resource, like a vein of ore to be mined. By all accounts tuition is going up at Iowa State and up even more at Iowa, which raises an interesting question. Why go to all of the trouble of putting a task force together on the pretense of making those new and abusive rounds of hikes more predictable? (If you’re going to be repeatedly punched in the face by a bully, does it really help to have advance notice, or does that actually make it worse?)
If the task force effectively grants the board the right to take whatever it wants from students and their families, making hikes more predictable will not be difficult. On the other hand, the board is contemplating a radical departure from past tuition policy, and on that front there are uncertainties. Creating a Tuition Task Force is an efficient way to sift through alternatives, test rationales and generate buy-in from affected stakeholders. That the Iowa Board of Regents does not consider students and their elected representatives to be among those stakeholders says a lot about the board’s priorities, but also helps us understand the questions the task force is actually trying to answer, which we decipher in the next post.
Stealing a line from the movie ‘Secretariat’, “There is a shortage of people over there that know what’s going on”.
The Univ of Iowa is clearly run by amateurs led by Harreld. Doubtful that the guy who had no idea what his job would be, has caught up in the past two years. Sure he is money grubbing, but what else is he up to? Making U of Iowa #156?
Is there anything other than hot air coming out of Iowa these days? Is anyone ‘changing medicine’? Is a new Van Allen putting satellite up into space? There is about as much excitement as a mattress testing business. Innovation comes from the West Coast and kind passes over Univ of Iowa..
Obviously the bean-counters have taken over, and their idea of fun is running a spreadsheet. For every bean-counter hired or in power, you can subtract 10 creative, artistic, and innovative faculty.
Harreld and his bean-counters only think statistics like average of tuition at peer schools, and have no ability, none, nada., zip ability to come up with exciting new areas of study, or new programs or programs to actually ATTRACT excellent faculty or students.
And that is the sad paradox of all this: As the bean-counters raise the cost of the school, they lower the quality. Sooner or later the U of Iowa becomes the old Parsons Univ, or ‘Last Chance U’ where Iowa students attend from loyalty and Chicagoland kids go because anyone who pays gets in and it is a Big Ten university. The most innovative program is Bruce Harreld teaching on ‘How I Single-Handedly Revitalized IBM to be Better than Anything in the Universe, Yes Even Better than Sears or KMart”, (except it isn’t, have you checked the stock price lately?).
I swear bean-counter smear manure on their teeth to get that kinda bean-counter breath than keeps appointments short and nonproductive and meetings long and gross. Maybe they roll it in like dogs thinking they are cool.
The trend described isn’t even itself new or innovative. Tends to be the way the Trumpian USA is going, for instance blowing a 10T-world wide industry like green energy to gain 10,000 miner’s votes and all the ignorant curmudgeons who deny climate change. Buttercup Kaufman would be dang proud.
What will happen is that Iowa, as a whole is more dumbed down to Bobby K’s delight. Bad enough but these students will be caught in the inevitable Great Financial Crisis generated by massive student debt.. The Univ Iowa might as well ring up a bill too, to add to the panic.
Student debt is
1.) Stupid: In 2017 there should be free university (at least 2 years if not 4) to educate a population for future tough competition in a world increasingly educated (exception USA) and techincal;
2.) Immoral: Making money from students is simply immoral. It should not be the mission of higher education to feature University Inc to obtain nice carpets, pretty secretaries, and big cars;
3.) Suicidal: When the Big Financial Crisis hits, at a point when students cannot possibly pay back the massive debt as the overall financial situation worsens due to the business cycle, or Trumps pathetic nonexistent economic policies of pulling out of world trade, and putting in place tariffs.
When the students default on their 250,000-300,000 of debt once again financial institutions will go down, and the economy will be in a massive recession.
Student monies should not be going to Bruce Harreld’s new stupid projects. No; Starting a career as a young adult in debt is terrible plan and disastrous over time.
Further, anyone with 1/2 a brain should understand that freed up from the 150,000 to 350,000 debt, these new career adults would be buying houses, cars, TVs etc etc etc and investing which would increase the economy’s growth by 1-2 % at least (I made that % number up, but I think it is a good lie; but it is true that would be an incredible and realistic economic stimulus).
Harreld,, who despite his engineering degree must be a bean-counter at heart, is simply following the national trend into hell, and economic crisis.. At that point 33% of faculty will be unemployed, classes slashed, and tuition will decrease….or perhaps totally mitigated by someone with enough political savvy and foresight to see how the USA committed economic and technical suicide with regressive academic policies.
Harreld and his legion of bean-counters will contribute to a disaster that may change the face of higher education in the country. The UIHC will over build and likewise go down in financial crisis (with other health systems) that will likewise change the face of health care in America.
The two major changes in America over the next 10-15 years:
1. Free or greatly reduced higher education and tech training;
2. A national health care system offering basic health care and good preventive care
But is all has to fail before America changes it’s ways; that seems to be the New World’s way.
In line with your comment, one of the realities I’ve come to over the past two years is that the bean counters took advantage of the enrollment increases triggered by the Great Recession across the board. Almost all of the commentary about the high cost of education comes from inside what is effectively a bubble, giving rise to opinions which are incomplete and distorted.
This article appeared a couple of days ago, and while it’s understandable that it didn’t get a lot of notice given what’s happening in D.C., it should scare the hell out of everyone in higher-ed. Any subprime collapse has a ripple effect, and coupled with a contraction in overall enrollment even some of the bigger schools — which spent like loons over the past decade — could be looking at serious problems.
Dormouse has raised the question of debt at UI more than once, and every once in a while I find myself wondering if the budget is okay in the near term, but there is some monstrous day of reckoning lying in the out years, which is the real objective of the Tuition Task Force. (It’s been almost two years since we had the last budget numbers on the cost overruns at the new Children’s Hospital.)
Everyone involved is preying on the students, and along comes Harreld, eager to ratchet that abuse up to a whole ‘nother level. It makes no sense, and yet that’s clearly what they are thinking about doing….
Yes, I think there is a monstrous day of reckoning on the way, though if it doesn’t have to do with a fiscal sinkhole opening at the hospital, likely it’ll have to do with a flock decision on the part of Chinese parents that there’s no reason to send children to Iowa for an education. There just isn’t a way to make up for either of those things.
If it comes to that we’ll just close down entire programs and there’ll be some kind of baloney about online whosis for a while until people tacitly admit that it isn’t happening. I don’t know what happens when you turn off a university building, but I bet it’s not great. We’d have the abandoned McMansion wastelands you saw in the last recession up between Coralville and North Liberty, and a lot of rental projects would collapse. I suppose the bond ratings would tank as we failed to borrow money to service existing debt and then missed payments. And basically people would be freaking out.
My guess is there’d be some effort to consolidate Regents’ universities, also to beg desperately for federal help, but…I mean this is all part of the story of the decline, no?
The really distressing thing is how personal prudence won’t save you anymore. It doesn’t really matter how carefully you manage your own affairs if your civic and state-level leaders are busy indebting you to the moon and back with no very solid prospect of paying off the debt. And for what? A lot of fancy buildings that won’t hold up well anyhow. Buildings, buildings, buildings. Palaces for all.
Did you know that Portland’s just voted to borrow nearly a billion dollars to spend on various school facilities? Billion dollars.
Oh…I’m pretty sure there’s a monstrous day of reckoning, but I don’t really see how a TTF can fix it. I mean lookit. You got an international-student population responsible for $100M, $120M a year. The day those parents decide something else is better, that’s over, and those kids take their pink Prada spring coats somewhere else.
Where else does that kind of money come from? The debt service doesn’t stop when they leave, either; the research money doesn’t look promising, either. I looked a while back at what we pay on that debt, can’t remember, but service on $1B can’t be small.
I’m watching these guys run through all the usual permutations: we’ll have business partnerships! We’ll deliver courses over the internet! We’ll hang up banners everywhere! We’ll expand, no, cut enrollment! We’ll hire more student fin-aid advisors to help the kids sign the forms! We’ll give them free summer courses — wait, no we won’t! We’ll make it so they can graduate in three, no five, years! Look, new programs made of bits of old programs!
Except, in the end, none of it really makes up for strong federal and state support and a taste for thrift. Shabby old classrooms. Libraries. Talky-talk majors. A crummy old fieldhouse. Kids who want to read and know something they didn’t know wherever they came from. A rep as a genuinely interesting place with odd, hopeful people.
I honestly don’t know what they’ll do when it implodes. Harreld will be gone by then, I imagine. And they can shut down programs, close buildings. But then what? Who wants to buy an academic hall 200 miles from Chicago?
Unfortunately, the unending greed and stupidity is making it remarkably easy to shove the quality of Iowa’s schools even further down the toilet.
I have a high-schooler. At one time, I actually thought UI might be a sensible place to send a kid to school, and I thought, well, how clever, to live right near a perfectly good and reasonably inexpensive university. Now, of course, it’s neither. But. You know what costs just about the same thing as UI?
McGill.
Concordia.
UBC’s a bit more.
That’s right. For a couple thousand more a year than UI’s COA, more or less the same once Bruce is through, you can send a kid to one of the best universities in the world in Montréal or Vancouver. Much less if you or the kid’s other parent is Canadian, or if you’ve got a friend or relative up there the kid can stay with. You can’t get into those schools if you’re a terrible student, but if you’re a pretty good student, you can, meaning there’s no need to Xanax and all-nighter your way through high school. Staying in’s reportedly harder than getting in.
It’s looking like study abroad from here.
Unless you’re rich, you’ve also got other options if your kid’s bright and tests well. Most of the fancy schools in the US will grant your kid enough in aid to put the price at or below UI’s.
I cannot believe that any of these people actually have any idea what they’re doing. This all reminds me of the mediacorp feeding frenzy for publishing houses in the 80s and 90s, before the mediacorps stopped and noticed that what everyone had been yelling at them was true, that there’s no money in books. Then they freaked out and tried to unload, but they’d sunk so much money that nobody would take the houses off their hands, not at those prices. Along the way they did manage to destroy one of the best publishing industries that had ever been, though. There was that.
I’m also trying really hard to imagine why, if I were a Chinese or Indian parent, I’d send my not-quite-UT-caliber kid to Iowa rather than UBC or Simon Fraser.
1. Massive Chinese and Indian communities in Vancouver; none to speak of in Iowa.
2. UBC/SFU costs, what, $80K less than UI for intl students?
3. UBC’s ranked much higher than UI.
4. UBC/SFU comes with a 3-year pass to get a job in Canada and qualify for permanent residency; Trump admin is hoarding H-1Bs and telling foreign students to go home.
I mean there must be something, but I don’t get it.
I don’t get it either. The tuition road map that the board is hinting at is like Golidlocks and the Three Universities. UNI will be the cheap school, ISU will be the low-priced research school, and UI will be the high-priced snob school.
This cash grab will take place in a context of what looks like regional recession, increased competition among neighboring states for resident students, and in complete denial of the fact that students really might opt to go elsewhere in numbers.
As you note, there are a lot of metrics that already suggest UI is bumping up against its own value proposition, and yet Harreld wants to raise tuition by 33% over five years. What could go wrong?
I think one of the things Harreld figured out very quickly when he was first approached to be the beneficiary of Rastetter’s fake search, is that — despite plenty of rah-rah bravado — far too many people in Iowa have deep-seated feelings of inadequacy about themselves and the state. (We saw this in nauseating detail when McKibben slobbered all over Leath for buying a land for a retirement home, as if that somehow validated Iowa’s existence.)
Harreld’s “world class” tic is aimed at preying on those week minds, like a higher-ed version of Sylvester McMonkey McBean. And the hell of it is, it seems to be working. Far too many people have bought into Harreld’s demented view of higher education, the founding principle of which is exploiting students at every conceivable opportunity.
In the previous post we showed, definitively, that the Iowa Board of Regents’ Tuition Task Force is not concerned with the welfare of the students who will end up paying whatever increases the board eventually approves. In an earlier four-part post we also laid bare the lie that tuition hikes at public schools are always or even mostly triggered by cuts in state appropriations. Not only is that conventional wisdom not true in general, it was decidedly not the case in Iowa in Fiscal Year 2017 (FY17), when the board approved egregious hikes well before the emergency budget cuts which occurred later in that fiscal cycle. That those unexpected mid-year cuts were then used to justify another round of hikes in June merely underscores the degree to which the regents will use any pretext to gouge the students.
Still, whether out of ignorance or malevolence the general consensus among those who have looked at the rapidly rising cost of higher education at public schools — which has outstripped inflation for decades — is that decreased state funding is largely to blame. Despite being provably false, and despite the fact that the Board of Regents pushed through completely unwarranted tuition hikes in the summer of 2016, the board used that exact rationale to justify a new round of tuition hikes this summer, while simultaneously ignoring tens of millions of dollars in new, self-generated tuition revenue. Ignoring the board’s wilful, premeditated lie of omission, and looking only at the messaging by the board, if we were to imagine that the regents set out to study and rectify that funding problem what would the board have inevitably done? That is: if the board acted on the false claim that cuts in appropriations were the root cause of all tuition hikes, while perhaps also acting on its purported desire to do the right thing for the students, what would that response look like like?
The answer, of course, is that the Iowa Board of Regents would have put together an Appropriations Task Force, thus taking the funding fight to the state legislature, which the board has identified as the primary if not sole trigger of tuition hikes. Instead, however, the board not only empaneled a Tuition Task Force, it then invited those same legislative perpetrators to weigh in on how much the board should charge the students at the state schools in the future. From the Tuition Task Force web page:
Imagine a scenario in which your local police claimed that a criminal organization was responsible for a string of robberies. Now imagine that instead of putting together a Robbery Task Force, the police put together a Taxation Task Force to hire more officers, then invited the leaders of that criminal organization to weigh in on the appropriate rates of taxation. Would you put up with that, or would you be outraged?
That’s where we are with the Tuition Task Force. While the Iowa Board of Regents insists that it only raises rates in response to funding cuts — which, from the past year alone is a provable lie — it has done nothing to take the fight for more funding to state government. Instead, the board uses every available pretext to take more and more money from the students, and as often as not those tuition hikes are out of scale to any real or imagined cuts.
The problem, of course, is that the Iowa Board of Regents is not only not an innocent bystander, or even a bit player in the tuition-hike grift, but the ringleader, spearheading the fleecing of students and families by any and every means possible. By the very nature of its statutory charter, the Board of Regents is the government agency by which money can be taken — in the form of a fee called tuition — from private citizens, in return for the service of a (partially) state-funded education. (Even in those rare years when tuition is not increased, the board can still generate tens of millions of dollars by imposing new ancillary fees, increasing preexisting fees, and/or raising the price of room and board.)
As noted in prior posts, the stated objective of the task force is to make tuition hikes more predictable, which of course says nothing about what that predictability might cost. Still, that objective is being sold as a benefit to students and their families, as well as to the board, and all other things being equal — which they are not — it probably would be better to have predictable tuition hikes as opposed to last-minute increases, for whatever reason. Even if the board is robbing students blind, students would be able to plan for those stickups, and of course the board would love to know when its next windfall was due.
In terms of how to make tuition hikes more predictable, however, there still doesn’t seem to be much justification for putting together a Tuition Task Force, because there is only one possible answer. Instead of waiting for a funding cut, or a purported funding cut, or any other excuse for raising tuition, the board will have to schedule regular increases in advance. (In this post we will pretend that the board will not still use any and every excuse to raise tuition even more than planned.) From the board’s point of view, the problem with that solution is that it solves the predictability problem at the expense of the two foundational justifications that the board uses for increasing tuition. (While making tuition increases predictable may be of some marginal benefit, any hike still has to have some purported basis, else increasing the cost of tuition would constitute nothing more than state-sanctioned theft. You know — like the slew of tuition hikes that were enacted last summer.)
First, and most obviously, raising tuition at regularly scheduled intervals would put the lie to any claim that tuition increases only take place in response to heartless funding cuts from state legislators. Second, raising tuition at regularly scheduled intervals would almost inevitably expose those increases as having nothing to do with the cost of delivering the education that students were paying for. Instead, not only would regular tuition hikes effectively produce a guaranteed profit, but — as we saw with the tuition hikes enacted in the summer of 2016 — such preemptive payments would actually incentivize the state legislature to cut funding. As a result, it’s entirely possible that the state schools would remain revenue neutral over time, or close to it, even as students were paying an ever-increasing percentage of the total cost of their education.
If the board raises tuition in the absence of a compelling justification, let alone in a way that voids both of the justifications it usually puts forward, then students and their families are rightly going to wonder why they’re paying more simply for the privilege of doing so predictably. Of course the scale of any scheduled tuition hikes also matters, but the board is clearly not talking about authorizing simple inflationary adjustments. To the contrary, the board is already seriously considering a plan by J. Bruce Harreld, the fraudulent president of the University of Iowa, to raise tuition 33% over the next five years, and to do so for reasons that have nothing to do with inflation, legislative funding cuts, or the cost of delivering the education that UI students receive. (More on that in a moment.)
Even at UNI, which is the smaller of the state’s three universities, and will introduce the smallest proposed hikes when it unveils its own five-year plan in two weeks, any proposed tuition increases must buffer the school from the purported disruptions which caused the board to hike tuition twice in the past year, or what’s the point? Likewise, while Iowa State will likely propose tuition hikes that fall between UNI and UI, those increases will be significantly greater than inflationary adjustments, and will have little or nothing to do with the base cost of delivering an education.
Were the board to offer students and their families a choice between last-minute tuition hikes triggered by actual cuts in funding, or increases in the cost of delivering an education, versus regular hikes divorced from either necessity, I think most students would choose the former because doing so would cost a lot less over time. (Perhaps another reason why the board has no interest in inviting formal presentations from students or their elected campus representatives.) On the other hand, from the board’s perspective, cutting ties with both of those justifications would be a theoretical boon because it would effectively allow the board to raise tuition with impunity. Unfortunately, in the real world the victims of tuition hikes expect some plausible justification for the increase in cost, over and above convenience.
Here, then, we finally have the answer to our question. Because regular tuition hikes in excess of inflation necessarily invalidate the board’s prior justifications for increasing tuition, the board needs new excuses for raising rates as a matter of routine. Unless the state legislature is willing to enact regular, perfectly-timed cuts in appropriations, the regents won’t have the legislators to kick around any more. And unless the regents are willing to argue that they can predict the cost of delivering an education years in advance — which they have utterly failed to do in the past — the board will not be able to blame rising costs for driving its own rising costs.
The board does not want to call attention to this fact, but the five-year plans they are about to implement constitute the most radical changes in tuition policy in the history of the regents. What the board really does not want to acknowledge, however, is that for the most part that radical agenda has already been tacitly approved, pending a formal rubber stamp. For example, following the paid appearance by an academic expert at the board meeting in June, along with prior messaging in the press, the board is poised to allow base tuition at the state schools to diverge, which will inevitably impact the organizational structure of each university. (That upheaval may be why J. Bruce Harreld previously initiated a review of Iowa’s organizational structure through former Provost P. Barry Butler, to get ahead of some of the more obvious negative effects.)
Because Harreld has been talking for months about increasing tuition at Iowa by 33%, it is also a foregone conclusion that tuition is going way up at that school, and up as well at Iowa State, based on nothing more than a desire for more revenue. Where the board might have argued for small, regular hikes in tuition, perhaps in line with average increases over the past ten or twenty years, tacit acceptance of Harreld’s plan makes that impossible. While the final percentages are still in flux, the premise of increasing tuition in order to fund research and other non-educational pursuits has simply been accepted by the board with no debate.
The critical question the board is thus faced with is not how to take uncertainty out of the tuition-setting process, but how to sell what the board already intends to do. Fortunately, the Tuition Task Force enables the board to validate those decisions after the fact, through various administrative gimmicks like stage-managed presentations and meaningless public dialogues. Even better, the answers the task force will likely adopt are not only already in play, but in heavy rotation at the board.
Look through press reports and official statements, and nowhere will you find anyone claiming that tuition needs to go up precipitously at the regent universities in order to provide the education that those schools are obliged to deliver. Instead, and as noted in these pages over the past two years, what you will find is J. Bruce Harreld endlessly hyping “world-class” everything, including world-class faculty, world-class facilities, world-class research, and of course a world-class Athletics Department — notwithstanding one gender discrimination case that was recently lost, and another that was settled, for a combined $6.5M. Where Harreld fails as a university president, he truly excels as a marketing weasel, which makes sense given that he used to be the head of global marketing for IBM. As such, Harreld has been beating the “world-class” drum for years, in keeping with his stated philosophy of messaging as leadership:
True to his word, Harreld has been relentless in selling the idea of Iowa as a world-class institution, in large part because delivering on that promise will cost him absolutely nothing. To see what I mean, imagine you have a sudden hankerin’ for an apple. Fortunately, it’s apple season and you can buy a dozen crisp, delicious, worm-free apples at your local farmer’s market, for only a few dollars. And let me tell you: these are really good apples. Pesticide-free, multiple varieties, peak freshness — you cannot get a better-tasting apple at any price.
Just as you are about to pull the trigger on that deal however, you see a nearby manhole cover slide open, and moments later J. Bruce Harreld climbs out of the sewer. Slinking over to where you are — which, fortunately, is upwind — Harreld tells you that while all of those other apples are fine if you like that sort of thing, he has a world-class apple he’s willing to sell. He doesn’t have it on him, of course — but he’s got one, and because you’re such a nice person he’s willing to sell you that world-class apple at a special price.
Now, given that you can purchase a dozen apples which check all of your apple-buying boxes for a couple of bucks, how would you price that world-class apple? Because that is exactly what marketing weasels are good at. They take a couple of words, they wedge those words into the recesses of vain or needy or fearful minds, then they exact a hefty price for providing that dubious service.
In Harreld’s case, even as he was applying for the gig at Iowa he was practicing Snob Appeal 101, hyping the school as a world-class university. And why not? There were undoubtedly many ignorant Iowans who did not know they were supposed to measure the state universities against world-class competition — however different that competition might be from UI, ISU and UNI — and were instead naively grading those schools on boring metrics like education. To Harreld’s good fortune, it turns out there is indeed a persistent streak of deep-seated insecurity in some Iowans, including particularly those in positions of power, which makes them especially susceptible to carpetbagging trash from the coasts. All Harreld had to do was exploit those feelings until Iowans felt like crap about themselves, at which point he would be able to propose almost anything — including, say, a 33% tuition hike over five years, premised on nothing but the fact that Iowa’s undergraduate tuition is less than the average for its research-oriented peer group. (Again, note the snobbish synergy: Iowa is ‘below average’.)
To understand how Harreld’s weaselly messaging has come to dominate the conversation at the Board of Regents, consider first this quote from a report by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, way back on 12/01/15:
At that time, and until early this year, the “growth” strategy was championed by former regent president Bruce Rastetter, who thought about such weighty issues with a commodity baron’s mindset. Cripple the competition, corner the market, drive prices through the roof. Harreld, on the other hand, proposed a radically different approach which would culminate in the same eventual larceny, yet his approach involved a whole lot less work. Instead of growing the business, take it upscale.
Flash forward to today, and here’s regent Larry McKibben — who also happens to be chairing the Tuition Task Force — as reported by Iowa State Daily’s Maggie Curry, ten days ago on 07/13/17:
McKibben is not actually concerned with figuring out what it costs to fund “world-class research” or “high-quality teaching”, because there are no metrics that will answer such questions. (Again, how much is a world-class apple worth?) Instead, one of McKibben’s main goals as chair of the task force is to figure out what the board can charge for such meaningless hype. How much more money can the regents steal from students in the name of “excellence” or “quality”, as opposed to delivering and improving real (and expensive) educational services? Is 33% at UI doable, or too much?
A similar marketing con unfolded at the “world-class” Iowa Athletics Department this past week. From the Gazette’s Mike Hlas, on Monday, 07/17/17:
To be clear, Hlas gets that it’s all marketing hype, but his complaint is that it’s bad marketing hype, because he’s still not sold:
It’s one thing for politicians, businesspeople and the board to agree on a plan that they themselves won’t have to pay for, and another thing entirely to convince the students and families who will have to eat Harreld’s baseless 33% hike that doing so is in their best interest. What are the deliverables UI will return to students in exchange for massive, regular increases in the cost of the same degrees those students are earning now? Will they get a gold tassel at graduation? Will their degrees be hand-printed in an overseas calligraphy sweatshop? (Not without a fee.)
In terms of actual performance, what are the metrics by which the state schools and the board will demonstrate that “world-class” quality has been achieved? Or does all of that devolve back to questions of rankings, which can be gamed? From the point of view of students, if — for some inexplicable reason — they bought into such a plan, they might want some assurance that money collected for nebulous qualitative improvements was not being siphoned off for other purposes. Conversely, from the board’s point of view, nothing would be better than finding ‘quality’ metrics that could be improved through accounting tricks alone, thus allowing some of all of that new tuition revenue to be spent on other pursuits.
As regular readers know, what Harreld really wants to spend money on at UI, and what McKibben wants to spend money on at ISU, is not improving quality, but actual research — and particularly for-profit research, as conducted by corporate partners who will be eager if not determined to get the answers they are paying for. One big motivation for using tuition hikes to fund that research is that all of that money will flow into the general education fund, meaning it will be both unrestricted and disconnected from its source. As a result, where most people who contribute to research expect something in return — stock options, a percentage of the profits, revenue from the licensing of patent rights — all Iowa will have grant to its compulsory student ‘investors’ is the exact same degree that would have been conferred anyway.
Look again at McKibben’s quote above, where he mentions “world class research” first, then remembers to add something about improving the quality of the teaching at ISU. Even though he got both concepts into the same sentence, that formulation still renders education and research as distinct, which fails to justify the board’s tuition-poaching agenda. Because J. Bruce Harreld is quite literally a world-class marketing weasel, however, only a few days ago, on 07/20/17, he closed the remaining gap between education and research.
In yet another ghostwritten press release Harreld argues — without any supporting data — that students inevitably benefit from studying at a research university, thus any money spent on research equals money spent on education. Of course as any college student knows, that’s not even remotely true. Between classes taught by grad students and coursework that involves no applied research, many if not most students at UI and ISU receive the exact same education they would receive at UNI, which is not a research university. But of course Harreld can’t acknowledge that, or he won’t have a good excuse for screwing the students at Iowa out of tens of millions of unrestricted dollars, which he can then shove around as he sees fit.
The Tuition Task Force is not concerned with improving the educational mission at the state schools, and it is only peripherally concerned with making tuition hikes predictable. The unstated goal of the task force is making research funding more predictable, and the easiest way to do that is to sock the students with regularly scheduled tuition hikes year after year. However, because predictability undermines the argument that funding cuts drive tuition hikes, and because the magnitude of the hikes under considering voids any claim that educational costs are driving those increases, the board seems to be following Harreld’s lead at UI and replacing those justifications with marketing hype.
Where before tuition hikes were purportedly caused by cuts in legislative funding, or increases in the cost of delivering an education, now tuition hikes are critical to achieving world-class standing. Unfortunately, at least for the students at the state’s two research universities, that status can only (and quite coincidentally) be accomplished by bringing base undergraduate tuition up to the average of the research-oriented peer groups to which those schools belong. The end goal for the Tuition Task Force, then, is to determine which new justifications will allow the board to raise tuition the most at each school, and yet in that uncertainty there is some faint hope. While many of the big decisions have already been made, the fact that there is some wiggle room in the conversation means there is still an opportunity to influence the outcome.
In any administrative undertaking it is important to know who you can and cannot count on. Do you have the institutional support you need to accomplish your goals? Do you have political cover? And of course, whether what you’re doing is for good or for ill, do you have the votes?
For all of those reasons it is not very often that you see a group of seasoned government operatives slip on a banana peel, tumble down a flight of stairs and plummet into an open elevator shaft, but this week the Iowa Board of Regents did just that. Today should have been the all-star kickoff to a series of scheduled public meetings by the board’s recently formed Tuition Task Force, including six hours of presentations from legislative and economic stakeholders. That invitation-only, information-gathering session should have provided critical political and administrative cover for the board’s long-term plan to normalize annual tuition hikes at the state’s three universities. Instead, on Monday the board’s political and administrative vulnerability was exposed when the regents announced that the day-long meeting had been cancelled.
In order to parse McKibben’s statement it is helpful to know the following facts. The Iowa Board of Regents is comprised of nine members, all of them citizen volunteers appointed by the governor. The mission-specific Tuition Task Force is comprised of four of the nine regents, and is slated to submit a final report sometime in September. (The board is scheduled to meet on September 6th and 7th at the University of Iowa, but it is not clear if the report will be submitted to the full board at that time, or later that month..)
While the board is a separate statutory body from the governor’s office, it was reduced to a corrupt crony apparatus by the former governor and remains so to this day. Although the current Iowa governor, “Casino” Kim Reynolds, just took office after her predecessor abruptly resigned and left the country, she was consulted on the recent re-appointment of one sitting regent and the appointment of two new regents. For that and other reasons, the political composition and leanings of the majority of the members of the board — and in particular the newly elected president, “Casino” Mike Richards (no relation) — are closely allied with the governor.
Legislative invitees to the three-hour morning session of today’s cancelled task force meeting included: the governor (or designee), the legislative leadership (or designees), the Legislative Services Agency (LSA), and the Department of Management (DoM). Because both houses of the Iowa legislature are currently controlled by the governor’s party, the Iowa Board of Regents has powerful friends in high places in every branch of government. For that reason, not only should there have been no problem getting those invitees to attend, there was every opportunity to mount a coordinated series of presentations in favor of whatever agenda those politicians and regents agreed upon in advance.
For the three-hour afternoon session, which focused on economic development, the invitees included: the Iowa Association of Business and Industry (IABI), the Department of Workforce Development, and the Department of Economic Development. If you look up those groups you quickly learn that Workforce Development is a government department (it has a .gov URL), the IABI is a private organization (it has .org URL), and that the Department of Economic Development (IDED) no longer exists. Instead, in 2011 the IDED was replaced by the Iowa Economic Development Agency (IEDA), which is indeed also part of state government, even as it uses a .com address, which always seems sketchy.
Because of the dominance of the governor’s party in state government, and particularly the business-friendly nature of the governor’s politics, it would also seem to have been a triviality to get those groups to appear before the Tuition Task Force, regardless of the relevance or appropriateness of doing so. Cinching those associations even tighter, note that the original idea for the Tuition Task Force reaches back months, to when the former governor was still governor, and one of his biggest political donors was still president of the regents. In fact, when the former governor resigned and handed the job to Reynolds, who had been his Lieutenant Governor for six years, and the former board president handed his gavel to Richards, who was a long-time political crony, one of the first decisions the new governor made was to borrow the private jet of Richard’s casino partner, Gary Kirke — yet another long-time business and political crony of the former, governor, the former board president and the current board president — and take herself on a barnstorming tour of that state. (Thus “Casino” Kim.)
In terms of governmental, political and personal connections, the relationship between the board president and the governor alone could hardly be tighter, suggesting that the governor had the board’s back as it sought new, plausible justifications for changes in tuition policy. In that context, you would also think there would have been ample coordination between the board and the governor’s office regarding the objectives and actions of the Tuition Task Force. Whether through staff intermediaries or direct back-channel communications, the idea that the board and the governor’s office were not on the same page about the Tuition Task Force, let alone actively collaborating on achieving the board’s objectives, seemed laughable on its face.
And yet…given the board’s history of tuition hikes over the past two years, it should have been clear from the get-go that the task force represented a risk to every elected government official. When news broke on Monday that today’s meeting had been cancelled, I was revising several posts I intended to publish in the days before the meeting, each of which focused on a different task force vulnerability. Even the fact that the governor had been publicly invited to present seemed problematic, yet at the same time it was inconceivable that the governor had been named if permission to do so had not be secured in advance. (The “or designee” alternative seemed to have been included precisely to give the governor a way to weigh in without committing her to a personal, and politically attributable, appearance.)
From the post I was working on when the cancellation was announced:
If we look at the statement released by McKibben, it says only that the task force was “not going to have a high enough turnout of presenters”. From subsequent reporting, however, we got the details on the individual invitees. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, also on Monday, 07/24/17:
In terms of a show of support that is about as bad as it could possibly get for the task force, and by extension the board. In particular, what prompted the broad-based snub by the governor? Not only couldn’t Reynolds even be bothered to send a designee to say something politically expedient into a microphone, but the majority of departments under her authority refused to contribute in any way. Add in the refusal of allies in the state legislature to participate, and the silent treatment from the private-sector IABI, and the response from those who should have been most supportive — if not also most compliant in their participation — was a virtual wipeout. (Among the state agencies only the director of Workforce Development, who was appointed by Branstad, confirmed participation. Did she miss a memo?)
Again, how is this possible? Did the board not ask the governor if she wanted to be involved before publicly inviting her to appear? Were no other options presented, even at the last minute, to somehow save face? From the outside looking in, it’s almost as if the governor went out of her way to kill today’s meeting, yet why she might have felt the need to do so is not immediately clear.
We get a very big clue, however, from the fact that the only two elected officials who agreed to show up hailed from the loyal opposition. Not only that, but both Quirmbach and Winckler would have brought long legislative experience to bear. In state education policy they are both gavel-pounding heavyweights, and the fact that they were both willing to present to the task force suggests that whatever political exposure exists, they are not particularly concerned about its effects. (Both Quirmbach and Winckler are up for reelection in 2018, lending credence to the idea that if Tuition Task Force is politically toxic, that toxicity will have a decidedly partisan effect.)
In fact, in a related story by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller two days later, on 07/26/17, Quirmbach made it clear that he himself recognizes the political risk to the governor and her party:
As regular readers know, Quirmbach is right in the narrow case he is making about Fiscal Year 2017, but wrong in the broader assertion that legislative cuts are wholly or even largely to blame for tuition increases at the state schools. To the extent that Quirmbach is a politician and senses an opportunity to make political hay, we can understand the impulse, but we must not turn a blind eye to the facts. On the question of the board’s hikes hurting students and their families, however, Quirmbach is spot on.
From a USAToday report by Haley Samsell, on 07/20/17:
The changes that the Board of Regents are contemplating, and that the task force was empaneled to legitimize, include unprecedented tuition hikes, particularly at the state’s two research universities. Whether the ~85,000 students who attend the three state schools, and their invested relatives, are sufficient in number to cause political trepidation, is a question that seems to have been answered in the affirmative this week, and in a very big way. All of which means that as things now stand, the Tuition Task Force is not simply on its own, but it has become a political liability.
If any of this is surprising it’s the degree to which the board seems to have been genuinely blindsided by the lack of response from the governor. No administrator with any savvy walks into that kind of pubic rejection, but here were are. What was to have been the most important public meeting held by the Tuition Task Force is now a void, yet it also seems clear that whatever the task force recommends, those recommendations will not receive political cover from the governor or state legislature.
That exposure is critically important going forward, because the board itself will now have to take sole responsibility for raising the price of tuition at the state schools. Given that there is no pressing need for such hikes, and that the state legislature has no immediate plans for funding cuts that would then allow the regents to shift blame, it is not at all clear that the board has the will to forge ahead. Instead, cancellation of today’s meeting may have put an effective end to the board’s plans for massive hikes.
Whatever inherent uncertainty there may be in planning for tuition hikes — which the board as often as not exploits by raising rates significantly more than required to compensate — that may simply be the best of a bunch of bad options. From the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne, also on 06/26/17:
Of the three invitees who were prepared to present to the task force, the director of Workforce Development had no comment when contacted by Payne about the basis of her intended presentation. Winckler and Quirmbach did respond, however, with the latter also noting the omission of any invitation to students or their elected campus representatives:
The cancellation of today’s meeting means we will not be able to answer some important questions, but thanks to late reporting one curiosity has been partly resolved. While presentations from the governor (or designee) and the legislative leaders (or designees) would have been noteworthy because of their offices, I was particularly looking forward to what the Legislative Services Agency and Department of Management might have had to say about preventing last-minute tuition hikes. As happened on Monday, news dropped on that front while I was in the middle of drafting this post last night, and it is more than a little perplexing.
From Paul Brennan at Little Village, late on 07/26/17:
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, how did the crack staff at the Board of Regents, or the leadership at the board, or the three former state legislators now serving on the board, not know this? How is it possible that an invitation was sent to a long-standing, thoroughly mundane government agency, when that agency is not in the business of doing what the board asked them to do? Was that a cry for help? Proof of diminished capacity? Or…did the governor simply tell the DoM director to pass?
Regarding the groups that were invited to the afternoon session, what they would have contributed to any conversation about last-minute tuition hikes left me completely baffled. With regard to the IABI in particular, I was eager to hear their presentation because I could not imagine how they would advance the topic under consideration, or any other aspect of the tuition question. Still, that the board chose to invite private business interests to present, while making no time for presentations from students or their elected campus leaders, struck me as particularly revealing.
The Tuition Task Force is Not a Fait Accompli
Over a number of recent posts we have looked at the core issues the task force is and is not concerned with, but there is another important dynamic to keep in mind. Whether an organization is squeaky clean or completely corrupt, at any moment in time there is an internal momentum driving every institution toward its goals. Like turning a large ship, pivoting any collective human endeavor in response to internal, market or even cultural changes takes time, and the bigger an organization is, the longer it usually takes.
The Iowa Board of Regents is comprised of only nine citizen volunteers, who are supported by a relatively lean office staff of 20 or so employees. The number of stakeholders who are affected by board business, however, easily tops 100,000 statewide, with additional reach across the country and around the world. Impacting every major power center in business and government, including the local communities in which the three state universities reside, the $5B regents enterprise has a massive footprint, and as such tends to change course only after considerable deliberation. (As often as not that deliberation takes place behind the scenes, and involves political and business cronies, but it still takes place.)
It is not clear who selected the four regents who comprise the task force, or what conversations may have taken place while former president Bruce Rastetter was still haunting the regent halls. As soon as Rastetter passed the gavel, however, “Casino” Mike Richards signaled a different managerial approach. We do not yet know if the changes will be substantive or not, but the very existence of the Tuition Task Force reflects Richards’ desire for more transparency, and despite today’s cancelled meeting the work product of the task force will definitively answer that question.
The possibility that the Tuition Task Force may, to some degree, be a genuine fact-finding body, is supported by two observations. First, because of recent turnover at the board, the long-time crony enforcers — former president Rastetter and former president pro tem Katie Mulholland — are gone, and they have been replaced by new regents who are decidedly more deliberative. Both former legislators, these new regents in turn give the board a decidedly less-corrupt cast, while the inclusion of one of those former legislators on the task force suggests that the board is genuinely interested in making use of her legislative expertise, as opposed to making sure the fix is in. (Not that those two objectives are mutually exclusive.)
The second reason the task force may not be just for show is that a number of the linked documents on the task force website either undercut or do not support changes in board policy that the board seems poised to embrace. Those changes include: allowing base tuition to diverge at each of the three state schools; justifying large-scale hikes using the “world class” rationale put forward by fraudulent University of Iowa president J. Bruce Harreld; and promising to increase need-based aid in exchange for rate hikes, which is tantamount to wealth redistribution. While the Tuition Task Force is relatively clear in its charge — to “examine the core issues and strategies central to the process of setting tuition at the three Regent Universities” — it would have been trivially easy to link only to documents and resources which support the board’s broader aims, yet the board chose to include information which calls some of those aims into question.
We will consider a number of those linked documents in detail in the next post, while in the remainder of this post we will take a closer look at the four regents who make up the task force, and the degree to which they may or may not be willing to own the radical changes in tuition policy that are under consideration. Although there are clear signs that the board will gladly brutalize students with egregious and unwarranted tuition hikes, as already transpired in the summer of 2016, there are also indications that it may pivot away from Harreld’s grand plan. From the point of view of the students it’s all bad, with any difference measured only in the number of dollars they have left, but as the lack of buy-in for today’s cancelled meeting makes clear, such takings are not without risks. And that’s before we consider the possibility — no mater how slight — that some of the task force members may be contending with moral qualms of their own.
To understand why the Tuition Task Force could still go either way, consider that despite recently voicing support for “world-class research” and “high quality teaching”, the chair of the committee — Larry McKibben — favors keeping costs down as much as anyone on the board. And I don’t just mean McKibben is committed to keeping tuition down, I mean he is fanatical about keeping all costs down, including the state’s minimum wage, even if that means workers live below poverty level. The fact that McKibben’s ideology has no regard for human suffering actually lends credence to the idea that McKibben might oppose Harreld’s massive hikes at Iowa, and lesser hikes at the other schools.
As noted on more than one occasion, it does not matter what people say, it matters what they do. Could McKibben be sandbagging in his role as head of the task force? Is he saying the right things to the pro-increase crowd, while making sure those plans are scuttled by the task force itself? Over the past two years McKibben’s track record has been one of submissive compliance to Rastetter, but tuition is an issue that cuts to his political core. Were McKibben to go along with Harreld’s abusive plan he would reveal all of his prior rhetoric to be nothing more than self-serving talk.
Like McKibben, the vice chair of the task force, Milt Dakovich, has been on the board for four years, and has two years remaining in his term. Like McKibben, Dakovich was a loyal crony vote during Rastetter’s autocratic rule, to such a degree that he was one of the regents who conspired — along with Rastetter, Mulholland, McKibben and former regent Mary Andringa — to fraudulently appoint Harreld at Iowa. As to Dakovich’s personal views about tuition or any other issue, I have no idea what they are because he rarely speaks in public. Based on his track record it can reasonably be assumed that he will follow McKibben’s lead, unless and until president Richards tells him to do something different.
One concern with McKibben and Dakovich — who make up one half of the task force — is that they are both named in a lawsuit against the five regents who conspired to fix the final board vote in Harreld’s favor. Specifically, on 07/30/15, McKibben, Dakovich, Mulholland and Andringa met with Harreld in two meetings of two at Rastetter’s place of business in Ames, more than a month before the final vote, and mere days before the search committee’s cut-down process began. While Harreld himself is not named in that suit, because he was in those meetings, and because Rastetter coordinated those meetings with Harreld, it is possible that Harreld knows — and could thus threaten to expose — information which would be injurious to McKibben and Dakovich, were they to oppose his plan to hike tuition at the University of Iowa by 33%.
The third task force member, Sherry Bates, who was originally appointed to complete the term of a regent who resigned, was recently reappointed to a new, full, six-year term of her own. Like Dakovich, Bates seems to keep her head down, but not because she is a subservient crony tool. In reading about her contributions to the board she has done good work on the Campus Security and Safety committee, yet given the track record of the board overall, and in particular a number of her recorded votes, I have to acknowledge that I am probably once again being naive. Still, weighing heavily in Bates’ favor is the fact that she was not one of the four regents who improperly met with J. Bruce Harreld prior to his sham appointment.
The fourth member of the task force is the new kid on the block — Nancy Boettger. While an unknown in terms of the board, like McKibben she is a former state legislator, and not merely in passing:
Not surprisingly, Bottger’s background is seen as an asset by the current board, and particularly by McKibben. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 04/06/17:
As noted in the previous post, ‘excellence’ or ‘quality’ is the new marketing strategy by which Harreld and the regents intend to legitimize any changes in tuition policy which are eventually passed. As such, Bottger’s words could easily be read as supportive of a plan to strip students of as much money as possible. There are, however, three mitigating factors in reading Boettger’s comments in that light. First, here is the next paragraph from Charis-Carlson’s piece:
As longtime readers know, here at Ditchwalk we are big fans of Mary Louise Petersen. Following Harreld’s rigged election in early September of 2015, she was one of the few heavyweights in the UI orbit who had the courage to question the manner of Harreld’s appointment — including particularly the improper meetings Harreld participated in with members of the board. Whether Nancy Boettger has that kind of spine or not remains to be seen, but if Petersen is a friend that’s a vote in Boettger’s favor.
Second, Boettger has four children and sixteen grandchildren, including offspring who have attended the state schools. In fact, one of her sons is currently a senior at UI, so it seems unlikely she would favor socking resident undergrads with a 33% increase over five years. While there are admittedly plenty of people who do not care what happens to others as long as they get theirs, but I don’t see Boettger as one of those people. Unlike the carpetbagging Harreld, or even the malevolent Rastetter, I think Boettger thinks of Iowans as something more than a commodity to exploit.
Third, while four-year graduation rates have ticked up and down over the past few years, Boettger understands that one of the best ways to keep total costs down is to get out in four years. Unfortunately, 40% to 50% of students at Iowa’s state universities currently fail to do so, meaning they are subject to another year or two of tuition and fees.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/22/17:
That combination of public policy and familial tough love does not sound like someone who intends to massively increase the price of a regent degree, because doing so would inevitably decrease the four-year graduation rate while driving up student debt. Notwithstanding the board’s willingness to soak students with tuition hikes this year and last, I also do not see McKibben, Dakovich or Bates looking to raise rates precipitously, and that’s the entire task force. There are five other regents on the board, of course, meaning a majority, but a quick head count suggests it is unlikely that there are five solid votes in favor of allowing Harreld to rampage through student bank accounts..
Again, it may turn out that Harreld’s 33% gambit was always a feint. The board could ‘force’ him to settle for 25% (wink-wink), ISU could raise rates 15%-20% over five years and still look cheap in comparison, while UNI could increase prices 10% and profit handsomely. All told the schools would generate well in excess of a hundred million dollars in new annual revenue compared to today, yet UI and ISU would still be able to complain that they were below average when compared with their research-oriented peer groups. Even at those ‘reduced’ rates, however, the imposition of massive year-over-year increases premised on no demonstrable need would make the Board of Regents politically radioactive, raising the additional possibility that the governor or the legislative leaders in her party may not simply abstain from presenting ideas, but might move against such a plan.
Although there is clearly momentum at the regents to set the fleecing of Iowa’s students on autopilot, there may also be individuals or even a faction on the board who are opposed to that radical plan. In fact, as just noted, there may be members of the task force who would prefer a more moderate approach, which could in turn affect their findings, or even the five-year plans that the regent universities are set to reveal in the next two and a half weeks. In any case, publicly engaging the task force with questions and facts which expose the board’s flawed assumptions, refute the board’s baseless claims, and put the task force members themselves on the hot seat, may pay off with the rejection of Harreld’s “world class” con at Iowa, and thus also prevent collateral abuse at the other two schools.
Here is another quote from the blog post I was writing on Monday:
That was written before I learned that today’s meeting had to be cancelled because the governor and her minions left the task force in the lurch. It would not be hyperbole to say that the most important objective of the Tuition Task Force is now lost, and I am not talking about any of the board’s plans to raise tuition. Instead, I am talking about the board’s clear intent to insulate itself from accountability by positioning itself as a mere agent of the consensus of more prominent stakeholders.
The governor and members of her administration and party have made it abundantly clear that they want no part in the task force’s decision making process. Where the board has always blamed the legislature for forcing tuition hikes — even in those instances when the board chose to raise rates of its own free will — in a counterproductive moment of perverse irony, the only person currently reinforcing that cliched justification is state Senator Quirmbach. (He needs to think about who he wants to help: the task force and board, or the students and families who are about to be robbed.)
The board’s only fallback position, which President Richards has already laid the groundwork for, is to claim that any tuition hikes are really the responsibility of the university presidents. Unfortunately, because only the board has statutory authority to approve increases in tuition, that excuse will not inoculate the board from any blowback. For all of the reasons stated above, then, and more that we will get to in the next post, I will not be surprised if the five-year plans which are announced are significantly less aggressive than has previously been intimated. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next three meetings were also cancelled in the coming days, because for the first time in a long time the board is truly exposed.
I really do not sense that they’ve got a lot of room between the tops of their heads and the ceiling, tuitionwise. This isn’t Massachusetts. The average family isn’t making serious middle-class money. This is a state with a lot of divorce and families where the support order runs less than $200 per kid; it’s also a state where only a quarter of the population’s been to any kind of college and hardly anyone’s gone to graduate school. We’re talking about people to whom $300 is serious money. There isn’t an extra $300.
Whatever arguments they may be making to themselves about the reasonableness of jacking tuition given other schools, I’m just not seeing it going.
That said, I also don’t know how they continue in this manner, and again the question of institutional debt comes up. Built into the bond ratings is an expectation of revenue growth. And that will come from…nowhere. So here’s all this debt service and an institution that’s mostly trying to retain the circulation in all its extremities, and…you know, here’s the thing.
Remember new university buildings in the ’60s and ’70s? Full of that terrible linoleum and carpet, pre-terrazzo and granite? They were thrifty buildings, well-equipped, but not luxurious at all. They were hopeful. This was where a nation high on itself was going to do Big Things. I don’t see hopeful buildings at this campus now. I see desperately tired buildings, and I see self-aggrandizing shiny-suit buildings. Neither one says anything about hope. The shiny buildings also seem to age poorly and fast.
I really don’t know what this state can do. It’s true we can go on educating the weaker Illinois students as their own state collapses. (The better ones will go to Madison and Ann Arbor and Minneapolis, if they don’t go to private schools.) We’ll ride the China train into the ground. But when I look around to see where more money might come from, I’m damned if I see it. Okay, tax business more if the people will vote in a government that’d do it, but…it’s not exactly a giant economy, and it’s true that we don’t have a well-educated workforce. We haven’t begun to reckon the costs of public pension plans. Every Iowan student I talk to has parents cobbling together livings, all the families have too many kids for the income, and there’s huge dependence on government jobs.
I think it’s possible that over the next 20 years both universities shrink back towards pre-1980 shapes: fewer programs of study, very large lectures, less hands-on work. I just don’t see how we’ll be able to live out Gartner’s dream, with expensive biz/tech programs.
I can see governance trying to build some baloney public-private partnership with corporate partners running, say, biosciences, but you’d have to persuade them to do that here rather than, say, Boston, or southern California, or New Jersey, or St. Louis, and I just don’t see why they would.
Will that mean less opportunity? Yes and no. It’d mean you’d have to leave to do, say, neuroscience. But we don’t have top programs in many of these things now — we have limping-along programs from which kids emerge and struggle to find jobs, because when you’re inside them you don’t really know what a competitive program is, you got in and went because you’re probably not all that eager, you don’t have the publications you need to go after a tenure-track job in academia and you honestly have no idea what industry is. So while I’d say we have opportunities, you’re going to work a lot harder to make those opportunities than you would, say, at Rutgers.
I’m just not really seeing what else fits into this ecological niche.
I’m with you. Everything we know about the financial margins Iowa students and their families are operating within says there isn’t a lot of loose money floating around. The very fact that Harreld is trying to sell his cash-grab hikes with the promise of more financial aid in return, tells us there is serious demand for that aid. (Every time I think he is out of deeply cynical ploys, he comes up with a new one.)
Even the increases that have already been approved over the past year are steep, to which we can add differential tuition and upperclassperson fees and on and on. It’s like watching a piranha feed on a still-writhing body….
I also find myself thinking again and again about the debt issue you’ve been pointing to all this time. Harreld is trying to raise an insane amount of money — all of it unrestricted, and thus free to be “sloshed around”. It is so out of scale to any pressing need, or even any reasonable want, that I can’t stop thinking there is a financial crater out on the horizon that only a few at UI or the board even know about.
As hard as it maybe be to believe, in a little over a month it will not only be two years since Harreld was fraudulently appointed, it will be two years since we had the last update on the construction budget for the Children’s Hospital of Iowa (CHI). On September 1st, 2015 — two days before Harreld’s sham appointment — the regents dumped news on a variety of fronts, including the fact that CHI had blown its budget by about $70M. Since then, and despite additional delays, nothing.
Then there’s the fact that Rastetter gave the naming rights to CHI