A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
07/15/18 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Student Housing Market.
07/08/18 — A must-read report on the chaotic and reckless construction process of the new UI children’s hospital, from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller.
07/05/18 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Mike Crow/ASU Playbook — Part 2.
07/02/18 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Mike Crow/ASU Playbook — Part 1.
06/18/18 — J. Bruce Harreld Tells (More) Lies to the Daily Iowan. Updated 06/20/18.
06/04/18 — Reassessing the Integrity and Credibility of the Iowa Board of Regents.
05/28/18 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Employment Practices Whitewash.
05/20/18 — The Bunker Mentality of J. Bruce Harreld – Now With Loaded Guns.
05/13/18 — J. Bruce Harreld Lawyers Up.
05/07/18 — About That “New” Budget Model at the University of Iowa.
05/01/18 — That didn’t take long. The Gazette’s Vanessa Miller reports that J. Bruce Harreld is killing off Iowa’s 70-year-old Institute of Public Affairs.
04/30/18 — Long-Simmering Problems at UI Healthcare are Coming to a Boil.
04/25/18 — Which UI Centers and Institutes Will Harreld the Ogre Slash and Burn? Updated.
04/19/18 — Larry McKibben Has Had Enough of ‘Casino’ Kim Reynolds.
04/17/18 — Updating the UI 2020 Academic Organizational Task Force.
04/15/18 — J. Bruce Harreld Turns on the University of Iowa.
04/08/18 — Tuition Hikes, Naming Rights, Textbook Taxes and More.
04/01/18 — Two Weeks Until Crunch Time: Taxes, Tuition and the 2020 Task Force.
03/25/18 — How State Legislatures and Governing Boards Prey on Higher-Ed Students. With particular attention paid to Iowa Representative Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford.
03/18/18 — J. Bruce Harreld at the Halfway Point. It’s all downhill from here.
03/04/18 — Part 7 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. What Mike Crow’s book is really about and who it is for.
03/01/18 — Part 6 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. Covers the period between publication in March of 2015 and today.
02/25/18 — Part 5 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. Covers the second half of chapter seven — p. 267-297 — and the conclusion. Updated 03/05/18.
02/22/18 — Part 4 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. Covers the first half of chapter seven — p. 240-267.
02/18/18 — Part 3 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. Covers chapters five and six.
02/16/18 — A few quick thoughts on the now-annual conjecture that UIHC might be privatized or partner with a commercial healthcare provider.
02/15/18 — Part 2 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. Covers chapters three and four.
02/11/18 — Part 1 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. Covers the preface, acknowledgements and introduction, and chapters one and two.
In approaching any book for the first time, whether fiction or nonfiction, there are usually two concerns. The first, which is overt, is whether the book will be a ‘good read’ or a torment. Will you enjoy the process of reading, as much as the achievement of completing the work, or will you have to battle the text the whole way? You may still be glad you read a book that was a death march to digest, but given the choice, most people would prefer to enjoy what they read as opposed to fighting through every page.
Complicating matters is the fact that some books get off to a laborious start before they find their footing. For example, years ago I was tipped off to Wanderer by Sterling Hayden, but I was also warned that I would have to fight through the stilted beginning. Without that caution I may have passed on the rest of the book, which would have been a mistake.
As someone outside the academic “milieu”, my lack of familiarity with the higher-ed industry may have contributed to my impression that fighting into Designing the New American University was a jungle-grade slog. To the extent that the rest of the work seemed more tolerable, I cannot say whether that was the result of improved execution on the part of the authors, or or greater familiarity on my part as a reader. I did find the historical context in the work illuminating, and in the end I got what I came for, which was a comprehensive understanding of the work that Michael M. Crow has done at Arizona State University over the past sixteen years.
The second concern with any book — whether consciously considered or not — is whether the narrator is reliable. As we now see playing out in our national politics, it matters whether what you are reading can be trusted. It is also possible, however, that you may perceive, or have been indoctrinated to perceive, bias where none exists, which is a useful reminder that truth is never determined by audience reaction. That is instead the de facto definition of entertainment, yet even in the world of fiction the penalty for springing an unreliable narrator on the audience can be severe.
There are exceptions, of course, such as the narrator in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, or in Robert Frost’s celebrated poem, The Road Not Taken. Ambiguity is part of the appeal in both of those works, and in neither case is the reader pointedly informed that they have been deceived. When that does happen — when the author reveals that the narrator has been lying — readers tend to feel that they have been duped, because they have been duped.
With nonfiction, the question of reliability hinges largely on sourcing, though previously established credibility may also be a factor. While history is always an interpretation, some interpreters are more even-handed and credible, and the same holds for biographers. Expertise is also helpful in establishing the reliability of a narrator, such that we tend to presume someone with fifty years’ experience in construction will have more to say that is of merit than someone with five years’ experience — yet even that assumption may fail if the subject matter concerns new building methods.
Prior to grappling with Designing the New American University in earnest, I found myself confronting three red flags about the reliability of the narrator. First and most obviously, while the book was co-authored, I knew from reading several reviews that the contents focused on the work of only one of the authors. In many co-authored nonfiction works it is easy to tell who the narrator is because that role is inherent. Think of a celebrity tell-all or athletic memoir, and if the subject of the book was honest enough to admit they had help — as opposed to hiring a ghostwriter and lying about the authorship of the work — then any other credited names are clearly facilitators of that person’s recollections. A famous or infamous person has a story to tell, a writer is hired, and out pops a co-authored work in which every reader understands who played what part and why.
Other nonfiction works really are co-authored, often by people who were involved in the same pursuit, whether climbing a mountain or conducting research. As regards Designing The New American University, however, that does not seem to be the case. While two authors are credited — Michael M. Crow and William B. Dabars — the book is clearly about only one of those men, meaning Crow. That in turn means that on some level, this particular collaboration has the whiff of celebrity. Because Crow is an able writer himself, however, Dabars must have served some additional function, including perhaps the drudgework of preparing the manuscript, compiling the end notes and fact-checking, while Crow went about the very heady business of being his fabulous pioneering self.
Without regard to the specifics of their individual contributions, such a relationship is strongly suggested by the placement of the author’s names on the cover, with Crow directly under the title, and Dabars segregated by a strong separator. Too, the use of “and” instead of “&” between their names makes clear — to informed readers — that the work was not co-authored so much as co-written, meaning labor was divided. Because such cues might be missed by the average reader, however, Crow metes out responsibility for the contents in two quotes in the preface, which is solely attributed to Crow.
From page vii:
As to the historical context and content of the book, then — which required, undoubtedly, the same painstaking, mind-numbing academic research that goes into any scholarly work — Dabars gets shared credit, even if he did the lion’s share of the reading, mining, and organizing. As to the monumental, transformational advance promised by the title, however, on p. ix of the preface, Crow makes sure the reader knows where credit is due:
So the book as a book is co-authored, even if that means Crow gets more credit than he deserves, while the sexy stuff you’re actually reading the book for is all Crow. And why not? Of the two co-authors, in the drab world of academe Crow really is a celebrity, and he is also personally responsible for putting the ideas in the book to the test. If Crow needed help cranking out a book to help raise his profile in early 2015, for whatever reason, I’m sure his co-author was thrilled to contribute.
For the remainder of this post, then — which is primarily focused on the concepts implemented by Crow, and less so on their historical context — we will refer to Designing the New American University as Crow’s book, without implying anything negative about the co-author’s contribution. From the preface alone the work is clearly a vehicle for Crow’s academic celebrity, as well as whatever merit his transformational concepts may have, and it is important to understand the book in that context. Speaking of which….
The second red flag regarding the reliability of the narrator — meaning now specifically Crow — concerned the ‘advance praise’ blurbs just inside the front flyleaf. As a long-time reader I understand that including rave quotes from famous people is standard operating procedure for the marketing weasels in the book industry. At the same time, I have long held the view that the intrinsic value of a book is inversely proportional to the fame of the people who are quoted. If you wrote something that is genuinely worth reading, then you don’t need to traffic in hype that is itself of dubious origin.
Sure — maybe this is just me, but I honestly do not believe that most of the famous people who blurb books have read the books they are raving about. Instead, I imagine that such quotes — like everything else in that famous person’s life — are handled by a staffer, and may not even be approved by the celebrity whose name is attached. As to why a famous person would blurb a book they had not read, the obvious answer is that such blurbs have transactional value, either as quid or quo. (Hold that thought.)
Keeping in mind what Crow’s book is nominally about, if only from the title, and remembering that it was published in early 2015, who would you guess might be the first person to heap ‘advance praise’ on the amazing Michael Crow? Seriously — take a moment and put yourself in the mind of the author, the publishing house, and the agencies representing all of the above. Who would benefit the book most by being in first position on the blurb page?
Bill Clinton! That’s right — despite the fact that his wife would be announcing her presidential bid only a few months later — which you would think would have fully occupied that giant genius brain of his — in early 2015, former president Bill Clinton was not only taking time out of his busy day to blurb Crow’s book, but to actually read it, allegedly. And boy, was he impressed:
In the ‘getting’ business, that is what is known as a big-time ‘get’. Crow must have been thrilled to have the Big Dog not only affirm his book, but also testify as to the effectiveness of the changes Crow has wrought at ASU. Sure, the blurb itself doesn’t really read like a human being talking, so much as it does a marketing department honing two keyword-laded sentences to the point of retail lethality, but still — if you’re hawking a book, and you believe people are motivated to the point of purchase by the approval of others, in early 2015 you could not do much better than a former president.
Although…one obvious concern about any high-profile political blurber is that some people might hold political or moral or ethical views in opposition to that person, and you wouldn’t want to give your book a partisan cast that stood in the way of sales. The equally obvious solution, of course, would be to find another political party to blurb your book, so as to give it the rare. bipartisan stamp of approval. So guess who the second blurb is from?
Jeb Bush! Jeb! Seriously — what are the odds? Not only did Crow’s book generate bipartisan raves, and not only did those raves come from the two dominant political aristocracies in America, but in 2015, both of those families were poised to make yet another run for the White House. Sure, a scant three years later, in early 2018, Bill Clinton has undergone yet another cultural reappraisal, and is now largely seen as a perv, while Jeb is the “low-energy” candidate who could not derail the presidential ambitions of yet another perv — but still! In 2015, Michael Crow bagged two of the biggest names in the coming political cycle for his very nerdy book on universities — which of course raises a few interesting questions….
As to what Clinton and Bush got out of blurbing Crow’s book, who knows? Maybe they guaranteed future blurbs from the celebs of their choice, for their own literary properties. On the other hand, they’re both savvy political players, and it is not out of the realm of possibility that Crow may have been positioning himself, and being positioned for, a shot at Secretary of Education in either prospective administration. In fact, given the current deranged occupant of that office, he would clearly have been over-qualified. (One does wonder if Clinton and Bush were informed of the other’s blurbs.)
The next three blurbs, out of ten total, are from a former university president and two academic authors. In the context of the 2015 presidential search at the University of Iowa, however, it is the sixth blurb — also by a university president — which stands out. Penned, or at least attributed to, current Purdue president Mitch Daniels, his praise is considerably more tame than the enthusiasm of Clinton or Bush, but Daniels is himself a political animal who only came to academia late in life. First rising to prominence as Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush White House, Daniels went on to serve two terms as governor of Indiana before transitioning himself to the Purdue presidency in early 2013:
Along with being a self-styled transformational leader in higher education — albeit one with considerably less experience than Crow at ASU — Mitch Daniels also has the unique distinction of having personally confirmed that he was in fact the origin of J. Bruce Harreld’s candidacy at the University of Iowa, when in reality that was demonstrably not the case. Whether Harreld and his co-conspirators lied to Daniels, or Daniels was doing his fellow Presbyterian elder a solid by lying on his behalf, we still don’t know, but in any case what Daniels said was false. (That’s okay, though, because two months later Harreld changed his origin story and left Daniels out.)
I don’t know how I would have reacted to those three blurbers in early 2015 — meaning Clinton, Bush and Daniels — but from the vantage point of 2018 we have one former president who couldn’t keep his pants zipped, the brother of another former president who started a war we didn’t need to fight, and a former politician who seems — at least according to the public record — to have been perfectly willing to lie for Harreld until that lie was exposed. Did those people make me think more highly of Designing the New American University, or of Crow himself? No, they did not.
The third red flag was something I was tipped to from reviews I had read before I got my hands on a copy of the work. Specifically, the book includes a good deal of material that had been previously published elsewhere. While that is not uncommon, particularly in academic circles, it does call into question whether the book is simply a padded-out compendium, or there is some valid overarching rationale for rehashing those prior works.
We get the skinny on what is and isn’t new in the acknowledgements, which is the perfect place to bury that information if you don’t want anyone to know. There are seven chapters in Designing the New American University, of which: “Various chapters in our book contain revised portions of texts that appeared previously in articles and book chapters we have either co-authored or authored singly”. From a careful reading of references to those prior publications, we learn that chapters one, two, four, five and six contain “revised portions of text”, though “revised formulations of phrases and paragraphs” are “interspersed throughout the book”.
So there we have it. Of the seven chapters in the book, chapters three and seven are new, except to the extent that they are not. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with pulling everything together into a literary magnum whoopass, particularly given that I was not reading the publications where any of that material originally appeared. In fact, the question about repackaging the content is not so much about the content itself, but about why Crow decided to pull it all together in 2014, for publication in early 2015.
Introduction
Whenever Michael Crow decided to write Designing the New American University, that decision came well before UI president Sally Mason decided, in late 2014, that she would resign in August of 2015. By the time Mason publicly announced her retirement, however, in mid-January of 2015, and particularly by the time the UI Presidential Search Committee was announced in late February, Crow’s book was close to publication, meaning individuals on the search committee may have been aware of that forthcoming title. (Indeed, one of the earliest reviews, based on an advance copy, was published at the end of January, only ten days after Mason’s official announcement, and a month before the official release.)
As detailed in a recent post, it is also possible, if not likely, that one individual on the 2015 UI search committee knew about Crow’s book even in advance of any public mention. That person was part-time Scottsdale resident Jerre Stead, a mover and shaker in the same society circles that Crow belongs to in Phoenix, as well as a successful entrepreneur and mega-donor to the University of Iowa. Given that Stead also introduced former business executive and future fraudulent UI president J. Bruce Harreld to others on the search committee, in March of 2015 — meaning when Crow’s book was released, and only weeks after the committee was empaneled — it is not only possible that Stead was aware of Crow’s book, but that he intended to use Harreld to implement Crow’s “design” at the University of Iowa. (It is also possible that Crow was consulted along the way, or even approached about the position himself.)
In the introduction to Designing The New American University, on p. 12, Crow makes clear that it was not merely his intent to elevate Arizona State when he was hired, but to offer a “foundational prototype”:
While those quotes (the latter two of which are from the same article) speak to the intent of Crow’s book, it is worth noting that the Nature editorial is dated 04/25/07, while the Newsweek piece appeared just over a year later, on 08/08/08. Meaning by the time Crow’s book was published in 2015, another six to seven years had passed, yet Crow chose to highlight quotes which were accurate but outdated, instead of more recent appraisals of his overall success.
Here is how the Nature editorial concludes:
We find the same point at the beginning of the Newsweek piece:
This is, of course, what everyone wants to hear: that institutions of higher education will be turned to the cause of economic development, instead of wasting time on subjects like history, reading and writing, or grappling with ethics — the latter of which seems perpetually hostile to making money. In the context of the 2015 presidential search at UI, however, and particularly with regard to the otherwise stupefying choice of J. Bruce Harreld to lead that school, the quotes above illuminate the motivation behind that corrupt act of remorseless betrayal better than any we have invoked to-date.
With regard to the ongoing 2020 Task Force at the University of Iowa, which is reimagining the academic organizational structure of the entire campus, it should be equally clear — particularly after Crow himself was interviewed in recent months — that the ASU model will have a great deal to do with the changes imposed by Harreld and his loyal interim provost, Sue Curry. Bring in new corporate partners, put the focus on for-profit research, dismantle the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and along the way, dispense with as many departments and disciplines as possible which do not promise revenue generation.
One question that is not directly addressed in the introduction to Crow’s book, but can be resolved with quotes from the preface, introduction, and first chapter, concerns which universities Crow is talking about. For example, the title of the book is Designing the New American University, but chapter one is titled American Research Universities at a Fork in the Road. As that chapter heading suggests, despite casting a wide net with the book title, Crow is largely concerned with research universities, and particularly public research universities — of which Arizona State is one, though it only achieved that status relatively recently.
We can confirm that particular point of emphasis because the old Nature and Newsweek articles that Crow cited are concerned with research universities.. Likewise, in the preface, introduction and first chapter, he makes repeated reference to research universities as a group. The problem with the broad association made by the book title, of course, is that the number of institutions Crow is talking about and talking to, diminishes sharply as his focus narrows. From the preface, p. vii:
Not only is ASU a “major research university”, whatever that means, but note the emphasis on its size, which is a critical factor in Crow’s ‘design’ for other schools. So how many other universities — or research universities, or major research universities — does Crow’s ASU model apply to?
From the introduction, p. 7:
Here Crow seems to imply that large and small universities, including both research universities and major research universities, can benefit from following the ASU model, and from a marketing perspective that’s a smart pitch. If there are only a handful of schools that can reinvent themselves as ASU has purportedly done, then the audience for Crow’s book would obviously be quite small. On p. 8 of the introduction, Crow takes pains to keep the door wide open, at least momentarily:
Okay…so the book applies to roughly two hundred universities, regardless of size, of which one hundred are major research universities. It is not until p. 20 of chapter one, however, that Crow actually nails down the categorizing of research universities, which in turn constrains his audience:
So the book really applies only to a hundred or so major research universities, of which the only working prototype, Arizona State, is also “one of the nation’s largest public universities governed by a single administration”. Given Crow’s persistent emphasis on the importance of scalability, being small would seem to be a severe handicap, but we’ll return to that later. Because universities are, at least ostensibly, also in the ‘business’ of education — as opposed to simply functioning as R&D units for sponsoring corporations — Crow also invokes quality as an important factor, and in so doing further constrains his target audience.
From p 31, once again in the context of research, and specifically membership in the research-centric AAU:
We will return to who this book was written for, and why it was written, at various points in this series of posts. Here we will simply note — as ever seems to be the case among entrepreneurial university presidents — that the pool of schools Crow is concerned with are not the two hundred “research universities”, or the 108 “major research universities”, or even the 62 AAU member schools, but the “thirty-four public AAU member institutions”, all of which are large-scale. Interestingly, however, while Iowa and Crow’s former haunts of Columbia and Iowa State are members of the AAU, Arizona State is not. (Hold that thought.)
Chapter One
Whether Michael Crow can be trusted as a narrator is emphatically and objectively answered in the negative by the following quotes from chapter one, beginning on p. 29:
Note use of the word “progressively”, implying a steady decrease in funding. The clear implication is that there was no acute reason for that nationwide decline, but that it occurred consistently over time. Continuing from p. 29:
Here Crow provides data to support his prior contention, but that data also suggests that the decline in legislative support accelerated greatly between 2001 and 2012. For some reason, in that decade, public funding for higher education fell off a cliff across the entire country, but because no specific cause is cited, that decrease does not counter his “progressive” claim. As you probably know, however, even if you never spend any time thinking about the tribulations of higher-ed, the single most noteworthy economic downturn in the life of the vast majority of Americans occurred in 2008.
Called the Great Recession, it was by all accounts a catastrophic global financial collapse, and in some ways produced negative effects which outlasted those of the Great Depression, eighty years earlier. More to the point, the Great Recession was widely publicized, such that we might fairly expect that more learned types — like, say, college and university presidents — would have heard about it, if not felt its effects first hand. For some reason, however, despite widespread reporting about the Great Recession, many academic presidents seem to have developed amnesia about how that singularly noteworthy financial disaster affected higher-ed funding.
In fact, if you’re a regular reader and you’re having a bit of deja vu, you’re right: we have seen this specific lie of omission before, in the propaganda put forward by sham UI president Harreld, while pushing his five-year, 41% tuition hike. As noted in multiple prior posts, and specifically with regard to his presentation before the Tuition Task Force last summer, Harreld also omitted any reference to the Great Recession in his own data.
Continuing with the next sentence from p. 29, here is more ‘proof’ from Crow:
Note the exploded time frame compared to the previous quoted sentence. Instead of the decade between 2001 and 2012, Crow now reaches back to 1985 — thirty years prior to his book at the time of publication. This is yet another dodge that college and university presidents are enamored of, and it falls in the larger category of cherry-picking data to suit any occasion. And of course Harreld has proven to be a master of cherry-picking himself, including invoking equally long time frames when it suits his cause.
Specifically, one of the data points Harreld has repeatedly cited in pleading poverty concerns state funding of UI over the past twenty-five years or so. Drawn largely from information in a recent CATO report, like Crow in his book two years earlier, Harreld has made frequent reference to the overall decrease in state funding while completely omitting the precipitous decline triggered by the Great Recession. (See the Iowa graph on p. 29 here; the Colorado graph on p. 20 for comparison.)
One additional problem with all of these cherry-picked stats is that these declining numbers are almost always reported in percentage terms, which quite often distort if not contradict the underlying reality. For example, if you increase appropriations a bit when adjusted for inflation, while increasing tuition a good deal more, the percentage of state appropriations will decrease even as revenue increases on all fronts. Again, because it would be fair to assume that college and university presidents are aware of this potential for conveying the wrong impression, it also seems fair to assume that they routinely do so with the intent to deceive.
Continuing from the next sentence in Crow’s book:
If the previous time frames were not compelling enough, here we have a five-year span which quite literally begins with the Great Recession, yet once again Crow makes no reference to that historic event. Instead, we simply get another shocking example of the decrease in higher-ed funding, again in percentage terms. Ironically, however, two years after Crow’s book was published, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities produced an excellent, comprehensive report on the impact of the Great Recession on appropriations at public universities. Titled “A Lost Decade in Higher Education Funding“, it details the correlations that Crow went out of his way to avoid. Which is not to say that Crow omitted any mention of the recession, as we find in the final two sentences of that same paragraph:
Although the words “prerecession” and “recession” do finally appear, we suddenly go from no mention of a recession to two mentions of a recession with no explanation, nor does Crow connect the dots after the fact. If you do not know that the Great Recession began in 2008, Michael Crow is not going to tell you, because that would undercut the barrage of data that he puts forward in chapter one. Nor is he going to explain the overall effect of the Great Recession on public funding, which was clearly understood in 2014, and particularly so by all of the affected college and university presidents.
If all we wanted to know was whether Crow was an honest broker or not, hacking and slogging our way to page 29 would give us that answer. Like far too many college and university presidents — including those at public institutions, who are largely paid with taxpayer dollars — Crow ignores inconvenient truths and cherry-picks facts to fit his agenda. Unfortunately, we are not just trying to determine whether Crow is worth listening to, we are trying to figure out what he is up to, because there is a very good chance that J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed at the University of Iowa to implement Crow’s ASU model. (And to that point, we also know that two years after the fact, Harreld has employed many of the same cherry-picked data points and lies of omission that Crow used in his book.)
Taken as a whole, chapter one reads like a detailed explication of the introduction, chock-full of charts, graphs, and endless factoids, all of which overwhelm the reader to the point of intellectual capitulation. It is one thing to pull disparate facts together to tease out a previously unseen commonality, but what the reader gets from Crow is academic carpet bombing in service of his contention that improving higher education is critical to everything and everyone in the U.S. It’s the same approach people take with tax policy and national security and social values, and it’s tedious and irritating and gets in the way of the valid point Crow is trying to make.
On p. 39 the Great Recession is again acknowledged, but still not named:
On p. 41, finally, the Great Recession is explicitly acknowledged by name, though in the index there is no entry pointing to that or any other mention. Because the book was written in 2014, however, Crow does slip in a few mentions of Thomas Piketty’s, who was all the rage at the time — and who does merit mention in the index:
After discussing the economic collapse of 2008 a bit more — and conflating the word ‘inequality’ in the process — Crow brings the conversation back to a legitimate concern, which is that wealthier students have greater access to superior institutions of higher education, regardless of their academic qualifications. From p. 53:
Throw out the hype and Crow is right about this. He’s not uniquely right — he is not making an original point — but it is an important point in the higher-ed industry, and particularly so for public schools. In fact, our previous review of Engines of Anxiety (2016), about the damage rankings do to colleges and universities, also dealt with this issue, because academic institutions know that wealthier students improve the student success indicators which factor into rankings. (That is also why Harreld should have been fired on the spot last summer, for proposing a 41% increase in tuition over five years, which will disproportionately impact disadvantaged high school students who hope to attend UI. Harreld’s cynical gambit, backed by the ever-enabling Iowa Board of Regents, was to ask for a few million in additional appropriations which would all be devoted to financial aid, in exchange for the right to raise hundreds of millions in new revenue.)
In typical Crow fashion, the point that academically qualified students tend to be “‘undermatched'” in the colleges and universities they attend is insufficient, so he makes the case that the issue is of critical importance not simply to those individual students, but to Western civilization. From p. 59:
Again, notwithstanding the overkill, the concern is valid. As to why that concern is of pressing importance to Crow as the president of Arizona State, we get that on p. 60:
Hack out the hype and hysteria and Crow is making another valid point. In terms of solving the problem of “‘undermatched'” students at scale, the only institutions in a position to do so are major universities, and particularly large public schools like ASU. Whether research intensive or not, and whether members of the AAU or not, it takes a certain amount of mass to bring significantly more students aboard while still meeting basic standards of student success, as well as maintaining important metrics like class size. Unfortunately, this scalability requirement further decreases the number of schools for which the ASU prototype is applicable, but that does not invalidate the basic point Crow is making.
From p. 61, here is the Arizona State mission statement, which almost any college or university would agree with as an aspirational goal:
The question we’re left with at the end of chapter one is not what Crow wants to do — because he’s already doing it at ASU, and wants to replicate that success at other major research universities — but why the question of scalability is so central to that objective. What does scalability mean, how is it achieved, and what are the positives and negatives of increasing the number of students who are served? (Hold those thoughts.)
Chapter Two
The title of this chapter is The Gold Standard in American Higher Education, and it begins as follows:
Despite portending a dry retrospective on the origins of the modern research university, much of what follows in this chapter is genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, as ever seems to be the case in higher-ed, the verbiage attendant to such institutions, including the word ‘research’ itself, abets the fudging of the causes and effects that we dealt with in chapter one. In exploring the history of research universities it is important to note that multiple dynamics are always in play, which in turn makes it that much easier to confuse and conflate issues for rhetorical gain.
For example, as the book notes, there is a difference between undergraduate and graduate education, the former having its roots in English colleges, and the latter in German universities. And in all that there is also tension with the presumption that research universities must also educate. From p. 78:
In 1852, no one could have imagined anything like a modern research university, so the definition of a university at that time may indeed have been more like what we think of as a standalone college or comprehensive university today — meaning an institution primarily focused on educating undergraduates. In the modern context, it is axiomatic that research is a core part of the mission of a research university, yet on the question of education and its importance, Newman is not wrong, and may have been prescient. Specifically, the trend at major research universities — as well as Harreld’s clear objective at the University of Iowa — is to treat education and students as peripheral or subordinate to the mission of research. The education of students is a burden to be managed in that context, and there are indeed a great many people in higher-ed who would be happy not to have students clogging up the halls. (Which is, oddly enough, exactly the attitude one would expect in a commercial context, where the obligation to educate students would clearly be a waste of time and money.)
From the German tradition we learn the intent of pursuing research at a university, and how that informs the process of education for faculty and students alike. From p. 81:
This is the ideal of the modern research university, which hopes not only to educate, but to increase knowledge by teaching students how ideas are questioned, tested, proven or disproved. It is the method of the research university which is important, and which is applicable to both “scientific and philosophical discovery”. Still, over time that lofty intent has evolved, and particularly so in the United States. In fact, pragmatism was part of the very conception of a university by the time the United States became a country, 140 years after the founding of Harvard. From p. 87:
The idea that America’s research universities, and particularly government-funded research universities, should solve “hands-on” problems, makes sense for a young expanding nation, and only intensified during the Civil War. From p. 83:
As you may know, Iowa State University is a land-grant school, and in its present incarnation still exhibits many of these pragmatic traits. From p. 85:
Because it was founded after the University of Iowa, with a more pragmatic mission, Iowa State today is farther along toward an entrepreneurial focus in both its research and educational missions. In the original formulation of that pragmatic intent, that was not necessarily a bad thing, but again that intent has changed over time. In its original conception, pragmatism and entrepreneurialism were desired by the government for the benefit of the citizenry, community and country, not for the direct economic benefit of for-profit companies, or even of the universities themselves. From p. 95:
This was true and remains true. The problem, which is apparent to anyone who takes even a cursory look at research universities across the country, is that basic research is being eased aside in preference of commercial research, which is often conducted in partnership with private companies. From the perspective of those corporate partners, however, this perverting of the historical pragmatism of research universities makes obvious sense. Why wait for the practical application of basic research to become apparent over time spans that may be measured in decades, when you can turn the entire apparatus of federally-funded and state-funded institutions to the cause of commercial research?
In effect, and at an ever-increasing pace, knowledge production — even if pragmatic or entreprenuerial in intent — is being replaced by profit-production, and America’s research universities are aggressively pursuing that goal both for themselves and their private-sector partners. Then again, as noted on p. 75, the roots of this corporate synergy run deep:
It is to the immediate and long-term advantage of major universities — both public and private — to leverage their research capability for profit, including generating patents and intellectual property which may produce significant revenue streams. Unfortunately, the quickest and most cost-effective way to produce such revenue-generating research is not to engage in basic research, but to engage in narrowly targeted, commercially viable research, as corporations do. The problem — hearkening back to the Newman quote on p. 78 — is that students and education are quite literally extraneous to such profit-seeking research initiatives.
Again, even if we assume that there has been a pragmatic or entrepreneurial intent behind the governmental sponsorship of research at public universities in the United States, the benefit of that research was expected to fall to the citizens who fund those institutions. As to the educational component, not only is that becoming a secondary concern, but students are now being trained not to think for themselves, but to be white-collar drones, while also providing millions of dollars in free labor to the schools they attend, and to any businesses those schools partner with.
Given that a small cabal of entrepreneurially minded chiselers ran a fake search at the University of Iowa in 2015, to appoint a former business executive with no experience in academic administration as president, it is tempting to conclude that UI is ground zero for such exploitation in the state of Iowa, but as noted above that’s not the case. While Harreld was fraudulently appointed to prioritize for-profit research and economic development over education, precisely because Iowa State is a land-grant school, its educational and research missions were long ago subordinated to the demands of BigAg and corporate America. (Case in point, less than two months after Kristin Failor was hired by the Iowa Board of Regents as the state relations officer for Iowa State — meaning she was a state employee — Failor was working behind the scenes with the largest energy company in the state to sell out the school, and thus also the people of Iowa.)
Perhaps nowhere can the difference between ISU and UI be seen more clearly than in the public comments which followed their all-but-identical presentations to the Tuition Task Force last summer. Despite having documented the corruption at both Iowa State (Leath, ‘planegate’ and so much more) and Iowa (Harreld, Robillard and so much more), I was still shocked that corporate interests believed it was their right to chime in on the proposed five-year, 41% tuition increase at ISU.
From a post on the UNI and ISU tuition proposals, and specifically a section on the ISU listening session:
Now contrast that with the following, from the second part of a two-part post on UI’s tuition proposal, which followed a week later:
In the context of Harreld’s fraudulent hire, and of his subsequent comments and emphasis in office, the intent to corrupt the University of Iowa in a similar manner could not be clearer. To those transfixed by the entrepreneurial ethos, whether in government, at UI, or in the private sector, there is not only no downside to pursuing profits above all, but students can be exploited in multiple ways to speed that process. For example, students who perform laboratory work or research under the guise of their degree program are provide free work for whomever benefits from that research.
In the old days that wasn’t a problem because the research was basic or academic, meaning it held little hope of turning a profit. Now, however, students may be working on for-profit research for the university and/or its corporate partners. Likewise, internships with those corporate partners are often unpaid, yielding a renewable source of free labor which is portrayed by the university as helping students jump-start their careers. (In Iowa there is an entire euphemistic program devoted to the transfer of free labor in exchange for purported educational benefit. Called ‘Work-Based Learning‘, the program is part of the Iowa Department of Education, and applies to K-12 students as well [p. 3] — although no one has explained why a kindergarten student would be or should be working.)
As for Crow’s book — which may well be the template for Harreld at Iowa — the obvious question is where Crow himself comes down on profit-seeking. From p. 102:
Crow clearly believes research universities should make money for themselves, which is undoubtedly a “new role in society”. That it is a corrosive role, which runs counter to our ideals as citizens and as a nation, should be obvious, and probably would be obvious to Americans of a half-century ago. Because American democracy has been conquered by American capitalism, however, this perversion of academic intent now reads as inspired when viewed through the only lens we have left. (Money.)
Further suggesting that ties between Crow’s model and Harreld’s appointment are not simply speculative, here is the final sentence of chapter two, from p. 105:
Whether the word ‘punctuated’ stood out in that quote to you, it sounded as a cannon shot when I first read it. As regular readers may recall, the paper that Harreld forwarded to former regent Mary Andringa, following his secret meetings with five regents on 07/30/15, was titled Leading Strategic Renewal: Proactive Punctuated Change through Innovation Streams and Disciplined Learning. You can see a later version of the document that Harreld forwarded here, but the authors are the same: Michael Tushman, Charles O’Reilly, Bruce Harreld.
From the footnote to the quote above, on p. 114:
Whether Crow, Tushman and Harreld all hang out at the same watering hole or not, there is clearly an academic tie that binds them.
For Part 2 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context, click here.
The “Unreliable Narrator” was a hot trend in fiction a few years ago. Starting with “Gone Girl” to “Girl on a Train” to dozens of others that weren’t as commercially successful or successful at all. As far as I know, that trend was short lived but I imagine, there are still some “Gone Girl” wannabes waiting for release.
That’s interesting about Gone Girl. I remember seeing the first ad for that movie on TV, and I knew I just wasn’t interested in a ‘mystery’ that made me feel like a sucker. (Still have never seen the film.)
All these years, and I am still 100% opposed to people disrupting my easy relationship with the cinema….
This is Part 2 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. For Part 1, click here.
Chapter Three
Titled The Varieties of Academic Tradition, this chapter moves from framing historical context to actively making the case for a New American University. As is often the case in academia, that advocacy is accomplished largely by taking relatively common arguments and dressing them up with obscure language. From p. 116:
The idea that tradition can have a dark side is obviously not new. Even if you don’t have an MBA, you probably know that it is important for organizations of all kinds to remain “nimble” and to refuse to settle for the “status quo“. Whether you are aggressively competing with others, or simply trying to remain stable and relevant, you have to keep looking at how you do things and why you do things to see if you can improve.
Even if you know nothing about business or running an organization, however, it would seem self evident that “unquestioning conformity” in any context is a dangerous thing, whether or not there is a five dollar word attached. Then again, when you’re trying to demonstrate your academic bona fides to an intellectual crowd, restating the obvious in highfalutin’ terms is de rigueur. Which brings us to p. 118:
So your filiopietism bone is connected to your isomorphism bone, which is in turn connected to your vanity bone. Indubitably, prestige is an obsession in higher education, and we can see that clearly in Crow’s book as well as J. Bruce Harreld’s messaging at Iowa, where they both repeatedly use the term ‘world-class’ to sucker, weak-minded administrators, faculty and staff. If you want people to buy into your brand of transformational change, then you have to give them a reason to care, and quite often in academia that reason is a chest-puffing bump in prestige.
As to Crow’s contention that the tendency of “organizations and institutions to emulate one another” is paradoxical, I have no idea what he is talking about. Take any market segment in the private sector and you will almost always find more homogeneity than difference between companies, even as each tries to gain a competitive advantage on price, quality, service, or some other factor. For example, in the fast-food industry, is there really a big difference between McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King? (No.)
Continuing the topic, from p. 121:
Again, in a business context none of this seems remotely revelatory. Markets have segments, and while companies in any segment may differentiate themselves to take market share from each other — the same way colleges and universities do in the higher-ed market segment — because of the self-preservational tendency of competition to mimic successful strategies, it is inevitable that there will be always be convergence toward a single optimized model in any segment. To that basic dynamic we can also add the homogenizing effect of outside actors, such as the American Association of Universities in higher-ed, which clearly imposes group-think and conformity. If you are required to maintain the research standards of the AAU in order to attain or retain membership, then that alone will tend to produce homogenized institutions.
As regular readers know, at both the University of Iowa and Iowa State there is low-grade panic about the standing of those schools with the AAU, which the opportunistic presidents and interim presidents of those schools foment at every possible opportunity. While Iowa State is closer to expulsion than Iowa, the recent pleas at both schools for a 41% increase in tuition over five years are directly tied to plans to spend a good deal of that revenue not on the education of the students who will pay that much more for the same degrees, but on research that will please the AAU. By contrast, the very fact that Arizona State is not a member of the AAU means ASU does not have to cannibalize its own students to appease the AAU bureaucracy, further liberating it from the tendency to “become increasingly homogeneous”.
If it is a basic premise of the New American University that administrators should eschew outside factors in pursuit of being the best academic institution they can be, I certainly support that objective. Not only have I said that Iowa and Iowa State should voluntarily leave the AAU and get on with exactly that goal, but I have also called on Iowa to opt out of the U.S. News rankings for the same reason. Obedience to outside interests which have no concern for the students, faculty or staff on campus constitutes dereliction of duty, if not also cowardice, and is rampant in higher-ed.
As to the book’s obliviousness about market dynamics, and how such forces encourage if not impose isomorphism, I find that inexplicable. One of the few acknowledgements that education is a service and higher education is an industry occurs on p. 122, but even there the reference is fleeting:
Again, why Crow finds isomorphism counterintuitive, when he himself cites the inevitability of that tendency relative to competition in the marketplace, is baffling. The only answer I can come up with is that Crow wants to position ASU as a rebel in that regard — bucking the isomorphism quo, as it were. Yet whether we are talking about market segments or evolution, competition in any context necessarily produces survivors who are tightly grouped by common traits, because all of the other variants die off.
On p. 123, Crow returns to the subject of prestige, and in so doing strikes a chord which harmonizes with the prestige mongering of Harreld at Iowa:
From day one at Iowa, Harreld has been unrelenting in championing the pursuit of other schools, whether through national rankings or associations such as the AAU. As noted in prior posts, Harreld constantly references Iowa’s self-selected peer institutions, including those which are literally defined as aspirational — meaning UI is not a peer of those institutions, but merely aspires to be. (To be fair to Harreld, although calling a non-peer a peer is a blatant lie, that particular lie is normal in the higher-ed industry.)
Add in Harreld’s personal affinity for Harvard — both as an MBA grad, and later, as a part-time lecturer at the School of Business — and it is hardly surprising that Harreld’s administrative stock in trade is snobbery. With regard to Crow and his book, however, there is a very big problem with the premise that higher education embraces prestige in lieu of available profits, because the two are not mutually exclusive. That may have been true in the past, but as a UI press release made clear just last year, research universities are now also a launching point for private businesses, including partnerships with corporations such as IBM — which, coincidentally, is where Harreld spent the last thirteen years of his career as a business exec:
I’m sure Abramoff is a great guy, and I’m sure his company will do great things for patients all over the world. In terms of motivation, however, it is clear that money is not off the table in higher-ed. In fact, research universities in particular are incentivizing business development precisely because they can then take a cut of the profits themselves.
While enriching oneself through inventions or ventures may have been the province of business and industry in days of yore, even then you had to make sure you owned what you invented. If you were employed by IBM as a researcher, then they owned whatever you invented, unless the fine print in your contract said otherwise. Now, for similar reasons, research universities are incentivizing faculty and staff — and even students — to pursue profit-making inventions and ventures.
Like IBM or any other company, the University of Iowa operations manual has a meaty section on “Inventions Policy“, which includes this:
To see how aggressive the institutional drive for profits is at Iowa, consider this startling statement:
At UI, the mere act of enrolling constitutes an “assignment of rights”. Given that the university puts “students and visiting scientists/scholars” on notice, it should be obvious that salaried faculty and staff are not only covered by more aggressive provisions, but that the university could make the pursuit of inventions or intellectual property the sole focus of those employees. At which point the difference between a major research university like Iowa and a research-intensive corporation like IBM would be effectively nil.
To the extent that Iowa still has an obligation to educate students on the side, that otherwise inconvenient responsibility can also be turned to the pursuit of profits. As noted in multiple prior posts, that is in fact why Harreld is aggressively pushing for a 41% tuition hike over five years, after having already raised tuition 12% the previous two years. Instead of scrounging for funding from angels or venture capitalists like the saps in the private sector, research universities can simply take more money from students whenever they choose. Even better, unlike private businesses, universities do not have to give students a cut of any profitable ventures or inventions that result, whereas that return on investment is the whole point for angels and VC’s.
We finally get to the truth about filiopietism and isomorphism in higher-ed on p. 123, which still seems to escape Crow, despite the fact that he wrote the book:
Not only does that pathology fit Harreld’s snobbery like a hand-sewn glove of the finest leather, but in talking about “more abundant financial resources” it finally puts the focus where it belongs: not on prestige, but on money. Isomorphism occurs among major research universities not because everyone aspires to the same definition of academic success, but because everyone ends up chasing the same revenue sources, including finite appropriations devoted to federally funded research. That in turn reveals that the real filiopietism in today’s higher-ed industry — the “excessive veneration of tradition” which stands in the way of progress — is the quaint notion that education should take precedence over revenue generation.
On p. 137, Crow seems to buy into the idea that education should come first, which is either utterly naive or thoroughly disingenuous on his part:
The glaringly obvious problem with this romantic notion, of course, is that some administrators may not be concerned at all about damaging the educational product, particularly if they can game (meaning rig or fake) the statistics and metrics which are used to rate that product. It is entirely possible that there are college and university presidents who are happy to screw the students if it helps the bottom line — much as Iowa State stockpiled undergraduates over the past decade to reap a tuition windfall, while simultaneously failing to keep pace with the services and facilities necessary to meet the collective and individual needs of those students. If all you care about is making money — and particularly if you have a stake in the balance sheet yourself, whether from profit participation or promises of deferred compensation — why would you not sell out the kids to drive entrepreneurial success? Sure, it would be morally bankrupt, but it’s not like it would be illegal.
Whether or not Crow genuinely believes that the “profit maximization that motivates other industries would be irrelevant” in higher-ed, it is undeniable that entrepreneurs have descended on major research universities in a big way. In the entire country there is no more obvious example of that invasion than the hijacking of the presidency at the University of Iowa, which, as noted in Part 1 of this multi-part post, may have been inspired by Jerre Stead’s familiarity with Crow’s work. Because Harreld had zero chance of being appointed on the merits of his own candidacy his co-conspirators decided to cheat, but they didn’t cheat because they thought he would improve the educational mission of the University of Iowa.
Harreld’s co-conspirators rigged the 2015 UI search in his favor not because he was an academic visionary, but because Harreld is a former business exec who built new businesses in the IBM EBO division. After leaving IBM Harreld spent six years as a part-time lecturer at Harreld, including teaching a one-week executive education course on — wait for it — Building New Businesses in Established Companies. As the faculty chair for that class, which Harreld taught alongside research bro Michael L. Tushman, Harreld promised that:
Sound familiar? All you have to do is swap in “major research universities” for “large, established companies”, and given the size, longevity and economic muscle of those academic institutions that’s not much of a leap. Because such institutions are also encumbered by “organizational and political obstacles”, hiring someone like Harreld to break through that resistance is a smart move, as long as you’re also willing to put up with any sanctions which arise from the flagrant abuses of power you will need to commit to jam him into office..
In the closing pages of chapter three Crow returns to the issue of scale in the context of online learning, which we will return to later as well. From p.138:
Crow initially seems to suggest that online learning is viable and will scale, but then he hedges. As it turns out, that’s only true when online learning is “operationalized” by — wait for it — a research university. Like, say, Arizona State, where Mike Crow is doing fabulous things. (Fabulous!)
Whatever Crow has to say about “online instruction” and the issue of scalability in chapter seven, for the time being I would point to a post I wrote a year and a half before Harreld’s fraudulent appointment, in which I noted that online learning has already been through a massive cultural trial, and largely failed. It may be that technological advances on the order of sentient androids will bring excellent education to the masses — provided they do not unionize — but for the time being online learning is genuinely limited in application, and Crow seems to know that. As to the problem of scale, Crow comes very close to porting commercial solutions to higher-ed, but pulls back at the last minute. From p. 139:
For the answer to that provocative question, let’s take a look at Boston Market, which was, for a time, one of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories in the restaurant sector. More importantly for the purposes of this discussion, illegitimate UI president J. Bruce Harreld was the legitimate president of Boston Market from 1993 to 1995, as well as a member of the board of directors. From Harreld’s resume:
With that kind of unqualified success, you may be thinking that the cabal of co-conspirators who fraudulently appointed Harreld should be excused for their abuses of power, but that’s only because Harreld’s resume and UI bio page omit critical information. First, in typical Harreld fashion, Harreld overstates his involvement with Boston Market (originally Boston Chicken/BCI). Specifically, his claim to have “led the organization from 20 stores in the Boston area” is demonstrably false.
Per Harreld’s resume, he was employed by Kraft General Foods in Illinois as a senior VP and division president until 1993. From 1993 to 1994 he also worked as an adjunct professor at Northwestern, and from 1993 to 1995 he worked for Boston Chicken. Fortunately, we also all of that from a 1997 SEC filing:
In that filing we also get some granular detail about Harreld’s relationship with Boston Market, including particularly his initial role in the company:
Although Boston Market did experience explosive growth, the “20 stores” that Harreld referenced were stores that were opened by the original owners starting in the 1980’s. From p. 280 of The Foundations of Organizational Evil, chapter 16: Devolution, by Larry M. Zwain — who had the misfortune to join Boston Market as president and CEO in 1996:
From p. 278:
In 1992 the original owners sold Boston Chicken to the group that Harreld would join in 1993, who subsequently changed the name to Boston Market. From a table on p. 284 of The Foundations of Organizational Evil, we learn that Boston Market actually had 82 stores by the end of 1992, and growth quickly accelerated to 217 stores by the end of 1993. Because Harreld joined Boston Market in June of 1993, a conservative estimate would put the numbers of stores at more than 100 at that time, or five times the number that Harreld claimed on his resume.
From 1993, which ended with 217 stores, to the end of 1995, Boston Market grew to 829 stores. When Harreld left Boston Market for IBM in October of 1995, a conservative estimate would place the number of stores at about 750, or 350 less than the total claimed on his resume. More importantly, with regard to the utility of restaurant entrepreneurs and their transformational business plans in the context higher education, it’s also worth noting that after Boston Market passed 1,076 stores in 1996 — meaning fifteen months after Harreld left — the company went belly up two years later.
From p. 286-287:
As a general reply to Crow, then — it is not a good idea to look to the restaurant industry, or any other industry, for solutions to the problems in higher education. As regards the University of Iowa in particular, it is also not a good idea to hire someone who routinely lies and overstates his importance and contributions, let alone someone who was president and member of the board of a company that created a $900M crater, following unsustainable growth that reached its peak on his watch. (Although Harreld remained a member of the BCI board through 1996, and seems to have escaped any legal sanction, you can see him listed as a defendant here, in a case that was filed in 1997.)
Finally, and to his credit, in chapter three Crow disavows the dim-witted dolts who believe the liberal arts are synonymous with waste. From p. 140:
In that same vein, Harreld has also advocated for the liberal arts since he was given a five-year deal at $800K per year to run UI, but that doesn’t mean he cares about all of the liberal arts in the same way, or any of them if they stand in the way of profits. Whether Harreld will walk the walk in defending the liberal arts remains to be seen, particularly in the context of the ongoing academic organizational review, which has in turn occasioned overt interest in Crow’s work at Arizona State. That the Phase I Report of the task force has already singled out the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for substantial change, despite claiming that no decisions have yet been made, is not promising.
Chapter Four
The title of this chapter is Discovery, Creativity and Innovation. If it had a subtitle, it would be How You Can Make a Crap-Ton of Money From All of the Above. To begin, Crow acknowledges that there is much more to education than science and technology. From p. 152:
Because all of that is beyond measure, however, Crow kicks the humanities to the curb and cozies up to science and tech, which can be measured — by money. From p. 154:
Crow hastily adds, however, that it’s not all about the money, even though he’s really only talking about the money. Continuing, from p. 154:
The wealthier we are, the more democratic we are — or something. (Yet another example of how capitalism killed democracy while we were all fighting communism or socialism, or each other. We are now at the point where even in higher-ed — including public higher-ed — we cannot talk about “social advancement” or “prosperity” or “values” or “ideals” or “our pluralistic democracy”, without doing so in the context of “prosperity”.)
The bulk of this chapter is not only about how to make money from Discovery, Creativity and Innovation, but about giving academics permission to adopt the entrepreneurial ethos. Money isn’t just useful, it is the gateway to goodness — to “social advancement”. From p. 158:
It is of course hard to argue against the proposition that more money makes things better. For example, the more money you have, the less likely it is that the ravages of poverty will consume your every waking moment, thus making it more likely that you will have free time to read textbooks that cost more than a car. And of course if your college or university president suddenly decides to increase tuition 41% over five years, so he has more of your money, you will be able to survive the ravages of that hostile act — which will, inevitably, either expel the least wealthy students, or saddle them with tens of thousands of extra dollars in suffocating debt.
Following pages and pages of greasy rhetoric, all of it designed to ease timid and uncomfortable academics into accepting the entrepreneurial mindset, Crow finally presents some useful facts on p. 162:
These numbers do substantiate the claim — both in Crow’s book and in the higher-ed industry in general — that the federal government funds basic research at public and private universities because the money-grubbers in private industry are all focused on making the greatest amount of profit in the least amount of time. Because basic research is often slow to produce a return on investment, if it ever does, the feds subsidize less-profitable research to keep the “knowledge economy” growing.
As an overall paradigm that all seems to make sense, including how higher education and business help each other by following different but parallel paths of discovery. One path — the business path — prioritizes profits, but may also suggest new avenues of basic research as a byproduct. The other path — the higher-ed path — prioritizes knowledge, but may also produce profitable new lines of commercial research.
In practice, however, and particularly in recent decades, there can be a significant blurring of the lines, and that is also borne out by the numbers Crow presents. While higher education received $41B from the feds for research in 2013, it spent a total of $66.6B, prompting the question of where that extra $25.6B came from. Crow simply says that the total was “derived from various sources”, but what are those sources? How do we account for the additional 38.5% of R&D spending by universities which does not come from the federal government?
If we divide $25.6B by the “five thousand institutions of higher education” that Crow mentioned earlier, we get a per-school contribution of $5,120,000. For schools like Iowa and Arizona State that is a trivial amount compared to their overall budgets, but for the vast majority of those five thousand schools that cost would mean instant death. Because most U.S. institutions of higher learning do not conduct substantive research, it would be more accurate to divide that $25.6B by the 108 institutions that the Carnegie Foundation categorizes as major research universities. While that will certainly overstate the cost per school, that will still give us an idea of how much schools like Iowa, Iowa State and Arizona would have to contribute.
For 2013, dividing $25.6B by 108 major research universities gives us a per-school contribution of $237M that was spent on non-federally-funded research, with the obvious understanding that some schools contributed substantially more or less. (For example, in 2013, Johns Hopkins alone spent over $2B on research, while seven other schools were over the $1B mark.) At a time when everyone agrees that higher-ed is in the throes of a never-ending funding crisis, and states are cutting support for public colleges and universities, how could 108 universities, on average, possibly invest $237M of their own money on research in a single year?
While there are certainly a number of generous donors at the University of Iowa, most donations are targeted at specific causes or concerns, and are not available as unrestricted cash. Even if they were, however, all of the donations in an average year would not cover that $237M tab. For example, in 2017 the UI Foundation wrapped up an eight-and-a-half-year fundraising campaign with $1.975B pledged, exceeding its goal by 18%. Even if we assume UI had all of that money in the bank, however, the average annual take would only have been about $232M, or $5M short. (In reality, UI currently has only $1.45B on hand, and the vast majority of that money is restricted to specific uses.)
A related problem with looking to donors to fund massive research expenditures on an annual basis is that a drop-off in any given year would put ongoing research at risk. That is in fact why donations which fund ongoing expenses — including research, but also endowed positions — are invested to protect the principal, and only the return on those investments is spent. Unfortunately, to generate $232M per year from donations would require tens of billions of dollars in principal, which only a few universities — including Harvard, of course — have on hand.
The obvious solution to this revenue problem for most schools, if not the only viable long-term strategy, is to fund in-house research by increasing tuition to cover that cost. Because tuition is billed regularly, and enrollment can be reliably projected years in advance on most campuses, revenue from students is extremely reliable and stable as funding source. Better yet, because tuition produces unrestricted funds, any excess tuition revenue can be diverted to whatever programs the university wants to support, including in-house research, for-profit research, or even kickbacks to corporations who ‘partner’ with schools on research. Best of all — particularly at public universities — students are little more than hostages once they enroll, and can thus be exploited with impunity. (The vast majority of students will not go through the hassle of transferring to another school in mid-degree, even if it means saving thousands of dollars over the long haul. Instead, they will simply increase their debt load, which means the school still gets paid.)
One very big reason to suspect that tuition was the means, or a big part of the means, by which universities funded that $25.6B in non-federally-funded research in 2013, is that we know tuition has been going up out of scale to inflation or any other basic economic factor. Where the donor base at all colleges and universities varies drastically in number and contributions, almost all colleges and universities charge tuition, and tuition at almost all colleges and universities has been increasing out of scale for decades. If you want a ready source of black-box funds that you can skim or divert on a whim, you cannot not do better than new tuition revenue.
One big wrench in the works, however, as established by Crow, concerns the fact that most of the research that universities conduct is basic research, which does not promise a quick return on investment. For the 61% of research that is federally funded, that isn’t a problem because the schools are not out of pocket. Those funds keep people busy, add to the school’s prestige, and help keep the lights on, so there’s no downside even if there is no literal payoff. For the remaining 39% of basic research that is not federally funded, however, what possible incentive could there be for major research universities to pump their own money into basic research, when that research is unlikely to return a profit over time, or even to pay for itself?
If you’re going to choose between basic and applied research, simply out of self-interest you would go where the profits are if the funding was coming out of your own account. In fact, while everyone agrees that basic research is critical to the knowledge pipeline, and often becomes useful much later, even with the feds dangling billions in funding, the best research institutions would still be incentivized to chase profits as opposed to knowledge for its own sake. Which may be why the feds actually changed the game thirty-five years ago. From p. 162:
As you can see, not only were research universities allowed to profit directly from their federally funded discoveries, but that law was passed precisely to facilitate ‘transdisciplinarity’ between both public and private “academic institutions and business and industry”. Whether you see that as the cost of doing business in a rabidly capitalistic society, or the tearing down of an important Chinese wall between education and commerce, for the first time research schools could profit from all of the research they engaged in, thus further incentivizing research at the expense of education. More to the point, while that wouldn’t have much of an effect on most schools because most schools conduct little if any research, at the nation’s 108 leading-edge research universities that synergy with business and industry might easily become the tail that wags the dog.
One obvious question arising from the Bayh-Dole Act is whether research expenditures, including non-federally-funded research, markedly increased as a result, and if so by how much. While tuition has been badly outpacing inflation for decades, as it turns out the real cost of educating each individual student at the University of Iowa has remained flat for decades [p. 11]. The usual explanation for that disparity — always couched in misleading percentages — is that state appropriations have plummeted, yet time and again state schools raise tuition two to three times the amount of any cuts. So where is all that extra money going, and how much of it is going to research? If schools have indeed been raising the cost of an education to fund their own for-profit research and business ventures, shouldn’t we be able to tease that out of the abundance of data we have on hand?
Prior to the Bayh-Dole Act, the research priorities of both higher-ed and the business community were inherently differentiated by the federal government. Because businesses want to profit, they focused on riskier applied or commercial research that they funded themselves. Because higher-ed had no skin in the game, and was simply putting federal (or state, or donor) dollars to work, academia had little or no incentive to push into commercial territory, unless it wanted to assume the same level of risk. After the Bayh-Dole Act, however, what were previously divergent incentives not only converged, but research universities could now profit without putting any of their own money at risk.
In that context, it should be abundantly clear why businesses may have suddenly been eager not only to partner with research universities — thus extending their potential gains while reducing their own risk — but also how, over time, such partnerships would inevitably warp research universities toward corporate interests. Whatever role undergrads and graduate students used to have in helping faculty and staff conduct basic research, that role dovetailed neatly with the educational mission of a school. With the approval of for-profit federal research, however, suddenly students were being used to make money, and corporations would certainly want to get in on all that free labor as well.
Having paid lip service to all of the benefits of research universities, while dwelling almost exclusively on the economic benefits of scientific and technological research, Crow then whets the reader’s appetite for profit-making by referencing real-world academic and business synergies which also happened to make a lot of people stinking rich. Because doing so directly would have been crass, however, he introduces those examples with yet another spasm of indecipherable academic flair. From p. 165:
If you have any idea what that means, give yourself a gold star. For the rest of us, the gist is made clear on p. 166:
The idea that major research universities have an economic impact on their geographical surroundings is not new. As a largely life-long resident of Iowa City, Iowa, I can tell you from personal experience that the main reason Johnson County has always had low unemployment (and a relatively high cost of living) is because untold millions flow into the area from students, from the state, and from the federal government. Just like having a massive factory in town, the University of Iowa bleeds money by the buckets, and always has. What Crow is dangling, however, is something different, and implicitly promises to sate the lust for both money and prestige.
Even the idea of becoming a knockoff Research Triangle, or a mini Silicon Valley, is not new. In Iowa, both the University of Iowa and Iowa State have been involved in ‘corridor’ constructs — both rhetorical and economic — for decades. Located in the center of the state, the well-worn path between the state capital of Des Moines and Ames, home to Iowa State forty miles to the north, has been dubbed the Cultivation Corridor — in obvious reference to the state’s agricultural industry. (Full disclosure: there is a small subset of Iowans who believe that term actually speaks to the amount of fertilizer in both communities.)
In eastern Iowa, what is still locally known as the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids Corridor — or simply ‘the Corridor’ — has grown exponentially over the past twenty or thirty years, and along with it several in-between bus stops have become full-blown bedroom communities serving both cities. In 2009, vested interests proposed calling the region the “Hawkeye Corridor” — tying together both the nickname of the state and of UI. Flash forward to 2015, and after kind’a-sort’a branding the two communities as Iowa’s Creative Corridor, one of the first official acts of illegitimate president J. Bruce Harreld — even before he took office — was accepting an offer to become tri-chair of that group.
In early 2017, while Harreld was giving the keynote speech to the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, he said this:
This is the president of a major research university talking to an economic development group as if he is running — or would like to be running — a business incubator like those associated with Silicon Valley or Route 128 in Massachusetts. Unlike Harreld, however, after setting the entrepreneurial hook in deep, Crow clearly has a pang of conscience about making promises he cannot keep. From p. 167:
As much a Crow would like to claim that there is a tried-and-true recipe for turning academic research into mega-success and mega-prestige, there is no scholarship he can point to which makes that case. Yes, there have been great successes, but if you only look at the successes that doesn’t tell you the whole story. Harreld, on the other hand — coming as he does from the private sector, where lying by omission is a core competency — does not want you or anyone else to know the whole story. As far as he is concerned, all the Board of Regents has to do is allow him to increase the amount that students pay for their degrees by 41% over five years, then get out of the way.
So props to Crow for the admission. There is clearly a relationship between research, making money and being a sexy entrepreneur, but nobody can boil that all down to hard science. That in turn is why corporations are so eager to have universities help fund their research, in exchange for a share of any future profits — after deductions for ancillary costs, or cross-collateralized projects, or and anything else that can be used to drive down the net proceeds. (If there is one thing the private sector is better at than making money, it’s taking money from sleepy-eyed academic business partners.)
Still, even Michael Crow can’t let the dream — or the sales pitch — die, so he closes out chapter four with the following sentences, on p. 169:
What probably seems a daunting task to the uninitiated — saving the planet — is easy-peasy. All you have to do is encourage more partnerships between government, industry and research universities, and everything will turn out fine. And along the way, maybe you and your institution will also end up stinking rich — and isn’t that really the best prestige?
For Part 3 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context, click here.
This is Part 3 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. For Part 2, click here.
Chapter Five
You might think — particularly after two hundred grueling pages of intellectualism, philosophical asides, historical asides and regurgitated arguments — that a chapter titled Designing Knowledge Enterprises would tell you how to, you know, design knowledge enterprises, but you would be wrong. Instead, this chapter tells you all about the importance of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in achieving that end. As noted in a prior post I am a big believer in interdisciplinary endeavors, and I think there is important work to be done in the voids between specialized branches of knowledge, particularly in medicine. On the other hand, it’s one thing to make a practical argument about that simple interdisciplinary truth, and another to overshoot that objective and imbue the concept of transdisciplinarity with magical powers that are antithetical to good research.
As anyone knows who has ever designed anything, it can be thrilling to explore the farthest reaches of abstraction, but there is also an obligation to make sure that whatever you design will function in its intended context. Whether you have designed a product, a service or an experience — even if only for yourself — at some point your design must work, and so it is with universities. The problem for the esteemed Michael Crow is that while he presents a number of reasons why research universities should shift their emphasis from theoretical or academic research to applied or commercial research, he consistently ignores the most important reality of all, which is that you can’t design around human frailties and failings. From p. 180:
Well…there is a reason, but it doesn’t have anything to do with conceptualizing. Rather, it has to do with the fact that no matter how you design an institution or organization, it is going to end up being run by human beings, who, historically, have all sorts of qualities that get in the way of precision. Like, say, ego, vanity, vice, competitiveness (the bad kind), greed, sloth, and on and on. Which is to say that you can design a cracking good institutional or organizational concept, but just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no institutional or organizational design can ever nullify the chaos, corruption and conceit of human beings.
Crow avoids talking about this problem by invoking open-systems theory in the context of the twin missions of any research university. From p. 181:
With repeated use of the word “useful” we once again see Crow put his thumb heavily on the scale, tipping the conversation towards applied research, yet here at least he does acknowledge that universities are responsible for educating students. In most of this chapter, as in most of the book, that reality — which, in terms of revenue generation, is the realeconomic engine at most colleges and universities, regardless of mission — is subsumed by Crow’s lust for research. The design of the New American University is thus only peripherally concerned with education, and almost solely concerned with turning research universities into knowledge enterprises in the business sense — meaning institutions which produce knowledge to be sold, bartered, and exploited for proprietary gain.
From p. 182:
As to how research universities make that leap, that brings us to the subject of interdisciplinarity — or better yet, transdiciplinarity — which is at the heart of this chapter. From p. 185:
Notwithstanding the dense verbiage, the premise is clear: if you want to profit, figuratively and literally, from the benefits of interdisciplinarity (or transdisciplinarity), you have to design universities from the ground up with that objective in mind. And from the point of view of converting universities into ‘knowledge enterprises’ that makes perfect sense. At least until you remember that research universities not only have an obligation to conduct research, they have a nagging, irritating, and at times counter-productive obligation to also educate students. Not surprisingly, in making the arguments for his New American University, and specifically advocating for research primacy, Crow pays almost no attention to the way this radical change impacts that educational obligation. From p. 185:
It would be one thing if Crow were content to shore up or improve or even maximize the research component of a research university. As you can see from the quote above, however, and from prior quotes, and indeed the entire book if you read it, that’s not the argument Crow is making. Instead, Crow is positing that research universities should be designed to put research first, over and above education, and to that end he marshals historical and academic arguments in favor of that proposition. When you finally realize the amount of relevant information that Crow is leaving out, however, the willfulness of his deceit comes across as a rank insult.
For example, consider the basic premise of education, as opposed to research. With education you take knowledge that already exists, and may have existed for a very long time, and impart that information to students. In order to do that, you have to start at a very early age with what we might call the basics, then build from there. If you don’t get the alphabet in early, there’s no reading and there’s no writing. If you don’t get the number system and basic arithmetic in early, there’s no algebra, calculus or trigonometry, and later on, no science or engineering or business study.
As a purely theoretical matter, all education builds upon critical foundations, and that remains true as students progress through the grades, including up to and through undergraduate and even graduate study. For that reason, it makes obvious sense to organize that critical educational process around those foundations, even as they may eventually lead to academic areas of specialization or even hyper-specialization. For example, whatever the current cutting edge is in mathematical research in higher-ed, it makes sense that you would find that in a Department of Mathematics, which was defined by the discipline of mathematics. To the extent that math can be of value in interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary research efforts, the question is whether it makes sense to upend that obvious and sensible organizational structure, which is dictated by the process of education, and instead impose a new interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary structure which prioritizes research first.
Consider the practical demands of both the educational and research missions at a large university. Were those demands equal, the decision to organize the structure of a university around one or the other would be a judgment call, but of course the practical demands are not equal in any regard. For example, while there are thousands of faculty and staff on the campus of the University of Iowa, not only are there 33,000+ students who are there to learn, the majority of the faculty and staff are there primarily to teach or facilitate the educational mission, not to conduct the kind of research that Crow wants to elevate to interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary status.
Given the massive disparity between the number of people who are on campus at UI to learn, versus the number who are there to conduct any research, what sense would it make to break up or splinter the traditional educational disciplines across new interdisciplinary departments? Behind the scenes, sure — it might make sense to pull faculty and staff together from different departments to pursue a particular line of research, but when you have tens of thousands of students to teach — including teaching them about subjects which are foundational even at the collegiate level — it makes no sense to reorganize the “traditional correlation between academic disciplines and departments”, which exist precisely because it facilitates the educational mission. (And that includes the transfer of students from one institution to the other, where changes in departments and disciplines may not be recognized at other institutions.)
Changing the traditional, sensible, logical, market-friendly academic organizational structure of an institution of higher learning to facilitate interdisciplinary research runs contrary to the educational mission, yet that is clearly what Crow is proposing. From p. 187:
In the limited context of fostering interdisciplinary research, all of this makes sense. The idea of overhauling an entire university to facilitate that limited context, however, is antithetical to the educational mission of higher education. That reality — which Crow avoids of necessity — should also make clear that the organizational structure Crow is proposing only makes sense at the level of research administration. And in fact Crow actually makes that point himself, albeit unintentionally. From p. 187-188:
Industrial and government labs may indeed serve as a useful model for interdisciplinary research in academia, but only on the back end. Why? Because industrial and government labs have no concurrent educational obligation. In fact, Crow’s quotes from the National Academies badly damage the case he is trying to make for wholesale change at the level of university administration, because they make clear that the most useful organizational structure for interdisciplinary research is one that constantly evolves.
Is Crow proposing that the structure of disciplines and departments at research universities remain perpetually in flux? Because no matter how gung-ho anyone might be about turning universities into economic development engines, in terms of the functionality and management of the educational component of those schools, that will never, ever work
Crow finally gets to the heart of what frustrates him about the traditional academic disciplines and departments, and that ultimately has almost nothing to do with organizational structure. From p. 188:
When reading books there will be authors you click with and those you find difficult to follow. While I certainly did not click with Crow, at this point in the book I became absolutely convinced that I knew where Crow was going, and as it turned out, I was absolutely wrong. Yes, communication is critical, but the human structures which facilitate innovative communication most ably are often the least-organized, if not accidental.
In terms of knowledge output, you would be hard-pressed to find a better example of how communication fostered multiple advances than to study the history of Building 20 on the MIT campus. As I was reading this section of Crow’s book I was convinced that he would cite that specific example, precisely because it is so compelling. In retrospect, however, he could not cite that example because it counters his argument that the administrative structure of research universities must change to facilitate interdisciplinary research.
So…Building 20 was a war-time hack, but that doesn’t begin to explain the utter lack of any real organizational structure that persisted over the years. From the New Yorker, on 01/30/12:
From the Atlantic, on 10/10/11:
From the example of Building 20, and from Crow’s own comments about communication, it should be clear that any overarching administrative structure, even if ideal in the moment, will inevitably impede future research, and thus need to be replaced. Because such evolution is impossible to enact at the college or university level — meaning a top-down approach will never work — it makes sense to start with communication as a core principle and build teams from the bottom-up on an as-needed basis. Which is precisely what Crow advocates on p. 189:
Setting aside what constitutes an “academic unit”, if the goal is solving a “challenge” — including the ‘grand challenges’ that Crow and his academic peers are always yammering about — then this approach makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes so much sense that it is not even original to Crow, but is how most large institutions, including those in government and industry, have always tackled specific problems. Instead of reinventing themselves from the top down, they put together panels or committees or — to invoke a word which currently resonates in multiple ways — task forces.
Building 20 was an emergency hack spurred and partially funded by one of the largest institutions in the world: the United States Department of Defense. But of course that’s not the only example of the American military pulling assets, resources and individuals together to solve a pressing problem on short notice. In fact, on p. 198, Crow himself mentions the most storied example:
Despite such organizational plasticity, however, the U.S. military also has long-established disciplines which inform departments, and chances are none of that is going to change any time soon. Some evolution might be in the best interests of the country, both from the point of view of economics and effectiveness, but those macro issues do not stand in opposition to strategic and tactical problem solving across different service branches, or even across the entirety of the federal government. And of course Robert Oppenheimer was not also obligated to teach undergraduate math….
Flash forward from WWII to today, and every aspect of modern communication facilitates exactly the kind of project-specific interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that Crow wants to conduct, while at the same time obviating the need to get everyone in the same room, or in the same plywood building, to solve problems. Instead, people can gather, interface, participate and disperse in a virtual context as needed, regardless of the organizational structures they work under. All of the usual concerns — money, time, authorization — which Crow is trying to resolve by changing the structure of an organization the size of a major research university, can be handled administratively behind the scenes, just as they are when a national emergency strikes.
By Crow’s own criteria, the solution he is proposing does not optimally facilitate the pursuit of transdisciplinary knowledge production. That in turn suggests that Crow either does not know what he is talking about, or, that the problem he is trying to solve with his book is not the problem he claims to be trying to solve. (Hold that latter thought.)
As to the former possibility, we can see Crow’s reasoning contradict itself in the following quotes. From p. 201:
The entire history of the United States is premised on the worship of the individual. It is in our cultural DNA. The greatest rewards go to individual pioneers, even if those people we actually part of a team, group, or large institution. That heroic shorthand not only serves narrative needs in our society, at times it also reflects the responsibility of leadership, but that is hardly unique to “academic culture”. (For example, it is why quarterbacks get most of the blame and credit in the sport of American football.)
Note also the sneak attack on academic or basic research, in preference of applied or commercial research: “…specialized knowledge over problem-based collaboration…” Again, Crow unabashedly puts his thumb heavily on the scale, tipping the argument in his favor…only this time he then shoots off that same thumb. From p. 202:
So “priz[ing] individualism” is bad, unless you have a Pasteur kicking around, in which case it’s all good. On p. 204, Crow clarifies his overall objective using multiple qualifiers:
Note here that Crow uses the term “research enterprise” instead of “knowledge enterprise”, which seems a blatant ‘tell’ regarding his real priorities. And of course the big difference between academia on the one hand and business, industry and government on the other is that universities have that nagging educational obligation which always seems to get in the way. Pressing his case on p. 204-205, Crow badly overreaches:
There are two indefensible assertions here. First, I don’t know if “the university” ever had a monopoly on knowledge production, but if it did, it wasn’t recently. As Crow himself pointed out on p. 162, industry accounts for 85% of research “by dollar” in the United States, meaning universities are and have been minority players for a long time. Second, if there ever comes a day when the “criteria for the evaluation of quality” for any research is either “social” or “political”, then the concept of research will be dead.
For the time being, we will assume that Crow simply got a little too enthusiastic and confused quality with viability, which is indeed susceptible to all sorts of factors. As to his obsessive focus on research, even when Crow attempts to loop the educational component of a university back into the conversation, he fails. From p. 206:
Note that Crow says “teaching”, not “learning”. While interdisciplinary experience would almost certainly make for more well-rounded faculty (how could it not), that says nothing about the subject matter being taught, which would still rest on foundational academic disciplines, particularly at the undergraduate level. For that reason, from the point of view of the students, few if any of the wholesale changes Crow proposes on the research front would improve the education provided. Conversely, all of the obstacles Crow perceives in the current, education-friendly structure of research universities could be obviated on the research side simply by ignoring them and bringing the right people together, regardless of labels.
In sum, in the very chapter in which Crow sets out to prove that interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity necessarily require a New American University, Crow not only fails to make that case, his own arguments prove him wrong. To that we can now add the fact that human beings tend to respond to any organizational structure in the same way, particularly over time, which presents additional inevitable obstacles to the research renaissance Crow hopes to engineer. From fighting over power to fighting over territory to fighting over who gets credit, human beings are wired up to warp any administrative or bureaucratic structure to their vanities and vices, meaning no matter how it might be designed or implemented, the New American University would be no different.
Finally, let us admire the colossal implicit irony in all of the above, particularly relative to the current cultural context in higher education. On the research side, while Crow allows that all research is important, he quickly focuses on technological and scientific research because that’s where the money is. Crow then argues against specialization and academic silos, and for interdisciplinary departments and transdisciplinary programs, because that will create more economic development.
As the same time, however, on the education side, which Crow completely ignores save a few passing references, we live at a time when all of the transdisciplinary partners that Crow extols — business, industry and government — are trying to turn universities into factories which produce narrowly educated, specialized grads, largely suitable for employment in STEM fields. The traditional liberal arts education, which is by its very nature interdisciplinary, and seeks to provide graduates with the exact broad-based academic foundation that would be a force multiplier in business, industry and government research, is under almost constant assault by the very parties Crow wants to partner with in conducting transdisciplinary research. (To the extent that Crow himself expressed an appreciation for the liberal arts on the education side, he has little or nothing to say about the benefits of the liberal arts in terms of research.)
Chapter Six
Though one of the shortest chapters in the book, A Pragmatic Approach to Innovation and Sustainability feels a lot longer because it is also the most schizophrenic chapter. The first half is a treatise on the philosophical roots of American pragmatism and its applicability to the foundations of the New American University. As with other sections, it has the feel of an argument that was reverse-engineered to support Crow’s larger narrative, as opposed to explaining the actual origins of his model.
Whether you are entrenched in academia yourself, are an escapee or a refugee, or are an outsider, you will find the going tough, with few respites along the way. The crux of Crow’s argument about pragmatism, however, can be found on p. 217:
The convergence here with utility, and specifically with Crow’s focus on applied research, is obvious. Following ten pages of tortured advocacy for the obvious, Crow then introduces the concept of sustainability as a guiding principle in the design of the New American University. In this shift we also see the value of sticking with a tough text. From p. 225:
On p. 227, we get another interesting insight, which would have been particularly helpful a couple hundred pages earlier:
Here we see the origins of the battle between capitalism and democracy, and why democracy has largely come out on the loosing end. To the degree that individualism is a core concept of American culture, that also clearly springs from the Constitution, yet as was said in a different context, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. To the extent that research universities, or all colleges and universities, or education in itself, can help us find a balance between individual rights and healthy, sustainable cultural choices, that is all to the good.
On p. 229 we find a section titled Negotiating Human Limitation, and it is worth reading in its lucid entirety. (Some of it, at least, springs from Crow’s own pen, because passages have been published elsewhere under his name.) In providing an oasis of crisp, clear and accessible thinking, however, Crow once again undercuts his own arguments. Or, more charitably, he acknowledges that the New American University won’t be an easy sell, particularly to the rich and powerful who grant permission (and raise money) for such revolutions. From p. 232:
Crow wants to create a “transdisicplinary synthesis” between research universities, business, industry and government. Unfortunately, business, industry and government are often led by people who are driven by “nakedly self-interested pursuits” — meaning even if there is a consciousness raising in higher education, the other parties in any transdisciplinary research will almost certainly be focused on money. Having said that, for several pages thereafter Crow goes on a tear, and it is clear that he is aware of this intrinsic problem. From p. 233:
On the final page of Chapter six, however, Crow develops amnesia about points that he himself just made in this and the preceding chapter. From p. 235:
Wait — corporate visionaries? Aren’t those the same people who embody the self-interest that Crow was just railing against? And what about those government leaders? Aren’t those people afflicted with a “dangerous scientific and technological illiteracy”? In fact, as long as we’re asking questions, how many true public servants are there in government these days, on either side of the aisle?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the current president of the United States is a degenerate con-artist fronting for a cabal of psychopathic libertarians and closeted fundamentalists, none of whom have any vested interest in the future, in ethics, or even in education as a public good. Likewise, Congress and the various departments of government are a blur of revolving doors, well-lubricated by dark money and corporate profits. And these are the people with whom academia needs to forge “much closer ties”?
Again, on the research side, everything Crow is arguing for sounds like it would prosper with widespread adoption of the liberal arts on the education side. Instead, not only are the liberal arts ignored while “corporate visionaries” get a shout-out, but how education resolves questions of sustainability is, at most, an afterthought. Where exactly does Crow think human beings learn the value – the connectedness — of pragmatism or sustainability as a philosophical cornerstone that has meaning for people “other than philosophers”? That’s the province not of STEM courses or the “corporate visionaries” they work for, but of the humanities and the army of faculty who teach and preach those lessons.
Part 4 will be posted Thursday.
This is Part 4 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. For Part 3, click here.
Chapter Seven — first half (p. 240-267)
After 200-plus pages of historical context and intellectual mood music, we arrive at the meat of the book in the final chapter, titled Designing a New American University at the Frontier. Diving back into Crow’s unprecedented success at Arizona State (just ask him), we learn (again) that he reimagined ASU over the course of a decade — which only sounds like a long time. From p. 240:
The ostensible point of Crow’s book is to explain how other research universities might replicate what Crow did at ASU, and here we have the first important metric. If you want to go down the same boundlessly beneficial road, you’re looking at a decade minimum. Even if that is quick compared to any other viable alternative, however — and Crow himself hedges with “might” — it is also worth noting that the higher-ed industry could change in inimical ways over that time frame, potentially wiping out any gains, or making things worse. But still — it’s only ten years!
As previously discussed, there is something unique and relevant about the specific decade Crow is referencing. From p. 242:
Mike Crow started his ASU makeover in 2002, which means it reached fruition in 2012. As noted earlier in discussing chapter one, and in multiple prior posts, that particular ten-year span was not like most other ten-year spans in American history. Specifically, at the exact midpoint between 2002 and 2012, the U.S. and world economies fell into what is now called the Great Recession — the single biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression back in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s.
As also noted, however, college and university presidents, along with their governing boards, seem to have a uniformly difficult time remembering that the Great Recession ever happened, let alone that it had a profound impact on higher education. And that’s more than a little weird given how hyper-educated such individuals tend to be, even if they were not — like Crow — running a college or university when the bottom actually dropped out.
As to how the Great Recession impacted Crow’s renewal at Arizona State, we are still left to wonder. (Hold that thought.) As to Crow’s specific recipe for success — the results of which he demonstrates with a slew of claims about improved metrics — we get an overview on p. 245-246:
And later on p. 246:
So the multi-campus ASU plan, which is the prototype for the New American University, is loosely founded on the structure of the multi-campus University of London. (As a coincidental aside, when J. Bruce Harreld was finally installed as the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa in the summer of 2016, his invited keynote speaker was Funmi Olonisakin, a professor at King’s College London. Two months later, in October, Harreld flew to London and gave a reciprocal lecture at King’s College, in the middle of the fall term. The fact that one of Harreld’s daughters was studying under Olonisakin, and those reciprocal invites thus netted him a free, UI-Foundation-paid trip to London to hang with one of his kids, reportedly had nothing to do with any of the above.)
Speaking of coincidental asides and King’s College, a year and a half after publication of Crow’s book, it was announced that Arizona State and the University of New South Wales in Australia were entering into a partnership with King’s College. From Karin Fischer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, on 11/01/16:
The Plus Alliance officially launched on 02/09/16. (Branded website here, Wikipedia here, Vimeo here.) In that alliance, even if we know nothing else about it, we clearly see that research universities do not need to reconfigure themselves in order to engage in trandisciplinary pursuits among schools, further emboldening us in our conviction that they need not do so within schools.
As to the benefits of such an alliance, in terms of research the idea of distributing faculty collaboration across institutions, or even international boundaries, clearly offers considerable cost savings compared to having faculty “in adjacent departments or even adjacent schools in their own institutions”. For example, if you need three key faculty to pursue a given line of inquiry, and you already have one on campus, there are two options. Either hire the other two faculty, thus increasing your payroll, or figure out how to collaborate with the other two faculty where they already work.
By employing the latter solution you also profit when the project is done because the group can simply be disbanded. If you had hired the other two faculty you would have to find something for them to do to make their salaries worthwhile when the project was finished. Although that wouldn’t necessarily be hard, you would be obligated to play to their strengths as opposed to pursuing lines of research that might be more profitable. Conversely, without those two additional faculty on staff, you would be free to hook up the next alliance and get on with the most optimal project.
The only possible downside in terms of a school’s research mission is that one institution would not own all of the rights to any potential profits which resulted from that collaborative project. On the other hand, not only would costs have been reduced by two thirds, but so would risk. Given that the ultimate objective is generating the most money from research with the least amount of cost or risk — along with, obviously, advancing knowledge and solving ‘grand challenges’ blah blah blah — such alliances seem to facilitate that goal in every way, at least on the research side.
As to the educational mission of a school involved in such an alliance, in an ideal world each institution’s esteemed faculty would spend as much or more time in the classroom as they did on research, so not having the other two faculty on staff would clearly be a detriment to the students. Instead of ending up with three great faculty to infuse the student body with a passion for knowledge, and with key insights into their specific areas of academic expertise, there would only be one person on staff who could teach in the classroom. (We are assuming here that there is no online or distance-learning component included in the alliance.)
One of the age-old excuses that presidents like Crow and Harreld use to justify tuition hikes is that they are critical to hiring ‘world-class’ faculty. That pitch sounds good because it is presumed that faculty actually teach, but as more and more people have come to realize, that’s not always the case. What Crow and Harreld really mean when they talk about hiring world-class faculty, is that those faculty are beneficial in conducting research. (There may be a college or university somewhere which hires faculty because they are world-class teachers, but that is the exception, not the rule.) Precisely because world-class faculty are more valuable in the lab, any classwork assigned to them is often left to adjuncts or grad students, who handle the mundane task of shoveling enough knowledge at students to justify fleecing their bank accounts.
As to how all of this plays out within the context of the New American University model, we get that on p. 246:
From Arizona State’s subsequent alliance with King’s College and UNSW, we know such partnerships offer considerable costs savings related to personnel, and indeed here we find Crow using the word “consolidation” rather than ‘merger’. Take four or five departments, “reconfigure” them to eliminate redundancies in staffing, and presto: cost savings in service of profit-driven transdisciplinary research. And yet…it is not at all clear how this serves the school’s educational mission, or even how classes taken in departments “which no longer serve as the sole institutional locus of a given discipline” are memorialized on a transcript.
As to the frequency and pace of change at ASU, consider this, from p. 247:
In constructing the first New American University it is understandable that there would have been change orders along the way. Unfortunately, because Crow cannot provide a one-size-fits-all plan for other schools, the process will be equally uncertain for each institution that adopts the same methodology. As to how that uncertain process might be focused, Crow again returns to his own focus on research. Also from p. 247:
It is not at all clear how the New American University model “facilitate[s] teaching”, except insofar as students may be herded into larger classes or steered toward online and distance-learning courses which have less cost. In any event, in no sense will changing the names of departments alter much if any of the learning that most students do. As previously noted, students still have to take in the same foundational knowledge that has been taught for hundreds of years, and changing the name of the department or the faculty in that department will not alter that reality..
As to the administrative mechanics by which Arizona State was transformed, and, presumably, by which other schools can transform themselves, we get that on p. 248:
By incredible coincidence, Crow’s University Design Team sounds a lot like the ongoing Academic Organizational Structure 2020 Task Force at the University of Iowa, which is under the putative administrative authority of the (interim) provost. Like Crow’s UDT, the UI initiative also involves multiple deans and faculty and “participation from all sectors of the university”, although the generic goal of the Iowa review is improving “academic excellence“. As a practical matter, however, many of the potential outcomes at UI are remarkably similar to those that transpired at ASU:
Even if what you really want is to reconfigure a campus to support a massive increase in for-profit transdisciplinary research, you don’t have to be up-front about that objective. Instead, you can initiate an academic reorganization that no one asked for, then use that as a stalking horse for the changes you want to make. (And that’s particularly effective if the ultimate authority in the process is a president who seems to have been hands-off throughout the process — much as Harreld has purportedly been through Phase I and Phase II of the 2020 Task Force at UI.)
As for Crow and his New American University, despite providing an embarrassing amount of information about how great ASU became under his visionary leadership, details about how to replicate that success are few and far between. Then again, if I have learned anything over the past two years while digging into the aftermath of the Harreld hire, it is that far too many college and university presidents are the ethical equivalent of used car salespersons. Which is to say that they provide misleading information and omit critical information as easily as they breathe.
We get a sterling example of Crow’s instinct for deception on p. 250, in a clause that might otherwise be overlooked:
That fragment appears in a seven-line sentence about the motivations which inspired the New American University. As far as it goes that statement seems damning, and all the more so because of the words “investment” and “per-student basis”, which clearly imply wilful neglect. The problem with measuring state support on a per-student basis, however, is that it can be inherently misleading, which is of course why so many colleges, universities and think tanks love that squishy metric.
To see the problem clearly, imagine that you have a state college or university which is running at seventy percent capacity. If appropriations stay flat, even after adjusting for inflation, but the school enrolls more students to fill those empty seats, then on a per-student basis the funding from the state will decrease, even as the school profits from all of that new tuition revenue. Yes, if you add a lot of students and have to build out new dorms or hire new faculty, that per-student metric might have some merit, but in all the reading I have done I have yet to come across anyone who is using the per-student formula on the up-and-up. Rather, in every instance, that metric is deployed precisely because it can be so easily exploited, particularly in the context of the Great Recession.
As noted in multiple prior posts, there is a similar problem with reporting the percentage of support that comes from appropriations and tuition. Even if appropriations increase and tuition stays the same, a sizeable increase in enrollment will also greatly increase total tuition revenue, which will again make the appropriations percentage decrease. That’s particularly important to remember in the context of ASU, because increasing enrollment is a cornerstone of Crow’s New American University model. From p. 250:
Put another way, ASU is the only research university in a very large metropolitan area, meaning it has that market all to itself. For that reason, the idea that ASU “confronted burgeoning enrollment demand” is a heroic characterization of the growth potential inherent in that market, and that potential will persist for some time given that the population is expected to double by 2050. Finally, by referencing the “Sun Corridor”, Crow hearkens back to the sexy success of Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Massachusetts.
Not surprisingly, Crow’s plan for his New American University was to exploit the underserved demand in Phoenix to the fullest. From p. 251:
In an economic context this is Supply and Demand 101, but it also severely limits the number of other institutions which will be able to reinvent themselves using the New American University model. Are you located in a major metropolitan area? Is there massive untapped demand for higher education? Is the population expected to double in thirty years?
To truly understand how anomalous Crow’s situation was at Arizona State, it helps to have traveled across the western United States, where the distance between major cities in the same state can be greater than the span of multiple states in the east. For example, in the very large state of California, the distance between San Francisco and Los Angeles to the south is 350 miles, and between those two major cities there is basically nothing. By contrast, if you start in New York City and travel 350 miles south you end up at the northern border of North Carolina, and along the way you pass Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Richmond Virginia.
Here is a 300-mile circle centered on New York City:
Even ignoring the substantial part that is ocean, it should be clear that competition among educational institutions of all stripes in that 70,685 square-mile area would be and is quite fierce. Now here is a 300-mile circle centered on Phoenix:
As you can see, despite the fact that Arizona is entirely land-locked, other than Tucson — which is home to the University of Arizona 100 miles to the southeast — there is almost nothing around Phoenix. To get to another major metropolitan area you have to actually leave the state and travel 260 miles to Vegas, 300 miles to San Diego, 330 miles to Albuquerque, or 360 miles to Los Angeles. By contrast, Philadelphia is only 80 miles from New York City, Providence 150 miles, Boston 190, and D.C. 200.
As to the population of Phoenix, the city itself is around 1.6M. When you take the entire metro area into account, however, that number explodes to about 4.6M, out of a total state population of 6.9M. By contrast, Tucson, which is the only other large-ish city in the state, is about 500K.
Without taking any credit from Crow for what he has accomplished at Arizona State, it is fair to point out that the vast majority of universities in the U.S. do not dominate a massive, under-served metropolitan area. In Iowa, the University of Iowa is located in a small town that numbers 80K residents on a good day, in a county that tops out at about 145K. Likewise, the population of Iowa State’s home town of Ames is about 70K, while the population of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls metro area, which is home to the University of Northern Iowa, is around 170K. Total them all up and you get 385K, which is still 115K less than Tucson, which is 4.1M less than the Phoenix metroplex..
Not only are the towns which host all three of Iowa’s regent universities quite small, even at those small numbers no one is predicting that those areas will double in population in the next thirty years. It might happen, and the state would like it to happen, and the local business communities will try to make it happen, but between Iowa being in the winter-ravaged north, and run by anti-government fundamentalists and libertarians, it is unlikely that people are going to flock to those towns whether they are specifically interested in higher education or not.
I do not know how many other universities are situated in metro areas verging on 5M inhabitants, with no other major cities in the state or in the surrounding 70K+ square miles, but I would think the number would be quite small. Which is to say that on that point alone, the applicability of Crow’s New American University model to other schools — even allowing for differentiation in accord with all other relevant factors — would also be quite small. Because that would obviously undercut the appeal of his book, however, Crow understandably does not dwell on that point.
As to how the massive and captive population of the Phoenix metro area helps Crow drive success at ASU, we get a startling glimpse in a section titled Recalibrating Mission and Goals. In that section, Crow provides an extensive list of the goals ASU established for 2014 and beyond, beginning on p. 253 and ending at the bottom of p. 254. Among the twenty or so objectives, many of which are couched in terms of squishy percentage growth, we find the following two items under the heading of Demonstrate leadership in academic excellence and accessibility:
Even allowing for the fact that ASU has multiple campuses, the idea that any university would be able to crank out 25K graduates each year implies an enrollment of 100K at minimum, and probably considerably more given that many students do not graduate in four years. As for having 100K online students seeking degrees, it is not clear how many of those would factor into the previous 25K goal, but even if the answer is ‘all’, the idea that any university would have that many degree-seeking — and tuition-paying — online students is probably a radical notion to anyone who is reading this post at another college or university.
We will return to Crow’s list of post-2014 goals in a bit, but for now simply note how important scale was and is to Crow’s New American University model. It’s not just that he wants to bring education to the masses, it’s that ASU was in the perfect place to pursue growth, and Crow pursued that growth with a vengeance. In fact, as we will also see shortly, it is worth wondering not only how applicable such a model is to most other schools and locales, but how sustainable that model is even at Arizona State.
In the next section, titled Academic Accomplishment and the Scale of Impact, Crow carpet bombs the reader with facts and information to the point of disorientation, and in so doing the importance of scale comes through all the more. A sampling, from p. 256:
Again, even if they pulled out all the stops, how many universities could drive that kind of growth? More to the point, would that be a good idea in all cases? Iowa State has had unprecedented growth over the past decade, to the point that it passed the University of Iowa and is now the largest university in the state. Even at that, however, the rate of growth at ISU is nothing compared to the numbers that Crow reports at ASU.
From the Press Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 09/08/16:
In the context of the New American University model, those numbers suggest that Iowa State should get busy and recruit more students, yet the entire point of Charis-Carlson’s piece was that ISU was “dial[ing] down enrollment”. As to why, it turns out that even though large numbers of new students produce a windfall in tuition revenue, they also require things like dorm rooms and cafeterias and classrooms and faculty and all the facilities and services that must also scale to provide food, housing, medical and mental health care, and of course fully-accredited degrees.
The University of Iowa also put the brakes on enrollment growth after its own, shorter, record-setting run, and in fact J. Bruce Harreld made it clear early on that he did not consider growth to be a viable strategy for UI. That was in marked contrast to one of his co-conspirators — former regents president Bruce Rastetter, who was the agent of the record growth at both schools — who believed growth was inherently good. (As we will see, although Harreld does not see growth as a viable path to success, that does not mean he is not interested in other aspects of Crow’s master plan to drive research.)
Another obstacle to replicating the New American University model is that even after 250 pages it is difficult to describe Arizona State as an institution. Yes, it is a university by name and a research university at that, but between multiple campuses and a massive online component, the distributed nature of the organization makes it hard to both visualize and conceptualize. In fact, the longer you read, and the more data points Crow fires off, the more it seems as if ASU is less like a traditional university and more accurately described as a higher-ed conglomerate.
That persistent feeling of uncertainty finally lifted for me on p. 257, when I read the following, which was buried in an extensive, mind-numbing paragraph detailing enrollment, graduation rates, and student honors:
What initially brought me to a halt was that in all my years I had never heard of a college anywhere named Barrett, and that struck me as unlikely because my last name is Barrett. That in turn prompted me to take a closer look at the two sentences above, which is when I realized that Barrett was not just some college in Arizona, along the lines of the small liberal arts colleges Crow had been dismissing with faint praise, but a residential honors college which was part of the ASU campus — or one of the campuses. And indeed it is:
As you can see, there are differences between the text from the book and the text from the Barrett website, but the point is made either way. Inside the great expanse of egalitarian Arizona State, there is a super-snooty school for brainy students, just like all of the super-snooty liberal arts colleges and Ivies that focus on exclusivity in defiance of market demand, social injustice or economic privation. The key difference, of course, is that because Barrett is part of ASU, it can also claim to be part of a visionary research university, and not just a playground for rich kids.
From the History of Barrett page on the ASU website:
Only after reading about Barrett did Arizona State finally come into focus. While referred to as a unified whole, ASU is not only a conglomeration of educational institutions, it is horizontally and vertically integrated across the higher-ed market. Horizontally, in the sense that it has multiple campuses for undergraduate and graduate students; vertically in that it includes graduate programs, high-end undergraduate offerings like Barrett, more accessible and affordable four-year degrees, and full-time online and distance learning programs.
On its face there is nothing wrong with any of that, but it is exceedingly unlikely that there will be many other schools in the United States, or on planet Earth, that can emulate the ASU model, because it is so clearly predicated on exploiting growth as a business strategy. Most schools simply do not have the available demand that Crow exploited in Phoenix, let alone a monopoly on that demand because of geographical isolation. Even with all of those advantages, however, some of the numbers that Crow reports are eye-popping, and leave one wondering what will happen when supply finally equals demand.
It would not be correct to say that Arizona State is a Ponzi scheme, but any success predicated on perpetual growth is by definition unsustainable. As noted in a recent post on the budget debacle in Iowa, which is now in its second year — and will, for the second year in a row, require mid-year ‘clawbacks’ of funds that were previously appropriated to the regent universities — one of the great risks in precipitously raising tuition at Iowa’s three state universities is that enrollment could drop as a result. Not only would any reduction in enrollment diminish the revenue expected revenue from the initiating hikes, but the only way to make up that money would be to increase prices on the remaining students, which would discourage even more students from attending.
(If I thought of anything while reading this section of chapter seven, it was not of other academic institutions, but again of Boston Chicken, and what happened to that white-hot company when then-president J. Bruce Harreld and others recklessly oversold the number of franchises that could be sustained by the underlying business model. In a strictly legal sense Boston Chicken was not a Ponzi scheme, but when inflows of new money dried up the company went bankrupt. More on that here.)
Even given the large population of the Phoenix metro area, however — which, as of 2002 was around 1.3M — that does not mean enrollment growth could be taken for granted, or even driven with incentives. As it turned out, however, and as previously mentioned, the Great Recession broke out with a vengeance in 2008, idling millions of workers across the country. Because of that economic downturn, many citizens chose to attend or return to college, producing a spike in enrollment:
For any other research university to replicate the context in which the New American University model has proven successful at Arizona State, not only would that school have to be located in a relatively isolated geographic location, and in a major metropolitan area that was grossly underserved, but midway through that evolution the U.S. economy would also have to blow itself to smithereens. Perhaps because that convergence of factors seems unlikely, however, Crow does not correlate the success metrics he provides with that historic economic break. Instead, like so many other college and university presidents, he takes advantage of the Great Recession by cherry-picking only those statistics which are of use.
With regard to the regent universities in Iowa, as just noted the two largest schools — Iowa and Iowa State — do not intend to grow enrollment for the foreseeable future. Both schools are at, or in the case of ISU, exceeding current capacity, and without increases in spending for infrastructure and services there is simply nowhere to put thousands of new students, let alone tens of thousands on either campus. Even if they did pursue growth, however, that would presume that there is great untapped demand for seats at either school, which there is not, and certainly will not be if either or both of the schools raise tuition by 41% over the next five years.
In reality, there are few if any universities that will ever replicate the enrollment growth of Arizona State. That does not mean, however, that what Crow has to say is of no use to other presidents or administrators. While enrollment growth does correlate with may of the increased metrics he cites, of greater importance to the New American University — and of greater interest to other colleges and universities — is the wholesale conversion of ASU from a traditional research university to an academic institution infused with the entrepreneurial ethos. From p. 262, following a blast of carefully qualified success metrics on research:
Compared to the University of Iowa, which was founded in 1847 — let alone Harvard, which was founded in 1636 — ASU is indeed a babe in the desert. Its overall growth, however, clearly correlates to its “trajectory” as a “research enterprise”, which in turn relates to population growth in the Phoenix metro area. For example, in 1960, two years after ASU was founded, the population of the city of Phoenix was still only about 440K. In 1980, when funded research began in earnest, the population was a bit less than 800K, while in 1994 — when Research 1 status was granted — the population had pushed well past 1M.
What does stand out about the relatively proportional growth in research at ASU is the aggressive degree to which Crow made for-profit research a focus. Indeed, unlike most colleges and universities in the U.S., Arizona State had no institutional tradition of basic or academic research, though faculty hires would certainly have brought that practice with them. On p. 263, Crow gives a tantalizing hint at the riches that await if other schools only have the courage to follow suit in prioritizing for-profit research:
In terms of what Crow really cares about, and what most university presidents care about, we have finally arrived. Sure, Crow does not specify which “peer research institutions” he’s talking about, and that “per $10 million” stat is typically obscure, but as soon as the word “patents” appears no one is going to ask any questions. (Truly, you could tear the preceding 260-plus pages off the book and most readers would not care less.)
The name of the game in higher-ed these days is no longer education, it’s research, and profit-driven research at that. Or, if you’re really lucky, state-subsidized profit-driven research, which, despite all the whining about decreased government funding, still gives you an insane advantage over most private schools. (And you can always increase tuition.)
As for Crow’s success at ASU, however, it’s worth remembering that his prior job at Columbia involved the exact same thing — meaning what he brought to ASU was not simply a plan, but extensive experience and the digital equivalent of a Rolodex. With very little history, no regional competition, and massive untapped demand, at ASU Crow was not only able to replicate what he had been doing at Columbia, he was almost certainly hired with that objective in mind. From the announcement of Crow’s departure from Columbia, on 03/29/02:
The problem, again, is that if you don’t have a Michael Crow lying around, you’re going to have a hard time implementing the New American University model — assuming Crow ever explains it in sufficient detail. On that same point, even in his departing comments Crow made clear how important growth potential was, further putting a damper on those who might try to replicate his success at other schools:
Ignoring the fortuitous happenstance of the Great Recession, which not only helped drive growth but gave Crow unprecedented license to tear up the floorboards at ASU, the odds of any other institution hiring someone like Crow are prohibitive. On a diminished scale, however, and with the focus not on growth but on research — as it would necessarily be at any older, established, mature university — it might be possible to replicate a knock-off version of the New American University by focusing on for-profit research, and by hiring a knock-off version of Mike Crow.
In fact, if all you really cared about was the research part of the Mike Crow System, you wouldn’t even need a president with experience in academic administration. Instead, you could hire someone from the private sector — a mercenary — who, ideally, would have experience developing patents and spinning out new businesses. Someone like, say, former IBM executive J. Bruce Harreld, who, coincidentally, was jammed into the president’s office at the University of Iowa just after Mike Crow’s book was published in 2015. (It really is a small world, isn’t it?)
And why would you not do that if this is what it got you — also from p. 263:
AzTE was formed the year after Crow arrived from Columbia, and was clearly modeled on his success at that school. AzTE was also not established to facilitate academic or scholarly research, but to help turn applied or commercial research into profit-making businesses. Not so coincidentally, at IBM one of Harreld’s jobs was to run the Emerging Business Opportunities division for legendary CEO Lou Gerstner. From p. 224 of The Future of Management, published in October of 2007:
In terms of replicating what Crow did at ASU, you can see the parallels which convinced Jerre Stead, Bruce Rastetter and UI administrator Jean Robillard that Harreld was their guy, long before the 2015 UI search process truly kicked into gear. Given the results that Crow claims at ASU, it is also not hard to imagine why those three men decided to kick their personal integrity to the curb and betray the UI community in making that hire. It was still an abuse of power, but from a conscienceless, money-grubbing perspective it has a certain logic to it. Continuing from p. 263-264:
Momentarily interrupting the research porn, Crow follows that tease with a section titled Further Indicators of the Viability of the Model, which covers the all-too familiar topic of national and international rankings. As regular readers know, the usual administrative scam is to promote increases in the ubiquitous U.S. News rankings after having gamed those same rankings for a few years, but Crow goes deep in the weeds on ASU’s rankings before U.S. News even comes up.
Only on p. 266 do we finally learn why:
I’m not exactly sure if Crow is calling U.S. News straight-up racist, but that seems to be the gist. In any case, Crow is clearly not a fan of the U.S. News rankings, and does not feel they fairly measure ASU’s caliber as an institution. Indeed, despite the densely packed success metrics that spill out of chapter seven, and earlier sections of the book, in 2017, after more than a decade of unbridled if not unparalleled success at Arizona State, U.S. News ranked ASU #117 among national universities. (For comparison’s sake, Iowa State ranked #115, and Iowa ranked #78 — though Crow would undoubtedly point out that UI has a medical college on campus, while ISU and ASU do not.)
Still, however racist or biased or just plain unfair the U.S. News rankings might be, Crow warms up to them considerably in the very next sentence:
That’s Mike Crow in a nutshell. When he doesn’t like the numbers U.S. News puts out, he omits them and calls the methodology into question. When he does like the U.S. News numbers, he quotes them freely.
Speaking of fun with numbers, on the subject of “innovative change[s] in measures” of faculty, we assumed earlier that the sexy, for-profit research in any New American University will be done by the same kind of ‘world-class’ faculty that Harreld has been barking about for the past two years. Because those academic stars would be wasted in the classroom, however, others will have to pick up the slack. At the bottom of p. 266 — after coming full circle and taking yet another shot at U.S. News — Crow addresses that issue in passing:
So there you go. If you end up on the faculty of a New American University — whether you are hired or your school is converted to that model — and you’re not one of the world-class faculty who are cranking out patents by the dozen, you will work your ass off. On the positive side, for a moment Crow was actually talking about education.
For Part 5 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context, click here.
This is Part 5 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. For Part 4, click here.
Chapter Seven — second half (p. 267-297)
For anyone who is a bit queasy about for-profit research in higher education, in the first few pages of the next section — titled Interrelated and Interdependent Design Aspirations — Michael Crow is there to tell you it’s all okay. From p. 268:
Critics! All they do is get in the way of catalyzing innovation for the public good!
But wait…. It is not only “critics” who “allege” that “collaboration between the academy and business and industry…compromises disinterested inquiry”, that’s pretty much the definition of compromising disinterested inquiry. If you are performing research in pursuit of pure knowledge, the chance that you will skew results in favor of a particular industry or business are quite low because there is no advantage in doing so. On the other hand, if you’re in bed with business, or business is paying some or all of your costs, then you’re really a client — or they’re your client — and that increases the chance that you might skew results in their check-writing favor. (Not at ASU, of course, or UI, but at other schools, where everyone is not a perfect academic angel.)
While we’re on the subject, who says that “leverag[ing] their knowledge production” is “critical” for research universities? I know Crow says that — it’s his entire pitch, after you take out all the academic and sociological filler — but it’s not an established fact, or even a mainstream belief. The way Crow describes partnering with business and industry, there is no downside to switching over from super-boring basic or academic research to applied, commercial or for-profit research.
Of course there is a downside, and that downside is a great deal more risk — like the risk that sham UI president Harreld wanted to defray with third-party participants during his EBO days at IBM. You may indeed strike it rich at some point, and that success may get all the press, but even in the high-flying, cultish, “fail-faster” world of business incubation, great rivers of cash money are flushed down the toilet every day. Is that really a process that research universities, and particularly public research universities, should be involved in?
From footnote 62, p. 297, of Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line, published in September of 2004:
One of the problems with undertaking “bold, sometimes chancy initiatives” at academic institutions is that more often than not, the people who take those bold chances have no actual skin in the game. Yes, their reputations may be on the line, but not only are they not investing their own money, they are often pulling a six-figure salary at the same time. If there are no institutional barriers to gambling money by the millions on “bold” or “chancy” research, what is there to stop a president like Crow or Harreld from throwing tuition revenue or state funds at research which has exposure to the same market risks that business and industry seek to defray — often, ironically, by partnering with research universities?
You can see the brutish benefit of convincing people to take crazy risks by looking at the private sector, and particularly swamps like Silicon Valley, where more risk means more chances — however slim — at a monster hit. Making such risk-taking all the more appealing is that no one ever sits down and tallies the money that has been wasted on risky investments, let alone the number of lives damaged along the way. Instead, everyone rationalizes such losses as the cost of generating the staggering market cap of Amazon, Google or Facebook, and that keeps the gamblers hooked.
Even in higher-ed, where facts, data and truth supposedly reign supreme, no institution is genuinely forthcoming about its research costs. The usual claim is that such information is proprietary, but that’s a self-serving dodge put forward by the presidents of academic institutions, who do not want to be held publicly accountable for performance on their watch. Just as in business and industry, any research hits are celebrated endlessly, while the misses — and the millions of precious dollars lost — are hushed up so the academic crap game can continue.
Perhaps anticipating that presidents of conscience could be averse to risking precious funds, in the very next sentence in his book, also on p. 268, Crow implies that research universities are actually in a position of strength:
In his zeal to encourage other academic institutions to pursue for-profit research, Crow claims that “business and industry have become increasingly dependent” on research universities, and “universities are the key actors”. If you go back to “Chapter 4”, however, that is not what Crow’s own data suggests. (Indeed, in the entire book there may not be a better example of Mike Crow as an academic used car salesman.) Quoting from the post on that chapter:
Crow’s claim that “business and industry have become increasingly dependent” on research universities is not only unsubstantiated, it is entirely possible that any increased interaction reflects not dependence but private-sector opportunism. Moreover, of the total R&D in the U.S., “academia performs roughly 15 percent”, while business and industry conduct “over half”. Only in the sphere of “basic research” is academia dominant, but that is not the kind of research Crow is talking about in chapter seven. (We know that to a certainty because if that was what he was talking about, he wouldn’t need to talk about it, because that is already the kind of research to which universities devote the bulk of their resources.)
Even if we assume that “business and industry have become increasingly dependent” on research universities, however, that in itself is not an inducement for research universities to expose themselves to additional risk. Quite the contrary, what Crow is arguing is that the value of the research that universities produce — of whatever stripe — has increased in the marketplace, meaning institutions of higher learning should be able to command a greater premium compared to the past. And of course if that’s true for basic research, which business and industry do not want to engage in anyway, then there should be a premium for agreeing to conduct applied or commercial research. (With complete objectivity, of course.)
The fly in the petri dish is that business, industry and even government compel academic research institutions to compete against each other for research dollars, and that’s particularly true with private partnerships. That competition not only depresses the price of services for research universities, but obligates them to take on more of the risks that business and industry want to defray, with little or no upside. The only way to win that rigged game is not to play, but then research funding falls off and donors and alumni freak out, and the next thing you know the big noggins who are supposed to have a given institution’s best interests at heart are taking whatever deals they can get and giving the school away in the process. Add in the perpetual panic that college and university presidents are in about their own prestige, and throwing millions of dollars of somebody else’s money down a stinky hole is infinitely preferable to playing it safe.
University presidents turn this negative into a positive by playing on the appeal of athletics, if not our cultural identity as Americans. Instead of explaining that research has significant costs and risks, the used-car salespersons in academia openly sell the idea of ‘competing’ for research funds. (One of J. Bruce Harreld’s favorite words is ‘compete’, which he most often employs when targeting student bank accounts — whether by legal or illegal means.) Here again we also see the implicit menace of the AAU, which compels its members to compete like dogs for research dollars, lest they face the ignominy of expulsion. Instead of advocating for its members, the AAU helps to drive down costs for government and private industry by facilitating competition between schools.
Other than refusing to participate, the only way to escape these crippling pressures is to be one of the winners, as Crow clearly was at Columbia. The quickest way to that exalted status, however — as noted with the Plus Alliance between ASU, King’s College and UNSW — is to take on maximal risk by pursuing research without any outside partners. If you lose, you lose big, but if you strike it rich you don’t have to share the profits.
What Crow is ultimately arguing for, then, despite all of his lofty talk about transdisciplinarity, is that research universities should cut out the middlemen as much as possible and go into business for themselves. Not only by generating patents and intellectual property which can be licensed, but launching for-profit businesses which compete in the marketplace with private industry. (That in turn is why the co-conspirators who jammed J. Bruce Harreld into office at UI hired a former business executive who claimed that as his area of expertise.)
What Crow spends little time talking about is the potential for disaster in going down this very risky revenue-generating road. While it is possible to hit it big with licensing, or to lock up profitable patents for a few years, business and industry always trying to reduce their own risk because the downside is potentially catastrophic. For a public university in particular, even if research is segregated from academics on the books, it is more than appropriate to ask if the assumption of private-sector risk is part of that school’s mission. Fortunately, being the slick used-car salesman he is, Crow has an answer for similar questions of conscience. Or, if not an actual answer, a plausible-sounding excuse. Also from p. 268:
The earnestness with which variants of this argument are tossed around by pro-profit purveyors in higher-ed is laughable, because of course “money is a dimension of the academic enterprise”. It is also a dimension of parking your car on the street in front of a meter, or going on a date, or attending college. Whatever it was called at the time, the moment the University of Iowa was founded on February 25th, 1847, it had a business office — which later became the Billing Office I used back in the day, which still exists for the same obvious and utterly banal reason.
The distinction is not whether UI or any other school uses money to pay for the cost of doing business as a college or university, but whether a school should go into business — meaning try to generate profits by competing in the marketplace. For obvious reasons, that question is particularly important for public schools, which are themselves institutions of government. (Imagine if your local DMV announced that it was going into the autonomous vehicle business, or your Secretary of State announced plans for a new travel agency.)
Fortunately, Crow once again steps in to reassure the reader that making money is a-okay. In fact, over several paragraphs Crow works so hard at giving college and university administrators permission to adopt an entrepreneurial approach that he verges on self-parody. From p. 268-269:
While Crow is always careful to hedge his statements with qualifiers like “appropriate”, his objective is clearly to legitimize money-making in higher education. We know that because higher-ed has always been a competitive industry, albeit one where the competition was literally academic. Now, however, in equating “academic institutions” with “corporations”, the competition shifts to profits.
As for Crow’s “real world” crack, that may not be the dumbest thing he has ever said, but it’s the dumbest line in the book by far. While academic institutions do operate in the real world, so do crime families. Put a truly committed educator at the helm of an academic institution and it is almost inevitable that the students will receive a better education. Put a crime boss in charge, and the place gets looted. And of course if you put a burned-out business executive in charge, chances are he will shift resources to generating profits at the expense of education.
Because Crow does know his skittish academic audience, however, after explicitly giving everyone permission to run their academic institutions like corporations, he concludes the same paragraph with this:
It isn’t? To the contrary: as a reader of Crow’s book I can tell you that isn’t the only thing Crow is arguing for, but it is clearly one of the things he argues for — and the next three sentences on p. 269 make that clear.
The first sentence belatedly addresses the subliminal use of the word ‘enterprise’ that Crow has employed throughout the book:
Actually no — or at least that’s not the case in Iowa, where the Iowa Board of Regents is routinely referred to as an enterprise. Cleverly, however, merely in formulating that sentence Crow compels the association that he professes to innocently observe. Now here’s the next sentence:
The obvious question that Crow avoids in the first clause of that sentence is: “too deliberative” for what? The idea that institutions of higher learning — which often wrestle with issues that are thousands of years old — can be “too deliberative” is patently absurd without specifics. Crow dutifully avoids any specifics in the second clause, which reads like a pitch from the boiler room of a Wall St. brokerage. If you hesitate you may “miss out on opportunities” — and boy has Mike Crow got an opportunity for you. Act now, and you too can get in on the ground floor of the New American University!
Finally, three sentences after stating that “academic enterprise is not about replacing an archaic academic culture with an efficient corporate variant”, Crow says this with a straight literary face:
Where to start? First, here Crow is clearly advocating for the replacement of an “archaic academic culture” with an “efficient corporate variant”. Second, note again the timely qualifier: “intelligent”. Translation? Don’t make any bad bets! Third, the only context in which any of this is “imperative” is if a school commits to going into business, because then it will have to compete head-to-head with businesses which are designed from the ground up to be reactive and adaptive.
(Many years ago I read a review of the movie Psycho, which characterized that film as a jet-black comedy. I recalled that review at this point in Crow’s book, because to my surprise I found myself laughing out loud. I don’t know why Crow flushed his credibility down the drain in service of a sales pitch that has all the sophistication of a timeshare proposal, but he clearly accomplished that goal.)
The degree to which Crow cycles between granting “the academy” permission to focus on making money, while reassuring academics that they are not selling out by doing so, is hilarious. It’s okay to want to make money. You’re not bad if you want to make money. All the other college and university presidents are making money.
As for Crow’s magic formulate for success at Arizona State — which, at this point, is the only reason anyone is still reading the book — we finally get that in the first ten words of the following sentence on p. 269:
The New American University is a research university which has been converted into a money-making “enterprise”. It is a vertically and horizontally integrated institution, and each aspect is evaluated first and foremost not by its educational merit, but by its potential for generating income, even if that greatly increases risk. (There will be some negative effects when converting a school to a New American University, such as greatly increasing the amount of teaching that rank and file faculty have to do, but these are the sacrifices one must make others make.)
Particularly worth noting in this capitalistic context is the very next sentence, which is not only a non sequitur, but is genuinely manipulative in its intent:
While I have no idea how this sentence relates to the previous sentence, what I do know is that this is some black-belt-level rhetorical jujitsu, and anyone with the capacity to think like this deserves a wide berth. When Crow says “students in all disciplines possess the potential to approach knowledge entrepreneurially”, that sounds very much as if Crow believes ASU’s students are part of the New American University profit engine. The not-so-subtle accusation is that there is some widespread belief in academia that students other than those interested in business or the tech sector are too stupid to start businesses and make money. At Arizona State, however, Mike Crow and his crack team of entrepreneurial liberators are not afflicted by that sickening, anti-entrepreneurial bias, and Crow backs that up:
Unlike elitist institutions which are focused on education — which, in itself, is an aggression against law-abiding student entrepreneurs — ASU is not only saturated in entrepreneurial cultural, there are “focused” entrepreneurial offerings for those who truly see the light. Crow provides more tantalizing hints of the wealth to come on p. 271, if only students are willing to believe in the New American University. If you give his claims a close read, however, it’s not clear who is making money:
When Crow says that seven companies are “currently generat[ing] revenue”, that does not mean they generated a profit. Companies which are on the verge of bankruptcy, or even in bankruptcy, also generate revenue. As for Arizona State’s business success, the story is similar. Also from p. 271:
Profits? No mention. (For context, during the dot-com bubble many companies raised hundreds of millions in external funding, which was then lost when those companies went bankrupt. More recently, here’s a tech company that was able to raise $120M from VC’s, because it turns out some tech investors are fools.)
On p. 272 Crows talks about really big money, but again, not about profits:
What is odd about Skysong is that when you go to the website it has a dot-com address, not a dot-edu address. At the top of the home page it does say that SkySong is “The ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center”, but there is no immediate, obvious tie to Arizona State. On the About Skysong/Overview page, things get even more confusing:
So there is something called SkySong, which is commercial, which is separate but also related to ASU SkySong. Sure enough, in the main nav on the SkySong website there is an ASU Connection button, and the dropdown menu for that button has a link to an ASU at SkySong page. It is on that page — if, like me, you happen to be very slow on the uptake — that the light bulb finally goes on:
So SkySong is a research park affiliated with Arizona State, and at a remove there’s nothing particularly remarkable about that. Like many research universities, Iowa State has a research park, albeit one registered as a dot-org, and the University of Iowa also has a research park, albeit one registered as a dot-edu. SkySong, however, is clearly in a different league, which seems befitting for the research park of a — or rather the — New American University.
As for Crow laying claim to any economic impact arising from SkySong, as opposed to ASU proper, that’s obviously a joke, but it’s a joke every research university is in on because it legitimizes getting in bed with business and industry. School X rents space to Company Z, which goes on to raise $60M in a round-two funding, then School X takes credit for that money. Likewise, while an estimated $9B in “total economic output” over three decades is nothing to sneeze at, compared to the economic might of Arizona State University it is almost certainly chicken feed. For example, the 2018 budget for the University of Iowa is $4B, meaning over that same time frame UI will put $120B to work, and that’s without allowing for future budget growth. Even without first becoming a New American University, a 2010 study concluded that UI contributed $6B to the state economy and produced a 1,500% return for each dollar appropriated by the legislature, while a 2015 study concluded that UI accounted for “$3.12 billion in regional industrial output”.
One obvious question about SkySong — which would probably not arise in the context of most other research universities — is whether Crow has a piece of the action, either directly, from revenue generated by the research park, or indirectly, in terms of bonuses or deferred compensation tied to SkySong’s performance. Given Crow’s emphasis on all things profit, and his determination to involve businesses in creating a transdisciplinary “knowledge enterprise”, it is not hard to imagine that he insisted on entrepreneurial rewards for himself — so as to lead by example.
After talking about money to the point of frothy lust, in the next paragraph we are reminded that it is not all about the money:
This endearing sentence signals a return to the issue of scale, and all of the ways that digital technology and online initiatives are used to educate the horde of students that ASU must process each year in order to remain solvent. From p. 274:
Three things here. First, after tolerating endless Oxford commas, here we have no comma between “interactive” and “personalized”, which is just crazy. Second, while perhaps incapable of “infinite scale”, the printing press was and remains a fairly good way of widely distributing knowledge, particularly in locations which are not powered by a massive electrical grid. Third, the idea of teaching students at “infinite scale” would seem to suggest that even if there were infinite students, there wouldn’t be infinite teachers, so we obviously need “adaptive, interactive[,] personalized learning” to step in — at which point maybe we won’t need any more real teachers at all.
One thing we can be sure of, however, is that Crow’s emphasis on online learning and technology is definitely not about the money. From p. 275:
As previously mentioned, the best way to cut costs in education is to cut payroll, and nothing promises decreased personnel costs more than digital learning. While there is clearly a place for online coursework — particularly for people who cannot relocate to, or commute to, a dedicated campus — the returns so far indicate that retention and comprehension suffer, putting education and entrepreneurship at odds. If all you really want to do is cut costs, however, that’s definitely the way to go.
After more humble-brags about all of the different ways that Crow has turned Arizona State into a shining knowledge enterprise on a dune — and we are talking pages and pages — we arrive at an extended discussion of ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (CSPO), which begins on p. 283 and ends on p. 288. What we do not learn until the bottom of p. 284, however, is that even though the CSPO is at ASU, under the co-direction of Daniel Sarewitz, that is not where it started:
As to why Crow and Sarewitz changed ‘Center’ to ‘Consortium’ when they moved the whole shebang to Arizona State, there were probably trademark issues with Columbia, and that allowed them to keep the ‘CSPO’ acronym. As to what CSPO actually is, it is registered as a dot-org, not a dot-com, suggesting it may be a non-profit instead of a for-profit — but I couldn’t find that notice. In fact, I couldn’t find any information about the legal structure of ASU’s CSPO, and the ASU Foundation also has no obvious ties to the Consortium.
As to what the CSPO does, from the website and press materials it sounds a lot like a think tank. Given that Columbia — which is in New York City — located the original CSPO in Washington, D.C., however, that suggests more of a lobbying focus. Then again, one way of engaging in lobbying without having to register as a lobbyist is — wait for it — to open up a think tank. (The line between thinking and advocacy is notoriously blurry.)
Precisely because NYC is itself a locus of business, industry and political power, and because Columbia would have been eager to land research grants and cultivate new funding streams, it is hard to imagine that lobbying — albeit in an unofficial capacity — was not part of the original mission of the CSPO in Washington, D.C. That Crow and Sarewitz chose to relocate the new CSPO to Arizona would seem to argue against that suspicion, until we get to this, on p. 287:
For a ‘knowledge enterprise’ like Crow’s ASU, which refuses to just sit around and educate students when there is money to be made, being in the nation’s capital would be almost compulsory, because that’s where all federal funding originates. Again, why go through a middleman when you can short circuit the process, and in so doing gain a competitive advantage? (You can see the Washington CSPO web page here.)
Still, none of this is new — it’s just amplified. Since his sham appointment in 2015, J. Bruce Harreld has made the rounds in the federal and state capitals several times, pitching elected officials on the University of Iowa, and getting pretty much nothing for his trouble. In fact, that may be why — in concert with surprise budget cuts last year — Harreld momentarily forgot that he was the president of a public university, and threatened to start his own political action committee.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 03/10/17:
The fact that lawmakers only “seem to care about…the people voting” is obviously inexplicable. Equally inexplicable, however, is why Harreld did not know that starting a PAC would put the University of Iowa in legal jeopardy:
The next day, the UI press office explained what Harreld really meant:
If there is one thing every college and university president would agree on, it is that they always need more funding. That’s why it was particularly newsworthy that even as the state budget was falling apart last year, and the legislature was taking back tens of million of dollars that had already been appropriated to the regents, Harreld went on the record and said UI did not need more money. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on 02/02/17 — roughly one month before Harreld momentarily put UI’s non-profit, tax-protected status at risk:
At the same time, Harreld expressed a very Crow-like view of how to succeed:
Proving that Harreld’s disinterest in state funding was not a fluke, a month later — at the exact same event where he momentarily went berserk about starting a PAC, purportedly in response to the fact that the state was de-appropriating UI in the middle of the fiscal year — Harreld hit all of the same notes, both about state funding and building his own version of the New American University:
I do not know how many presidents of research universities — public or private — have ever said, “Let’s go build new businesses”, but if there are any remaining doubts about why Harreld was hired in 2015, over three eminently qualified academicians, I would submit that Crow’s book, and Crow’s example at Arizona State, and the fact that Scottsdale is home to both SkySong and Harreld’s co-conspirator, Jerre Stead, puts those doubts to rest. As the former head of IBM’s Emerging Business Opportunities division, Harreld was rescued by Stead from executive oblivion at Harvard, where he had been slumming for six years, and given the de facto job of turning the University of Iowa into a New American University.
Ironically, however, while Harreld clearly embodies Crow’s research-first mantra, and that focus will undoubtedly factor heavily into the changes that Harreld implements following the final Phase II report of the 2020 Task Force (regardless what the report actually says), there is very little of the ASU model that is directly applicable to UI. In fact, because I am perpetually slow on the uptake, it was not until the end of chapter seven that it finally dawned on me that Crow’s book is not about ‘how to’ design a New American University, it is about how Crow himself designed the New American University. Meaning it is not a guide, but a retrospective — a history — and a spectacularly self-serving one at that.
The problem with such works is that vanity is a feeble arbiter of the truth. For all the information that Crow presents about Arizona State, it is also important to note what he leaves out, or — as mentioned on multiple occasions — how information is presented in a way that is intentionally misleading. Designing the New American University is as much a brag as anything else, and a one-sided testimonial from the man himself, without any input from detractors. (More on all that shortly.)
Because Crow still wants to keep one oar in academia, however, he cannot produce a work which is pure hubris. For that reason, on p. 288, in the final pages of the last chapter of the book, Crow finally gets around to talking about the Great Recession, in a section titled, Managing Change during a Period of Historic Public Disinvestment. [The ‘d’ in ‘during’ is lowercase in the book.] Though Crow did make passing reference on several occasions, only at this late date is the subject of the Great Recession fully broached, including the effect it had on ASU.
Not surprisingly, Crow plays the victim card with gusto. From p. 288:
At first blush — which is the only blush most readers would give that statistical barrage — it certainly sounds like Arizona State was under assault. And yet, as previously noted, there are a lot of mushy statistics in the higher-ed industry, and here Crow treats himself to a bowl full. For starters, note that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) references the dreaded per-student stats we talked about before. The problem with such measurements in this instance is that because Arizona State was growing so quickly, it is inevitable that it would have shown a funding decline even if the economy had not fallen apart. (Meaning some percentage of the reported decrease in per-student state funding related not to the Great Recession, but to the enrollment binge ASU was on.)
The fact that Arizona’s legislature cut funding more than any other state in both absolute dollars and as a percentage also sounds bad, but again the growth at ASU has to be considered. It is not as if the Arizona state legislature was oblivious to the amount of new revenue that Crow was raking in during that explosive growth, meaning it might be expected that the state would cut the public universities more in a sudden economic downturn, because of their ability to raise revenue from tuition. (In Iowa we saw this with the clawbacks last year, which outpaced other state cuts precisely because the regent schools increased tuition the year before — meaning they had more money to fall back on than other departments.)
In Crow’s book, Figure 16 does indeed show Arizona lagging the rest of the country, but the slope of the lines is not wildly divergent. At the same time, the metric used for that graph — state higher-ed support per $1,000 in personal income — comes from something called the Postsecondary Education Opportunity, not the CBPP. (Yet another example of a sneaky higher-ed administrator cherry-picking stats.)
Finally, note how Crow characterizes the record enrollment at ASU — which was a central tenet of his plan for the school — as “demand”, then positions Arizona State as a victim which had to absorb “85 percent” of the enrollment growth in the state system. With that massive enrollment growth came a massive increase in tuition revenue, yet there is no mention of that offsetting income in the above quote. Earlier in chapter seven, however, on p. 258, we learned why:
Not only did ASU generate a lot more tuition revenue by bringing in a lot more students starting in 2002, but at the same time the school substantially increased tuition on all students. Fortunately, the same CBPP report which Crow referenced to document the budget cuts in Arizona also talks about tuition:
That increase, however, is for the period after the Great Recession began in the 2007-2008 academic year, meaning Crow had been banking additional revenue under the “moderate-tuition” approach for six years before the economy imploded. Scroll down farther in the CPBB report and not only did Arizona lead all states in increasing tuition between 2008 and 2013, at a whopping 78.4%, but it also led the country in the inflation-adjusted dollar amount of that increase, at $4,275.
To that we can also factor in the cost savings that Crow obliquely alluded to earlier in the book. From the same CPBB report (original source here):
While those numbers represent cuts across the entire Arizona system, given Crow’s radical intent, the Great Recession presented him with an unprecedented opportunity to hack out academic dead wood — or at least wood that was not producing a sufficient return on investment — and who could complain? Because the financial carnage was undeniable, the Great Recession made it possible to inflict even more damage while asserting that he was simply responding to an economic calamity.
From the ASU website, on an extensive page devoted to the budget cuts that were implemented during FY09:
A sampling of the carnage that followed, from that same page:
On another page there is an extensive list of Additional ASU program closures which were announced on Feb. 10, 2009. While there is no question that Arizona State and Arizona as a state were hit hard, so were other public colleges and universities in the country, and most of them did not have a massive enrollment increase or a significant tuition increase to fall back on. (Of related interest is an 08/23/17 article by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, titled A Lost Decade in Higher Education Funding.)
Again, because Crow has to at least pretend to be an honest academic broker, at the bottom of the next page he alludes to all of the above, but without providing any specifics. From p. 289:
If you paid close attention while reading the book that is a downright confessional paragraph, but most readers won’t take it as such. Like all good college and university presidents, Crow obscures the tuition side of the revenue picture because he made out like a bandit, while simultaneously cutting costs like a fiend in response to cuts from the Arizona legislature. (Those must have been heady days.)
Only on p. 296, at the tail end of chapter seven, does Crow finally address what I erroneously believed the book was about. From the the last section, titled Replicating the Model of a New American University, which runs a page and a half:
So there you have it, from visionary higher-ed pioneer Michael M. Crow. In order to design your own New American University, all you have to do is chart a course and stick to it, as opposed to charting a course and wandering off in another direction.
Conclusion
Toward the end of chapter seven, and in much of the five-and-a-half page Conclusion — which is titled Toward More New American Universities — Crow belatedly returns to the subject of education, and reminds the reader just how important it truly is. Sure, he spent the majority of his book talking about research, and particularly scientific and technological research, and especially applied research in fields which might be more likely to generate a profit, but even that was really about education. From p. 307:
Did you catch that? What Crow is aching to say here is that money spent on research — including for-profit research — benefits students, but because he is not a full-on tool like Harreld, the best he can do is claim that it “yields outcomes”. And I’m sure it does. Whether those outcomes are positive or negative, or worth the expense, has apparently not been determined, but why quibble?
What Crow is arguing for — while using students as a shield — is an increase in for-profit research. His excuse for diverting precious resources to money-making ventures is that doing so will not only benefit the students who are being warehoused on campus, or minimally educated by low-cost computer programs — while simultaneously being driven further and further into debt to provide Crow with the investment capital he needs — but that for-profit research also meets “the needs of society”. That those “needs” may be financially remunerative is a mere coincidence, and in any case he is not proposing anything crazy. Just applied or commercial research “equal” to the basic or academic research already being conducted at any school that becomes a New American University — like, say, the University of Iowa.
Truly, it’s enough to make a reader wonder what the private sector is for.
Update 03/05/18: Crow takes ASU’s ‘think tank’ upscale in D.C. No details on exactly who paid for what, or how much it will cost to maintain.
For Part 6 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context, click here.
This is Part 6 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. For Part 5, click here.
In his book, Arizona State University president Michael Crow claims unequivocal success for the New American University as prototyped at ASU. Given that Crow himself defined the terms of that success, however, that wasn’t a particularly risky assertion. At the time of publication, the only factual information anyone had to go on was the information contained in Crow’s book, or in laudatory press accounts which echoed if not parroted messaging from the ASU press office.
Coming up on three years after the release of Crow’s book in March of 2015, we can now follow the arc of Crow’s purported success past the final page. How has Crow’s entrepreneurial approach to building a ‘knowledge enterprise’ held up in the interim? Is Arizona State free from economic want? If not, what problems does ASU still face going forward?
Entrepreneur Crow and Risk
Given Crow’s purported allegiance to scholarship, the most damaging question we can ask is whether Designing the New American University is an honest book, and it clearly is not. Even when he is pushing his ‘knowledge enterprise’ agenda, the text is replete with ass-covering caveats and qualifiers so as to avoid making any actual guarantees. While Crow claims success at every turn, because we do not have visibility to the ASU ledger, and the ultimate disposition of Crow’s initiatives may not be known for decades to come, the best we can say is that the jury is still out on whether the New American University model is sustainable over the long haul.
Despite all of his rhetorical appeals to history and scholarship, and his conflation of the economic benefits of scaling up the ASU enterprise with the relaxing of admissions standards which allowed him to do just that, if we were forced to choose a single sentence in the book which speaks to the core of Crow’s convictions about the New American University, we would be hard-pressed to do better than this, from p. 268-269:
That is, unreservedly, a rallying cry, and one that was welcomed by the private sector, which stands to profit greatly from increased risk-taking in academia. But is that call to corporatism appropriate for universities, let alone those in the public sector? While there is a cost to doing business as a college or university, should schools — and particularly public schools — be in business to turn a profit?
On that point, what is the difference between an academic business administrator and an academic entrepreneur like Michael Crow? From Google Search, here is the dictionary definition of ‘entrepreneur’:
From Dictionary.com:
From Merriam-Webster.com:
In Crow’s case, unless he is also personally investing in the startups that ASU spins out, he has no money at risk. That does not mean, however, that there is no risk to the school or state if things go badly. In terms of far-sightedness and innovation, Crow would clearly love to have that meaning applied to him. In fact, instead of waiting for others to do it for him, he wrote a three hundred page book which does just that.
Anecdotally, from an article in Forbes on 06/06/12, here is an explanation of the difference between being in business and being an entrepreneur:
Readers who remember the aftermath of Harreld’s fraudulent hire in September of 2015 will recall that liberation from the dreaded status quo was the main rationale put forward by his co-conspirators. Hardcore proponents of entrepreneurial public higher education to the last man, former regents president Bruce Rastetter, former VP for Medical Affairs and interim UI president Jean Robillard, and mega-donor Jerre Stead, all cited Harreld’s business chops and the need to take entrepreneurial risks as justifications for his illegitimate appointment. That those men were eager to play with other people’s money and professional lives merely puts them in good company with Crow at ASU. (Some individuals did recognize the ‘status quo’ boondoggle almost immediately.)
From a prescient article on Entrepreneur.com, on 05/15/14, nine months before Crow’s book hit stores, we find Crow ticking all of the entrepreneurial boxes:
We will return to the critical importance of scale in Crow’s claims of entrepreneurial success at ASU, but for now, as you can see, one of the key distinguishing characteristics of entrepreneurs is not simply that they are in business, but that they assume risk beyond that found in most businesses. If you own a bridge and charge a toll you are not an entrepreneur, you are a businessperson. If you leverage the asset value of your bridge to put in a gift shop or a restaurant, that qualifies you as an entrepreneur, but also means you may lose your bridge.
Likewise, if you run a college or university and you provide an education supported by donations, endowments, tuition revenue, and, if you are state funded, appropriations, then you are not an entrepreneur. You are, instead, the type of businessperson commonly known as an academic administrator. On the other hand, if you are willing to put donations, endowments, tuition revenue and even appropriations at risk to generate a profit at a college or university, then you are an academic entrepreneur.
The idea that colleges and universities — including particularly those in the public sector — should run themselves like corporations sounds nuts, but even that does not necessarily equate to an entrepreneurial approach. Many mature corporations are as ‘slow to move’ as institutions of higher learning precisely because they do not want to assume first-mover risk. Like all great entrepreneurs, however — including many who have not only lost their own shirts, but the wardrobes of millions of investors — Michael Crow equates taking on risk with “freedom” and “modernizing” higher-ed. And lest you think I am unfairly portraying Crow’s philosophy, here is Crow only four weeks ago:
By what entrepreneurial voodoo did Crow raise, in round numbers, $2.8B over and above $300M in appropriations? Unfortunately, as is ever the case in higher-ed, even at public colleges and universities, there are no readily accessible numbers which back up Crow’s revenue claim. Even poring through ASU’s financials it is not clear how Crow gets to $2.8B.
You can see ASU’s comprehensive FY17 financial report here, prior financial reports here, current and historical charts here, and an FY18 summary here. For FY17 [p. 32], total operating revenues were $1.78B, of which $1.25B (70%) came from tuition. Total operating expenses for the period were $2.27B, resulting in a net operating loss of $483M.
Under non-operating revenue we do find $296M in state appropriations, so that’s close to Crow’s claim in the above quote. Throw in $128M in federal financial aid, and other miscellaneous line items — including a $69M loss for debt service — and Arizona State brought in an additional $549M in net non-operating revenue, giving us about $2.33B in revenue as against $2.27B in expenses, or a $66M profit. Throw in another $33M in capital commitments and appropriations, and ASU finished the year $99M ahead, but that also means we’re still missing more than $400M in revenue compared to Crow’s claim of $2.8B above. (On p. 34 we find $465M in cash on hand at the end of the year, but that would not qualify as “revenue” from “other sources”. As an aside, overstating revenue is also the kind of thing that can get real entrepreneurs in a lot of hot water.)
Despite Michael Crow’s claim to have turned ASU into an entrepreneurial powerhouse, you can see from the historical bar charts here (click on ‘sources of revenue’) that the main percentage increase in revenue at ASU — by far — comes from tuition, either as a result of increased pricing, increased enrollment, or likely both. Over that same time period, from 2008 to 2016, ‘research grants and contracts’ stayed largely flat until falling off more recently. That may go a long way to explaining why Crow is still banging the same drum after sixteen years — including over a decade of running Arizona State more like a corporation than any public university in the country — and that in turn would raise obvious questions about the claims Crow made in his book. If his reforms through early 2015 were largely ineffective at increasing research funding or raising revenue from for-profit initiatives, how do we know his entrepreneurial plan was the right plan? Every college and university in the country is raising tuition to cover costs, and Arizona State seems to be no different.
Entrepreneur Crow and Competition
Here again is Mike Crow’s rallying cry, from p. 268-269:
One of the things that corporations are extremely cautious about is entering into markets that they cannot defend. As in war, it can be relatively easy to take market share but almost impossible to keep it. Crow clearly did identify underseved higher-ed needs in Phoenix and across the state, but taking market share when there was no local competition was like taking undefended territory. The real test is what happens when competition for all of those easy tuition dollars stiffens.
One of the great advantages that public universities have is that they are components of government, not private businesses. As such, public universities gain an enormous competitive advantage from any state funding, even in the current diminished context. The more public universities transform themselves into horizontally and vertically integrated academic conglomerates, however, the more they infringe on and expose themselves to private competitors. The upside is that on an individual basis large universities can usually crush smaller competitors with relative impunity. The downside is that the more universities diversify into non-educational markets, the more time and resources they have to devote to maintaining profitability in those ventures. Which is another way of saying that their exposure to risk increases exponentially.
In recognition of the economic muscle of public universities, Iowa precludes public schools from competing with private industry by law:
For the Iowa Board of Regents specifically, there are a number of statutory exceptions:
Those exceptions are not a blank check, however, and private companies have the right to appeal and even sue if they feel the law is being violated. (You can see the year-end regent reports covering competition with private industry here: 2017, 2016, 2015, more.
As might be expected, the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) has a similar statute, albeit with one critical loophole that Mike Crow has driven his academic entrepreneurial truck through:
The fact that Iowa limits exemptions to a school’s “educational mission”, while Arizona allows a broad exception for “fulfill[ing] “the public service mission of the university”, gives state schools in Arizona license to do just about anything they want. That in turn goes a long way to explaining why Crow spends so much time in his book arguing that entrepreneurial activity at ASU meets the “needs of society”. If Arizona’s state schools are defined by “public service”, then anything that profits those schools — figuratively or literally — must be part of their “public service mission”.
Couple that virtually-boundless exception with Crow’s commitment to running Arizona State like a corporation, and it would not be at all surprising if he ventured into territory that most public universities would never even consider. And in fact that is exactly what Crow has done since his book was published, if not almost before. From the Phoenix Business Journal on 07/18/16:
At the time that article was published, “more than a year ago” would have been mid-to-early 2015, or only a few months after Crow’s book was published at the latest. Yet in his book there is no indication that “real estate” was an entrepreneurial row that Crow intended to hoe. In fact, it defies credulity that a public university would consider real estate to be a valid or appropriate profit-making endeavor on the heels of the Great Recession, particularly in Arizona, but that’s the genius of Mike Crow.
Continuing from the same article:
Just one week ago “Mirabella” did in fact break ground. Although ASU will largely profit by leasing the land on which the development sits, look at how hard tap-dancin’ Mike Crow works to assert that the project meets both ASU’s public service and educational missions:
Crow was indeed just getting started. Continuing from the Phoenix Biz Journal story linked above:
That Iowa currently requires its regent universities to hew to their educational missions would seem to preclude such entrepreneurial forays, but don’t bet on it. After whining about the “antiquated” clubhouse on UI’s Finkbine golf course, and lying about Finkbine in the process, Harreld secured permission from the regents to build a new $10M clubhouse that will be funded by “gifts” to the Athletics Department. At the same time, however, the university also plans to lease adjacent property to private developers for a new hotel, which will include a small conference center.
If local businesses in Iowa City, Coralville and Johnson County are smart — and there are many competing hotels and motels close by — they will object to the development of a hotel next to the brand new $10M Finkbine clubhouse, which could itself be paid for by the folks who would like to build that hotel. If the regents persist in allowing that development, those businesses should sue the university and the board for competing with private industry. Even without the advantage of a broad “public service” exemption, however, note how far UI is already willing to go under J. Bruce Harreld, over a golf course no less.
As to the educational mission of the University of Iowa, there is no competition in the surrounding area either for its research prowess or on-campus degree offerings. There are community colleges nearby, there are small colleges in other towns, but UI is the dominant player in eastern Iowa, despite the fact that it has not aggressively branched out horizontally or vertically, the way ASU has under Mike Crow. (UI does have a few satellite ‘campuses’, but they are exceedingly small. UI has also been rebuffed in attempting to take market share from other educational institutions in the state.)
Because Crow is much farther along in turning ASU into a commercial venture from top to bottom, he is also much farther along in exposing Arizona State to competition — not only in terms of real estate or research, but the core mission of education. Perhaps not surprisingly, after Crow exposed the massive untapped higher-ed demand in the Phoenix metro area, and spent a decade or more using online coursework to increase enrollment and revenue, another university took note of that success and decided to cash in as well. That in turn seems to have royally rankled academic visionary Michael Crow, who is all for turning universities into corporations, as long as they don’t have any competition.
Grand Canyon University has been around a long time, mostly in a very sleepy incarnation. In 2004, however, it became the “first for-profit Christian college in the United States”, and in 2008 it became the first such school to be sued by the federal government for “violating the Department of Education’s ‘incentive compensation ban'”. After paying $5.2M to settle that case, in 2014 GCU tried to return to non-profit status, but in 2016 that request was denied.
Currently, the school is again attempting to return to non-profit status. As to the reason behind that requested change in tax status, note the overlapping ironies in this ESPN story about GCU sports, from just last week:
You can see where this is going. With Crow having pioneered the New American University model, including, belatedly, adding the right of public-sector universities to go into the real estate business, and to launch for-profit ventures from non-profit foundations, why would GCU take a tax hit when it could also lease space for a tidy sum, with little or no tax burden? In fact, you would think Crow would be flattered to have another school mimic his money-making methods, because even if GCU does not conduct research, it clearly wants to “serve society” like ASU.
Oddly enough, however, despite the fact that Crow is all about entrepreneurial initiative, he does not seem particularly enamored of GCU, and the basis for his disdain is downright hilarious:
There may be no better example of the administrative incoherence, opportunism and malevolence of Michael Crow’s iron-fisted rule at Arizona State than his refusal to schedule games against GCU. To see why, consider again this quote from “Rick” Shangraw, CEO of the ASU Foundation, in July of 2016:
Coming up on two years ago Crow was perfectly happy to have his ASU Foundation fixer poach edgy entrepreneurial practices from the private sector, only to then turn around last week and refuse to schedule games with GCU because they’re still in the private sector. That naked hypocrisy may in turn have informed the delightfully aggressive reply from GCU president Brian Mueller:
The fact that GCU has also taken 70K online students out of the local higher-ed market, and now has 17K students on campuses around the state, has almost certainly not helped Crow’s mood. Nor, probably, has GCU’s finger-in-the-eye advertising strategy:
GCU is also working the financial aid system to beat Crow at his own marketing and branding game:
Here we see the problem with public research universities leaning on commoditized online degrees for additional low-cost revenue. Because of state subsidies, such schools will always be able to compete with private schools for live students, because they can guarantee a good on-campus, in-class education while keeping prices down. When you’re teaching students remotely, however, or worse, using automated content that has been ‘optimized’ for profitability, you’re going to have a lot more competitors on price. Branding might make a difference, and you can claim your online degrees are better than the other guys, but are any online degrees really worth much of a premium in the marketplace?
Entrepreneur Crow and the Legislature
Despite the fact that ace academic entrepreneur Mike Crow claimed success for his New American University model in early 2015, you can see why he might still be begging — and berating — the Arizona Board of Regents to give him more freedom to run ASU like a corporation. Then again, learning that Crow is still bleating about the same problems that every higher-ed president complains about, no less when the vast majority have not converted their schools to ‘knowledge enterprises’, calls into question the very premise of his vaunted paradigm. If it gets you nothing over the long haul, or worse, perpetually obligates you to become ever more aggressive in pressing your entrepreneurial bets, why expose your institution to that increased risk?
Unfortunately for Crow, he is not only facing competition in the marketplace, he is now facing push-back on the legislative front. Why? Because what Crow is really doing is gaming the system for ASU at the literal expense of the state. (Education and public service for the win!)
Since ASU already has the same non-profit status that GCU is angling for, and there are few prohibitions about how Crow can exert his entrepreneurial might, he can profit even more than GCU by also abusing the state tax code. Speaking of which, consider this, from AZCentral on 02/06/18 — less than one month ago:
You can read the whole article for the gory details, but the gist is this. In exchange for $30M in up-front cash, and a total of $45M over a decade — most of it accruing to Arizona State — ASU will shelter private developers from “$90 million to $120 million in property taxes” over that same time frame. As you might imagine, the state is not too happy to be out all that money, so legislators are now pushing a bill that would limit the tricks Crow can pull under the guise of building a ‘knowledge enterprise’.
In reply, the presidents of the three Arizona universities are also pushing back, and enlisting the crony business community in their grievance. From the Phoenix Business Journal on 01/30/18, here is the president of the University of Arizona, Robert Robbins — who has been on the job all of nine months — freaking out, and sounding a whole lot like J. Bruce Harreld in the process:
You can read about ASU’s hyper-aggressive response here and here, you can read the pending bill here, and you can read a pointed op-ed here. Notwithstanding the startling news that “research is a cost center”, which would almost certainly come as a shock to all of the AAU universities fighting for and conducting hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in research every year — including the University of Arizona, which, unlike ASU, is an AAU member school — note the arrogance and contempt. Although ASU is miles ahead in perpetrating such scams compared to any of the universities in Iowa, and most of the bills in the Iowa legislature which target the regent universities are cultural in nature (banning tenure, forcing schools to hire an equal number of faculty from each political party, allowing concealed firearms), even in Iowa the state legislature is getting sick and tired of the the arrogance of the regent universities and the governing board.
Specifically, there is a bill (HF 2301) currently working its way through the Iowa legislature which would limit the latitude the regents have in awarding construction contracts. It’s small potatoes compared to the ass-kicking the Arizona legislature is contemplating, but it’s still a sign. If you insist that you be allowed to run a state university with entrepreneurial impunity, you may find that there are people who feel otherwise, and some of those people may have the power to write laws into state code which put you and your smart mouth out of business.
Entrepreneur Crow and Motive
On the subject of increased risk, the only overt warning in Crow’s book comes from the text and accompanying graph on p. 103-104, which does indeed characterize the model for the New American University as “high risk”. Those two words, however, are immediately preceded by the word “innovative”. Given that by definition, entrepreneurial types assume increased risk in order to innovate and profit, calling the New American University “high risk” comes across more as an enticement than a caution. (The graph itself is almost indecipherable in its attempt to portray three dimensions, it has to be rotated ninety degrees for those words to be read, and the subject of ‘risk’ does not appear in the index. In sum, Crow was clearly less than eager to talk about the dark side of his vaunted new entrepreneurial approach to academic administration.)
Whether anyone at Grand Canyon University read Crow’s book or not, there is nothing in the text that would have profited them had they done so. As Crow wrote in several sections, the book is not an academic road map because there is no universal solution or template. Instead, over 300-plus pages, Designing the New American University makes a painstaking case for adopting a scale-driven ‘knowledge-enterprise’ which most universities will never be able to replicate — and that includes GCU whether it achieves non-profit status or not.
If anything, the relentlessly self-serving approach that Crow took, both in terms of his own celebrity and Arizona State’s standing in the academic community, does a disservice to the legitimate concerns he raises about access to higher education. Crow’s repeated references to the scalability of the New American University model speak to that issue, even as the specific conditions which allowed ASU to ramp-up enrollment are not applicable to most schools. As a result, the overall impression is that concerns about socioeconomic diversity, underserved populations and access to higher education are simply useful talking points in the selling of an entrepreneurial approach to higher education.
If that appraisal strikes you as unfair, consider that Crow could have championed the scalable aspects of the New American University without making any reference to ‘knowledge enterprises’ or entrepreneurial initiatives. For Crow, however, and Harreld at the University of Iowa, education is simply an excuse to throw other people’s money at risky ventures. Because academic institutions are inherently devoted to education, even among the ranks of Research One universities, shifting the administrative focus to prioritize profit-making necessarily means students and education will take a backseat.
There should indeed be more emphasis on broadening the demographic reach of colleges and universities of every size, and particularly so with regard to socioeconomic status, which tracks with graduation rates and various metrics of student success. As a long-time research devotee, however, let alone one who believes that schools should be run like corporations, Crow is clearly the wrong person to be making that pitch, which raises two important questions. Why does this book exist, and who is it for? Is it an elaborate SkySong recruiting tool? Was it aimed at the Arizona Board of Regents, to give Crow more clout among the state schools?
The reason we cannot answer those questions even after taking an absurdly close look at Crow’s book is because the answers are not in the book. They should be in the book, and if Crow was an honest broker they would be in the book, but they aren’t. Instead, to understand the objective of Designing the New American University, we have to follow up on a document which is mentioned in the book, but only belatedly. From p. 242, at the beginning of chapter seven:
The discussion of this “foundational white paper” goes on for two pages, and includes the most recent versions of eight specific design aspirations. Only if you follow footnote 4, however, will you learn that the white paper was titled One University in Many Places: Transitional Design to Twenty-First-Century Excellence, or that it was published in 2004. Searching for that document online reveals that most of its original contents are still on the ASU site, or you can read the full, original .pdf here.
One of the sub-pages [.pdf sections] of the white paper is titled, ASU: What do we need to become?, and on that page [.pdf p. 9] we find this text:
Given Crow’s personal experience with AAU schools, first at Iowa State and then Columbia, and his professional focus on research at those institutions, it is not surprising that he would peg ASU to that standard. On the other hand, as noted in prior posts about the ongoing 2020 Task Force at UI, about last summer’s ISU proposal and UI proposal to the Tuition Task Force, and about a deep dive into academic peer groups, the AAU traffics largely in prestige. (Still, the AAU carries so much weight on the campuses of its member institutions that it routinely triggers what I have come to call ‘AAU panic’, which is the fear of being expelled.)
Because Crow was willing if not eager to throw off conventions and limitations in designing the New American University, you would think he would have looked past the AAU to new horizons. That Arizona State does not belong to the AAU was in fact a boon, because it meant Crow did not have to contend with the AAU while transforming ASU into a new type of research university. If there is one institution in the American nerdiverse which stands in the way of real change at the nation’s research universities — both public and private, including Iowa and Iowa State — it is the AAU, but because of Arizona State’s simple beginnings Crow was blessedly free of that stifling, conforming influence.
All of which makes the following excerpt, from a bit farther down on the same ASU web page [.pdf p. 10], all the more revealing:
In 2004, after two years on the job at ASU, one of Michael Crow’s explicit goals for the New American University was to elevate Arizona State to membership in the hyper-exclusive AAU. Because that goal is still on the ASU website, it suggests that goal is still active, yet it is not referenced at all in Designing the New American University, which was published in 2015. Did Crow give up on his AAU dream?
To answer that question we have to click over to an organization called — wait for it — the New America Foundation, which was founded in 1999:
Perhaps not surprisingly, if you click on the Board of Directors page you will find one Michael Crow, president of Arizona State, among the Foundation luminaries. (In the context of an earlier post, titled Jerre Stead’s Hostile Takeover of the University of Iowa, it is also worth noting that among the New America Board Emeriti is Daneil Yergin, who is or was the Vice Chairman of IHS — which, until the end of last December, was run by UI alum, mega-donor, and 2015 UI presidential search co-conspirator Stead. See also Levi Tillemann.)
The first apparent connection between New America and ASU seems to have occurred in 2011, with notice of a joint venture called Future Tense, which also involved Slate.com. (More on that here, here and here. Bonus Crow Q&A here). Flash forward to June of 2014, and the New America Foundation released an independent report on higher education titled — wait for it — Building a New AAU.
After detailing the expulsion of Nebraska and Syracuse from the AAU in 2011, which we have talked about before, the New America report serves up this enlightening nugget:
From New America’s report we not only learn why ASU is not already in the AAU — because sainted Michael Crow is too dang charitable about allowing academic riff-raff into the school — but we also find New America proposing a new ranking system, which would allow Crow to join a revamped AAU. In fact, in that new ranking system, of the 80 universities measured [p. 10], Arizona State comes in at #9 in the accompanying and modestly unranked table. The New America AAU criteria would thus allow ASU to continue maximizing enrollment, generating a tuition bonanza which could then be diverted to entrepreneurial ventures while the students were educated by over-worked faculty or online software. (Speaking of which, in April of 2015 — meaning just after Crow’s book was published — ASU and edX announced a partnership called the Global Freshman Academy, which provides distributed coursework for full college credit.)
Do we know if Crow prompted or pushed for the New America report in 2014? Well, we do not have incontrovertible proof, but in the 2014 New America annual report, we find that Michael Crow was welcomed to the Board of Directors during that very same year [p. 33 and 34]. Also in that year-end report we learn that Arizona State — a publicly funded university scrapping for every available dollar — donated between $250K and $999K to NewAmerica.org [p. 32], and by the end of 2015 the amount of ASU’s contributions had climbed to $1M or more.
It is of course possible that all of these developments in 2014 were merely coincidental, and that Crow did not simply buy himself a sympathetic report and a seat on the New America board with the promise of a seven-figure donation from a pile of idle ASU cash. It may also be completely coincidental that the New America report came out in 2014, just ahead of Crow’s book, which was published in early 2015. Just because Crow wanted to elevate ASU to the AAU, but was clearly stymied, that does not mean the New America Foundation necessarily colluded with Crow to pressure the AAU to rewrite its elitist membership criteria.
Assuming for the sake of argument that nothing hinky happened — or at least nothing actionable — the real problem is that there was no mention of any of this in Crow’s book. If he genuinely believed Arizona State deserved membership in the AAU, and he spent an entire decade working toward that goal, and the school qualified in every way except for being so committed to education that it took in students who could not make the cut at more selective schools, how did Mike Crow not mention that in his book? And yet, not only is there no mention of ASU aspiring to AAU membership, in Designing The New American University there is no mention of the New America Foundation or its Building a New AAU report, which came out at least nine months before Crow’s book was published. (There are three mentions of New York Times columnist David Brooks, however — and by amazing coincidence, Brooks is also on the Board of Directors of New America.)
While Crow never confesses to AAU aspirations in his book, in a clever way he does suggest that ASU belongs in that illustrious organization by drawing implicit parallels to another AAU school. Crow mentions that twin institution on two separate occasions, in almost the exact same way — first on p. 34, then on p. 290, in the following slightly restated text:
What may have seemed like an aside to most readers now reads like a carefully couched comparison between ASU and Toronto, again pushing the argument that Arizona State should be admitted to the AAU despite its comparatively lax admissions standards. Like Toronto, ASU has multiple campuses supporting massive enrollment, and that does call into question the justification that the AAU apparently gave for refusing to grant ASU admission.
Although the AAU was founded in 1900 and the majority of its members joined before 1950 — meaning before ASU itself was founded — the AAU does regularly add to its membership rolls, and only rarely expels standing members. The last schools to join the AAU were the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010 and Boston College in 2012, which must have been particularly galling given how aggressively Crow was campaigning for membership at the time. Still, it would be a crowning achievement for Crow if ASU was invited to join, and to that end — quite coincidentally, I’m sure — the New America Foundation lobbied for a new standard of membership in 2014, while at the same time Crow was writing a book about a new higher-ed model for major research universities.
Even more amazing, however, is that both New America and Crow identified the exact same problem. From Building a New AAU, p. 12:
As to why Crow did not mention New America in his book, or the Foundation’s plan to reconfigure the AAU membership criteria, or ASU’s massive donation(s) to that organization, or Crow’s membership on the board of that organization, it would have been foolish for Crow to publicly tweak the AAU when he was also pining to join. The simplest solution, of course, would be for Crow to tighten up admissions requirements at Arizona State, but whether Crow wants as many students in the pipeline as he can get because it’s good for the students, or he needs them in the pipeline to generate critical revenue, trading AAU status for enrollment would cripple the New American University model. (Whether looking at the educational side or the revenue side, operating at scale is a cornerstone of Crow’s entrepreneurial model.)
Because Crow cannot come right out and say that he is enrolling students by the tens of thousands because there is big money in commoditizing education, in his book he leans hard on the argument that most other schools have tighter restrictions simply because they are elitist snobs. In thus calling out academic elitism, however, Crow runs the risk of exposing his own hypocritical desire to join the AAU, which in turn explains the utter lack of any mention of that goal in his book. From p. 123 of Designing the New American University, following a blistering paragraph about how academics are driven by a corrupting, soul-destroying lust for prestige:
Now here again is the earlier quote from the “foundational white paper” on the ASU website, about aspiring to AAU membership:
You can see the problem. Crow is dying to join the “prestigious” AAU, but in his book he rails against “Harvard envy” and other manifestations of prestige. Side by side, that’s not be a good look for Crow, and that’s particularly true given that any argument for joining the AAU on a substantive basis was discredited by the last school to be expelled from that body. From a 03/22/16 article in the Missourian, which includes a recounting of the expulsion of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 2011:
Ironically, that article also includes mention of a new-fangled AAU ranking criteria proposed by the New America Foundation. It’s main focus, however, is the degree to which institutions of higher education debase themselves in pursuit of, or maintenance of, membership in the AAU. To the extent that Perlman’s comments might be perceived as sour grapes, consider this, from the close of that piece:
Setting aside whether the New American University model is sustainable over time, Arizona State seems perfectly positioned to advance every one of Crow’s objectives, save his “explicit” goal of joining the AAU. Because there does seem to be a consensus that AAU membership confers no benefit other than prestige — which Crow rightly rails against in his book — that particular objective merely reveals Crow’s colossal ego needs. And yet, while he would certainly be thrilled if the AAU changed its membership criteria and welcomed ASU into its secret society, Designing the New American University does not read as if that was his intended goal. That Crow is a flagrant hypocrite about the issue of prestige, however, does help us answer the two questions we asked above. What is Crow’s book really about, and who is it for?
For Part 7 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context, click here.
This is Part 7 of Designing the New American University: a Book Review in Context. For Part 6, click here.
If Designing the New American University is not a how-to book — and by Crow’s own admission it is decidedly not — then why did he write it? While it may be of some historical value, as with any autobiographical work the claims Crow made must be subjected to contextual assessment by scholars before any conclusions can be reached. As it stands now, while Crow freely cites scholarly arguments in support of his motives, there is no commentary from people who questioned or opposed his sweeping reforms, there is no data provided about possible negative effects, and there is no second-guessing on Crow’s part about anything. What he did was smart and effective and good and right and true, and all you have to do to confirm that is read his book.
As noted in the preceding posts, even if someone wanted to go down the same road that Crow followed at Arizona State, the odds of replicating the environment in which Crow made radical changes at ASU are exceedingly long. Few if any other universities will find themselves situated in a major metropolitan area numbering in the millions, in which there is both pent-up demand and little or no competition. It is also unlikely that a major recession will strike just in time to legitimize and accelerate administrative changes which might otherwise be roundly opposed. (Throw in the fact that ASU is spread out on multiple campuses around Phoenix and across the state, and what Crow refers to as a single entity could easily be deemed a ‘university system’ unto itself.)
Given Crow’s incessant entrepreneurial cheerleading, it is possible that he means the book to be a motivational work, not only in exhorting university presidents to take the entrepreneurial plunge, but in showing them how to justify that risk-taking by advocating for students who might otherwise be excluded on a socioeconomic basis. The problem with that answer, beyond the rank cynicism, is that the text is simply not that motivational. Not only is the book frequently redundant, at times tediously grandiloquent, and only on rare occasions genuinely informative, but if all Crow wanted to do was lobby for presidents to put their institutions at greater risk, he could have done that in a single self-aggrandizing article. Instead, we get 300-plus pages of historical context and meticulous end notes from an academic entrepreneur whose latest big idea is screwing his own state out of $100M in property taxes over the next decade.
We are now three years on following publication of Designing the New American University, coming up on four years since the New America Foundation published its revised AAU criteria, more than five years past the latest addition of a school to the AAU membership rolls, and fourteen years since ASU — after the first two years of Crow’s presidency — published the “foundational white paper” titled One University in Many Places. And yet, almost a decade after the Great Recession, and after the implementation of many of the white paper’s stated goals, ASU is still an AAU wannabe, and all three of the ABOR presidents are still begging for even more authority to run their universities like corporations — including selling off chunks of their dignity and integrity to the highest bidders.
Crow’s claim, in a nutshell, is that infusing research universities with entrepreneurial fervor will save higher education from itself. Although Crow’s book is only three years old, as proof of his claim Crow offers endless statistics of the wild success that Arizona State has enjoyed over the past decade or more, much of which we detailed in the first six parts of this post. While Crow also considers his revolution to be lightning fast, as indeed it may be relative to much of the change that takes place in higher-ed, a decade it still ten years, and that is yet another obstacle to widespread adoption. How many schools or governing boards can risk that kind of long-term commitment to a model that has no clear relevance to the specifics of their individual circumstance?
If increasing entrepreneurship was the panacea that Crow, Harreld and others claim, of all the schools in the United States that have gone down that road, ASU should be rolling in dough. And yet Crow is still banging the same drum, asking for even more license to pursue licensing, research, real estate deals and who knows what else? (How about cryptocurrency?) We may only know whether the New American University works when ASU has taken itself private and committed itself entirely to the search for profits, yet even then it is almost impossible to imagine Crow conceding failure.
One big problem with many of Crow’s claims of success is that they do not all trace back to his adoption of an entrepreneurial approach to administering Arizona State. Instead, many of the positive statistics that Crow mentions in his book are explicitly related to the scale of the school, and particularly its massive distributed enrollment. (For example, if you simply have more students, you are probably going to have more students who receive honors or grants, even if the proportion is the same or less compared to other schools.)
As to Crow’s protracted stewardship at ASU, I don’t know how rare it is in historical terms, but in the modern era it is not at all common for someone to remain president of a major public university for a decade, let alone going on sixteen years. Not only does Crow show no sign of stopping, however, but it is not hard to see why. From a 06/27/17 AZCentral article on Mike Crow making bank in 2016:
While Crow does not make $1.5M every year — at least not from the Arizona Board of Regents — his annual compensation does approach $1M, and that would be tough for anyone to walk away from even if there were no other inducements or attachments. That a group of private citizens coughed up half a million dollars of their own money to lock Crow in for a decade is also interesting, if not eyebrow-raising. Speaking of which, it’s worth noting that Crow’s privately funded retention bonus paid out in 2016 — meaning the year after the fraudulent presidential search at Iowa. (Hold that thought.)
As for Crow’s relationship with ABOR, that also seems to be on solid footing:
Any suggesting that Crow is only staying at ASU for the money, however, would be ridiculous. In fact, here is Crow himself making that case, in a superhero profile from the Arizona State press machine titled The Velocity of Change, on 10/26/17:
Why Crow and ASU felt compelled to put out such a gushy profile, after Crow had already been on the job for fifteen years, may have something to do with an article that was written two and a half months earlier. From Charles T. Clark at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, on 07/02/17:
As we saw with Iowa State under former disgraced president Steven Leath, once you subvert the ethical and financial controls at a university foundation, there is no limit to the abuses that may follow. Because of Clark’s reporting, the ASU Foundation had to amend four years of tax filings, and you can read more about that here. As to how a private group funneled $550K to Crow through the ASU Foundation — purportedly augmenting his public-sector salary with a decade-long “retention bonus”, which sounds a lot like a rolling kickback, payoff or bribe — I found no explanation.
As detailed in this multi-part post, Crow’s central claim is that the only way to save American higher education is for colleges and universities to run themselves like corporations. To the extent that Crow believes he has demonstrated success in that respect, it is worth asking why another institution has not poached Crow over the past decade or more. It is possible Crow has passed on offers from other schools because he is emotionally invested in ASU, or because he is convinced that he can still gain entree into the AAU, or because he made a lot of promises and his anonymous benefactors expect him to keep them, but we are still confronted with a conundrum that does not make sense.
Quoting again from the AZCentral story about Crow being the highest paid university president in 2016:
Assuming that’s true, the question is not how much Crow can get from ABOR, which, as a state institution, is effectively cap-limited, but what Crow is worth on the open higher-ed market. If he really has invented the academic version of a golden-egg-laying goose, the amount of money that Harvard, Yale, Standford and the other usual suspects should be willing to throw at him — along with ample freedoms and perks — would be obscene. Yet despite being the go-to transformational university president referenced in all forms of media, Crow is still at Arizona State, and he is still begging ABOR for more autonomy.
Another ‘tell’ about whether Crow really has cracked the code in higher-ed relates to an issue we have discussed on this site before. Of all the subjects which are put under the academic microscope, college and university administration seems to be all but ignored. Instead, the industry keeps hiring used-car salespersons to sell their wares to donors, politicians and the press, and of course to the citizen saps who end up paying through the nose for degrees that are often worth a whole lot less than advertised, or cost a whole lot more than advertised, or both. Where you would think academics would know what does and doesn’t work in higher-ed, and why, almost no one wants to study that subject because having real answers limits the lies of commission and omission that can be told. (On a related subject, and as also previously discussed, there are endless references to college rankings, endless articles about college rankings, and endless opinions about college rankings, yet none of the people flapping their gums ever reference the seminal book on the subject — Engines of Anxiety — which happens to have been co-written by a UI professor.)
Given the staggering amount of money at stake, to say nothing of the critical linkage to education, why is there no department, school or college somewhere which can look at Crow and ASU and definitively say whether his reforms are working or not? Instead, we get a book from Crow himself, full of assertions and thin statistical proofs which do not seem to hold up under even cursory inspection. Meaning what we really have with Designing the New American University is not so much a proof of concept but the claim of a proof of concept, much like those found in diet books, self-help guides, and the like.
Peak Crow
If there was a high point for Michael Crow as a higher-ed guru it was clearly 2015. In the preceding years Crow had received, or engineered, consistently great press about his New American University. When his book finally shipped in March of that year there were the inevitable reviews (not a lot: see here, here, here, here and tangentially here), while half a continent away a presidential search was just getting underway at the University of Iowa.
Among the illustrious members of the UI search committee was Jerre Stead, an alumnus of UI and a notable resident of Scottsdale, Arizona. I do not know if Stead read Crow’s book, or if he talked to Crow about how to replicate the New American University model prior to helping two other co-conspirators install Harreld as the president at Iowa. What I do know — if that is where Stead got the genius idea to hire a remaindered business executive with no experience in academic administration to run a billion dollar public research university — is that in stark contrast to the dictates of his now-former profession in business acquisitions, Jerre Stead would have been buying what Michael M. Crow was selling at its peak. Given Crow’s slick pitch, however, it is not hard to see why Stead would have been enthused about Crow’s entrepreneurial approach to higher-ed in 2015, or how he may have convinced his long-time mentee, J. Bruce Harreld, to play the part of New American University franchisee.
While one of Crow’s goals was elevating ASU to AAU membership, the University of Iowa is already an AAU school. Although UI cannot expand enrollment the way Crow did at ASU, UI could engineer a sharp revenue increase simply by jacking up the cost of tuition, which would have the added advantage of keeping per-student costs flat while massively increasing the total amount of tuition revenue. And of course that is exactly what Harreld proposed last summer, when he pressed for a 41% tuition hike over five years, which would immediately increase the cost of each UI degree by $10K to $12K, and close to $15K in four years.
Because enrollment at UI is now effectively capped, those precipitous hikes would also drive the poorest students out of the pipeline, and that would benefit Harreld in two ways. First, the fewer students who come from impoverished backgrounds, the less need-based aid UI would have to provide to those students, keeping more tuition revenue in play for entrepreneurial ventures. Second, because poor students correlate with poor academic performance, having wealthier students on average would provide a boost to the school’s national rankings. With a massive windfall of unrestricted tuition revenue, and fewer students feeding at the financial-aid trough, Harreld could finally get on with “build[ing] new businesses” — which may not be the traditional focus of the University of Iowa, but is clearly what Harreld came for.
In terms of replicating the New American University model at Iowa, Harreld’s peer-driven target tuition price at the end of five years is $10,537 [p. 27]. Currently, the price of resident tuition at Arizona State is $10,792 [2017-2018]. As for the impact of the Great Recession on Crow’s ability to reshape ASU, another interesting parallel is that Harreld’s successes at IBM were largely the result of the rapid evolution of the tech industry, which allowed CEO Lou Gerstner to make radical moves that otherwise would have been opposed. At the University of Iowa, one reason Harreld may have repeatedly stated that UI does not need more state funding, while at the same time complaining endlessly about the state’s disinvestment in higher-ed, is because budgetary stress gives Harreld more license to carry out his radical Crow-like agenda. Because you can’t always count on a financial crisis when you need one, however, Harreld has also been tireless in using Iowa’s AAU membership as a threat. By routinely fanning the flames of AAU panic, and thus threatening faculty and staff with a loss of academic prestige, Harreld has sought to legitimize the plundering of student bank accounts and the investment of that revenue in entrepreneurial ventures.
If all you really care about is starting new businesses, it does seems to make diabolical sense to install a former IBM exec at a major research university. What gets lost in that calculus, however, is that there was never anything stopping Harreld or Crow or even Stead from putting a business incubator together in the private sector, then raising funds to drive the same successes that they believe they can drive at the public universities they now control. In fact, if you’ve got all the answers — if you’re a sure thing like Mike Crow — why waste time fighting the bureaucracy of a major university campus? Why not take your genius self and your genius ideas to the marketplace and clean up?
And yet, after Harreld left IBM, taking all of that whiz-bang business-genius experience with him, instead of betting on his entrepreneurial self he spent the next six years as a part-time lecturer at the Harvard School of Business, then part of the next year as a sole proprietor before being called up by Rastetter, Robillard and Stead to run the University of Iowa. In reality, Harreld was unwilling to risk gambling on research success in the private sector, let alone gambling his own money. Instead, he waited until he could suck on the government teat, compelling funding from hostage students through compulsory and abusive tuition hikes.
Mike Crow and UI
Speaking of Harreld’s illegitimate appointment…a commenter to an earlier post asked an interesting question about Mike Crow’s future:
There are so many speculative tangents here that’s it’s hard to keep them straight, but following the main lines of inquiry to their logical conclusions is interesting. As a precursor to the question above, one observation we can make — which is more important than it may initially appear — is that from everything we have learned about Mike Crow, it would not have been possible for him to apply for the Iowa presidency in 2015. First, as detailed above, Crow had a lot of money on the line going into 2015 and 2016. If he left ASU, or was known to be interviewing, that could have put multiple bonuses at risk, potentially costing him a million dollars or more. Second, although his book was on the shelves shortly after the 2015 UI search kicked off, it would have been a bad look to tout his success at ASU, then bail before the presses cooled. Third, because presidential searches in Iowa are open, Crow would have been competing with other candidates in the final stage of the search. Although he probably would have prevailed, Crow would have been auditioning instead of being anointed — while at the same time exposing himself to some non-negligible risk of losing to an upstart — and I think that would have been untenable for a man of such meticulously manicured status as an academic celebrity.
If Jerre Stead was enamored of Crow’s big ideas, however, even if the timing wasn’t quite right for Crow in 2015, it is possible that Harreld may have been hired not simply as a knock-off version of Crow, but as a warm-up act. Bring Harreld in to do the grunt work of driving out unwanted administrators, crippling the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, aggressively raising tuition, and otherwise setting the table for the high-profile entrepreneurial machinations that are Crow’s strength. And sure, that sounds loony, but consider that it was two years into Crow’s tenure when he published his vaunted “foundational white paper”, after two distinct phases of review purportedly initiated by the ASU provost [p. 20-32]. As detailed in prior posts, after two years in office Harreld is himself awaiting the results of a two-phase review at UI, which was purportedly initiated by the former provost. (In his spare time Harreld has also encouraged the state legislature to rewrite intellectual property laws in Iowa, thus making for-profit research that much more profitable for the state schools.)
That Harreld was given an unprecedented five-year deal right off the bat, at an equally unprecedented $800K per year (for Iowa) — despite having no prior experience in academic administration, and having not worked as a business executive during the preceding seven years — would seem to suggest that the Iowa Board of Regents invested in Harreld for the long haul. If Harreld was aware that he was simply laying the groundwork for Crow, however, then Harreld could simply step aside any time. On the other hand, if Harreld is a placeholder president, but no one told him he was keeping the seat warm until Crow was ready to leave Arizona State, all the board would have to do is cut Harreld a check for the balance due (currently $2M) and send him packing.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that doesn’t make any sense because Crow would still have to compete for the Iowa job in an open search. Well, that would have been the case in 2015, and would also be the case today, but in this scenario it is critically important to factor in the context immediately following the 2015 UI search. As it turns out, shortly after Harreld was fraudulently appointed, both of Stead’s co-conspirators on the search committee — former regents president Bruce Rastetter, and former VP for medical affairs Jean Robillard — cynically used that abuse of power to argue for the adoption of closed searches in Iowa. (In this video Rastetter claims that closed searches produce better results. Although that claim is often made by search firms and governing boards because it allows them to choose presidents without input from the greater academic community, there is no proof of that claim.)
Unfortunately, if that was their plan, or even if they just wanted to leave the door open for Crow, the closed-search option was lost when UI was sanctioned by the AAUP for abuses of shared governance during the 2015 search. That in turn compelled the Iowa Board of Regents to conduct an open search at UNI in 2016, and an open search at ISU in 2017, making it all but unimaginable that there will be anything other than an open search at UI when Harreld decides — or is told — to hit the bricks.
Mike Crow and ASU
Whether Iowa was or is in play or not, why might Crow leave ASU despite everything he has going for him there? Well, one of the problems with staying in one place for a long time — particularly if you spend the majority of your time telling everyone else they don’t have a clue — is that sooner or later you will become over-exposed, if not an irritant. From an otherwise unrelated Inside Higher Ed book review only last month, on 01/21/18:
Following publication of his own book in early 2015, not only did Crow have to put up with people questioning the massive amount of money his wife was making at the ASU Foundation, while the mean old Arizona Board of Regents refused to allow him to run ASU like a freewheeling academic robber baron, but in recent months the Arizona Attorney General has been trying to force Crow to lower tuition by invoking a provision in the state constitution. It it a nakedly political move on the part of the AG, but then again it’s hard to fault the man when Crow took millions of dollars from the Koch brothers to crank out pseudo-academic libertarian propaganda, only to then turn around and shovel $500K at the Clinton Foundation for what Crow later described as a “marketing expense”. (Yes, that would be the same Bill Clinton who graciously blurbed Crow’s book a year after that half-million was paid. Crow’s defense of those political affiliations was that he can’t be guilty of anything improper because he sold out to both the Clintons and the Kochs.)
To be clear, Crow still has plenty of supporters in Arizona, including the editorial board of the Daily Sun, which floated his name for governor only last month. Beyond literal and figurative politics, however, the question is how Crow is doing on the merits of his transformative agenda. In 2010, after eight years of revolution at ASU — and five years prior to publication of his book — it was not only acknowledged that the jury was still out, but Crow’s track record as a visionary was spotty even before he arrived at Arizona State. From an Inside Higher Ed article titled As the Crow Flies, on 07/16/10:
Eight years later, it is hard to find recent press about Crow or ASU which make the case that his big ideas really have paid big dividends. After sixteen years on the job he is still carping about being hamstrung by ABOR, while at the same time spending millions of dollars on political hacks or think tanks like New America. Even core entrepreneurial initiatives are languishing despite much-ballyhooed launches.
For example, in late September of 2013, ASU announced that it would be partnering on a new startup accelerator called Furnace:
A year and a half later, in March of 2015 — when Crow’s book was being published — ASU announced that Furnace was expanding:
Three years later, when I first started writing this multi-part post in mid-January, the Furnace Accelerator page pointed to a high-end furniture moving company. Today, it links to an Account Suspended page.
Mike Crow and Education
I don’t know if Crow ever had any interest in the University of Iowa, or whether he would take the job now if it was offered to him. I do know he was mentioned as a possible replacement for Harvard President Drew Faust, when she announced last summer that she would be stepping down this coming June. By October of 2017, however, Crow no longer seemed to be in the running, and just a few weeks ago Lawrence S. Bacow was announced as the chosen one.
Interestingly, the introduction of Bacow as an academic administrator on the Harvard website sounds like a carbon copy of Mike Crow:
Given Crow’s celebrity status and his eagerness to make sweeping changes at the very limits of propriety, however, Harvard may not have been the right fit:
Compare that to the hands-on role that Crow immediately took at Arizona State, vividly portrayed in the Phoenix New Times on 04/26/07:
Milun did sue, and ASU ultimately settled in the low six figures. Given that Crow wants universities to be run like corporations — and is certainly walking that brutish walk himself — it is hard to imagine him giving up the authority he has at Arizona State for a series of running skirmishes with the empowered faculty at Harvard, or any other school. Then again, with Harreld constantly fomenting AAU panic, and pitting the College of Medicine and others against the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and using interim provost Curry’s 2020 Task Force to legitimize whatever reorganizational plans he has in mind, and having already found a cadre of willing collaborators on the University of Iowa campus, faculty resistance would probably be much less of an issue if Crow did take over.
Whether Michael Crow is the Steve Jobs or P.T. Barnum of higher education will be determined by the bottom line at Arizona State. If his initiatives and reforms bear fruit, they will survive and perpetuate themselves through the higher-ed ecosystem by means other than fraudulent presidential searches and the imposition of burned-out business execs on hostage academic communities. As ever seems to be the case, however, the one topic that is ignored in the rush to laud Crow’s entrepreneurial approach is education. It’s not sexy like for-profit research, and no one wants to pay for it, but there does seem to be a general consensus that higher education still matters, if only in terms of grinding out worker drones for white collar industries.
On that point, in the reviews of Crow’s book there was a persistent concern that the students at entrepreneurial ASU may be getting short shrift. From Inside Higher Ed’s pre-release review of Designing the New American University, on 01/25/15:
From the Hechinger Report, on 03/11/15:
From an exhaustive review in the LA Review of Books by Christopher Newfield — who is also quoted in Crow’s book — on 04/05/15:
As noted above, instead of increasing enrollment at the University of Iowa, Harreld plans to increase tuition by almost half, and the net result will be even more profitable than Crow’s approach. After throwing a few million at need-based financial aid — in effect, giving back some of the money he just took, at pennies on the dollar — Harreld can divert the lion’s share of that new revenue to the same kind of entrepreneurial ventures Crow is relentless in promoting. Education will suffer, of course, but Crow and Harreld have an answer for that as well.
The academic canard they both put forward is that by having more and better researchers on campus — whether faculty or staff — every student benefits in the classroom. That’s not true, of course, but it is revealing, because what Crow, Harreld and other proponents of research-first paradigms are really selling is trickle-down higher education. One bright academic light in a campus lab somehow informs the education of every last student, including those who are shunted off to low-cost satellite campuses or online courses. That in turn allows the university to charge a premium for every last degree, whether each student interacts with and profits from those ‘world-class’ researchers or not.
The question for Iowans, and particularly for the University of Iowa community, is whether taking on market risk, and saddling more students with more debt, and short-changing students in the classroom, is the proper role of a public university. Hiring leading researchers and giving them money to gamble with could indeed pay off, but spending all of that money on education is a sure thing. Someone has to do the teaching, but right now that responsibility is falling more and more on the shoulders of people who are either in school themselves or insecure in their profession, or worse — being left to computer courses and programs which cannot provide the kind of classroom instruction that matters most.
What Crow’s Book is About and Who it is For
Whether or not Crow’s design for the New American University is sustainable over the longer term, it is undeniable that Crow created something else in the sixteen years since he arrived at Arizona State in 2002. Where exclusivity in enrollment was all the rage, Crow led the charge on inclusivity. Where specialization was the cornerstone of faculty excellence, Crow championed interdisciplinarity. Where education was always the focus, academic research a sidelight, and applied research left to the private sector, Crow unabashedly championed the conversion of higher education into an entrepreneurial enterprise premised on corporate practices and “competitive spirit”.
Even as he decried the pandering for prestige that is pervasive at institutions of higher learning, while simultaneously scheming to elevate Arizona State to the most prestige-bound organization in academia in the AAU, Crow was designing something of considerably greater value to America’s higher-ed administrators than the model for the New American University. We got a glimpse of what he was up to with the plan from the New America Foundation, which reconfigured the membership requirements for the AAU, and vaulted Arizona State into the top ten in that new research ranking system. If you do not like the rules of the game, change them. (Or, alternatively, donate a lot of money to someone who will do that on your behalf.)
Whatever his successes at Arizona State, or even at Columbia years before, the more you read about Mike Crow the more one thing stands out. Mike Crow wants credit — maybe more so than anyone I have run across outside the current deranged president of the United States. I don’t know whether Crow needs credit in the same way that Donald Trump does, but when it comes to self-promotion, including promotion via the Arizona State press office, making sure Mike Crow gets credit is job one.
For example, on 02/21/18 Arizona State put out a press release about breaking ground on the ‘Mirabella’ project, which contained quotes from Crow. Also on 02/21/18, ASU issued a separate press release about NAFTA in which Crow was quoted. Also on 02/21/18, ESPN published their story about GCU sports, including mention of Crow’s “feud” with that much-smaller Christian school. Also on 02/21/18, the State Press published a story on ASU and climate change, in which Crow was credited with having “had a hand in helping form” the University Climate Change Coalition (UC3). That’s four Crow mentions in one day, on an otherwise innocuous Wednesday, at the tail end of the dreariest month of the year.
It may well be that the AAU will allow ASU into the fold at some point in the future. Whether Crow is president at the time, however, I have no doubt that he will take credit whether it is given or not. So far, however, the AAU has refused to credit Crow for all of his putative advances by extending an invite, so Crow did what any self-respecting self-promoter would do in that situation. He wrote a book and gave credit to himself.
It is not Mike Crow’s fault if the AAU is too stupid to recognize that the American research university has evolved from a “public agency model to a public enterprise model”, as noted by the Phoenix Business Journal on 01/30/18:
The irony in Crow’s lazy and false analogy to the DMV is that you probably cannot find a bigger micromanager in all of higher education than Michael Crow. He’s got fingers in every pie, and he damn sure wants credit for all that pie-fingering. In reality, Mike Crow is leveraging a massively subsidized state institution to compete more and more with private industry, and in the short term — particularly if enrollment continues to grow — he cannot help but succeed. In that same context, however, it is also certain that there will be a day of reckoning, but because Crow can see the big picture, including, crucially, the Arizona State books, he will also know when it’s time to go. Like former governor Terry “Butcher” Branstad did a year ago in Iowa, Crow will take one look at the red ink on the horizon and quit in order to preserve his legacy.
Taking all of the above in sum, including the previous posts in this series, all we have to do to see what Crow’s book was really about is extend the title by one word:
Designing the New American University Prestige
As to who Crow’s book is for, it is first and foremost for Michael Crow, but also for his entrepreneurial disciples. Often treated like ogres by the faculty, and ignored by wave after wave of insufferable, ungrateful, self-absorbed students, college and university presidents now have the chance not only to sell out their academic institutions to crony business and political interests like they always have, but to be perceived as trendsetters and visionaries in doing so. Thanks to Designing the New American University, today even the new president of Harvard sounds like a Mike Crow clone, and that is no accident.
After sixteen years at Arizona State, Michael Crow has changed the definition of what it means to be a prestigious university president so it now perfectly matches Michael Crow. In doing so he also made it possible for Jerre Stead, Jean Robillard and Bruce Rastetter to install a broken-down business executive named J. Bruce Harreld at the helm of the University of Iowa, where Harreld is now poised to enact reforms that will make his fraudulent hire seem like a faculty picnic. The good news is that all we have to do to find out what Harreld, Stead, Robillard and Rastetter have in store — if not had in mind way back in September of 2015, when Harreld was fraudulently appointed, and Mike Crow’s book was hot off the presses — is wait for the Phase II report from the 2020 Task Force which should be out in the next few weeks.
“While Crow does not make $1.5M every year — at least not from the Arizona Board of Regents — his annual compensation does approach $1M, and that would be tough for anyone to walk away from even if there were no other inducements or attachments.”
That is not true. And I know it’s not true because I’ve walked away from offers of far less, but still too much, in public employment. For anyone who finds it reasonably easy to recall what “public service” means, or “public university”, or “public”, or “society”, it isn’t difficult to walk away from that sort of venality at all.
People who will steal from students and their families, and from taxpayers, in order to make you rich for, supposedly, serving the public never will be good people to work for. Naturally they have excuses. They talk about competitive salaries, as though they’re supposed to be competing with people who knock themselves out so shareholders can make a buck. Or they sotto-voce you about how the money’s on the table and you may as well, better you than someone else. Like it’s some kind of a lark, ripping off students and taxpayers.
Most people working in public universities are indeed working for less money than they could get elsewhere. They’re aware of it on a regular basis, because they’re paid so little that they have trouble sometimes with ordinary expenses. I think that a substantial proportion of them, offered criminal money to do their jobs, would decline.
I cannot take seriously any public university president outside New York and California willing to take much more than, say, $200K/yr for what is admittedly a round-the-clock job if done right. That salary is comfortable anywhere else in the country. If you’re pulling a gigantic salary for working on a campus where the kids are burying themselves in debt and still going hungry, you’re a monster of greed. It’s as simple as that. And you have no business near the controls of any public institution.
Thanks for the reality check. Like you, I also do not prioritize money ahead of the welfare of others, but I confess that writing about people who do for the past two and a half years has warped my perspective.
The fact that J. Bruce Harreld makes $800K per year as president of the University of Iowa ($200K deferred) is not simply obscene, it is an insult. After a while, however, such absurd amounts stop being real money and turn into relative numbers. (The next thing you know you’re thinking like governing boards across the country, paying whatever the market comps say you should pay.)
I noted in the past that part of this perversion stems directly from the fact that entrepreneurial types are more and more trying to poach high-level administrative jobs, and why wouldn’t they? Harreld basically gets paid close to half a million dollars to work on his year-around tan, while giving one or two “it’s not my fault” interviews to the DI each year.
In my own defense, there was also implicit cynicism in this statement when it played out in my head:
By “anyone”, I meant, “any of the higher-ed administrators I’ve been reading and writing about”, because I cannot conceive of a selfless person becoming the president of a public university. I’m sure there are some decent people heading up colleges and universities somewhere, but the people I end up reading about are money-grubbing egotists.
Which is my round-about way of saying I agree with this:
In the context of Mike ‘the Entrepreneur’ Crow at ASU, and Harreld at UI, I think there’s an additional damning critique which I mentioned in the post above. Nothing prevented those geniuses from showing what they can do in the private sector, yet they’re both taking taxpayer money for their salary while gambling taxpayer funds and student tuition on risky initiatives that they themselves have no exposure to.
I’m sure they tell people how smart they are to minimize exposure, too. And that those people laugh as though it’s a pretty good joke.
This:
“I cannot conceive of a selfless person becoming the president of a public university”
is terribly sad. I’m not a total moron, I know that our past presidents weren’t in it with literal begging bowls. But I remember them being, as far as people at the head of hundreds? thousands? of tenured faculty can be, really quite decent people who meant to do well by the students.
I feel like all I do some days is wander around reminding people that in better times, under better leadership, things aren’t horrible, stupid, pointless, ruinous, destructive, etc., and that it’s important to retain your sense of civilization in all this. We’re going to need it again someday.
Two years, six and a half months ago, on September 3rd, 2015, following a corrupt presidential search that he himself immediately attempted to cover up, J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of the University of Iowa. Two years, four and a half months ago, on November 2nd, 2015, after giving interviews which exposed the illegitimacy of his appointment and proved that he lied to cover for his co-conspirators, Harreld officially took office. Apart from the arrogance and contempt implicit in the crony corruption which facilitated his illegitimate hire, however, the most startling aspect of Harreld’s appointment was, by his own admission, that he was not qualified for the job he had just been hired to do.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 09/03/15, only moments after Harreld’s shocking appointment over three eminently qualified candidates:
Note the implicit menace in Harreld’s statement that, “I suspect and hope all of them will”. Having moments earlier been hired by high-placed, powerful co-conspirators who deceived the search committee as well as four of the nine members of the Iowa Board of Regents, Harreld publicly expressed an immediate expectation that his detractors would help him make up for his profound deficits, now that he had them under his administrative thumb. In so doing, Harreld told the members of the UI community everything they needed to know about his own arrogance and contempt not only for them, but for higher education as a profession. Whatever he did not know he could pick up on the fly, while the things he did know — his purported business acumen, developed over decades as an executive in the private sector — justified the serial abuses of power which were used to install him in office.
As for Harreld being “unanimously” approved by the Board of Regents, it was later learned that such reported votes are a convention of the board. In reality, not only did Harreld not have the unanimous support of all nine regents, but five of the regents — a voting majority — met in secret with Harreld shortly before the winnowing process began, after which those same five members all forgot to mention those meetings to the other four members of the board. Equally stunning was that the corrupt board leadership then gave their apprentice president — a man who openly acknowledged that he needed “a lot of help, a lot of coaching” — an initial five-year contract that was unprecedented in Iowa, paying an equally unprecedented $800K per year ($200K deferred), for a total of $4M over the life of the deal. (To underscore the deeply repressed hostility which drove the board to act in such a manner, Harreld — an objectively unqualified male — was paid $200K more per year than the female president he replaced, who had eight years of experience when she retired.)
Today, two and a half years later, we are approximately halfway through Harreld’s initial five-year contract. In the state of Iowa we are also dealing with the second straight year of budget shortfalls, including impending mid-year legislative cuts to the Board of Regents, and anticipating a third straight year of impending tuition hikes. To those hikes we can also add Harreld’s push for an additional 41% increase in tuition over the next five years, which he proposed during last summer’s Tuition Task Force. (More on the task force here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)
The University of Iowa also finds itself at a decisive juncture on multiple fronts. So much so, in fact, that it feels as if the school is not only at a tipping point regarding its long-term future, but specifically with regard to the subversive motivation for Harreld’s corrupt hire. A few weeks from now the 2020 Task Force is expected to release its Phase II report on the reorganization of the entire academic structure of the UI campus. Having already signaled in the Phase I report that the task force supports the breakup of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences — which is the heart of UI, and by far the largest college on campus — there is considerable concern that the Phase II report will simply be a fait accompli engineered by interim provost Sue Curry. (Whether in bullet points, footnotes or euphemistic phrasing, that report will give Harreld the administrative pretext he craves to remake Iowa in the anything-goes image of gonzo Mike Crow at Arizona State.)
In this fraught and uncertain context, it seems appropriate to gauge the ongoing apprenticeship of J. Bruce Harreld at the halfway point of his initial contract. What exactly does $2M buy in terms of taxpayer-funded coaching, mentoring and teaching for an unqualified university president, and how much progress has Harreld made over the past two and a half years? Fortuitously, we have the perfect vehicle for that appraisal in Harreld’s most recent Daily Iowan interview, which was conducted eleven days ago and published on 03/09/18. As a bonus, we can also, finally, (maybe), answer a vexing question about interim provost Sue Curry’s future.
The 03/09/18 Daily Iowan Interview
While Harreld is almost resolute in his refusal to grant interviews to the mainstream press, he has given a number of interviews to the student-run campus paper — albeit only because he is obligated to do so to maintain the charade of his presidency. And while Harreld does, finally, have some basic familiarity with issues that would be of concern to any academic community, in terms of his manner and comportment there has been little change between his early interviews — where he literally had no idea what he was talking about — and this latest exchange. As a general observation, Harreld likes to talk, a lot, in an affected breezy manner, but he does not simply ramble to hear the sound of his own voice.
Instead, Harreld meanders through answers in service of one or both of the following objectives. First, Harreld often seeks to change the focus of a question, reframing it in a context which is more rhetorically advantageous or flattering to his ego needs. Second, and relatedly, Harreld is very keen on positioning himself as the wise man who understands complex issues that students, faculty and staff struggle to comprehend. That, in turn, helps cast his attempts to change the subject as important insights or overlooked perspectives, when they are neither.
The first question in the Daily Iowan interview concerned the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Massacre, a subsequent scare in one of the Iowa dorms, and general concerns about campus safety.
The Parkland massacre took place on 02/14/18, twenty-one days prior to Harreld’s interview with the DI. Many of the undergraduates on the UI campus are themselves only a year or two out of high school, and thus probably felt some additional connectedness with victims and survivors. In any event, as members of an academic community it makes sense that the DI reporters would ask Harreld for a status update on campus safety, so as to pass along some faint sense of security to the greater campus.
In typical Harreld fashion, however, he ignored all that, and instead immediately corrected the reporters:
Here we have Harreld the Pedantic Historian, taking time out of his busy day to inform the oh-so-naive DI reporters that preparedness on the UI campus did not start with the latest mass murder in Florida. Instead of offering some reassurance, however dubious it might have been given that America is awash in weapons of war, Harreld implied that the young people asking him questions had not done their homework, or had somehow made a journalistic mistake in referencing Parkland. Which is to say that from the very first sentence of the most recent DI interview, Harreld continued the same tone-deaf and defensive leadership that he demonstrated when he was fraudulently hired two and a half years ago.
What is particularly ironic about Harreld’s scolding of the DI reporters is that one of the mass shootings that had a great deal to do with Iowa’s current level of preparedness occurred on the UI campus on November 1st, 1991. On that horrifying day, six people were shot to death and a seventh was left paralyzed from the neck down — meaning today’s UI students, even if they were not born at the time, have good cause to be particularly concerned about the threat of gun violence. Adding insult to prior injury, although Harreld acknowledged during his candidate forum that he researched UI by looking at the university’s Wikipedia page, he either did not notice or soon forgot about the paragraph describing the November 1st massacre. And we know that because only a few months later Harreld commented to a member of the UI staff that people who were not prepared to do their jobs “should be shot“.
Continuing from Harreld’s response to the first DI question, we get a glimmer of administrative lucidity, couched in unfortunate verbiage:
Describing the firearms massacre of fourteen high school students and three adults as a “flare-up” is grotesquely euphemistic — as if describing bursitis, or perhaps back pain. Then again, Harreld is a busy man, and he can’t spend all day choosing the exact right word when there are so many self-serving points to make. Speaking of which….
Here we get Harreld the Keen Observer. Having admonished the DI reporters that Parkland was not the inciting event in Iowa’s preparedness for a firearms massacre on campus, Harreld then talked about Parkland as if it were the inciting event in our national dialogue — or at least his own, belated internal dialogue — about how to prevent such barbaric acts. And yet even at that he came to the wrong conclusion, because as a factual matter there is a “single answer” to the apparently complex question of gun violence, which is to repeal the 2nd Amendment and get rid of all of the guns. (Granted, that’s not likely to happen, but in terms of solutions it is bulletproof. No more guns, no more deaths from guns.)
So there we have it. From the great man himself, the root cause of the problem of gun violence in America, and particularly the massacre of students of all ages, is, “like, everything”. Or at least that’s what you get from a university president who is inoculating himself against the possibility that there could be, at any moment, a bloodbath on his own campus. Again, however, because the nation really is awash in guns, that’s not an irrational position to take if you know you will be held accountable for circumstances that will almost certainly be out of your control. So points to Harreld for the prospective ass-covering.
In the remainder of his reply to the first question Harreld followed up with specific steps that are being taken to protect the UI campus. And in that basic competency we do see improvement — as might admittedly be expected by mere osmosis — which is a far cry from Harreld’s performance in early 2016, when he learned, after only a few months on the job, that his then-interim director of public safety interfered with an investigation by the Johnson County sheriff. Clearly out of his depth and oblivious to the importance of good working relations with local law enforcement, Harreld took a quick look at the problem and confidently absolved himself and the university of any responsibility:
Several days later, after apparently taking “a deeper look”, the interim director stepped down and was subsequently replaced by Scott Beckner, one of Harreld’s better hires to-date. That the Iowa Board of Regents was not only thrilled to hire a man who had no capacity to make critical decisions that would keep the campus safe, but the board president actually ran a fake search to jam Harreld into office, is a disgrace — as is the fact that Harreld himself applied for and took the job despite such glaring and potentially lethal deficiencies. That Harreld has now managed, after two and a half year, to develop some basic competency in that regard should not be surprising, but it is only by the grace of good fortune that the arrogance of the board and of Harreld himself has not proved tragic.
Taken in sum, what is most instructive about Harreld’s reply to the first question in the DI interview is that he could not skip his pontificating and get to the specifics of what is being done to keep the UI campus safe. That’s all the question required, and that’s all the reporters were looking for, and yet that incapacity is a constant with Harreld, and underscores why, by temperament, he was not and is not qualified to be the president of a major university. At root, Harreld is all about Harreld, and always will be. If he managed to acquire some competence at a job that he has so far been paid $2M to perform, that is hardly cause for celebration.
The second question from the DI reporters concerned campus sexual assault, and specifically the second biannual Speak Out survey being conducted this year. Here Harreld got off to a much better start, thanking everyone for contributing, and it’s a glimpse of what he should have been able to do the moment he was hired. The survey itself, which is voluntary, was developed in fits and starts, and even now has only minimal participation, but Harreld did a good job of explaining what the objectives are so that students who read the interview will have a better understanding of the program, instead of a better understanding of him.
Again, this response is light years better than Harreld’s early forays into the subject of campus sexual assault, which began with his candidate forum a few days before his fraudulent hire. On that occasion Harreld actually made fun of the six-point plan that was being developed by outgoing president Sally Mason to combat campus sexual assault, and instead offered his own two-point, “N-O” plan. After his shocking appointment, Harreld followed that up by deputizing the UI football team to act as campus protectors.
Eight months later, with a solid six months of academic administration under his belt, a wiser J. Bruce Harreld celebrated the completion of Mason’s six-point plan in his first interview with the Daily Iowan. Demonstrating both the pettiness and neediness that would become his signature, however, Harreld not only did not mention Sally Mason by name, but he took credit for implementing the same exact program that he ridiculed during his candidate forum. (Taking credit for other people’s ideas is a core tenet of Harreld’s leadership style.)
The third question from the DI reporters also concerned campus sexual assault:
This question is framed in a gender-neutral manner — “more people are coming forward” — but it is understood that most of the individuals who report sexual misconduct are women. As to the process taking 14 weeks, that’s another way of describing three and a half months of post-assault limbo, or the greater part of an entire semester. While there is obviously some average administrative time span required to investigate such complaints, the question from the DI is ultimately about whether the process can be resolved more quickly, so as to alleviate the period of uncertainty and fear that victims must endure.
The very fact that this question was asked suggests that the DI reporters have some familiarity with this concern on campus, which is clearly not the usual student griping about run-of-the-diploma-mill delays. After two and a half years on the job, and on the UI campus, you would also think that Harreld would get that — perhaps because he had some administrative exposure to the reality of what victims go through, both in terms of the initial abuse and the bureaucratic aftermath. Even if students are encouraged to come forward and are treated with respect, that still exposes them to additional emotional and psychological pain.
With all that in mind, then, here is the first sentence of Harreld’s reply:
Harreld’s immediate aside — “your question suggests that it is” — once again reveals the reflexively bratty man that Harreld has always been. From the point of view of a sexual assault or abuse victim, the idea that the “legal process” must play out over time is inherently discouraging. At its most banal the process is still an odious obligation, like standing in line at an invasive DMV. At its most harrowing it can be a repeated revisiting of the trauma which compelled the individual to ask for help in the first place.
All Harreld had to do — even if he is constitutionally incapable of any emotional connection to the victims themselves — was express empathy, or even fake empathy. But he couldn’t do it. Instead, he balked at the suggestion that the process at UI, his process, was taking too long, and once again corrected the DI reporters about yet another purported misapprehension.
Note also that Harreld’s bureaucratic response dovetails with the current hostile national context, which women are rightly concerned about on campuses all over the country. Because of the teachings of her religion — which subordinates women to men — the fundamentalist Secretary of Education in the Trump-Pence administration, Betsy DeVos, recently rolled back protections on college campuses. As a result, the federal government’s focus is now on protecting what are, largely, men, from false accusations, even if that means some perpetrators escape any consequence for their actions.
Instead of acknowledging that setback, and reassuring women on campus that UI does not intend to follow suit, Harreld gave an administrative reply which seemed equally concerned with the sliver of (largely) men who might be falsely accused, as compared to the great preponderance of women who are genuine victims. If you were a woman on the UI campus, and you read Harreld’s response, and the seventeenth through twenty-fifth words in the first sentence were, “it will take as much time as it takes”, would you be encouraged or discouraged from coming forward? Does the entirety of Harreld’s two-paragraph reply make you think he is an empathetic and credible voice on campus sexual assault, or is he once again simply covering his own backside?
Switching tacks, here is the fourth question from the DI interview:
As to the claim in the first sentence, not only has the University of Iowa been hemorrhaging high-level administrators over the past year, but since Harreld was hired. And of course once you know that, it is hard not to see causation in that sequence of events. As to the question in the second sentence, however, note that the why of it comes after concerns about retention. When a long-time administrator leaves, their experience leaves with them, which means UI has been bleeding institutional knowledge at a horrific rate for over two years.
In fact, if we start with the loss of Sally Mason’s eight years of experience as president, including her deep relationships in higher-ed and across the state, the brain-drain at UI was inherent in the process of replacing her. That the corrupt Board of Regents exacerbated that problem by replacing Mason with a carpetbagging dilettante who had no experience in academic administration, and no ties to Iowa, means UI was badly hobbled the moment Harreld was appointed. That the board and Harreld then expected UI administrators and deans to coach, mentor and teach Harreld so he might someday know what the hell he was doing not only added insult to that grievous institutional injury, but also provided a compelling motivation for those administrators and deans to move on.
As you might imagine, however, from Harreld’s point of view it would be difficult to admit that the reason people were fleeing in droves was because he was hired, or, because he was incompetent or insufferable. Which is probably why Harreld opted to ignore those possibilities, along with the scandalous loss of institutional knowledge, and simply explain away or minimize the unrelenting administrative blood loss.
Corroborating the assertion of mass departures, Harreld’s first reflex was to make clear just how hard he has been working. He followed that up by claiming that the exodus was really “just retirement or people going on to other opportunities”, then gave former provost P. Barry Butler as an example. And yes, Butler did move on to become the president of Embry-Riddle almost exactly one year ago, but that’s not the full story….
After more than thirty years of service to the University of Iowa, including rising to provost in 2011, Butler was himself a candidate during the 2015 UI presidential search. As such, Butler clearly had no desire to leave, and indeed probably felt that his wealth of administrative experience, including particularly his long experience at Iowa, would be an asset to the school, if not also give him an edge in the hiring process. When the four finalists were announced in late August, however, Butler was not among them. Instead, there were three long-time academic administrators with whom Butler compared favorably, and a burned out former business executive named J. Bruce Harreld.
While it was not publicly known at the time that Butler had been a candidate, because only the finalists were ever revealed, when that did later become public knowledge — thanks to J. Bruce Harreld himself, just as Butler was moving on last year — the obvious assumption was that Butler simply did not make the cut. The obvious flaw in that otherwise sensible conclusion was that the 2015 presidential search was a rolling series of abuses of power and betrayals on the part of select members of the search committee and Board of Regents. Meaning it is entirely possible that Butler was more than qualified to be among the finalists, but was screwed over precisely because he would have presented a formidable obstacle to Harreld’s fraudulent candidacy. (This is the exact opposite of what happened during the recent Iowa State search, where the Ames mafia made sure that long-time ISU dean Wendy Wintersteen was one of the finalists, so it would be all but impossible for the regents to appoint anyone else.)
Now, I don’t know how you would feel if you spent your life acquiring and demonstrating skill in your chosen profession, only to have a cabal of corrupt hacks give the job you wanted to an unqualified applicant like J. Bruce Harreld, but you probably wouldn’t feel appreciated. You might solider on without raising a fuss, but you might also look for a position elsewhere, particularly if it turned out you would be the point person in facilitating Harreld’s on-the-job training for a position that you yourself were qualified to assume. Which is to say yes: there may have been a number of departures at Iowa which were due to retirements or opportunities elsewhere, but perhaps some or all of those departures were initiated by a common factor, and that common factor is J. Bruce Harreld.
Not surprisingly, Harreld omitted all of that and continued instead by talking about Butler’s replacement, interim provost Sue Curry, whom he appointed in February of 2017. Since then Curry has proven critical to Harreld’s plan to radically alter the academic structure on the UI campus, particularly by using her 2020 Task Force as a stalking horse. Among Harreld’s objectives is dismantling the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Curry has been an able and loyal facilitator in that regard, at least until the UI Faculty Senate figured out what she was up to and convinced her to change course. While praising Curry, however, Harreld also filled in a vexing piece of the ongoing transition puzzle.
Specifically, Sue Curry was previously the dean of the UI College of Public Health (CoPH), but left that job to serve as interim provost. It was also noted at the time, however, that the interim provost would not be eligible for that position, so the obvious question was where Curry would land when a permanent provost was hired. When a search was subsequently initiated to hire a new CoPH dean, that ruled out Curry returning to her old job, but because she could not become the permanent provost there was still no obvious position for her to assume. Had Harreld planned all along to change his mind and give Curry the provost job? Might Harreld use Curry’s 2020 Task Force to create a brand new college, then make her the dean?
Thanks to the DI reporters, Harreld finally provided the answer:
Why neither Harreld nor Curry ever previously mentioned that she intended to retire after serving as interim provost seems inexplicable — unless that in itself is a recent development. In any event, there has been a good deal of tension on the UI campus this past year, while Curry has been serving as interim provost, and knowing what her intentions are would have dispelled some legitimate concerns. (As an aside, in the DI interview there are two notes having to do with Harreld’s use of the word “need” in the above quote. I took that as Harreld relaying Curry’s perspective — meaning she was ready to retire — but I also see how it could have been read as critical of Curry’s performance, or even her age. In the updates both the DI and a UI spokesperson make clear that no disrespect was intended.)
The only sticking point is that we don’t have that statement from Curry herself, but okay. For the time being we will assume that Sue Curry is out after the new provost is hired. Unfortunately, because she only initiated that search process a few weeks ago, and Harreld will certainly encourage that committee to delay the meat of the process for at least six months, it is likely if not certain that Curry will still be the interim provost nine months from now, if not considerably longer.
Returning to the question of why there has been so much administrative turnover at UI, note the end of the quote, where Harreld suggests that given the size of the university there have not really been that many key departures. That is false. Between the people who left following his appointment, and the people who chose to leave over the past year, there is nothing normal about the turnover at UI. Ever the optimist, however — at least when he doesn’t want to acknowledge the obvious — Harreld spends another paragraph actually talking himself into that conviction:
People who love their jobs stay in their jobs as long as they can, even if they’re not healthy. For some reason, however, two and a half years ago a whole lot of high-level administrators began deciding that they no longer loved their jobs at UI.
The fifth question in the DI interview concerned tuition and state funding — subjects we have covered extensively. Harreld’s practiced reply recycled many of the disingenuous arguments he has made in the past, all of them in service of his plan to increase tuition 41% over five years. As for the following rant, however, not only was it wrong with regard to UI, it was nauseatingly manipulative:
Harreld doesn’t care about democracy. What Harreld cares about is getting his grubby entrepreneurial hands on tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in new, unrestricted tuition revenue that he can plow into for-profit ventures and research. If he cared one whit about citizenship, the last thing he would propose would be burying another generation of students in crushing debt, particularly when more than half of UI students already leave with $20K or more in student loans.
Unfortunately, flag waving as an excuse for raiding student bank accounts is par for the course for Harreld. As to his point about privatization, however, what is important to understand about public higher education in Iowa, is that in 2012 the legislature outlawed what was known as a ‘tuition set-aside‘ for resident undergrads. That mechanism allowed the Board of Regents to literally set aside some tuition revenue to provide financial aid for low-income students, some of whom were also first-generation. As families of greater means pointed out, however, that practice amounted to state-mandated income redistribution, meaning wealthier families were paying for poorer families to send their children to college.
As a public good that practice makes sense, and Medicaid and other social safety nets function the same way, but critically those programs are funded by taxes, as opposed to a fee (tuition) for a service (education). In that difference you can see why some people would not be happy to bear that additional burden, and why they would feel that the cost of a college degree from a state university should not include that subsidy. Having now discontinued the set-aside, there really is no compelling reason to keep Iowa’s state universities public, because doing so actually makes it harder for poor students to attend college. On the other hand, if the schools were privatized they could charge whatever they wanted, then spend a big chunk of that revenue on aid for underprivileged students. (The state is already contributing such meager resources that a tuition hike like the one proposed by Harreld, extended a few more years, would compensate for the state’s funding.)
Question six from the Daily Iowan also concerned tuition, and specifically the multi-year plans that were put forward during last summer’s Tuition Task Force. While the Board of Regents and state schools did a good job of pretending that those plans were dead over the past six months or so, the press recently rooted out the truth, which is that the board is still considering long-term, multi-year hikes. In fact, no one has ever officially repudiated Harreld’s plan for a 41% hike over five years, or for similar hikes at Iowa State.
Harreld’s response was again largely a rehash of his prior arguments in favor of precipitous tuition increases, yet in keeping with the current stealth game plan he avoided talking about specifics. If Harreld did make any budget news in the DI interview it wasn’t on the tuition front, but from this bit of scaremongering:
First, the state is not taking $16M from UI this year. The final number has yet to be determined, but that statement by Harreld — admittedly garbled — is disingenuous at best and intentionally deceptive at worst. Second, neither the president of UNI nor the president of ISU has talked about layoffs as a result of any cuts, let alone layoffs comprising 70% of the dollar value of those cuts. Given that the UI Athletic Department shifted $2M to the academic books this year — a big win for Harreld — and the most recent revenue projections for the state are looking up, any mid-year budget cuts at UI can almost certainly be absorbed.
Question seven from the DI deserves a special commendation, because it would have been easy to let the subject go. To the reporters’ credit, however, they followed up on an important issue that Harreld had not been asked about in prior interviews.
To understand Harreld’s immediate if not emphatic response to this question, it is important to note that among all of the relationships Harreld has established at the University of Iowa, his relationship with Gary Barta involves total commitment. For reasons that have never been explained, Harreld has been in Barta’s corner from the moment Harreld was hired, and that allegiance held fast even as Barta and his department fell under the gun of multiple gender discrimination lawsuits and federal investigations. What Gary Barta did to Assistant AD Jane Meyer, and to Meyer’s partner, softball coach Tracey Griesbaum, was unconscionable, and yet Harreld gave Barta a massive raise after only being in office a matter of weeks. Six months into Harreld’s tenure he then gave Barta another passionate and public vote of personal and professional confidence during a rare local TV interview, which effectively threw every woman on campus under the discrimination bus that Barta was driving.
With all that in mind, and understanding that the question from the DI reporters allowed Harreld wide latitude in his reply, note the first sentence in Harreld’s respone, and his immediate emphasis of the same point in the second sentence:
Harreld’s repeated disavowal of any responsibility or even complicity on the part of Gary Barta is not simply a lie, it is a repulsive lie. The University of Iowa was in fact named as the defendant in the case, precisely because UI was Barta’s employer, and should have prevented him from acting the way he did — including by terminating his employment. Gary Barta personally destroyed the professional careers of two women, and as a result the University of Iowa was obligated to pay $6.5M in damages to both of them, after first losing in court to Jane Meyer.
Harreld’s hair-splitting defense of Barta is loathsome even for Harreld, and is a betrayal not only of the two women whose careers were cut short, but of anyone who has ever suffered discrimination. The only reason others were involved is because they were obligated to try to clean up Barta’s mess without leaving the university open to the very legal jeopardy that finally took its toll. Without Barta’s abject failings as an administrator there were no issues to resolve, which of course brings us now to the bitterest of ironies. Even as UI continues hemorrhaging high-level administrators, the one person on campus that Harreld wedded himself to is the one person on campus who discriminated against two women and cost the university $6.5M.
In the DI interview Harreld followed up his whitewashing of Gary Barta’s history with this, concerning a Title IX investigation of the Athletics Department:
That is not what happened, and Harreld knows that is not what happened. What happened is that the feds found substantial variance in the support given to men’s and women’s programs. Unfortunately — or, fortunately for Harreld and Barta — fundamentalist EdSec Betsy DeVos subsequently announced that the department would “scale back” such investigations:
Jackson, a fellow woman-hating fundamentalist brought on by DeVos, distinguished herself earlier with this appraisal of campus sexual assault:
These are the people who actually killed the Title IX investigation into the UI Athletics Department, but because they got Harreld and his bro Barta off the hook, Harreld was happy to go along for the ride. Even at that, however, UI was not and is not off the hook. From the AP, less than two months ago:
At the end of his reply Harreld waffles because he knows he is lying his ass off. Given the option of expressing any sympathy to Meyer and Griesbaum, however, or any of the other women on campus who were cheated by Barta, Harreld willfully mischaracterizes the facts to give Gary Barta cover. And why wouldn’t he? Earlier in the interview he had the same change to express empathy or sympathy to victims of campus sexual assault — who are also predominantly women — but Harreld focused instead on administrative platitudes like “there are two sides to these stories,” and “it will take as much time as it takes”. As for Gary Barta, he continues to receive Harreld’s full support despite costing the university $6.5M.
The eighth question from the DI reporters concerned the administrative aftermath of the Meyer and Griesbaum settlements, and particularly a review of employment practices across the university. Again, note Harreld’s immediate response:
In the aftermath of the $6.5M verdict, the University of Iowa immediately announced that it would review Iowa’s employment practices to make sure nothing like that happened again. The committee that Harreld quickly established then promptly fell asleep and drew the initial hiring process out for a whopping six months. And yet, what J. Bruce Harreld most wants readers to know about all that — as the take-charge president of the University of Iowa — is that he “wasn’t involved” in that delay.
In fact, if anyone failed to define the “scope” of the inquiry in advance, that would be Harreld. And if anyone was responsible for tracking the progress of the “independent group” that Harreld pulled together, that would also be Harreld. Speaking of which, how thrilled are the members of that “independent group” to be thrown under the bus in a Daily Iowan interview? Is that their impression of what went wrong as well? Or did Harreld chance the rules in the middle of the game, and in so doing buy himself another six months or even a year so he could clean up Iowa’s employment practices before the retained consultant ripped him a new orifice?
But it gets better. In his response Harreld then goes on to characterize the review as a good thing, and no different than other reviews or audits on campus. Which, it turns out, is also how he framed the federal investigation into Title IX violations at the UI Athletics Department, during his first DI interview in April of 2016, after six months on the job:
Two years later and it’s the same story. Nothing to see here. Everything is fine.
The ninth question from the Daily Iowan concerned the ongoing 2020 Task Force:
Again, note Harreld’s immediate response:
As noted in multiple prior posts, the idea that former provost Butler initiated the 2020 Task Force on his own, after he had already applied to become president at Embry-Riddle, is absurd. The entire point of then appointing Curry as an interim provost, instead of immediately launching a search to replace Butler, was so Harreld could manipulate the 2020 Task Force through her, engineering the ‘findings’ he needs to pervert UI to its core. At the drop of a hat Harreld could stall the task force until after a new CLAS dean and permanent provost were hired, but he refuses to do so precisely because he has orchestrated this opportunity for abuse.
Still, because Harreld has now made it clear on multiple occasions that the 2020 Task Force is the sole responsibility of Sue Curry, and we now also know that she will be retiring when a new provost is hired, there is nothing to prevent her from doing the right thing and stalling the ongoing review herself until after a new provost and CLAS dean join the university. The strategic plan, which Harreld prioritizes over everything, can wait while the two most important academic leadership positions on campus — by far — are filled. Curry can and should announce that the Phase II report from the 2020 Task Force will signal a pause until those two key stakeholders are on the payroll, at which point any final conclusions can be reached by consensus through a feedback process with the entire university.
The tenth and final question in the DI interview concerned first generation students — meaning those who are the first in their families to attend college — as well as a First Generation Summit that will be held on April 7th. For the most part Harreld’s response was equal parts supportive and self-congratulatory, except for this bit of bafflement:
If your parents went to college, then you’re not a first-gen student, but okay. Overall, Harreld stressed that first-generation students face unique obstacles and that helping them is important, and it is. In fact, Harreld goes on for six paragraphs on the subject, coming at it from various points of view, and concludes by again saying that the issue is very important, which it is. (For an excellent first-person perspective, see this article by the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne, who is a first-gen student herself.)
Tempting as it may be, however, to see Harreld’s six-paragraph disquisition as evidence that he is not a thoroughly contemptible human being, that’s only because Harreld once again omits critical information. In order to understand how Harreld really feels about first-generation students, you have to contrast his supportive discourse with his five-year tuition proposal, which will negatively impact first-gen students as much or more than any other population on campus. Precisely because most first-generation students come from homes of lesser means, Harreld’s punishing hikes will inevitably put more pressure on first-gen students, which is in turn why Harreld does not mention his tuition hikes while talking about the struggles that first-gen students face — because that would reveal him to be the thoroughly contemptible person that he is. But it’s worse than that.
Having spent decades in the private sector, not only reading balance sheets but gaming and framing numbers to his advantage, Harreld knows that his five-year tuition proposal will force some students — including particularly first-generation students — to take on ten thousand dollars or more in additional debt. Harreld also knows that because of his hikes, some students — including particularly first-generation students — will no longer be able to attend or even enroll at UI. In fact, Harreld is so clearly aware of this inevitability, that in his response to the Daily Iowan he actually laid the administrative groundwork for accepting and defending the inevitable negative effects of his hikes on first-generation students.
Having committed to 20 percent as a floor, but having already reached 23%, Harreld can kill off 3% of the current first-gen students at Iowa and still meet the arbitrary metric he set for himself. Sure, some lives will be ruined in the process, if not generations of lives in a few families, but that’s okay because Harreld will finally be able to fund the commercial research and for-profit startups that the regents hired him to establish. That he will have acquired those funds by stripping the bank accounts of students and their families, or forcing students and their families to accumulate massive amounts of additional debt, is too bad for them, but that clearly is what the Iowa Board of Regents hired Harreld to do. (We know that to a certainty because if the board cared about campus sexual assault or about first-gen students, or even about education, they would have hired one of the three eminently qualified finalists to lead on those issues from day one — or perhaps even former provost P. Barry Butler. Instead, they went dumpster diving for a remaindered business executive who needed — and clearly still needs — coaching, mentoring and teaching just to do the job he was hired to do.)
As to what the people of Iowa have gotten for their $2M over the past two and a half year, the interview speaks for itself. That is who J. Bruce Harreld was when he was hired, that is who he is now, and that’s not going to change in the future. The best that can be said about his state-funded apprenticeship is that while he is still incapable of being a university president, he has gotten better at faking it.
As to the idea that Harreld’s business genius compensates for this incapacity, let us also take a moment to appreciate that the only bold plan Harreld has put forward over the past two and a half years involves rocking the student body — UI’s captive consumers — with a 41% tuition hike over five years, on top of a 12% increase during his first two years, which will increase to 16% by the end of this term. Even academic lifers know that the simplest way to raise millions in new revenue is to jack up tuition, meaning once again the regents should have hired Butler or one of the qualified finalists. Instead, Harreld was imposed on UI to follow the entrepreneurial template established by Mike Crow at Arizona State University, and to that end, Harreld is now biding his time until the ginned-up Phase II report from the 2020 Task Force is completed — at which point he can get on with “build[ing] new businesses“.
That the leadership of CLAS has effectively been decapitated, and the provost’s office co-opted by the appointment of Curry, merely facilitates that end. Despite knowing almost a year ago that the CLAS dean would be retiring this summer, and knowing that a new provost needed to be hired, Sue Curry delayed both searches until recently. Although the search for a CLAS dean finally got underway at the beginning of February, and the provost search was launched at the beginning of March, it is unlikely that either position will be filled until the end of the coming fall term at the earliest.
That is, of course, more than enough time to allow Harreld to do a massive amount of damage to the UI campus. As to when he will start swinging the wrecking ball against the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the final Faculty Senate meeting for this academic year is scheduled for late April, after which there will be four long months until the beginning of the fall term. Expect the final draft of the Phase II report to be released as close to the end of April as possible, at which point Harreld will begin dictating changes while the campus sleeps through the summer. (In all likelihood, Harreld will have seen a draft of that document in advance of its final release, if he hasn’t already. In fact, he may even contribute desired elements to the Phase II report himself, either directly or by proxy, to guarantee the results.)
People are fleeing. I’ve never seen so many people jumping at once, which is really interesting, because it’s not like other universities are in such great shape. We’ve got more upper admin interviewing around and leaving. Faculty are retiring and taking off. I’ve stopped keeping track of failed faculty searches I hear about across colleges. Apparently we haven’t been able to find a replacement for the HR director, either. I’m finding it really difficult to see how Harreld comes out looking like a halfway-reasonable custodian of this place. It’s not IBM, you don’t get prizes for “leaning” the workforce until it’s half strangers at the meetings and you’ve got major jobs left undone because…just because.
I was looking at a memo from several years ago and realized that only one of the people named on it was still here. Everyone else had moved or retired. You used to see that with VAPs and assistant profs, people who just didn’t make it, and you’d see administrators trundling on up the ranks and leaving vacancies, which were filled. But enough people are leaving fast enough now that I think we’re in danger of not having enough institutional memory left — not enough people who remember how everything in the departments runs and why.
At some point not too long from now we’re going to have to start telling students that things we advertised, when they were picking schools, aren’t really available because we don’t have staff or faculty to run and teach those things anymore.
I see they were putting granite countertops in at Tippie lately, though. There’s that. They could go look at the countertops.
In January on the Twitter I noted that we were coming up on the release of this year’s Faculty Resignations Report from the Iowa Board of Regents. When the agenda for the February meetings was posted, however, that report was not included, so perhaps it has been pushed out to April. In any event, when (if) the report is released this year, it will be interested to see if the hemorrhaging continues at the College of Medicine, as it has over the past two years, and whether other colleges are also seeing an exodus.
I haven’t seen any news about the UI HR director leaving — meaning Cheryl Reardon, who committeed herself into a new job in 2016, following another fake review process instigated by Harreld. (Reardon’s title is now Chief Human Resources Officer. Maybe there’s another ‘director’?)
What frustrates me no end about the self-inflicted budget woes in Iowa, and particularly the lack of increased state funding for the regent universities, is that the state was perfectly positioned to poach good faculty from Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri, which are all having worse problems at their state schools. If you’re willing to live in those states you’d be willing to live in Iowa, yet at the exact moment when faculty at those schools are looking for a new home, not only does the state of Iowa do everything possible to cripple itself as a desirable option, but the board hires Harreld and gets UI put on sanction by the AAUP.
(The strategic incompetence of the Board of Regents cannot be overstated. It has done generational damage in the past six years.)
As for Tippie, is there a more high-maintenance college on campus — figuratively and literally? From last year at about this time
:
I’m sure the parents will be thrilled with the granite….
The great thing about the granite is that right across the walkway is Trowbridge Hall, neglected home to…geology.
Reardon’s no doubt bound for some chancellorship somewhere after doing that voodoo here for a while. No, the person trying to leave is Nancy Fick, who’s been in the job forever and a day and knows an awful lot. It should be a plum HR job, too. So something’s going wrong there.
The Pentacrest Museums director is also leaving, and I hear there are no plans to fill her job. We’re off on the hunt for a VP of Research and Economic Development soon, and…we’ll see. Another Research VP looks to be in the running for a job at UN Lincoln. We have interims stacked on interims all over.
I mean like I said, some flux is always normal, but this is ridiculous. And my guess is that a fair number of the parents are sharp enough to look at granite and smell baloney, however excited the kids might be.
The distressing thing to me is the number of people who, when it comes down to it, can’t bear the idea that things really are falling apart, so they’re proceeding as though things are fine. That the usual opportunities exist. That support will exist for this or that. And then when it turns out the person who flips that switch doesn’t exist anymore, it turns into a Soviet-era play with blinking and sighing and a suggestion of tea, and then a sort of erasing from the mind that things aren’t working so that the next ludicrous conversation can happen. Then every so often there’s an outburst, a monologue of revolutionary sense, which is received with pindrop silence or a derailment, and the next memo comes through.
It turns out to be really very important who you let drive. Fancy that.
You have probably heard, perhaps endlessly, that state governments across the country are cutting back on funding for public colleges and universities. What you have probably not heard is that in response to legislative funding cuts, the governing boards of those same state schools turn around and raise tuition not simply to compensate for any cuts, but to profit as a result of any decrease in funding. If $10M is cut by the state, the schools and their governing boards then increase tuition revenue by $20M, $30M or $50M, laughing all the way to the bank.
This is the great untold con-game in American higher education, and it is pervasive. Making it that much harder to detect is the fact that the participants don’t have to conspire because all of their actions are driven by self-interest. Elected officials are always looking to free up money for other things, and offloading the cost of higher education onto students does just that. Likewise, state schools and their governing boards could not care less where their funding comes from, they just want as much money as they can get. Combine those two motives, and the runaway cost of higher education in the United States is literally inevitable.
As regular readers know, we saw this symbiotic predation play out at the end of the 2015-2016 academic year in Iowa, when the state fell $1.7M short in funding the minimum increase that the Board of Regents insisted it needed to avoid any tuition hikes. That the governor and Republican-controlled legislature could not find $1.7M in a budget of more than $7B+ is preposterous on its face, making it likely that the shortfall was itself engineered to assist the board in raising rates. In any event, in June of 2016 the regents went berserk, rocking students and their families with $65.4M in tuition hikes for the upcoming academic year.
That the regents seized $65.4M from the bank accounts of private citizens because of a $1.7M shortfall that may have been orchestrated for that very purpose was beyond corrupt. That the board did so in a year in which legislative funding actually increased by $6.7M not only betrays the brazen nature of that abuse, but how conditioned governing boards are to expect that they can get away with such abuse. Because the $6.7M increase was less than the $20M the board originally requested, and less than the $8M that the board declared to be the minimum it could withstand — without any evidence to back up that assertion — the regents did not simply increase tuition to make up either difference, they used that pretext to generate between $45.4M and $57.4M in pure profit for the regents enterprise.
In the intervening two years, as you have probably also heard, the unsustainable fiscal policies of the Republican Governor and Republican-led legislature — first under Terry ‘Butcher’ Branstad, now under ‘Casino’ Kim Reynolds — did lead to actual budget cuts for the state universities, which the schools again over-compensated for by increasing tuition on two other occasions. Having given away too much of the state budget to corporate tax breaks, funds that had already been appropriated to the state schools were taken back in the middle of the previous budget cycle (FY17), and more funds are being taken back in the current budget cycle (FY18), while appropriations are also expected to be cut for the second straight year in the upcoming budget (FY19).
And yet — miracle of miracles — even before the board can enact the next round of tuition hikes, which are already on the agenda for this coming June, the regents are net-ahead compared to where they were in 2015-2016, despite all of the subsequent cuts. At the University of Iowa specifically, taking all cuts over the past two years into account — including what will probably be a $6M hit from an $11M clawback that the legislature passed last week — the school will still be net-ahead roughly $24M precisely because it raised tuition more than necessary to compensate for those recent cuts. When the board does increase base tuition at all three state schools by 3% or 4% this coming June, at minimum the University of Iowa will easily be another $10M ahead of where it is now.
As you can see, no matter what happens at the state level, and no matter what happens at the Board of Regents, the only people who ever pay a price are students and their families. In fact, it is clearly to the board’s advantage to have the state cut funding, because each decrease in appropriations gives the regents another opportunity to profit by hiking tuition out of scale to any cuts. In terms of facing accountability for such abuses, because the nine regents are appointed they serve with electoral impunity, leaving voters no recourse. In fact, they can’t even be accused of taxation without representation because tuition hikes are not taxes — they are a fee for a governmental service, and the Board of Regents has the sole authority to set that fee.
Six months ago or so it became clear that the revenue shortfall which cratered the Iowa budget in FY17 would bleed over into FY18. As the numbers slowly came into focus at the beginning of this calendar year, first the governor, then the Republican-led Senate and House, put forward proposals to plug an estimated $36M hole in the current budget. While a lot of numbers were thrown around, and the governor and both houses positioned themselves for political advantage in the negotiations that followed, I thought the final hit to the Board of Regents would be about $10M. Then something changed.
From the Gazette’s Rod Boshart, on 03/09/18:
As a result of the federal tax plan that was signed into law earlier this year, the state of Iowa ‘found’ another $22M or so in new revenue, which was roughly two thirds of the estimated FY18 shortfall. Instead of using that money to reduce their planned cuts, however, the governor, Senate and House insisted that the found money was both suspect in itself and important to hold in reserve, in case this year’s budget proved to be as mindlessly incompetent as the plan they all agreed on last year.
Continuing from Boshart’s report:
With the Iowa Board of Regents on the verge of returning $10M or so due to the managerial incompetence of the very people who commanded that clawback, those same geniuses received a $22M reprieve, which they then refused to use to defray the impending cuts to the Board of Regents. The money was there, and everyone knew it was there, but Casino Kim and the Republican legislative leadership were still determined to hit the state schools with mid-year cuts — and again, why wouldn’t they? The board would simply make up the difference and then some from the tuition hikes that are already pending, if not by hiking rates even more.
Note also, however, that the shortfall for the remainder of FY18 is expected to give way to significantly brighter fiscal prospects in FY19, which begins a mere three months from now, on July 1st:
Take a look around the country and you will be hard-pressed to find any other state projecting 6.4% growth for 2019, yet that is exactly what Casino Kim’s revenue estimators are predicting. Sure, those are the same people who triggered the FY17 budget collapse by being wildly off in their projections for that year, but not only is that the only official number we have to go on, we can safely assume that Reynolds and the Republican leadership have high confidence in that projection. Whatever fiscal needle needs to be threaded to close out the last three months of FY18, the governor and legislative leaders clearly expect there to be sunny skies ahead, if not rainbows and unicorns. All of which makes their insistence on bleeding the Board of Regents that much more perplexing.
From Joyce Russell at Iowa Public Radio, on 03/20/18:
The Iowa senate is the more radicalized of the Republican-led legislative chambers, and is thus not to be trusted, but Grassley’s understated reply is itself infused with malice toward the state schools, and by extension to the students and families who pay tuition. To see why, imagine that you have a rapidly progressing infection in your leg. The infection can be treated with medication, but Grassley informs you that your leg will have to be amputated because there is not enough medication on hand. At the last minute a truckload of medicine arrives, but Grassley still says you can’t have what you need because that shipment is being held in reserve. Now imagine that you also learn that additional shipments of medicine are already on their way, guaranteeing a surplus for generations to come, yet Grassley still won’t approve the dispensing of the medication you need. As your leg was being sawed off you might be more than a little miffed that Pat Grassley was butchering you unnecessarily.
The current Iowa budget is about $36M short. Recently, the state found another $22M in revenue for this year. Instead of using that money to offset cuts for FY18, however, Grassley and his anti-education peers in the House and Senate are determined to sit on those funds, which inevitably means that students and their families will pay more to attend the regent universities. Making it even worse for Grassley, however, is that while many of his Republican peers are truly unhinged, Grassley knows better. And I know he knows better, because where I initially got the previously mentioned FY16 boondoggle wrong, he sussed it out perfectly:
Grassley is clearly not an idiot, yet here he is, less than two years later, claiming that his own unnecessary cuts must still be enforced. Why?
Again, even though the Republican Party has run the state of Iowa into a fiscal ditch two years in a row, and their tax giveaways to corporations are clearly unsustainable, to a crony they are convinced that the state is about to turn the corner and enter an age of unparalleled prosperity. In fact, Casino Kim and the Republican congressional leaders are so sure of the coming upturn that they already putting forward aggressive plans to slash the state’s tax revenues by more than a billion dollars, even though the entire Iowa budget is only about $7B.
Starting in FY19, which begins in all of three months, revenues are expected to explode, meaning there should be no concern that the state needs to end FY18 with $30M+ in cash on hand. And that’s particularly true given that the governor has plenty of discretionary borrowing power even if she did cut things a hair too close in closing out the current cycle. If Reynolds, Grassley and their legislative comrades spent this year’s budget down to the last projected nickel, and ended up being off by $10M the wrong way, there would still be no actual penalty to the state — and that’s before all that new revenue starts rolling in during FY19.
So again we have to ask — why is Grassley insisting on cutting the budgets at two of the state universities? And of course the answer is that by forcing cuts that do not need to be made, Grassley can count on the Board of Regents to take even more money from students and families to make up the difference, which in turn means Grassley’s anti-university caucus will have that much more money to dole out to political and business cronies. As for the regents, while they will certainly use Grassley’s punitive, mean-spirited, vindictive cuts as fodder for endless posturing, in reality the board will also be thrilled because it can once again savage students and their families for even more revenue.
In fact, here is the head of the regents office, Mark Braun, playing his part to the hilt — from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, also on 03/21/18:
One thing you can count on from the Iowa Board of Regents is that they will always use the students as shields when it helps them push their agenda. And right now the board’s agenda is raising tuition by any and every means necessary, primarily to fund for-profit research at Iowa and Iowa State. (Not surprisingly, along with the $11M in cuts that were just approved, the regents are prohibited from taking any of that money from the University of Northern Iowa, which is not a research university.)
Even as the board pledges to protect the students, however, it has already signaled that it will raise base tuition 3-4% for next year, meaning the only unresolved question is how much to soak the students. As a result of the $11M in 2018 clawbacks, not only is it likely that the board will approve the high end of that range — if not higher still — but between differential hikes and fee increases, the board can easily raise two or three or five times what it is losing from those cuts. And yet, nowhere will the total amount of new revenue be reported side-by-side with the state cuts, because that would clearly show that the regents were using the state funding cuts to poach money from students and families.
On top of all that, the board is also still looking at long-term, multi-year hikes following the 2018-2019 academic year, and it has still not taken the five-year, 41% hikes that were proposed by both UI and ISU off the table. Note also that the board takes its own operating budget from the state’s appropriations to the universities, to the parasitic detriment of those institutions. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 07/26/16:
Ironically, one of the costs that the board needed extra money for in 2015 was the bloated salary of the newly appointed Chief Operating Officer, Mark Braun. After a long career as a regent spy and fixer at the University of Iowa, Braun was brought on at the board proper — in the middle of the 2015 search that led to J. Bruce Harreld’s illegitimate appointment — as a shadow Executive Director. For the next two years Braun was paid even more than the sitting XD/CEO, and as such also evaded the state law which caps the salary of the board’s putative leader.
Fortunately, after paying two redundant six-figure salaries for two years, the lame-duck Executive Director finally resigned. At that point the board pretended to search for a replacement before giving Braun the job full-time, along with a $185K “recruitment incentive” to compensate him for his state-mandated cut in pay.
Never ones to miss a trick, the board then claimed that as a cost savings. From Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson, on 10/19/17:
Today, despite finger pointing and posturing in the press, we once again see that everyone is actually in agreement. From the governor to the state legislature to the Board of Regents, students are to exploited for monetary gain, and anyone who fails to take advantage is a bureaucratic sap. Best of all, however, as previously noted, none of this symbiotic abuse involves raising taxes, meaning most voters won’t care because most voters aren’t trying to fund college for themselves or their kids.
Speaking of taxes, where you might think the projected revenue windfall for FY19 would lead Casino Kim and her legislative co-conspirators to quickly make the regents whole, after subjecting the board to $11M in mid-year cuts, that’s not the case. In fact, back in early January, well before the final FY18 cuts were agreed upon, and before she revealed her radical tax-cut plan, not only did Reynolds lay out her proposed budget for FY19, but in that budget she rejected the board’s $12M request and made her own proposed regent cuts permanent. (With FY18 settled, the governor and state legislature will hammer out the final FY19 budget over the coming weeks.)
Still, in her initial FY19 budget she did do Mark Braun a solid by including a $7.25M blank checkfor the regents [p. 83]. Meaning, effectively, that with $11M coming back from Iowa and Iowa State in FY18, Reynolds intends to redirect $7.25M of that money to Braun for next year. (To be fair, the board’s initial request for FY19 included $3.2M for “debt service“, so assuming Braun doesn’t blow that off, only $4M of the $7.25M will be slush-funding around the board office.)
As for Pat Grassley, shortly after the governor pitched her FY19 budget in early January, he apparently grew tired of being questioned about the Board of Regents. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 01/15/18:
To be painfully fair to Grassley, I’m sure it gets tiresome hearing the Board of Regents whine when they are being given hundreds of millions of dollars that could go to equally worthy causes, or even into the pockets of wealthy political backers who will return the favor and then some. That said, the regents are a part of state government, and the state universities do not simply provide a public good, but also a tangible economic return on that investment. If the state wants to get out of the higher-ed business it can do so, but if not, it needs to stop foisting costs onto students and families, and instead significantly step up the lagging, flagging, faltering funding it is currently providing.
As to Grassley’s smart-mouth crack about being “very generous” to the regents, that pissy reply not only follows decreased appropriations the prior two years, but actual mid-year returns of appropriated funds, due in large part to his party’s fiscal mismanagement. In truth, Grassley simply does not want to be held accountable for the fact that the legislature has been cutting funding to the state universities, and everyone knows it. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller one week earlier, as the new legislative session was being gavelled in, on 01/09/19:
Note the bitter specificity of Grassley’s complaint. It’s not just that “we’re the ones to blame”, but that the legislature is “solely blamed for increases in tuition….” And Grassley is right: the Board of Regents routinely escapes blame, even as they are a big part of the tuition problem. As endlessly noted in these pages, and in this post, the regents not only increase tuition out of scale to any legislative cuts, but the board will happily hike rates on a pretext even in a year in which state funding increases.
In trying to shift some of the blame to the regents, however, Grassley not only used a wonky argument which completely missed those obvious points, but that argument was easily refuted by the board:
If Grassley wanted to finger the board for its actual complicity in the cost of a degree at the state universities, all he would have to do is put a chart together showing cuts in state funding compared to increases in tuition by year, because that would clearly show that the regents were padding their own revenues at the expense of students and families. Best of all, in looking at such a chart no one could possibly confuse who was responsible because the regents are the only body with the authority to set tuition. If tuition is going up more than funding is coming down, that is entirely, inescapably, the fault of the grubby Iowa Board of Regents.
So why doesn’t Grassley do that? Because the last thing Pat Grassley wants is to have to increase funding for the state schools. Grassley isn’t outraged about the toll that tuition hikes take on students and their families — about either the total cost of attendance, or the crippling effect of long-term student debt — he’s just pissed that he’s taking all of the blame while the regents get off scot-free. It’s not the price that students pay for a college degree that offends him, it’s the fact that he is paying a political price, which he feels is unfair to him personally.
Underscoring Grassley’s pettiness, we have this from Des Moines Register columnist Kathie Obradovich, this past Thursday, on 03/22/18:
Despite the fact that the state found more money for the current budget year, not only have Reynolds, Grassley and their anti-education ilk refused to reduce the cuts to the Iowa Board of Regents, but Grassley and the jackals in the House actually increased the damage out of a deranged sense of advocacy for local business owners. And yet, once again Grassley is actually right on the merits, as even Obradovich allows:
As noted in a series of recent posts about Arizona State’s go-go entrepreneurial president, Michael Crow, the issue of state schools poaching revenue from private businesses is a big deal, which is precisely why there are laws on the books in many states — including Iowa — to prevent exactly that. Even if university bookstores were charging sales tax it could be argued that the schools should not be selling merchandise on campus that can be bought off-campus, but the tax dodge is a complete scam and should be stopped. (More on all that here, in the excellent original report from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller.)
Having identified legitimate abuse on the part of the regent universities, what does Grassley do? Does he point out that there are laws on the books that should be enforced? Does he propose new legislation to curtail the practice? No. Once again Grassley uses that issue to justify cutting the Board of Regents budget even more, yet we already know what the inevitable result of any additional state cuts will be.
No matter how much Grassley cuts from the board, he cannot actually hurt the regents as a governing body, and he knows that. What he is doing is symbolic — and stupidly so — because the real-world consequence of his actions is that prices will go up for students and families. And that point is not lost on Obradovich:
As noted in the posts about Crow at ASU — who was almost certainly the motivation for fraudulently installing former business executive J. Bruce Harreld at the University of Iowa — the idea of making universities more self-sufficient inherently leads to competition with private industry. Unfortunately, the rubes in the Iowa statehouse who instigated this conflict by cutting funding seem to have an Ayn Rand fantasy about the entrepreneurial independence that will follow. In reality, few if any universities will launch the next Google (a shock, I know), meaning the great majority of schools will fight for dollars in more accessible markets.
From a recent post on Crow, ASU and competition with private industry:
As noted later in that same post, one of the ways Crow generates profits is by running a real estate business out of a back room at Arizona State, and specifically by using and abusing the school’s tax-exempt status to profit at the expense of the state. It’s exactly like Grassley’s complaint, only on steroids, yet what do these idiot legislators expect? Do they really think they can cut state schools to the bone, and demand that schools become more self-reliant, and not inevitably compel those massive economic engines to exploit their tax advantage or consume local businesses?
The good news, if we can call it that, is that this kind of political and bureaucratic idiocy is not limited to Iowa. The bad news it that in terms of administering higher education in the state, the idiocy in Iowa is pervasive. (While I do believe there are a few decent regents on the board, they aren’t in leadership positions. There is also at least one university president who is qualified for the job he holds, but on the whole the level of mindless incompetence in critical positions is dispiriting.)
As far as I can tell, the last person who really understood the issues at hand was former board president David Miles. So of course Miles was bulldozed out of his leadership position by Butcher Branstad, who was obligated to grease a path to the presidency for his biggest campaign donor, Bruce Rastetter. In fact, if you wanted to point to the moment when the fate of higher-ed in Iowa was sealed for the next decade, that would be it. (Although Rastetter is no longer on the board, his toxicity lives on in the presidency of J. Bruce Harreld at the University of Iowa, and in the presidency of Mike Richards at the Board of Regents.)
Speaking of Harreld, while it was inevitable that he would seize on last week’s clawbacks to push for more tuition hikes, the speed with which he pounced was impressive. Less than twenty-four hours after the final cuts were announced — and well before they were apportioned between UI and ISU — Harreld not only pushed out a press release to exploit the cuts to his advantage, but he managed to rope every administrative head on campus into supporting his agenda:
Where were all of these heroes before this year’s funding cuts were announced — let alone any of the funding cuts over the past two years? And while we’re on the subject, why are all of these people suddenly signing their names to a letter penned by their illegitimate boss, who controls their fates? Is that a sign of solidarity, or coercion?
As for increasing tuition, as previously noted there is already a 3-4% hike pending, so what exactly is Harreld asking for now that the clawbacks have been announced? And of course the answer would be more, because when it comes to the bank accounts of students and their families, Harreld can never get enough of other people’s money. Notably, however, Harreld did not mention that he has proposed, and is still pushing, a 41% tuition hike over five years, which is entirely elective. And of course he also did not mention that even after these latest cuts, UI will still be net-ahead because of prior hikes, but that’s Harreld for you. If there is a lie of omission he can profit from, he will not tell you what you need to know.
The only question now is whether the Board of Regents will hold the line on its promised 3-4% hikes, or use the $11M in mid-year clawbacks to raise rates even more. While that decision has probably already been made, before committing the regents will wait to see what Casino Kim’s revised FY19 budget looks like. What is clear from the way the governor and legislature are acting, is that they do not care how much the board hikes tuition, even as they will certainly exploit any increases for their own political advantage. In fact, the more the regents increase tuition, the easier it will be to finally shift some of the blame to the board.
As the clock ticks down on the current legislative session in Iowa, and on the spring semester and academic year at the University of Iowa, we have what looks to be a two-week lull before the politicians and administrators who control higher-ed in the state are effectively compelled to act. In the coming weeks the governor and state legislature will finalize the budget for FY19, which kicks off all of three months from now, on July 1st, and that in turn should lead the Iowa Board of Regents to finally make a tuition declaration for the 2019 academic year. Then again, the governor and legislature could stall their decision making, forcing the board to commit to next year’s tuition hikes first. (Once the pols know how much the regents are going to savage students and their families, that will allow them to cut the regents that much closer to the appropriations bone.)
In that context, and in light of recent developments — or lack thereof — I thought we would use this lull to follow up on a number of ongoing concerns. There are also a lot of long-term issues hanging in the balance right now, including whether or not the regents will give fraudulently appointed UI president J. Bruce Harreld the five-year, 41% tuition increase he has been arguing for since last summer. Not only has Harreld not taken that proposal off the table, the Board of Regents has consistently omitted any commentary on that subject, which is a ‘tell’ in itself. Still, it is going to take some pretty big crony cojones (of the gender neutral variety) to pull the trigger on an wealth-redistribution scam that brazen.
The University of Iowa Children’s Hospital
We last checked in on the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) in the middle of February, with a quick update about the possibility that UIHC might be privatized or partner with a commercial healthcare provider. As to why the university’s market-dominant, cutting-edge teaching hospital would be exploring a partnership with a private concern, no explanation has been forthcoming. Given that the regents allow UIHC to raise prices 6% on an annual basis, and the state’s public-sector unions were effectively euthanized during last year’s legislative session, the university’s hospitals and clinics should be doing well, but apparently that’s not the case.
Prior to that update, we discussed the new children’s hospital in a post in October of 2017. In that post we noted that Harreld’s long-time mentor, Jerre Stead — an alum and megadonor at the University of Iowa — was in fact the individual who instigated Harreld’s illegitimate hire at UI. And of course shortly after Harreld took office, he and Stead’s two co-conspirators — then-regents president Bruce Rastetter, and then-VP for Medical Affairs and self-appointed dean of the College of Medicine, Jean Robillard — all signed off on giving Stead the naming rights to the children’s hospital, without first conducting a study to determine the market value of those rights. (Conservatively, at the time those rights were probably worth tens of millions of dollars, but that valuation has exploded over the past year.)
Prior to that post, in February of 2017 we took a detailed look at the delays and cost-overruns which besieged the new children’s hospital. That included the startling disclosure that someone at UI approved building and tearing out fake construction to make the building look nice during an open house in November of 2016. Also in February of 2017 we noted that after shooting his mouth off about how to properly schedule long-term projects, business genius J. Bruce Harreld proved to be spectacularly incompetent in that regard.
In December of 2015, shortly after Harreld took office that November, we discussed the panic flight that Robillard took that preceding August, to see Stead in Colorado. Ostensibly involving a relatively small $5M donation, that trip occurred just a couple weeks before the latest construction numbers for the new children’s hospital were announced at a whopping $360M — or $70M (26%) over budget. In an earlier post, only two weeks after Harreld took office, we also discussed the fact that although Robillard swore Harreld was hired to help with a number of knotty issues at UIHC, as soon as Harreld took office he disavowed any involvement with UIHC or any other facet of Robillard’s medical-industrial complex on the west side of campus.
With all that as context, then, consider the following story from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, this past Friday, on 03/30/18:
As Miller noted in her report, of that total $21.5M award, $4.6M applies to Hancher, meaning the other $16.9M will be added to the $360M budget for the children’s hospital. That brings the total for the project to $376M, or $86M (30%) over the original budget, but even that new number is suspect. Importantly, that $360M number is now fully two and a half years old, and apart from Miller’s report on Friday there have been no updates to the total budget for the children’s hospital. Given that the final cost is still clearly in dispute with individual contractors, and that construction continued until February of 2017, if not well past that date, relying on a cost projection from September 1st of 2015 hardly seems prudent.
Even a year ago, as the project was finally winding down and pediatric units were belatedly opened to the first patients, it was entirely possible that the total project budget had pushed past $400M. This new arbitration award not only increases that likelihood, but to those direct construction costs we can also add the cost of ongoing litigation for both the school and regents. While Miller’s report makes clear that the University of Iowa does intend to fight these new awards, what really comes through in her reporting is the degree to which UI brought these problems on itself.
As for this bit of administrative cowardice, it’s as nauseating now as it was back when the university tried to use the kids to avoid arbitration:
As noted above, one of the changes that took place while UI was purportedly desperate to care for all of those sick children involved installing and then ripping out fake construction to make the hospital look nice during a two-day open house in early November of 2016. Although it was never reported exactly who approved the time and expense that led to delaying healthcare services for all of the sick kids who desperately needed care at UI’s new children’s hospital, if I was the attorney for Modern Piping or any other contractor that had been stiffed by the cretins who were running that project, I would certainly try to make that determination during discovery, if not during actual trial.
As to who was and is ultimately responsible for this unending train wreck, in typical Iowa fashion — meaning both at the state level and at the university — no high-level administrators have ever been held responsible for the obscene cost overruns and months-long delays. Although Harreld was hired less than forty-eight hours after the $360M budget number was released — meaning the project had been underway for years when he was appointed — he was the president of the school for sixteen months until the hospital opened in February of 2017. Not only could he and should he have brought his vast private-sector experience to bear on the project, he clearly showed no reticence to do so in other instances. For example, only a few months after taking office, in early 2016, Harreld had no problem terminating a public-private partnership for the new UI Museum of Art, because he though that was a bad deal for the school. And yet, with regard to UIHC he seems to have either shrunk from that responsibility, or to be hiding from it now.
Continuing from Miller’s report, note also that the $21.5M arbitration award, if upheld, concerns only Modern Piping.
Add even another $4M to the cost of construction from that case and that gets us to an even $380M that we know of, meaning $400M looks certain. All of which may not only explain why Robillard freaked out in August of 2015 and went running to Jerre Stead for more cash, but why UIHC has floated the idea of partnering with a private company. The big-idea leadership at UI, and the Board of Regents, may simply have dug a financial hole they cannot fill on their own.
Finally, regarding that dispiriting possibility, note the cautionary tale in the recent hire of J. Brooks Jackson from the University of Minnesota, who took over as Vice President for Medical Affairs and Dean of the UI College of Medicine. After being forced to sell its own university-owned hospital decades ago, the once-prominent UM medical school fell into a long, slow decline. Although Minnesota and the owner of the hospital tried to join forces in 2016, that deal fell apart just as Jackson was hired to lead that college. Despite everyone hoping for the best, Jackson would leave for UI less than two years later, while the University of Minnesota’s medical school continues to fall behind. (More on Jackson’s hire at UI here and here.)
The FY18 Mid-Year Budget Cuts
On Wednesday of last week, Republican Governor ‘Casino’ Kim Reynolds signed off on the mid-year budget cuts that she and the Republican-led House and Senate had been negotiating for the past two months. From the Daily Iowan’s Kayli Reese, on 03/28/18:
There is no word yet on how that $10.9M will be split between the two schools. If the regents are true to form they will stick UI with the larger share — probably $6M, as against $4.9M for ISU — but in any event those mid-year clawbacks will have to be accounted for immediately. (The FY18 budget expires at the end of June, after which there is an extended settlement period to make sure everything balances out.)
In reality, however, the only real problem for either school is liquidity. Both institutions have multi-billion dollar budgets, both take in hundreds of millions in state appropriations each year, and both bring in three times as much or more in tuition revenue, particularly after having raised tuition three times in the past two years. With more hikes to come in April, and despite all the wailing and crying, neither school will actually be harmed by these cuts, though they will certainly be inconvenienced.
In all likelihood, the Board of Regents will simply use those cuts not only to increase the pending tuition hikes in April — which have so far been pegged between 3% and 4% of base tuition at all three state universities — but as noted in the previous post, there will almost certainly be differential tuition hikes and fee increases as well. Assuming a $6M hit at UI, we know that the athletic department gave $2M to academics for the current budget year, so that means UI only has to find for another $4M in the next three months to satisfy the legislature. Fortunately, we also know that Harreld keeps an $11M slush fund on hand for emergencies.
From the Iowa Now website, on 07/13/16:
So what is a “small amount”? $1M $3M? $5M? Better yet, how much cash is in that fund right now? (The reason that’s a better questions is because there doesn’t seem to be any requirement that the funds in that pool be disbursed in full each year, meaning it may constitute more than $11M.)
To underscore the relatively small amount of the FY18 clawbacks, note that Harreld’s ‘Strategic Initiative Fund’ could, in itself, almost cover the entire cost of the cuts at both Iowa and Iowa State. That’s not what you’re going to hear from Harreld and his administrative lackeys, however, who will scream to the high heavens about the generational disinvestment in higher education, then push for Harreld’s proposed 41% increase in tuition over five years.
In fact, in the context of the preceding item in this post, consider the rank absurdity of that position. Even if UI gets stuck with $8M of the $10.9M in funding cuts that were passed into law, that would be half of what UI now has to pay to one contractor for the children’s hospital. Where is the administrative outrage about the $16.9M that was pissed away by gross mismanagement? More to the point, even allowing for what we don’t know it would not be hard to go back through the botched and bungled construction process at the children’s hospital and save $50M. And yet the same incompetent administrators who flushed that $50M down a hole, who will never be held to account in any way, will now turn around and demand even more tuition revenue from students and families.
The FY19 Budget and Tax Plan
Speaking of fiscal mismanagement and collective incompetence, despite having engineered two successive years of budget shortfalls in Iowa, the Republican brain trust that dominates state politics is not only moving aggressively to lay out the state budget for FY19, but also to cut taxes on a massive scale. In their defense, however, that is all by design, and follows a similarly idiotic approach adopted in states like Wisconsin, Kansas and Oklahoma. In exchange for keeping a few more dollars in income taxes, Iowa will obligate its citizens to cough up thousands of dollars in income to pay private companies to deliver inferior versions of critical services that the Iowa state government will no longer provide.
As to how that relates to the Board of Regents and the state universities, unless the administrators at those institutions are truly imbeciles, they know that while Casino Kim and her legislative mob could easily make up for the state cuts that were just passed, they will instead continue to hack away at the regents budget — which, after all, is just another expensive government service they no longer want to fund. That will, in turn, compel the board to keep increasing the cost of tuition — which, as noted in the prior post, is what the board and state schools want anyway, because that money is unrestricted, and can be seized by fiat. In sum, the charade continues, but it is about to greatly accelerate.
On the budget front, although Reynolds originally proposed cuts to Iowa and Iowa State totaling a bit over $5M, the ideologically enraged House and Senate more than doubled her number. After additional revenue was found between Reynolds’ original budget proposal and the final bill from the state legislature, I thought Casino Kim might give students the schools a bit of relief using her line-item veto, but instead she signed off on the whole $10.9M cut. Then again, given that Reynolds is up for her first gubernatorial election his year — having had the job handed to her by her predecessor — she may have decided that she needed the support of her party apparatus more than the support of the Board of Regents.
Because the new budget cycle begins in three months, because the governor and legislature expect a $30M+ surplus at the end of FY18, and because revenues are expected to increase 6.4% in FY19, it would be easy for Reynolds to make the regents whole following that $10.9M giveback, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. Instead of righting past wrongs — meaning cleaning up the mess they made — the governor and legislature are determined to keep going, which brings us now to their tax plans.
In mid-February Casino Kim outlined her tax plan, which did not address corporate taxes or the myriad giveaways that have crippled Iowa’s revenues for a decade. Two weeks later the radicalized Senate release its own plan, which was considerably more aggressive and included even more relief for corporations. As for the House, it announced that it would use the governor’s plan as its own starting point.
At the beginning of March, on 03/03/18, Erin Murphy of the Sioux City Journal outlined the differences between the two competing plans:
As you can see, even if the legislature goes along with Reynolds’ more conservative plan — as opposed to the certifiably insane plan from the senate — state revenues will fall by at least $80M in the coming year, or $50M if there is indeed a $30M surplus at the end of FY18. Even under the best of circumstances, then, and ignoring what happened the past two years, there won’t be any extra revenue to make up for the clawbacks this year, let alone money to increase appropriations next year. Meaning the most likely outcome for the regents in FY19 is another year of zero increase in the standing appropriations for the state schools. (More likely, Casino Kim will budget an increase which will simply never materialize.)
As to why Reynolds and the legislature are in such a rush to pass tax cuts, while it is exceedingly unlikely that either chamber of the statehouse will flip to the Democrats this year, Reynolds is not a lock in November, despite — or perhaps because of — her inherited incumbency. If the governor’s mansion does go to the Democrats, the Republican legislature will be hamstrung, so now is clearly the time to act. Unfortunately, these are the same bright lights who cratered the Iowa budget for two years in a row, so the idea that they are now going to push through well-considered tax relief in a matter of a few weeks seems unlikely in the extreme.
2018-2019 Tuition and Beyond
Last summer the Iowa Board of Regents announced that it would convene a Tuition Task Force in August. The first ominous sign came when Casino Kim not only refused to attend, but even to allow anyone in her administration to speak on the subject. Following that debacle, which led to the main meeting being cancelled, the interim ISU president and illegitimate UI president both proposed 41% hikes over five years, as if they never talked about those plans with each other or the board. (Seriously.) Then, in the following months, the board had to keep putting off its tuition plans for the coming year, even after it declared that any hikes would not be part of the long-range plans.
Today, nine months later, the Tuition Task Force seems like one of those cartoons where a driver starts off in a shiny vehicle, suffers a string of mishaps, and at the end is left with nothing but a bent steering wheel. And yet, with two weeks to go until next year’s tuition is announced, the Board of Regents is still effectively in limbo. Although Casino Kim and the blackguards in the statehouse have committed to the funds they are taking back this year, they still haven’t finalized the FY19 budget, or their tax plan, meaning there may still be some nasty surprises for the regents.
Having put off next year’s tuition for over six months, in the hope that the appropriations picture would become clearer, the only certainty seems to be uncertainty. Even if the governor and legislature finalize a budget and agree on a tax plan in the next two weeks, their track record suggests that things will not turn out as projected. They may turn out better, of course, but given that this is an election year, and that any day of reckoning will not happen until after the voters go to the polls in November, the odds are that what we’re going to get from here on out are a lot of promises that turn out to be empty — or worse — down the road.
As for the multi-year tuition proposals put forward last summer, although the board has been silent on the subject, none of those plans have been withdrawn. In fact, the regents have been perfectly happy to let students assume that conversations about tuition for 2018-2019 have rendered those plans obsolete, but that is decidedly not the case. More to the point, setting tuition targets in advance not only seems pointless given the economic uncertainty in Iowa — as demonstrated to a horrifying degree over the past two fiscal cycles — but it also means Iowa will provide surrounding states with information that can be used to competitive advantage. Whether anyone at the board thinks in such terms or not, one thing that does seem certain is that no matter what the budget looks like for 2019 and beyond, the regents will approve hikes well in excess of any cuts or shortfalls, then blame the legislature for that abuse.
The 2020 Academic Organizational Task Force
While the clock ticks down on the Board of Regents regarding tuition policy, at the University of Iowa the administration seems to be doing its best to run out the clock on the 2020 Task Force, which is charged with reimagining the academic organizational structure of the entire campus. Purportedly launched by the former provost in January of 2017, the 2020 Task Force has already reached the tentative conclusion that the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences should be busted up and sold off for scrap. Because that initial Phase I conclusion did not go over very well, however — particularly with the faculty of that massive college, which is the heart and soul of UI — the Phase II committee has so far been considerably more circumspect.
In fact, the Phase II committee has been so sensitive to campus concerns that it has not updated the 2020 Task Force website since December 1st of last year. Likewise, the last time the 2020 Task Force was on the agenda for the UI Faculty Council was November 7, 2017, and the last time the task force was on the Faculty Senate agenda was December 5th.
From the minutes of that December 5th meeting:
Spring Break on the UI campus ended two weeks ago, and to-date there has been no update or report about the status of the Phase II committee.
Also from the December 5th meeting of the Faculty Senate:
Not only has there been no word that Harreld or interim provost Sue Curry have been presented with any ideas from the task force, there has been no “core set of ideas” made available to the campus. Likewise, there has been no timeline announced for gathering “extensive feedback” from the UI community, which is more than a little concerning given that there are only five weeks before finals, which commence May 7th. Combine the crush of business at the end of the year with the focus on finals, and there are only two or three weeks remaining during which members of the UI community might reasonably be expected to devote time to providing “extensive feedback”, even if they were otherwise predisposed to do so.
Alternatively, of course, if Harreld and Curry are trying to minimize feedback they could not be doing a better job. By allowing the 2020 Task Force to fall off the radar for four months, and by failing to keep the campus apprised of any progress, that silence will in itself decrease involvement whenever the Phase II committee presents its “core set of ideas”. Should the task force suddenly issue a report at the last minute — much as Harreld tried to jam the creation of the entire UI Strategic Plan through at the end of the spring semester in 2016 — no one would be surprised when feedback proved sparse. That engineered lack of response would then give Harreld and Curry the freedom to implement their own conclusions over the summer, without interference.
Following a protracted, months-long period of self-imposed silence, a wealth of new information spilled forth from the Iowa Board of Regents last week, for two reasons. First, the governor and state legislature finally signed off on funding cuts for the current fiscal year (FY18), including a combined $10.9M in deappropriations for the University of Iowa and Iowa State. Second, the next regularly scheduled, two-day meeting of the board takes place this week, on Wednesday the 11th and Thursday the 12th, and because a detailed agenda is published in advance that makes it hard to keep upcoming issues under wraps.
For example, although it has not been a closely held secret, many people will be surprised to learn that there will be a vote on a new president and president pro tem this week, given that the current president and president pro tem were elected just last year. As it turns out, however, the current holders of those offices — Mike Richards and Patty Cownie, respectively — were elected to fill the final year of two-year terms for regents who were not reappointed to the board. This time, full two-year terms for both office will be in play. (I expect Richards to return as president, but will not be surprised if former long-time legislator Nancy Boettger is elected president pro tem.)
That there has been no public debate about the upcoming elections, however, including who should hold those important offices, is a reminder that the Board of Regents makes most of its decisions in secret, in avoidance of public scrutiny. In fact, when it suits their corrupt, crony interest, the regents will actually withhold information until the last possible second precisely to avoid uncomfortable questions. Such was the case, for example, when the board granted the naming rights for the new UI Children’s Hospital to UI alum and mega-donor Jerre Stead, only a few months after Stead and several co-conspirators fraudulently appointed Stead’s long-time mentee, J. Bruce Harreld, to the presidency at Iowa. In that instance — at the direction of then-president Bruce Rastetter, who was also one of Stead’s key co-conspirators — that information was withheld until only twenty-four hours before the meeting at which the naming was granted.
The 2018-2019 Tuition Hikes
Although third from last on the agenda for the second day of the upcoming meetings, the most important issue the board will address this week concerns the cost of tuition for the 2018-2019 academic year. A first reading on planned hikes will occur on Thursday, with perfunctory approval set for the next regular meetings in early June. Unfortunately, that means once again — despite the board’s best intentions — tuition will be going up only a few months before the new school year begins, giving students and their families little time to adjust their budgets.
Early last summer, after raising tuition for the third time in two years, the regents decided to get serious about long-term tuition planning for the state’s three universities, so as to preclude such last-minute hikes. As John Lennon observed, however, life is what happens while you’re making other plans. After an abortive launch to its Tuition Task Force last August, and facing the looming threat of another year of deappropriations in the fall (which came to pass only a few weeks ago), the first hint anyone had about the magnitude of next year’s inevitable hikes came, improbably, from Kristin Failor, the board’s state relations officer and regent spy assigned to Iowa State.
From Jillian Alt at Iowa State Daily, on 01/01/17:
Somewhere in the middle would be 4%, yet it would take another five months before the board made any semi-official declarations. As a practical matter — particularly after the budget chaos last year — no one faulted the regents for wanting to know what was happening during the current FY18 budget cycle, before announcing plans for the coming year. In fact, were the regents not now running out of time, it would have been prudent for the board to wait yet another week or two, until the governor and her merry band of anti-government legislators make their budget and tax intentions clear for the coming FY19 budget cycle as well.
Because the board is obligated to give a first reading on tuition, however, followed by approval at the following meeting, the meeting schedule dictates that the board broach the subject of tuition hikes this week. Still, by waiting until the last minute the board did learn how much it has to give back this year, and that almost certainly informed its choices regarding next year’s tuition. (That’s particularly true given that the board will not be able to count on any additional appropriations for the coming 2018-2019 academic year.)
As usual, after harping endlessly about funding cuts in dollars lost, the proposed tuition increases from the Board of Regents are presented in percentage terms [p.1], thus obscuring the millions in new revenue that will be raised as a result. For the University of Iowa and Iowa State, base tuition for resident undergrads will increase 3.8%, which is very close to Failor’s prediction last fall. For the University of Northern Iowa, which is significantly smaller and not a research university, undergraduate in-state tuition will increase 2.8%.
As to the total amount of new revenue that will be raised from those hikes, the board pegs that number at $24.9M [p. 5], or roughly two and a half times the $10.9M in deappropriations that were just passed into law :
Assuming that the projected $24.9M revenue increase is inclusive of all rate hikes for the coming year — and it seems decidedly light to me — it is not hard to imagine where that total came from. With $10.9M having just been reclaimed by the state, and with a doubtful supplemental request of $12M for the coming year, $24.9M in new revenue not only recovers the $10.9M that was just lost, but also guarantees that there will be another $14M coming in regardless of any increase in state appropriations.
If the state does increase regent appropriations next year — whether for the schools or board office — that money will be in addition to the $24.9M in new revenue that the board is taking from students and their families. One problem with the board tipping its hand in advance, however, is that there is now less incentive for the governor and legislature to increase funding, because they can see that the regents just granted themselves more than the $12M increase that the board requested for FY19. (To be fair, in the governor’s initial FY19 budget proposal at the beginning of this year, she took $5M away from the state schools and gave $7M to the board office, for a net gain of $2M. Add that measly $2M — which now looks shaky — to $10.9M and 12M, and you get exactly $24.9M.)
The 2018-2019 Tuition Hikes in Context
Looking at the board’s tuition hikes over the past three years, we once again see that the Iowa Regents will come out ahead this year even if the state stiffs the board on FY19 appropriations in the coming weeks. As noted in an earlier post, in July of 2016, after freezing tuition for three straight years, the board uncorked massive tuition hikes for FY17. To underscore the magnitude of that revenue increase relative to state appropriations, here are the general fund totals at the University of Iowa for the two years prior to those FY17 hikes:
After the FY17 hikes that were approved in the summer of 2016, tuition revenue at the University of Iowa alone spiked by $27M:
Even with clawbacks (deappropriations) and funding cuts in each of the next two fiscal years, those FY17 gains were not only protected but expanded upon because the board increased tuition two more times:
Compared to FY15, and despite non-stop wailing about funding cuts, mid-year clawbacks and the nationwide disinvestment in higher education, appropriations at UI dropped a total of $20M over that time, while tuition increased a whopping $52M. To which we can now add roughly $10M from the proposed $24.9M in tuition hikes for FY19:
As you can see, as a result of four tuition hikes over the prior three budget cycles, even if there is no increase in appropriations for FY19, the University of Iowa will take in roughly $30M-$40M more in tuition revenue ($52M) than it has lost in appropriations ($14M-$20M). You will not hear about that, of course, because the board does not want to let on that it is making out like a bandit, nor will the legislature point out that abuse because it can divert the board’s appropriations to tax breaks for corporations. The bottom line, however, is that in raising tuition over the past three years, the regents have not simply compensated for funding cuts, they have profited from those cuts at the direct expense of students, including piling on millions of dollars in additional student debt.
Differential Tuition and Price Divergence
Although Kristin Failor was almost spot on regarding the increase in base tuition for resident undergrads at ISU and UI, she was wildly off the mark when differential tuition at Iowa State is taken into account. At the University of Iowa and Northern Iowa, the proposed percentage hikes for differential programs are largely consistent with or lower than the base hikes at those schools, but at Iowa State the opposite is true. In fact, it’s hard to accurately describe what Iowa State is proposing without employing words like ‘larceny’, ‘highway robbery’ or ‘theft’….
For example, while “standard undergraduate resident” tuition at ISU will go up 3.8%, here are some of the hikes for differential programs [p. 10]:
If you are a student in one of those programs, how do you feel about Kristin Failor’s promise last fall that your tuition would not be going up 7%? Unlike UI or UNI, many of the proposed differential hikes at ISU are double and at times almost triple the base 3.8% increase. While ISU is clearly hurting for money, what President Wendy Wintersteen is doing — and what the regents are allowing her to do — is abusive. It is not the fault of the students that the board and ISU exploded enrollment over the past decade, leading to shortages of faculty, facilities and services.
More to the point, because most students cannot simply pull up stakes in mid-degree, Wintersteen is free to exploit current students like hostages. For example, consider the following pairings, and how sharply tuition increases once students commit to those particular degree programs:
ISU Undergraduate Resident – Business (lower division) – 3.8%
ISU Undergraduate Resident – Business (upper division) – 6.4%
ISU Undergraduate Resident – Engineering (lower division) — 3.8%
ISU Undergraduate Resident – Engineering (upper division) — 5.5%
ISU Undergraduate Resident – Comp Science (lower division) – 3.8%
ISU Undergraduate Resident – Comp Science (upper division) – 10.2%
What is the massive cost to the school from computer science majors in the upper division, which justifies a 10.2% differential hikes? Does every advanced student get a free DRX — and a personal trainer and hernia belt to go with it? In truth, computer hardware is dirt cheap, processing time is essentially free, yet the students who are classified as “upper division” are taking a 10.2% hit? (Or is ISU trying to kill off its Computer Science major?)
In terms of divergence, both UI and ISU seem to be staying close to each other in terms of base pricing, while rapidly outpacing UNI. That makes sense for a lot of reasons, but it also opens the door to more direct price competition between the bigger state schools. On that point, however, it turns out that those schools are already competing on price.
UI vs. ISU: Business and Engineering
In the percentages above, business and engineering are notable because those are distinct colleges on the ISU campus. Likewise, the University of Iowa also has a business college and engineering college, meaning the two universities are already competing on price for those specific degrees.
Here are the 2018-2019, in-state, undergraduate prices for the business colleges at UI and ISU, including proposed percentage hikes:
Note that the initial buy-in at Iowa is already $1,300 more for lower-division business students compared to Iowa State. Given a choice between the two schools, that suggests students will gravitate to ISU for that savings their first two years. As long as UI has sufficient enrollment in its business college that’s fine, but what if enrollment falls off?
While ISU plans to increase upper-division undergrad resident business tuition by 6.4% this year, that may be to close the pricing gap with UI. Yet at the same time, that means a much greater leap from lower division to upper division tuition at Iowa State. Specifically, the price hike between lower and upper divisions at the UI business college is about $1,650, and a whopping $2,300 at ISU. If differential tuition accounts for the increased cost of delivering a particular degree program, why do upper-division business courses at Iowa State cost an extra $600 when compared to UI? (Assuming that the cost of instruction is roughly the same, either UI is screwing its lower-division business students, or ISU is pricing lower-division courses below cost to attract more students to that campus.)
Now here are the numbers for engineering:
Again the buy-in for UI is $1,000 more than ISU, yet the upper-division prices are almost the same. If you go to ISU for engineering you save overall, but the increase between lower and upper division is an extra $1,000 above the increase at UI. ($1,600 increase at UI vs. $2,600 at ISU.)
Now here are the prices for undergrad non-residents in both the business and engineering colleges at UI and ISU:
Here the price differences across the board are obvious. If you are a nonresident undergrad studying business or engineering, you will pay $8,000-$9,000 more per year to do so at Iowa, compared to Iowa State. While that means UI is currently taking in more money per student in those programs, there is also a strong incentive for future students to enroll at ISU, and that could lead to declines in enrollment at UI.
University of Iowa Graduate Pricing
If there is anything odd about the proposed tuition hikes at UI, it is the extraneous rationale put forward for graduate tuition increases [p. 3]:
As regular readers know, J. Bruce Harreld is on a crusade to raise tuition, but not because of expenses. Instead, Harreld wants a precipitous tuition increase because Iowa’s self-selected peers — including some that are merely aspirational — currently charge more. In reality, Harreld’s tuition agenda is driven by his desire to initiate entrepreneurial projects at UI, as opposed to directing all of that new student-funded revenue toward the school’s educational mission. (What Harreld routinely and intentionally omits is that there are significant regional differences in the cost of education, such that Iowa should lag behind other schools.)
Although the board does include peer-group tuition in the .pdf for the upcoming meeting, nowhere else is peer tuition referenced as a justification for raising tuition at any of the state universities. Only in the context of increased prices for UI grad students is a peer rationale offered, yet when we look at the specific increases for those students they are no different than the proposed increases for undergrad programs [p. 10]:
As you can see, tuition is going up 3.8% for resident graduate students, which is the same increase being imposed on resident undergrads at UI. And yet, when we look at the rationale for increasing undergraduate tuition by 3.8% across the board, we find no mention of peer pricing. Instead, those undergrad hikes are largely portrayed as compensation for decreased appropriations in FY17 and FY18, although inflation is also mentioned as a factor [p. 5]:
While HEPI runs hotter than CPI, at the expected midpoint of 2% that means half of any 3.8% hikes at UI (and ISU) will go to offset the cost of inflation. In fact, in the rates just above, the entire 2% increase for non-resident grads is explained by the expected increase in inflation, so why does the .pdf reference peer tuition for resident-grad pricing? Is that an inadvertent confession that the additional 1.8% being charged to resident graduate students has nothing to do with the cost of instruction?
The only explanation I can think of for intentionally using a peer rationale to justify increasing the cost of tuition for UI grad students, when that rationale is used nowhere else for hikes of the same exact size, is that Harreld and the board are establishing that as a basis for additional hikes down the road. Again, increasing tuition is Harreld’s only real goal, particularly since he delivered his tuition proposal to the Tuition Task Force last summer. At the time, Harreld pitched a 41% increase in tuition at over five years, not because that’s what it costs to provide the education students that students would be paying for, but because he wants to play with all that new revenue himself.
Faculty Resignations
Each year the regents produce a report which tracks faculty resignations at the three state universities, and this year’s report is on the agenda for the upcoming meetings. Overall, the report — which lags by a year — is banal, with most numbers and trends reverting to the mean for UI, ISU and UNI. One interesting note, however, is that the board us using a new format largely for reporting the numbers at UI, although that change in itself is also understandable.
Unlike ISU and UNI, UI is host to a major medical center — the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) — along with an attendant College of Medicine (CoM). For that reason, at times it is not wrong to think of UIHC and the CoM as a separate regent institution, even as all of that is part of the UI campus proper. Perhaps to account for that difference, the new faculty resignations report breaks faculty at the state schools into non-clinical and clinical groups. (You can see the previous unified graph in the 2015-2016 report here.)
What the new split graphs do make clear, however, is that the oft-repeated claim that volatility over the previous two years at UI was largely due to clinical resignations is false. Over the past three years, 128 non-clinical faculty have resigned at UI, compared with 129 clinical faculty. What is also clear is that while non-clinical resignations peaked three years ago, clinical resignations peaked two years ago but remained high last year.
Whether splitting resignations into non-clinical and clinical graphs has some larger meaning — perhaps related to reported discussions about UI/UIHC partnering with a private, for-profit healthcare company — I do know. What is clear is that the spike in resignations on the clinical side is significantly greater than the norm over the past twelve years. (Although the graphs for non-clinical and clinical faculty span the same range — from 2006 to 2017, or twelve years — note that the non-clinical graph only contains data points for ten years.)
As for Iowa State and Northern Iowa, the only change of note is a spike in resignations at ISU last year, which may or may not correlate with the leadership and subsequent resignation of former disgraced president Steven Leath, in early spring of the 2016-2017 academic year. With 24 resignations the year before, the number almost doubled at ISU to 44.
Books, Merchandise and Taxes
In a recent post we discussed how governing boards and state legislatures conspire to loot revenue from students and their families. We also noted that state representative Pat Grassley was miffed not about the abuse, but about the fact that legislators take all the heat in the bargain. In venting at the Board of Regents, Grassley noted that the state universities have an unfair advantage over private businesses because of their sales tax exemption. Now, in what I’m sure is a total coincidence, a bill to remove that exemption is working its way through the statehouse.
From the Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel, on 04/04/18:
Grassley claims that $70M in merchandise which was not subject to sales tax has been sold by the regent schools, meaning about $4.2M in revenue was forfeit. While it is assumed that students were thus able to buy books and other items more cheaply, there is no actual evidence that the schools passed along any net savings to the students — meaning they may have profited instead.
For example, if a university bookstore and a retail store both charge $25 for a team t-shirt, while students pay the same price at either place, the school can pocket the 6% sales tax that the retailer must pass to the state. Students may think they’re getting a better deal because the schools tout the fact that they do not charge sales tax, but how many students actually compare prices? (You can see a Twitter thread here, with anecdotal evidence that school bookstores do not always pass along any savings.)
While the amount of money involved is not that great relative to the $7B state budget, or even to the budget of the University of Northern Iowa, in a tight appropriations environment every little bit helps. That may be why, late last year, UNI was quickly given permission to purchase a local retail bookstore, so it could sell books and other items on campus as ISU and UI have been doing for decades.
Whatever complaints the state universities have about decreasing appropriations, however, the problem for local retailers is that they operate on razor-thin margins, and they don’t get any money from the state. If their sales are undermined because the state schools do not have to pay sales tax, that small difference can put them out of business, which is precisely why government entities are largely barred, by law, from competition with private industry. If it also turns out that the state schools are taking some or all of that money as additional profit, instead of passing along any savings to students, that’s obviously worse, and could spur the movement to strip that exemption.
Should the current bill pass, or a similar bill pass in the future, that will be yet another self-inflicted wound which can be traced back to the short-sighted mantra of running the state schools like for-profit businesses. There is no question that the governor’s office and state legislature should increase higher-ed appropriations by tens of millions of dollars each year. The Great Recession is in the rear-view mirror and the national economy is booming, but unfortunately Iowa is dominated by anti-education, anti-government elected officials, who cannot stop giving money to corporations hand over fist while starving basic services like public education.
And yet, as wrong-headed as those politicians are, the regents cannot beat them at their own game because they literally have the power to make law. Unless the regents have Iowa’s politicians suckered, like Mike Crow does down in Arizona — and even some of them are not happy with Crow’s real estate scams — the board will always be limited in its ability to raise money by extra-curricular means. Instead of listening to sniveling entrepreneurial weasels, then, who will inevitably open the state schools to more and more risk, the Iowa Board of Regents must make clear, compelling arguments about why they should be given more money. It’s not sexy, it’s not easy to profit in terms of crony business and political favors, but it is not only the right thing to do, it is the only real option. It may not work with the current crop of college-hating fanatics in the Iowa legislature, but things change, and when they change, credibility will matter.
Iowa State Sells Out
Speaking of entrepreneurial weasels, on this past Thursday, 04/05/18, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller reported on another item on the board’s agenda:
While Miller reported that the “Egg Council and Hy-Line gifts at Iowa State are not contingent on the name recognition,” we can probably all agree that there is almost always a quid pro quo driving such honors at colleges and universities, if not also a legally enforceable contract behind the scenes. Even in instances where donations are not solely motivated by personal recognition, it is understood that individuals often expect recognition for their good works. As to why a for-profit business might be induced to give millions of dollars, however, there is no selfless motive. If they are not getting something of equal or greater value, including possible tax advantages for making charitable contributions, they are not giving that money.
That Iowa State wants to break precedent and take corporate money in exchange for naming rights, while pretending not to do so, tells us a few things — all of them bad. First, in combination with ISU’s egregious and abusive tuition proposals, including multiple differential hikes over 10%, it is clear that ISU is reeling financially. Despite all of the fundraising success claimed by former president Steven Leath, something is seriously wrong, even if it is not readily apparent from the most recent financials. Second, whatever deal ISU cut with those specific companies, the real value in breaking with tradition is that it opens the floodgates for other companies to buy their way into the good graces of the ISU community.
There is, of course, a long and storied tradition of naming buildings after individuals who donate large sums to a school. Only this past summer ISU announced that Debbie and Jerry Ivy were giving $50M to Iowa State, and that prompted the following headline at Iowa State:
Given the amount of money involved that deal wasn’t particularly surprising, and clearly the quid pro quo was openly acknowledged. Yet as the first donor-named college on campus, that deal also broke precedent at ISU. On its face there’s nothing wrong with such transactions, provided there are consistent policies in place to assure fairness and fair value for all, and yet, as repeatedly noted regarding the granting of the UI children’s hospital naming rights to Jerre Stead, there are no such rigorous policies at the Iowa Board of Regents.
Worse, to some particularly mercenary voices in higher-ed there is no difference between money donated by grateful alums and money donated by for-profit businesses. Even if we momentarily set that debate aside, however, there is a staggering internal incoherence to the process by which such transactions are valued in Iowa. No matter how transactional a school is willing to be in taking money from any and every quarter, the process of setting the value of naming rights should clearly not be left to back-room negotiations by parties who may not drive the hardest bargain for the college or university they purportedly represent. (Given the insular nature of Iowa State and the city of Ames, this is a particular concern at that school.)
Where is the policy by which the valuation of naming rights are determined for Iowa’s public universities? What are the triggers for market studies before deals are concluded? If individuals or companies want to pay above the going rate that’s great, but at a minimum they should be paying fair market value for any naming, and that requires conducting research into the value of each property to be named.
If determining market value for small buildings and facilities proves difficult, one time-honored way to make sure no money is left on the table is to initiate biding between suitors. Did ISU take the first offer they got, or did they shop for other corporate donors? How may other companies were contacted to see if they had any interest in bidding on the naming rights in question? The board is always taking about its fiduciary responsibility to the citizens of the state, so where is the evidence that ISU and the board met that responsibility in these instances?
The obvious and material difference between individuals and companies, of course, is that what individuals are buying with a donation is a grandiose headstone, while companies are buying advertising. The latter relationship means schools expose themselves to all of the complexities and conflicts that branding associations may entail. As to who can and cannot buy their way onto the ISU campus, I would assume that the American Nazi Party would not be welcome — at least not by a majority of the Ames community — but what are the specific criteria for corporate donors? (If the board ignores this question, at some point the regents will end up in court.)
What about the duration of the proposed naming rights? Are they being granted in perpetuity, or for a specified time? Because if ISU is proposing the former, that’s not simply dumb, that’s administrative malpractice. There are no perpetual ads without perpetual compensation, and the Board of Regents should not establish that precedent. (Offer John Deere the naming rights to Jack Trice Stadium in perpetuity and they might drop $100M without blinking – yet even that would be a steal.)
What about conflicts of interest or favoritism? What if Bruce Rastetter wants a facility named not after himself, but his company, Summit Agricultural Group? How about Dan Houston, President and CEO of Principal Financial Group, who was co-chair of the search committee that nominated Wintersteen? What policies are in place to assure that Principal Financial pays top dollar if they want to buy the naming rights to a building? Same goes for Suku Radia, long-time ISU booster and recently retired CEO of Bankers Trust, where Wintersteen is a board member. Who makes sure that any crony business and political players pay top dollar for their advertising?
For all the talk about running the state universities like businesses, there is no indication that even basic business principles went into ISU’s plan for these naming rights, or that there are any plans to develop rigorous policies in the future. As if that isn’t enough, however, there is also a bitter irony involved, which is that this incoherence contradicts the very rationale that the board routinely puts forward for setting the salaries of administrators, and that it is verging on using to justify precipitous tuition hikes. Specifically, in order to determine how much to pay university presidents and other high-ranking administrators, the board ignores local market conditions and instead looks to peer institutions to make those determinations. (That is how J. Bruce Harreld, with zero experience in academic administration, ended up making $800K per year, despite acknowledging that he also required an extended — and currently ongoing — apprenticeship to do the job.)
You can find the list of Iowa State’s peer institutions here. Of those schools that allow corporate advertising on buildings, what are the going rates on those campuses? How do they get maximum value in each transaction? What are their policies, and how might the Iowa Board of Regents go about adopting best practices?
When J. Bruce Harreld gave the naming rights to the UI children’s hospital to his long-time mentor, Jerre Stead, he had been on the job for less than two months. At the time, in an ideal world, then-VP for Medical Affairs Jean Robillard, and then-regents president Bruce Rastetter, would have prevented Harreld from doing so. Unfortunately, as it turns out, both men actually conspired with Stead to jam Harreld into office, meaning none of them had any motivation to do what was in the best interest of the university. Instead of determining the market value of those naming rights, and either selling them to the highest bidder or coercing another substantial donation from Stead, they gave the rights away for a song, at most.
At Iowa State, Wendy Wintersteen has been on the job for less than six months, yet she is already breaking new ground by selling out to corporate advertisers. We will never know if that was actually her idea, or if going along with the idea has anything to do with her appointment as president, but we do know that there are no policies and procedures in place to make sure ISU gets maximal value. (Bruce Rastetter and other big-name donors still haunt Ames and ISU, and they certainly have to juice to get themselves sweetheart deals on the Iowa State campus.)
What the Board of Regents should do, in part to protect the credibility of Wendy Wintersteen, is just say no — or at least not yet, until proper policies and procedures are in place. Unfortunately, the current board president, Mike Richards, was elected to that office not because of his experience in academic administration or higher education, but because he is — like his friend and fellow political power broker Bruce Rastetter — a big-time donor to former governor Terry Branstad’s political machine, which is currently being fronted by Governor Kim Reynolds.
While the agenda for the upcoming two-day meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents seems to list items that will be discussed, in reality nothing gets on that agenda if it has not already been decided, meaning the actual meetings are theater. For that reason, it is all but a given that the regents will approve Wintersteen’s plan this week, at which point that new practice will quickly bleed over to the other regent campuses. Even as everyone will happily cash every corporate check, however, and pose for pictures with the execs who are buying Iowa’s higher-ed campuses one deal at a time, those ‘donations’ will open a Pandora’s box that will plague the regents for years to come. The very fact that there has been and will be no public debate about this radical change — meaning no on-the-record conversations which are subject to Iowa’s Open Meeting law — proves how corrupt it is. And yet, when it finally does go sideways, the board will assert that it was ISU’s decision, ISU will claim that the board approved of the change, and no one will be held accountable.
Following last week’s two-day meetings of the Iowa Board of Regents there were a lot of news reports about issues we have been tracking for weeks, months, and even years. Garnering most of the headlines, and rightfully so, was the first reading of the latest round of tuition hikes — which, when approved this coming June, will constitute the fourth tuition increase approved by the board in the past twenty-three months. In several upcoming posts we will take a closer look at this year’s ritual tuition hike and other important developments arising from last week’s meetings. In this post we will focus on the most consequential development for the University of Iowa since September of 2015, when J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as the twenty-first president.
Two weeks from now we will be at the exact midpoint of Harreld’s initial five-year contract with the Board of Regents. Having taken office in early November of 2015, after being hired with zero experience as an academic administrator, the former business executive and apprentice president has now had two and a half years of on-the-job training. Unfortunately, in every regard Harreld has under-performed and failed to demonstrate the kind of leadership his co-conspirators, minders and campus enablers promised he would deliver. (It is often overlooked, but Harreld not only had no experience in academic administration or the public sector when he was hired, but he had never been the CEO of anything.)
Despite promising to perform all kinds of sophisticated private-sector voodoo at the University of Iowa, until this past week Harreld’s only plan for the future involved the brute-force exploitation of Iowa’s captive student body. Specifically, for the past two and a half years Harreld has advocated for massive tuition hikes as a means of raising new, unrestricted revenue, which would then be diverted to for-profit research and other entrepreneurial ventures. To his credit, not only has Harreld succeeded in raising tuition four times in less than two years, but last summer he also proposed an additional five-year, 41% increase in tuition, which has yet to be disavowed by the regents. In fact, on the final day of last week’s meetings, board president ‘Casino’ Mike Richards promised to once again increase tuition for the 2019-2020 school year, along with implementing additional multi-year hikes at the three state universities.
From the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne, on 04/12/18:
While that would seem to bode well for Harreld’s plan to fuel his own administrative success with the bank accounts of students and families, after two consecutive years of state budget shortfalls Harreld has clearly not made out like he hoped. It may also be that while Richards is willing to talk about long-range, multi-year hikes, he is unwilling to allow the kind of wholesale abuse for which Harreld has clamored. In any event, and for whatever reason, on the same day that Richards announced that the board would keep sticking it to the students, J. Bruce Harreld adopted a sharply different tone during his own presentation before the board.
Specifically, after thirty frustrating months of trying to generate tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in discretionary revenue through tuition hikes, Harreld pivoted to an approach that he had, for good reason, heretofore avoided. One great benefit of his determination to focus on tuition hikes was that doing so allowed Harreld to build alliances with faculty and staff which were premised on shared interest. If only the hapless, helpless students were hurt by Harreld’s abusive policies, and the faculty and staff directly benefited — particularly in the form of increased pay — then it would be to everyone’s advantage to push for massive hikes. If Harreld skimmed money for his own administrative designs, even those who were the wiser would not speak up because they benefited as well.
Case in point, even when Harreld blatantly tried to steal $4.2M from students by reneging on scholarships that UI was legally obligated to pay, he suffered not a whit when his plan unraveled in the face of multiple class-action lawsuits. Not only was he not arrested, or fired by the board, or even reprimanded, but there was no outrage among the administrators, faculty or staff, as there would have been if he had tried to deprive them of $4.2M in contractually obligated benefits. As long as Harreld only targeted the students for abuse he preserved any goodwill he had generated, while avoiding fights with more powerful campus foes.
After two straight years of state budget shortfalls, however — including mid-year clawbacks and cuts in appropriations — Harreld has been unable to generate the funds he needs to launch the for-profit ventures that his co-conspirators hired him to initiate. For that reason, and with nothing to show for his efforts so far, and the clock ticking down on his five-year deal, Harreld must now change course and generate that seed money internally. And the only way to do that at scale is to cut costs.
To be clear, there is nothing novel about that approach. Not only is cost-cutting a routine aspect of successful business management in the public and private sectors, but during administrative transitions it is common for new leadership teams to generate capital for their own plans by slashing old projects. That is, in fact, often the point of bankruptcy, which is a legal means of discharging financial obligations — often involving pension and healthcare benefits — so a company is no longer encumbered by those costs. (One of the big selling points for the recently appointed president of the University of Oklahoma, James Gallogly — who, like Harreld, has no experience in academic administration — is that he brought a company out of bankruptcy while making himself millions in the process. In reality, it is a lot easier to engineer success through bankruptcy than it is to recover without it, which is why Lou Gerstner’s leadership at IBM was so impressive.)
Whether Harreld wanted to immediately start cutting at UI or not, two key factors kept him from doing so. First, in the public sector, and particularly in higher education, there are considerable obstacles to administrative change even under the best of circumstances. Between obligations to shared governance, school and board policies, and state laws, what a CEO can accomplish with the wave of a hand could well prove impossible for the president of a public university. Second, given Harreld’s sham hire, and the suspicion and anger that followed, any attempt to slash and burn would have not only proven Harreld’s detractors right, it would have led to confrontations with many more individuals and campus constituencies. (At it was, Harreld was censured even before he took office.)
For those reasons, Harreld did the only thing he could do: he played nice with the people who were the greatest threat, while repeatedly preying on the most defenseless members of the UI community. Avoiding open warfare with faculty and staff also gave Harreld time to seek out and co-opt those who were amenable to a purely transactional relationship. Unfortunately, because the state is currently being managed by people who also have no idea what they are doing, Harreld is once again faced with the short-term problem of returning millions to the state before the fiscal year expires on June 30th. And the only way to get that done is to find that money in the current budget — meaning something has to give.
The most obvious solution, of course, is simply to delay construction on campus, thus freeing up cash flow which is currently committed to those projects. And that is in fact what Harreld has decided to do. From the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux, on 04/12/18:
This solution is so obvious, in fact, that disgraced ISU president Steven Leath used the same approach to deal with last year’s clawbacks shortly before he resigned. Because Harreld wanted to keep as much money as possible, however, instead of enacting a similar construction moratorium he tried to cover last year’s deappropriations by reneging on $4.2M in student scholarships, until the threat of impending legal action forced him to relent. At which point Harreld suddenly ‘found’ $4.9M in cash, meaning he intended to use that money to fund his entrepreneurial agenda all along, while once again targeting students for financial abuse.
Were Harreld a conscientious university president, he would order his administrative underlings to draw up a list of projects which could be delayed with minimal disruption, while still generating the required relief. Harreld being Harreld, however, not only is he going overboard and imposing a construction moratorium on projects that could still proceed, but as evidenced by his comments last week before the board, he intends to use this year’s $5.5M refunding as an excuse to cut costs with a vengeance. Beyond the obvious point that Harreld is not a conscientious university president, the current clawbacks thus provide multiple opportunities from generating unrestricted funds, protecting and supplementing current and future gains from increased tuition.
For example, while delaying a specific number of projects would clearly allow Harreld to generate the $5.5M he needs, slowing additional projects will free up additional millions which can be redirected as Harreld sees fit. In fact, what are the odds that the University of Iowa needs to return exactly $5.5M to the state in the next three months, and that’s exactly the amount that Harreld’s widespread construction moratorium will generate? From Harreld’s ghost-written press release on the morning of 04/10/18 — meaning the same day he spoke to the regents — note the word “estimated”:
What happens if that estimate proves to be short, and the construction moratorium generates an additional three million in cash, or five million? Then that revenue — which almost no one would know about — will simply sit in the general education fund until someone finds a use for it.
As for Harreld’s claim about “the shortfall created in FY19”, the governor and legislature have yet to finalize the FY19 budget. Because Harreld loves a good threat, however — even if he has to make it up himself — that claim is included in the press release, yet never explained or quantified.
There may indeed be another funding cut in FY19, or perhaps less money appropriated than the regents would prefer. It is important to remember, however, that despite all of the cuts over the past three years, the state universities are still net ahead from the past three tuition hikes, and that’s particularly true for the University of Iowa. As noted in the previous post, here are the UI revenue totals from tuition and appropriations for FY15 and FY16 — meaning the two fiscal years prior to the first of the four hikes that have been or will be implemented during FY17 and FY18 (current):
Now, after multiple funding cuts and mid-year deappropriations, here is the total amount of UI budgeted revenue through the end of the current fiscal year (FY18):
As you can plainly see, despite $20M in state funding that has been lost since the end of FY16, the first three hikes that Harreld pushed through since that time increased tuition revenue by a whopping $44M. Meaning despite losing $20M on the appropriations side, the University of Iowa is still net-ahead $24M as compared to FY16. Now add in the expected’ $10M increase from the tuition hikes that will be approved in June, and after all of the current cuts and hikes have been accounted for, UI will be net-ahead $34M in general fund revenue compared to FY16.
Any statement or claim that the University of Iowa is currently suffering because of otherwise indefensible state funding cuts over the past two years is objectively false. Not only have Harreld and the regents made up for those cuts with multiple tuition hikes, but in doing so they more than doubled the amount of revenue generated compared to the funding that was lost. And yet, Harreld being Harreld, he now clearly also intends to use the specter of “generational disinvestment” (his new pet marketing phrase) as justification for actual program cuts, which will in turn free up even more revenue that can be diverted to other projects:
Harreld is not wrong that the state has decreased funding over the past twenty years, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Unlike many other states, Iowa has not recovered to pre-recession higher-ed spending levels, in large part because the people who currently control the statehouse and governor’s mansion prefer corporate tax credits to education. Again, however, since Harreld arrived on the scene in 2015, UI’s total general fund revenue has only increased, meaning there is literally no basis for cutting any of the programs that he is talking about cutting. If there was money for those programs in FY16, there is even more money in the UI budget today.
As to which programs will be cut, however, Harreld is not only hedging his bets, in doing so he is serving notice to the UI community that now is the time to grovel for his administrative affection if you do not want to be on the chopping block. And why not? After pasting a smile on his face and patronizing academics for two and a half years — instead of immediately coercing them into compliance with a few “public hangings“, as he did at IBM — Harreld has clearly had enough If the state will not give him the money he needs to build new businesses, and the state will not let him take that money from students, he will get that money another way.
From the Des Moines Register’s Kathy Bolten, on 04/12/18:
There is a lot to parse in that quote, some of it truly galling, but let’s start with the most important point. As long as Harreld refrains from naming specific programs, his threat casts a coercive pall across the entire campus. The minute he targets any specific centers or institutes, however, he also makes mortal enemies. People who were on the fence or on the sidelines about his administration, or perhaps even those who carried water for him over the past two and a half years, will suddenly and stridently oppose him.
All of which is why Harreld took pains to say this almost two years ago, as reported by KCRG’s Forrest Saunders, on 05/17/16:
While Harreld can certainly snow disinterested parties with his “generational disinvestment” rhetoric, anyone who has a center, institute or program under threat already knows the same revenue numbers I posted above. The state has indeed disinvested in public higher education over the past twenty years, but over the past three years, as a result of relentlessly victimizing the students, the University of Iowa has more — not less — general fund revenue. And unless the governor and legislature give UI a $34M haircut in FY19, that will remain true next year as well.
As for Harreld hiding behind the very students he has relentlessly victimized — and still hopes to abuse with a 41% increase in tuition over the next five years — that’s who the man is. Then again, to be fair, if he was notified that he will not be getting those massive hikes, that may have contributed to his ire. Either way, however, note that Harreld is not saying UI students should get a break on tuition after he cuts centers and institutes, but only that tuition revenue should not be used to “subsidize” those costs. Instead, it should be used to subsidize the speculative for-profit ventures that his co-conspirators hired him to implement.
To be clear, this hostile tack was always inevitable. In fact, I also expect Harreld to use the Phase II report from the 2020 Task Force as justification for deep cuts in programs which are hostile to his entrepreneurial agenda. Because that committee process has fallen behind its projected timeline, however, Harreld may be reaching for another justification to begin the weeding-out process on schedule. (And that’s particularly true if he also recently learned that the Phase II report will not give him the answers, excuses and justifications he was seeking.)
In any event, time is running out for Harreld. He only has two and a half years left on his current contract, and it will be hard to pull off any entrepreneurial successes in that limited time frame. Making it all that much more difficult is that as of last Thursday, Harreld is now the ogre on the UI campus.
It is mid-April, and on the UI campus the spring semester of the 2017-18 academic year is drawing to a close. There are three weeks yet to go, then finals commence on Monday, May 7th. At the end of that week, classes will be out for the summer, and much of the UI community will scatter to the four corners of the state, if not the earth, until late August.
Amid all of the news from last week’s meetings of the Iowa Board of Regents, one of the most important things that happened regarding the University of Iowa is something that didn’t happen. Despite repeated assurances to the contrary, once again there was still no news about the ongoing 2020 Task Force, which is charged with reimagining the academic organizational structure of the entire UI campus. In fact, it has now been four and a half months since the task force posted the last progress report to its website, on December 1st of last year.
The most recent timeline had the Phase II committee presenting initial recommendations to interim provost Sue Curry and fraudulently appointed president J. Bruce Harreld shortly after spring break — which ended a month ago. Despite also committing to then presenting a consensus view to the greater UI community, so as to engage in a robust feedback process before the Phase II report is finalized, there has simply been no update about when that might happen. With only three weeks to go before finals, the clock is either running out, or being intentionally run down, on any hope of gathering considered responses to a draft report.
As for Harreld’s role in the process, on several occasions, including a Daily Iowan interview that was published just before spring break, on 03/09/18,. he has characterized the 2020 Task Force as an “academic exercise” wholly under the auspices of interim provost Curry. In doing so he also made clear that he was waiting on word from the Phase II committee himself, and that at least prior to spring break he had no information to share. In the recently posted minutes of the 03/06/18 Faculty Council meeting, however, we find the following comment from Harreld, who spoke at length on a number of issues that day:
As regular readers know, it is one of Harreld’s glaring deficiencies that he perpetually seeks credit, whether manufactured or appropriated. While Harreld said nothing to the Daily Iowan about giving the performing arts more prominence, here — in a Faculty Council meeting three days before the DI interview was published — Harreld is signaling, and taking credit for, the possible creation of a new College of Performing Arts, as distinct from the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (CLAS). On its own that may sound sensible, but when coupled with the new budget model that Harreld is also rolling out — which we will take a glance at in an upcoming post — that change would actually weaken CLAS, while also exposing that new and smaller college to significant budgetary pressures.
It is conceivable, in fact, that were the performing arts obligated to fend for themselves at UI, some or all of them might not survive. Then again, as STEM devotees, the worse things turn out for the performing arts and even CLAS, the better that will be for the co-conspirators who jammed Harreld into office in 2015. Splintering CLAS and splitting off the performing arts would make it that much easier to blame those departments for generating insufficient revenue to fund their programs. That in turn would give Harreld (or his successor) that much more latitude to kill off the arts entirely, thus converting Iowa into little more than a glorified arm of the state’s job training platform.
As for building a culture at Iowa where “we ask challenging questions”, that is of course the very nature of the inquiry and experimentation which takes place at any university. What Harreld is encouraging, however, are not academic questions, but questions aimed at for-profit research and revenue generation. Likewise, Harreld’s exhortation that Iowa should “not [be] afraid of failure”, is simply a more palatable version of the ‘fail-faster’ ethos which hoses billions of dollars down the drain each year in Silicon Valley, and at other regional innovation clusters.
Despite the fact that the UI community has heard nothing from the Phase II committee, as of a bit more than a month ago Harreld already had some idea of the course of action he intends to follow. Whether the University of Iowa gets a new College of Performing Arts, a School of Performing Arts, or just a big new sign pointing toward the various performing arts, time is running out if the campus is to have any chance of considering and responding to any report from the Phase II committee. While it is possible that the committee, interim provost Curry and/or Harreld have chosen to delay the Phase II report until later — perhaps even after a new CLAS dean and permanent provost have been hired — there has been no notice to that effect, and there would be no reason to delay that notice.
On the other hand, it may be that the committee, Curry or Harreld are intent on limiting the ability of the UI community to digest and respond to the committee’s proposals. And of course we have some precedent for Harreld giving the school the bum’s rush, as happened at almost the exact the same time of year in 2016, when Harreld tried to jam the entire process of developing Iowa’s new strategic plan into a few weeks at the end of that spring semester. Whether or not Harreld is up to his old tricks, however, it is already abundantly clear that there is no urgency on the part of the committee, Curry or Harreld to keep the campus informed or to foster a meaningful dialogue. The only thing we don’t know is why.
As noted in numerous posts, the public meetings of the Iowa Board of Regents are little more than carefully scripted theater. Any decisions of consequence are made beforehand, there is rarely any discussion or debate in open session, and even the agenda items are publicized only a week or so before each meeting. In sum, the regents do the absolute minimum to comply with Iowa’s Open Meeting law, and otherwise prefer as little transparency and accountability as possible.
In that context, the blast that Regent Larry McKibben unleashed at the meetings this past week was not only surprising, it has no parallel I can think of over the past two and a half years. Regent Subhash Sahai’s frustrations about the fraudulent 2015 presidential search — which led to J. Bruce Harreld’s illegitimate appointment at the University of Iowa — were of equivalent candor, but in terms of political implications nothing comes close to McKibben’s broadside. From the Des Moines Register’s Kathy Bolton on 04/12/18:
In the current tight fiscal environment it clearly is the case that the regents could use a $12M boost. What is remarkable about McKibben’s plea, however, is not only that he called out Governor ‘Casino’ Kim Reynolds in public, and not only that he portrayed her as out of touch with Iowans and Iowa, but that he specifically cited Reynolds’ indifference to citizens of the state who are struggling the most. In any context that would have been a direct affront, but because Reynolds was elevated to her post by the abdication of the former governor, and she is now running for the office she currently holds for the first time, Regent McKibben’s words could be used in devastating campaign commercials by any of the candidates who hope to unseat her. Where McKibben of the opposition party such commercials would be easy to dismiss, but as it turns out not only does McKibben hail from the governor’s party, but she was the Lt. Governor when McKibben was appointed to the board.
Still, Casino Kim is the governor, and she is the odds-on favorite to win in November, so it’s interesting that McKibben picked this fight. As to why he may have done so, there are several events to take notice of over the past twelve months. First, in May of 2017, the board needed to elect a new president and president pro tem, to fill the final year of those two-year terms after the regents who held those positions were not reappointed. Following a period of deafening silence by the sitting regents, Larry McKibben threw his hat into the ring for president during one of the regents’ public meetings. Given that McKibben had seniority on the newly reconstituted board, and had been a loyal foot solider and apologist for the previous president, his interest was not unexpected. When no one else announced their candidacy for either leadership position, Larry McKibben seemed to be running unopposed.
A few weeks later, however, when the vote was taken, Regent Mike Richards — who had only been appointed the year before — was elected president, and Regent Patty Cownie was elected president pro tem. That very public and humiliating shutout revealed to McKibben, and to everyone else, that the fix was in all along, yet even after years of loyal service no one had the decency to give McKibben a heads-up. As to who pulled the strings for Richards and Cownie, that wasn’t hard to figure out given that Richards was a major donor to both former governor Branstad and current governor (then-Lt. Governor) Reynolds, while Cownie hails from a political family closely tied to the Branstad/Reynolds machine.
Because McKibben hailed from the same political party as Branstad, Reynolds, Richards and Cownie, he took one for the team and fell back in line, dutifully protecting the status quo. That is in fact why McKibben was originally appointed by Branstad and Reynolds: to toe the political line and protect the machine at all costs. And yet, that is also why it is so surprising that McKibben called out Reynolds last week, and he was just getting started. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, also on 04/12/18:
Were the student leaders on each campus granted an opportunity to meet with the governor, I am sure they would capably advocate for their constituents. That McKibben publicly advocated for such a meeting, however, and was eager to put Reynolds in the difficult position of either meeting with, or refusing to meet with, the elected student leaders, also calls for a bit more context. Specifically, back in August of 2017 — meaning only a few months after he was embarrassed by the rigged election at the board — newly installed president Richards appointed McKibben as the chair of a four-member Tuition Task Force.
The objective of that committee was to explore ways that tuition hikes could be made more predictable, so they would not be foisted on students at the last minute — as they were in the two years prior, and once again will be this year. Having already headed up the controversial TIER process for the regents, and being a former state legislator himself, and even being a practicing attorney in Marshalltown, Larry McKibben was certainly qualified for that task. Calling on his wealth of public-sector experience, McKibben thus sent out invitations for the first and most important meeting of the task force, which was to be a quasi-governmental summit.
Included in the list of invitees were Governor Reynolds, a number of her department heads, and legislative leaders and stakeholders in both parties. While many of the invited Democrats promptly RSVP’d, however, nothing was heard from the governor, her administrative flunkies, or from key Republicans who controlled (and still control) both chambers of the statehouse. In fact, not only did Casino Kim never reply to McKibben’s invite — while at the same time barring most of her department heads from attending — but none of the Republican legislators from McKibben’s own party would commit to attending. As a result, with only minimal partisan participation confirmed, at the last minute Regent McKibben was forced to cancel the first and most important meeting of his Tuition Task Force. Meaning in the span of only a few months, Reynolds and her political machine made McKibben look like a fool on two occasions.
Now…to be fair to Reynolds, by mid-summer of 2017 she probably knew that the state economy was still in the ditch, meaning there would be another round of mid-year clawbacks. That in turn would put heavy pressure on the board to raise tuition yet again — for the fourth time in less than two years — and she would not want to be associated with those hikes on Election Day in 2018. So instead of stepping up and doing what was best for students and their families, Casino Kim hung Larry McKibben out to dry for the second time in three months.
With the task force kneecapped before it even got going, and with the state budget falling apart, the board decided to delay any tuition hikes until the fiscal fog lifted, When it finally did, only a few weeks ago, that then triggered the first reading of next year’s hikes at last week’s meetings, and those hikes will be approved in June. All of which may also explain this quote from McKibben, regarding his own party’s plans to slash state taxes after the second budget shortfall in as many years:
Over the past two and a half years, since Regent McKibben played a part in the rigged appointment of J. Bruce Harreld at UI, I have given him a lot of grief, all of it richly deserved. Over that time, for the most part, McKibben has fulfilled his obligations as a crony political appointee, to an embarrassing degree. And yet, all along I also believed that he was sincere when he said he wanted to hold down costs for students and their families. That was and is in keeping with the goals of the TIER process (if not its multi-million-dollar execution), as well as with the way McKibben seems to conduct himself in life. Unlike the jet-setters in Iowa politics — including the current and former regent presidents, who have thrown tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars at political candidates and elected officials — Larry McKibben seems to live a typical, a low-key Iowa life, as residing in Marshalltown would suggest.
Along with having been passed over for board president, and left hanging on the Tuition Task Force, it is likely that Regent McKibben was given assurances during the past year that appropriations to higher education would tick up as soon as revenues recovered. And yet, what he is now hearing from the governor and leaders of the state legislature — all of whom are members of his own political party — is that they plan to decrease revenue even more, by cutting taxes. Which means over the past twelve months, those same people have played Larry McKibben for a sucker not once, not twice, but three times, at the very least.
Whatever McKibben’s personal feelings are about being used and abused by the very people he has carried water for over the years, it seems clear from his advocacy last week that he is serious about speaking out on behalf of the students at the state schools. And a big reason for that may be that McKibben is simply old enough to remember when one of Iowa’s great strengths as a state and as a community was its emphasis on excellence in public education, from elementary to graduate school.
From Tim Johnson at the Daily Nonpareil, on 04/15/18:
I don’t know what will happen on Election Day this year, but if the Iowa Republican Party has lost Larry McKibben, they may be more vulnerable than they currently believe. That they have lost McKibben is clear, however, because in the quotes above he is not simply highlighting a policy difference. Instead, that is Larry McKibben — who knows how the game is played — calling out the governor and others in his own party for being the political trash they actually are. Glory hallelujah indeed.
In a recent post following the Iowa Board of Regents meetings two weeks ago, we noted that the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, not only ordered an aggressive construction moratorium in response to a $5.5M deappropriation by the state, but he also unexpectedly announced that he would be closing multiple “centers and institutes” on the UI campus. Harreld’s justification for summarily destroying the academic and professional legacies of faculty and staff at Iowa is that there has been a “generational disinvestment” in higher education in the state. In reality, however, and as noted in multiple prior posts, the University of Iowa will be net-ahead $34M this coming academic year, as compared to the 2015-2016 academic year, which is when Harreld took office.
Harreld’s construction moratorium will, at minimum, produce the necessary $5.5M in relief for the current budget year — if not considerably more, which Harreld can then put to use at his sole discretion. Despite multiple years of funding cuts and clawbacks, and despite Harreld’s incessant propaganda to the contrary, the University of Iowa is not otherwise facing a financial crisis, meaning Harreld’s sudden decision to turn on the UI faculty can only been seen as an opportunistic and predatory act. Since he has not specified which programs are at risk, however, his announcement also leaves members of the UI community in limbo, wondering who will be victimized.
In order to have some sense of the specific programs that Harreld intends to kill off, our only recourse is to consider what Harreld has specifically said about his elective budgetary offensive, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that Harreld’s word has proven notoriously worthless. From the official presidential press release by the UI Office of Strategic Communication, which was posted online at 9:10 a.m. on 04/12/18 — meaning the morning of Harreld’s recent report to the regents:
Here the linkage between funding and program cuts seems clear enough. If the state of Iowa previously funded a center or institute (“previous state support”), but there is no longer any targeted funding for that program because of “generational disinvestment”, then the university will no longer support that center or institute. More broadly, if the state wants UI to do something which is not part of the “core educational, research, and scholarship mission of the university”, then the state should pay for it, and that seems fair. The obvious problem, of course, is that there is no clear line between what is and is not part of the core mission at UI.
For example, the University of Iowa routinely provides free student labor to itself and to third parties on the premise that students learn valuable skills while they are being exploited. Which is to say that administrative self-interest often plays as much or more of a role as any objective criteria in determining whether a given program or policy furthers the university’s core mission of “education, research and scholarship”. Simply by association with the school it would be impossible to exclude any center or institute from all of those categories, meaning the real deciding factor — which Harreld repeatedly stresses — is the budgetary bottom line.
Continuing from the UI press release:
One very big problem with Harreld’s insistence that “programs must now be reevaluated” in light of falling state support, is that while state funding has decreased over the short and long term, overall revenue at the University of Iowa has increased since Harreld took office. Despite repeated state funding cuts and mid-year clawbacks, Harreld markedly increased total UI revenue by pushing through four tuition hikes in less than two years. As a result, while UI has lost about $20M in annual state funding, it has gained more than $50M in new annual tuition revenue. (Put another way, instead of simply keeping pace with state cuts by raising tuition to compensate, for each one dollar cut by the state, Harreld has pilfered two and a half dollars from students and their families.)
Because it would be to his administrative disadvantage, Harreld is clearly not arguing a general point about total revenue, but is instead making a very specific case about which particular dollars are used to fund a given program. If a center or institute was specifically funded by the state, but is no longer funded by the state, then it could be axed. As to what Harreld’s reevaluation process will look like, or what other criteria might be used to “determine the long-term feasibility” of specific programs, we get this:
As noted in multiple prior posts, one of the J. Bruce Harreld’s favorite bureaucratic ploys is the legitimizing of future abuses of power by pointing to administrative processes that he previously corrupted. For example, in the above quote Harreld clearly links the survival of at-risk academic centers and institutes to the “new budget allocation model”. (What is more than a little odd, however, is that Harreld first rolled out his new budget model in the summer of 2016, yet here it is again, being rolled out with fanfare as we head into the summer of 2018.)
Particularly incongruous is Harreld’s assertion that central administration will drive the process of determining which centers and institutes are to be closed — “in conjunction with” faculty leaders and shared governance policies — and that the determining factor will be the new budget model. So what is this new model to which Harreld keeps referring? Fortuitously, we have that from Harreld himself, in the minutes from the 03/06/18 meeting of the UI Faculty Council:
Two points here. First, Harreld makes it sound as if colleges will now have a greater right of self-determination, but that is not what he said. The new model changes how money is allocated, but that has nothing to do with allowing or disallowing expenditures. Instead, all the new models says is that where all college revenue was previously pooled, then parceled back out by central administration, a minimum of 70% of the revenue generated by each college will now remain with that college.
In point of fact, when Harreld first rolled out his new budget model in the summer of 2016, he made clear — albeit in a slippery way — that central administration would retain the right to veto spending at any college if it did not align with the four ‘pillars’ or ‘filters’ of the UI Strategic Plan. What Harreld obscured, however, was that he himself imposed those filters on the planning process, precisely to give him final say over spending.
Second and relatedly, there is an obvious contradiction between Harreld’s assertions about the autonomy of the “new budget allocation model”, and his determination to drive the winnowing of centers and institutes which no longer receive state funding. At the beginning of March, the sham president of the University of Iowa stood before the UI Faculty Council and patiently explained that unlike in the past — when central administration dictated funding — his new allocation model gave colleges “greater control over their destinies”. A mere six weeks later, however, in the middle of April, Harreld suddenly announced that centers and institutes would be killed off if they were not directly supported by the state, meaning he himself was dictating the fates of those programs.
So which is it? Are colleges free to choose which centers and institutes to fund with their “collegiate revenue”, or does Harreld get to make that call? On the afternoon of 04/12/18 — meaning the same day that UI released Harreld’s presidential statement announcing impending program cuts — he spoke to the regents in his regularly scheduled report to the board. Here is what Harreld specifically had to say about the need to cut centers and institutes at Iowa. [You can hear the entire afternoon session here. Harreld begins speaking at 54:08, talks about program cuts at 1:01:40, and the following quote begins at 1:01:53.]
There is a lot here, so we will break it all down sentence by sentence.
This echoes the comments in the UI press release. If the state is no longer providing funding for specific programs, then whether or not those programs satisfy any aspect of UI’s core mission, they may be cut.
As regular readers know, Harreld is, at heart, a hostage-taking extortionist. Given the slightest pretext he has no compunction about using any campus constituency as a shield, even if, in doing so, he also blatantly contradicts himself. For example, in the quote above Harreld is clearly using the students as justification for any program cuts, yet his false advocacy is blatantly exposed by Harreld’s demand for a 41% increase in tuition over the next five years. (In that regard, Harreld explicitly hopes to use UI students to subsidize the cost of research metrics which please the AAU, even as those metrics have nothing to do with education.)
Although Harreld repeatedly states that programs which are no longer funded by the state may be cut, as a practical matter that linkage could mean very few centers or institutes are on the chopping block. (Excluded would be programs that were never specifically funded by appropriations or state law.) It may even be that Harreld chose that linkage precisely because it allows him to get rid of one or more programs that he, his co-conspirators or minders want to destroy, while leaving the majority of programs alone. If no state money was specifically appropriated for a center or institute on the UI campus, who is to say whether any money that supported that program in the past came from state funds or from tuition? (The vast majority of revenue from those sources is pooled in the school’s general fund, and not specifically tied to particular programs.)
As just noted, not only is this not a given, but under the “new budget allocation model” it could be argued that affected colleges should make those decision themselves. Instead, here is Harreld asserting not only that the new “budget model” dictates the opposite, but he also omits any pretense of a discussion “in conjunction with academic leadership and shared governance”, and simply asserts that cuts “must” be made.
As if determined to outdo himself, here Harreld’s incoherence is pure. The new UI budget model relates to allocations, not expenditures, meaning it has no applicability to the issue that Harreld is talking about. Moreover, Harreld already stated that programs will be identified by comparing prior state funding to current state funding, meaning, again, that the UI budget model is entirely superfluous. Of considerably greater concern, however, is that once again Harreld casts these cuts as imperative. Instead of talking about a deliberate process, as he did in the press release posted for the UI community only a few hours earlier, in front of the board he states that cuts must be made “quickly”, and the obvious question is why.
Given Harreld’s explicit linkage between prior and current state funding, his impatience is even more confusing because on the day that he spoke before the board, the governor and legislative leadership were still hammering out the state budget. Meaning specific appropriations had not yet been locked down for the coming fiscal and academic years, which both begin on July 1st. While Harreld certainly has some idea of what to expect, until the final state budget is approved he clearly cannot begin having discussions “in conjunction with academic leadership and shared governance”, let alone make any cuts using his stated criteria.
Here Harreld acknowledges that what he is saying to the board will destabilize “our community” — meaning the University of Iowa campus — and it’s hard not to think that may be his objective. Knock the faculty off balance, make them fret, then do a little horsetrading for concessions that he’s been looking for. On the other hand, because the FY19 budget is still in flux, Harreld also opens the door for the governor and state legislators to do the same thing, using his words against him.
Having falsely associated any future program cuts with the new budget model, Harreld then does the same thing with the UI Strategic Plan. In fact, in keeping with his practice of using one rigged process to legitimize another, he literally reminds the board that everyone approved the new strategic plan, as if that then obligates the UI community accept whatever program cuts he dictates. Apart from that ludicrous linkage, the idea that everyone agreed on the strategic plan it itself nonsense, because that plan was generated in a relative rush after Harreld initially tired to jam the entire process through in a matter of weeks. Even at that, however, the specifics of the UI Strategic Plan would actually suggest that programs which are no longer funded by the state should continue to be funded by the school if they meet any of the tests of the strategic plan — which do overlap the core mission of UI.
Specifically, the three main objectives of the UI Strategic Plan — which you can read here — are research and discovery, student success, and engagement — not economic development, as Harreld stated before the board. (Economic development is peripherally mentioned in the engagement section, but even there the focus is narrow: “Support the translation of intellectual work into applications to enhance economic development.”)
So what’s going on here? What prompted Harreld’s sudden need to gut programs? I ask because I cannot find a single precursor — not in the meeting minutes of the Faculty Council or Faculty Senate, not in press releases from the Office of Strategic Communications, and not in the news. One minute Harreld is faced with a short-term funding problem and program cuts are not on the table, the next minute he implements a construction moratorium to solve the short-term problem, while proposing program cuts to solve a long-term problem that does not exist. (Again, although state funding has dropped, overall revenue at the University of Iowa is net-ahead at least $34M since Harreld took office in 2015.)
While Harreld is incensed that student tuition would ever be used to subsidize state programs, he has no problem subsidizing for-profit research with a 41% tuition hike over five years, on top of the 15% increase he has already imposed. That covert entrepreneurial agenda is in fact almost certainly why he was jammed into office by a small cabal of co-conspirators, and in that sense state cuts and clawbacks have eaten into his expected gains from four tuition hikes in less than two years. Another way for Harreld to raise unrestricted venture capital, then, would be to cut programs as quickly as possible and divert all of that liberated revenue to fund the sexy stuff he came for, instead of more boring academic research.
As to the specific support criteria that Harreld laid out, there are two programs of note on the UI campus that could fail his test, depending on what the legislature does this year. First, there is a UI center which both the legislature and one of Harreld’s co-conspirators took a run at over the past few years, and that center is already scheduled to be defunded in 2022. Second, there is another center which would seem to have Harreld’s blessing while also being excluded from his stated criteria, yet only last year the legislature also tried to defund that center. Now, however, because Harreld shot his mouth off before the FY19 budget was finalized, he actually made it possible for the governor or legislature to force him to cut both programs, using his own criteria against him. (Business genius at work.)
The Center for Global & Regional Environmental Research
Back in 2011, shortly after Terry ‘Butcher’ Branstad began his second run as Iowa’s governor-for-life, he set about populating the state bureaucracy with crony appointees. Tops on Branstad’s list was paying back mega-donor Bruce Rastetter for the bags of cash that Rastetter contributed to his campaign: first by appointing Rastetter to the Board of Regents, then by bulldozing the leadership of the board out of the way, which allowed Rastetter himself to eventually become president. The crony who served as president in the interim, and taught Rastetter the ropes, was Craig Lang, who is currently a candidate for Iowa secretary of agriculture.
From Jessica Opoien at Iowa State Daily, on 06/12/11:
In 2013, while serving as president pro tem under Lang, Rastetter sent a snotty note to then-UI President Sally Mason, requesting the opportunity to set a UI professor straight on the ethanol industry. From the DI Editorial Board, on 02/21/13:
Among other responsibilities on campus, Jerry Schnoor is co-director of the University of Iowa Center for Global & Regional Environmental Research (CGRER). The CGRER was originally funded decades ago — along with the Iowa Energy Center at Iowa State — by an “assessment of 1/10th of one percent of the total gross operating revenues of all Iowa gas and electric utilities each calendar year.” Because the CGRER and IEC were committed to providing objective information, they were of course despised by the energy industry, which heavily backed Branstad. That included former ethanol executive Bruce Rastetter, who — in his volunteer capacity as an Iowa regent — requested an opportunity to educate the “uninformed” Schoor about all of the great things that the ethanol industry was doing to Iowa’s groundwater. (Three months later, Rastetter was elected president of the Board of Regents.)
In further appreciation for the energy industry’s ongoing devotion to his political machine, in early 2015, after a bit of backroom dealing and political subterfuge, Branstad appointed former state representative Geri Huser to chair the three-person Iowa Utilities Board. Around that same time, Rastetter kicked off the corrupt 2015 presidential search at the University of Iowa, which culminated in early September in the shocking appointment of former business executive J. Bruce Harreld, who took office on November 2nd. Because the funding for UI’s CGRER and ISU’s IEC was provided by state law, as opposed to recurrent appropriations, Branstad and his crony appointees could not preclude those academic centers from being supported, even with crony presidents installed at each school. Fortunately, because Geri Huser proved to be exactly the kind of bureaucratic trash that Branstad had a talent for promoting, she did not let the law stand in her way. Less than a year after being appointed chair of the Iowa Utilities Board, Huser simply refused to pass along funding to the CGRER and IEC, as required by state law.
From the AP’s Ryan Foley, on 11/17/15:
Husler’s power play lasted only a few days, as reported by Foley on 11/23/15:
Of the $5.1M that was split between the two programs, the lion’s share — more than $4M — went to the IEC, while around $750K went to the CGRER. In March of 2016 Huser defended her actions, but acknowledged that perhaps she had overstepped her authority. Several months later, however, the director of the Iowa Energy Center announced his resignation, citing interference by the state and the energy industry. Huser went on to distinguish herself in 2017 both by running a lucrative side business while working full-time for the state, and by blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars remodeling a six-year-old state building in the middle of a budget shortfall.
Also in 2017, the Republican Party — which by that time controlled the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the Iowa statehouse — unveiled a plan to kill off any state funding for the IEC and CGRER. From the AP’s Foley and Barbara Rodriguez, on 04/13/17:
The name of the “sustainable agriculture research center” at Iowa State was the Leopold Center. Unfortunately, using a collapse in the state budget that they themselves precipitated as a pretext, former-governor Branstad and his legislative jackals cut the center’s appropriations, consigning it to bureaucratic purgatory. Although at the last minute Branstad technically vetoed the legislature’s decision to kill the Leopold Center outright, he did so in a deeply cynical way, with no funding, meaning it continues to exist largely in name only.
As for the Iowa Energy Center, in early 2017 the Iowa Board of Regents hired Kristin Failor as ISU’s new state relations officer (SRO) — a sanitized title for a job which is part lobbyist and part regent spy. Reflecting both her real duties and loyalties, Failor then immediately set to work selling out the Iowa Energy Center at Iowa State. From the AP’s Foley on 07/03/17:
By the end of 2017, as an objective source of knowledge and research the IEC was effectively dead. From the Des Moines Register’s Kevin Hardy on 10/31/17:
The upshot of all of those attacks and machinations was that by transferring the IEC to the IEDA, not only did Branstad kill off a source of information which countered propaganda from the energy industry, but the governor’s office — with the traitorous assistance of a Board of Regents employee, no less — took more than $4M in funding from Iowa State University. As if that wasn’t enough, in May of 2017 Branstad also signed Senate File 513, which included a sunset provision for IEC and CGRER funding — meaning the money for both centers will run dry in 2022. (On that same day, Branstad signed his unfunded veto of the Leopold Center, leaving it moribund.)
As for the Center for Global & Regional Environmental Research at UI, it would seem to be exempt from the criteria that Harreld laid out two weeks ago, because its funding is currently assured through 2021. On the other hand, because Harreld just laid out the criteria by which he will be cutting centers and institutes, all the legislature has to do is change the sunset provision to the current budget year (FY18), and the CGRER would meet that criteria. While killing off the research from that center would benefit the energy industry, in terms of taxpayer dollars the total savings would only be about $750K per year. In terms of economic impact, however — or economic development — that minimal savings would clearly be shortsighted. From the CGRER 2017 annual report [p. 14]:
The CGRER meets all three of Harreld’s tests for relevance to UI’s core mission — research, education and economic development — yet the only real factor that Harreld seems to be weighing is whether or not a center or institute is funded by the state. Because the governor and legislature are currently hammering out both the FY19 budget and an aggressive slate of tax cuts, they may not only change the sunset date for the CGRER, they could get rid of the assessment for the CGRER and IEC altogether. In any event, because Harreld prematurely announced his criteria for killing off programs, he opened the door for the state’s politicians to compel him to cut programs he might prefer to keep. And as it turns out, there is one center on the UI campus that the state legislature tried to defund just last year.
The Iowa Flood Center
In the section above, four different academic centers were targeted by the state for closure or castration. The Iowa Energy Center, and its $4M+ budget, was moved from ISU to the Iowa Economic Development Authority, so knowledge production that benefits all would cease, and corporate interests would prevail. The Leopold Center, also at Iowa State, was preserved in name only after its budget was gutted. The Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research, although still receiving state appropriations at UI, will lose its funding in 2022 — meaning according to Harreld’s current criteria, it would then be slated for termination as well.
The fourth center — the Iowa Flood Center, at the University of Iowa — is the youngest of the four programs, and many Iowa alums will remember its origins. In 2008, both the university and its host community of Iowa City suffered from flooding along the Iowa River, which bisects both the campus and town. Not only were a number of homes and businesses inundated, but for the university in particular the losses proved catastrophic, with the recovery process extending more than a decade to present day. (Most of the UI buildings that were damaged have been replaced, but the new UI Museum of Art is still awaiting construction. Because of Harreld’s moratorium, that project will now be idle for at least another five months.)
Because of the local flooding in 2008, and flood damage around the state in prior years, the University of Iowa launched the Iowa Flood Center (IFC). The IFC is in turn part of a larger center called IIHR–Hydroscience and Engineering, which is based in the UI College of Engineering. (IIHR used to stand for ‘Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research’, but apparently the branding sweet spot changed.)
From the About / Background page on the IFC website:
Flash forward six years, and Larry Weber found himself on the 2015 UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee, which famously went on to nominate three fully qualified candidates, and former Purdue engineer and private-sector business executive J. Bruce Harreld. When Harreld was subsequently appointed as a result of a rigged election by the Board of Regents, Weber was one of his earliest faculty supporters and enablers. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 09/03/15 — literally the day of Harreld’s scandalous appointment:
While Weber was all about thinking outside the box after Harreld was appointed, and perhaps even during the cutdown process that facilitated Harreld’s nomination, during the earliest stages of the search he was a real stickler. As noted in a post comment referencing the minutes to an early meeting of the search committee:
After Harreld took office, Weber served as co-chair of an equally infamous Faculty Senate Working Group. That group furthered a dubious charge from regents president Rastetter — who was also one of Harreld’s co-conspirators — by creating a pseudo-academic ‘white paper‘ which purportedly explained how Iowa could game its college rank, and in so doing elevate itself to “top-tier” status as a research university. (Although the white paper was never publicly released, and was subsequently scrubbed from the UI Faculty Senate website, Harreld integrated the idea of gaming Iowa’s national college rank into both the new UI budget allocation model and the new UI Strategic Plan.)
Following that project, Weber and the Iowa Flood Center honored Harreld with an open house, which was in fact part of Harreld’s self-directed two-week installation as emperor of UI. Unfortunately, however, the mutual admiration society between Harreld and Weber did not extend to the state capital in Des Moines. Instead, just a little over a year ago the legislature tried to axe the IFC during the first of the state’s back-to-back budget shortfalls.
From the Gazette’s Erin Jordan, on 04/11/17:
Note again the false economy of such a cut, given the amount of economic activity generated by the Iowa Flood Center:
From the Des Moines Register’s William Petroski, also on 04/11/17:
Whether UI and ISU got a heads-up about the proposed cuts or not, reaction was swift. While Iowa State was ultimately unable to save the funding for the Leopold Center, the Flood Center seemed to be another story. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 04/12/17:
As to where that $1.2M came from, however, the devil was in the details. From the Des Moines Register’s Brianne Pfannenstiel, also on 04/12/17:
So along with a $300K cut in total funding, the $1.2M that was approved for the UI Flood Center included almost $1M from the university’s own budget — meaning it was effectively a forced reduction. Either UI ponied up the majority of the money itself, or the IFC would die. Thankfully the university did not oppose the state’s filching, but that prompts an obvious question. If UI is providing most of the Flood Center funding from its own shrinking appropriations, doesn’t that mean it also fails the test that Harreld just laid out in front of the Board of Regents?
Harreld can certainly say that the Flood Center is educational, and it obviously generates research, and it clearly seems to be of economic benefit — even if only in mitigating loss of life and property, which the governor and legislature clearly care nothing about — but what institute or center at UI would not meet one or more of those tests? Again, the only meaningful test that Harreld seems to have put forward is whether a given program is state funded or not, and the Flood Center is largely not.
The Incoherence of Harreld’s Policy Position
As startled as Larry Weber would probably be to discover that J. Bruce Harreld was axing the Flood Center — or at least killing off 75% of its funding — the governor and legislature could force Harreld’s hand by removing its dedicated appropriation from the state budget. Even if the money stayed the same, the fact that the state was no longer insisting on the program via a restricted appropriation would mean the program failed the test that Harreld laid out, prompting its demise. All of which brings us to a larger point about Harreld’s plan, which is that it is incoherent.
If we stick with the most likely explanation, we end up with Harreld proposing a hard a fast rule without thinking through the obvious ramifications. It is unlikely that he will cut the Flood Center — not necessarily because he believes in it, but because he needs Weber’s faculty support — yet retaining the Flood Center will clearly undercuts any justification he cites for killing off other programs. (In her proposed FY19 budget at the beginning of the year, Casino Kim had $1.19M penciled in for the Flood Center — see p. 15.)
Underscoring the incoherence of Harreld’s plan to cut centers and institutes, we have a report yesterday in U.S. News from Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 04/24/18, about a program to help Iowa prisoners earn credit toward a college degree. While laudable in every regard, and almost certainly cost-effective over the long term, as with every other expenditure at the University of Iowa, the most important question is who will pay for it now and in the future.
While this program does not seem to be attached to or constitute a UI center or institute, it is not only possible that it is subsidized by student tuition, but the cost is clearly being born by the University of Iowa — both directly and indirectly. How will Harreld justify cutting centers and institutes while simultaneously allowing programs like this to go forward? As to why the state refuses to fund programs that are clearly useful to its own citizens — including Iowa’s farmers, as in the case of the Leopold Center — we have that from the Register’s Kathie Obradovich, on 04/17/17:
As regular readers know, Pat Grassley is every bit the opportunistic weasel that Harreld is, but that also speaks to a larger point. When it comes to what does and does not get funding — whether at the state or university level — more and more the only relevant criterion seems to be whether a crony fat-cat or business interest wants a program to continue. In fact, however, that has always been a concern in Iowa, which is precisely why Pat Grassley lied about the origins of the Leopold Center while gleefully driving a stake through its heart.
The truth is, between university presidents like Harreld, legislators like Grassley and governors like Reynolds, there isn’t any difference. They all want to direct as much state money as possible to private industry, while paying lip service to everything from education the healthcare to public safety. In that context, it will be more than a little interesting to see what happens with the state budget and tax plan in the coming weeks, and which programs Harreld then targets for elimination. Whether the CGRER and Flood Center escape unscathed, are scathed, or end up on the chopping block, Harreld has made it clear that he intends to make significant cuts in short order. That those cuts will be inherently incoherent is not a problem.
Update 05/01/18: As reported by the Gazette’s Vanessa Williams, Harreld is killing off the 70-year-old Institute of Public Affairs at UI.
Over the past few weeks we have looked at a number of issues following from the Iowa Board of Regents meetings in early April. The announcement by fraudulently appointed University of Iowa president J. Bruce Harreld, that he would be aggressively cutting institutes and centers on the UI campus, was not only unexpected, but on closer inspection also proved to be completely incoherent. Regent Larry McKibben’s full-on broadside against Governor Kim Reynolds and the state legislature was also unexpected, but welcome, and perhaps finally signals an awareness on the part of the board that they have no allies in state leadership.
The big news, of course, was the first reading of yet another tuition hike. When it is finalized in June, that will mark the fourth tuition increase in less than two years, putting the University of Iowa net-ahead a minimum of $34M as compared to the end of 2015-2016 academic year, when Harreld was hired. In just the past few days, the state legislature — which is grinding out the FY19 budget, along with massive tax-cuts that the state cannot afford — has also hinted that it may increase regent appropriations more than $8M, although specific appropriations for each school were not detailed.
Throw in a construction moratorium on the UI campus for the next five months, and although the financial picture at the University of Iowa is clearly not ideal, overall the school is not in crisis. Even as Harreld persistently rails that the university is critically underfunded by the state — and it is — he refuses to acknowledge that for every dollar cut by the state over the past two years, he has taken more than two and a half dollars from the bank accounts of students and their families. Instead, Harreld continues to harp only a state funding instead of total revenue, because that aids his argument for an additional 41% increase in tuition over the next five years. (Money that would, in large part, subsidize for-profit entrepreneurial ventures at the university, as opposed to improving the education for which students are paying.)
One major component of the University of Iowa which receives regular attention at regent meetings, as well as consistent press coverage throughout the year, is the collective medical megalopolis known as UI Healthcare, which includes University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC), the UI College of Medicine, and UI Physicians. For all of the collective reporting, however, precisely because UI Healthcare is dominated by patient services and professional training — as opposed to large-scale educational concerns like those at UI proper — stories tend focus on facets of UI Healthcare as opposed to the big picture. That in turn obscures the fact that UIHC and the UI College of Medicine are, effectively, a fourth and largely separate campus under the auspices of the Board of Regents.
From the UI Operations Manual:
Precisely because UIHC and its attendant medical college are a massive operation unto themselves, and involve exacting regulatory requirements which have no analogue on the main campus, that facet of the university is governed by its own specialized administrative staff. The president of the university is still the top dog, but in terms of management and day-to-day operations, that is largely left to the CEO of the hospital, in collaboration with the UI Vice President for Medical Affairs (VPMA). In normal administrative circumstances that division of responsibilities is particularly useful because the president of the University of Iowa — like most college and university presidents — tends to be a creature of academe, not medical practice.
As regular readers know, however, and as most readers are probably aware, the current illegitimate president at UI is not an academic. Instead, he is a former business executive who spent the bulk of his working life in the private sector. Although Harreld did spend a few years teaching at Northwestern, and later, another six years teaching at the Harvard School of Business in semi-retirement, he had no experience in academic administration or the public sector when he was hired at UI. That lack of relevant experience was not only remarkable in itself, but particularly so given that the purported rationale for his ‘non-traditional appointment included specific concerns about issues at UIHC.
As regular readers also know, no one was more central to the abuses of power that led to Harreld’s sham hire than former VPMA Jean Robillard, who not only served as the chair of the search committee, but was the interim UI president during the final critical month of the search. It was Robillard who invited Harreld to speak to dozens of assembled bigwigs at UIHC, while simultaneously arranging for Harreld’s wife to get a tour of the campus over which she and her husband would soon preside. In fact, Robillard not only chauffeured the couple from the Eastern Iowa Airport to the UI campus himself, but he arranged for a catered “VIP Lunch” after Harreld’s presentation, during which Harreld met with three other members of the search committee, including then-regents president Bruce Rastetter. From Eric Kelderman, writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, on 09/14/15:
As we now know, of course, Robillard was lying when he said he did not recall how he came to learn about Harreld. He was informed about, if not introduced to Harreld personally, by fellow search committee member Jerre Stead, who also happened to be Harreld’s long-time mentor in the business world. Importantly, Robillard then actively pursued Harreld’s expertise, based in large part on Harreld’s professed success at ‘proactive punctuated change’ and ‘strategic renewal’ during his years at IBM. On multiple occasions, Robillard — who would also make himself dean of the UI College of Medicine only three months after Harreld took office — defended Harreld’s appointment because of Harreld’s real-world experience in the private sector. Even before Harreld applied for the job, but after Harreld was put in play for the presidency by Stead and Rastetter, Robillard expressed a telling preference for a CEO-type:
Although Harreld was never actually the CEO of anything, he was apparently the best that Jerre Stead could dredge up on short notice, so Harreld it was. Despite a thin, tattered and falsified resume, Harreld passed through the crony-dominated search committee with flying colors, and in early September of 2015 was elected by the corrupt Board of Regents. All because of his purported business genius, particularly during transformational and strategic crises.
We get confirmation that Robillard and Harreld talked, and that Robillard was specifically interested in Harreld’s ideas in the context of UIHC, from Harreld himself, the day before he took office. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 11/01/15:
In reality, Robillard’s cheerleading on Harreld’s behalf before, during and after the search was part and parcel of a single protracted lie. Not only did Robillard, Rastetter and Stead perpetrate a fraud in terms of the mechanics of Harreld’s hire, they perpetrated a fraud regarding the basis for Harreld’s hire, and no one more so than Robillard. And we know that to a certainty because of this, from a related report by Charis-Carlson on 11/01/15 — again the day before Harreld took office:
As we now know from multiple reports over the past two and a half years, there are major problems at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, and those issues may compel UIHC to entertain a private-sector partner to remain solvent. That it has come to this is the result of a number of factors, chief among them hubris and incompetence, which in turn reveals the degree to which Harreld is completely unequipped to take the reins of any institution in a crisis, let alone the one he now leads. If you have not heard much about this looming threat that is not so much a fault with the reporting as it is that news about UI Healthcare tends to fragment across multiple beats. One story may have to do with patients and medicine, another may concern UIHC as a research facility, and yet another may be about contract negotiations or labor relations. They’re all facets of the same larger story having to do with UI Healthcare, but it is easy to lose track of that medical forest for the reportorial trees.
While a number of good local reporters have written stories about UIHC over the past two and a half years, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller has done an excellent job of reporting on UI Healthcare in context. And as Miller’s reporting makes clear, that context shows a decided slide over time, with UIHC suffering as a result of legislation, market forces and mismanagement. Despite being a massive state-run hospital, and having no real competition, UIHC find itself in a difficult position with few good options going forward, and that may be the biggest story of all.
On September 1st of 2015, two days before Harreld’s sham hire, the Board of Regents announced that the new UI Children’s Hospital, which was still under construction, had blown through its costs projections by $70M, or 27%. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 09/01/15:
As it turned out, additional delays pushed the opening of the new children’s hospital back another four months, but even then it was still under construction when the first clinics opened. Despite the overruns and blown schedule, however, that did not stop someone from ordering fake construction for an open house in November of 2016, only to then have the false fronts ripped out so the real work could continue. (Proving yet again that Harreld was not hired for his business genius, he chastised hospital administration for committing to a specific opening date, then blew his own projected date range by months. And no, you cannot make this stuff up.)
Only weeks after Harreld took office in early November of 2015, Robillard, Rastetter and Harreld conspired to name the new children’s hospital after Jerre Stead — although they kept that plan secret until the last possible minute. Two months later, Robillard decided he wanted to also be the dean of the College of Medicine, so he simply kicked the current dean to the curb and hired himself without prior regents approval.
A little over a year after Robillard, Rastetter and Stead jammed Harreld into office, and ten months after Harreld took the reins, UIHC announced record revenues:
And yet, warning signs were also readily apparent:
Three weeks later, Jean Robillard — serving then as both UI VPMA and dean of the College of Medicine — announced that he would be stepping down as soon as his replacement was hired. A pediatric nephrologist by profession, Robillard would remain on staff at the new children’s hospital, and by most accounts seemed to be leaving his dual leadership positions on a high note:
After almost immediately empaneling a committee, however, the search process slipped into a state of torpor for six months. In the interim, and with no warning, in early 2017 the radicalized, far-right Iowa legislature decided to gut the state’s long-standing collective bargaining laws for public sector unions. Among the affected citizens were employees at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, who were suddenly left defenseless in the middle of contract negotiations. What was the bane of the workers, however, was bounty for UIHC’s bottom line.
In April of 2017, however, UIHC began reporting problems with the state’s privatization of Medicaid, which was imposed earlier by former governor Terry ‘Butcher’ Branstad, and current governor ‘Casino’ Kim Reynolds:
In June of 2017, the Gazette’s Miller filed a story headlined, “UI Health Care reported lagging revenue due to the children’s hospital delay”:
Toward the end of June, Miller also reported on an increased need for ‘traveling nurses‘ at UIHC, despite the much more favorable employment picture:
Miller also noted the role that the UI College of Nursing could be and should be playing in solving the perpetual nursing shortage in Iowa:
The obvious solution would be to expand the capacity to educate nurses at UI, both for the benefit of the university and of the state, which has a large and growing population of elderly. As ever on the UI campus, however, nursing gets short shrift, while the doctor-centric leadership of UI Healthcare drives resources to doctor-friendly concerns. (Nursing could be a true economic engine at UI, but when it comes to female-dominated professions, even entrepreneurial males lapse into the latent sexism that has long marginalized that under-served profession.)
In August of 2017, Miller reported on UIHC’s continued excellent local standing, but sliding national rankings:
In September of 2017, Miller reported shocking news:
Once again the state’s decision to privatize Medicaid loomed large:
Having finally reawakened in the summer of 2017, the search committee that was empaneled to hire Robillard’s replacement eventually identified two candidates for the dual roles of VPMA and dean of the College of Medicine. In October of 2017 — meaning more than a year after Robillard announced that he would step down — J. Brooks Jackson was hired to replace him. (More on Jackson here.)
In January of 2018, UIHC CEO Ken Kates announced that he would be retiring this summer, although a firm date has not been set. A month later the search for a new Chief Nursing Officer — which began in August of 2016, and blew through $140K in search costs with no appointment — finally concluded with the appointment of the person who had been serving in that capacity on an interim basis for a year and a half. As to how a prestigious hospital like UIHC failed to attract excellent candidates to that position, the sudden change in collective bargaining laws, along with the general disinterest in anything having to do with nursing, likely played a part. (This is not to knock the individual who was ultimately appointed. She clearly demonstrated she can do the work, and UIHC should count itself lucky that she was available and willing.)
In early March of 2018, UIHC dissolved an alliance “in face of ‘financial headwinds'”:
It is possible that UIHC was simply telling a sob story to get out of a deal that it no longer found beneficial, but all signs suggest administrators were telling the truth. There are big problems at UIHC, and later in the same article Miller pulled the critical context together:
Just one month ago Miller reported that UI was also on the hook for tens of millions of dollars more in conjunction with the mismanaged construction of the new children’s hospital:
After initially vowing to fight the additional charges, a little over a week later Miller reported that UI was looking to settle:
Whether Harreld stepped in for the benefit of the university, or simply to keep his mentor Jerre Stead from having his name dragged through the courts for a year or more, is unknown. (In the late spring of 2017, Harreld settled two sexual discrimination lawsuits for $6.5M, after first losing one in court. That settlement kept the UI Athletics Department, and Harreld’s best buddy on campus — UI AD Gary Barta — from being a well-deserved punching bag in the press through the long summer.)
In any event, as Miller noted, more than two and a half years after the last construction estimate was released by the Iowa Board of Regents, the cost of the new children’s hospital continues to grow. At the two-day regent meetings earlier this month there were no overt shell shocks about UI Healthcare, but worrisome trends continued. On the faculty resignations front, last year marked the third straight year of elevated resignations among clinical faculty, as compared to the rest of the previous decade. (More on faculty resignations toward the end of this post.)
Also easily overlooked at the regent meetings was the degree to which UIHC has fallen behind in its audited reports [p. 5], some of which are now a year or more past due, after having already been extended. Shortly after the meetings concluded, Miller reported on the construction moratorium that Harreld decreed, in order to refund $5.5M to the state for the current fiscal year. From that report:
There are a lot of factors involved in this reversal of fortunes, but that also means there are a lot of excuses that can be made to avoid accountability for what is, objectively, a mess, and may well end up a disaster for the university. Central to the current issues that UIHC is facing, objectively, is failed management — largely but not solely on the part of Jean Robillard. From a report by Miller ten days ago, on one of Robillard’s satellite UI clinics:
Despite massive differences in scale between the new children’s hospital and the clinic, similarities in terms of execution — including sloppy management and cost overruns — were more than coincidental. Clearly the big shots at UI Healthcare got very comfortable overbuilding and frittering away money on construction, and a big part of that was the self-indulgent method they routinely used for project management:
The Iowa Board of Regents tends to favor design-build contracts, which are ripe for crony corruption and cost overruns. In response, state legislators this year passed a law that requires competitive bids for state projects – though the regents will almost certainly appeal for waivers at every opportunity.
On a strategic level, by aggressively expanding across Iowa City and Johnson County, UI Healthcare bought itself a bigger share of a healthcare market that was crippled by the privatization of Medicaid under Branstad and Reynolds. To that debacle we can also now add two straight years of budget shortfalls, which Reynolds and the legislature have taken as a signal to enact massive tax cuts which will strip hundreds of millions of dollars from the state budget going forward.
In that context, it is worth noting that the first order of business at UI Healthcare, every damn day, should be managing for stability, and that includes minimizing risk. Instead, the egomaniacs in charge fell in love with growth as a strategy, and the result is that the medical campus is now in peril. If the university can hold on long enough to get out from under the debt and start-up costs for the children’s hospital, that will certainly help, but even that will require leadership that J. Bruce Harreld cannot deliver. Instead of aggressively countering the failed vision that got UIHC into this mess in the first place, he is obligated to protect the reputations of the cronies who put him into office — and his scandalously errant judgement the day before he took office only underscores that complicity:
In the previous post we discussed Harreld’s farcical concern that student tuition might be used to subsidize campus programs that the state is no longer funding, even as Harreld intends to use all the tuition he can get to subsidize for-profit entrepreneurial ventures at UI. While we often hear that the academic and athletics ledgers are separate at the University of Iowa, what is not clear is how much money Harreld can slosh — or has already sloshed — over to the medical campus, to cover any losses. (That need may also factor into Harreld’s desire to increase tuition another 41%.)
The trends at UI Healthcare are bad and the gaps in reported information are growing. Only a very few people at UI and at the Board of Regents have a clear understanding of just how much trouble UIHC is in, and what it is going to take to solve that problem. What we can say is that the financial picture for the state is murky at best, but we only have to look at the wreckage in Kansas to see how bad things can get. If the mismanagement at UI Healthcare means UIHC will have to partner with, or be sold off to, a private company, the damage to the reputation and standing of the University of Iowa will be permanent and severe.
That such decisions are now in the hands of a man who is a toady to the very people who caused these problems, it not also a proxy for private-sector cronies who would love nothing more than to buy UIHC on the cheap, suggests that the decisions which are ultimately made will not be in the best interests of the university or the people of Iowa. At the very least, any such proposals must be fully vetted and reported to the public, preferably by a third party removed from the same Board of Regents that saw fit to employ all of these fools. If a sale does go through, the next order of business will be making sure that neither Robillard, Rastetter, Stead, Harreld nor any member of the corrupt Board of Regents personally profits from a deal that they effectively compelled.
Not to mention these ridiculous screw-ups:
1. Prior to Kates was CEO Donna Katen-Bahensky, who was demoted. Later she left to the Univ Wisconsin Hospitals, with a 700,000-800,000 settlement from the UIHC.
2. The College of Medicine hired Debra A. Schwinn, MD, as Dean in 2012, at great expense. In 2016, Robillard took the position away from her and made himself Dean. That initiated another search, again at great expense.
3. The new Children’s Hospital is always half full or if you are a pessimist half empty. Pediatrics is so dysfunctional they cannot recruit physicians or patients. (Kinda like the Chair of Pediatrics left for KC because Kates took away his title as head of Childrens Hospital.)
4. There are any number of dishonest, unethical, and lying administrators/leaders running around there. Constant mistakes, screw-ups and errors leading to millions of waste (that are never disclosed).
It is a corporate culture, only a stupid, self-destructive, political, Game of Thrones, corporate bumbling pit. Unethical. Vulnerable to all kinds of ethics violations.
The lineage of the current debacle is clear. Michael Gartner imagines himself an infallible judge of character, appoints Gary Fethke interim UI president. Fethke imagines himself an infallible judge of character, appoints Robillard VPMA for life. Granted unchecked power, Robillard comes to believe that he is the center of the UI universe, helps Stead and Rastetter fraudulently appoint Harreld as president.
The upshot?
More than a decade in which UIHC is run by people who weren’t elected and didn’t even have to apply for the jobs that they held. Throw in Harreld’s corrupt hire — which featured a rigged board election — and this vaunted group of entrepreneurially minded adventurists is nothing more than a bunch of good old boys passing power around like a beer bong.
UIHC should never have gotten to this, but here we are. Falling profits, massive debt, threats at every quarter, and still Harreld mans that ramparts to protect the rear flank of their failed collective legacy. Unless of course they really are trying to open the door to Wellmark buying up the university’s hospital on the cheap, at which point the question will be whether anyone involved has a profit percentage.
Dead on!
Meanwhile, the exodus of faculty and administrators continues unabated.
Ten days ago or so, on 04/26/18, an article was published on the University of Iowa’s Iowa Now website, titled New budget model increases collegiate control. Here are the first two paragraphs of that piece:
As to what a “generational decline in state support” has to do with the need for a “new” budget model, the answer is nothing. If the school needs a “new” budget model, then that model will impact total Gen-Ed Fund revenue, including tuition — not state funding alone. And of course, as detailed in endless prior posts, the University of Iowa is actually net-ahead in total revenue over the past two years, despite significant cuts in state appropriations. All of which again underscores the determination of fraudulently appointed president J. Bruce Harreld to tell unnecessary and easily disproved lies whenever possible.
Still, if you have not been paying attention to the serial deception which, appropriately, defines the administration of Iowa’s illegitimate president, the revelation that UI has a “new” budget model may strike you as mundane. The problem, however, as regular readers may recall, is that this is now the second “new” budget model that Harreld has introduced in the two and a half years since he took to his stolen office. And as it turns out, we don’t have to do a lot of detective work to prove that point.
News of Harreld’s “new” budget model first appeared in March of 2016, only five months after Harreld began punching the clock at $800K per year ($200K deferred). Clearly eager to impress his minders at the Iowa Board of Regents, Harreld — who had no prior experience in academic administration or the public sector — jumped in with both feet, bringing his vaunted private-sector experience to bear before he had any idea what he was actually doing. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/18/16:
One month later to the day, the university put out a press release touting Harreld’s “new” budget model. Not so coincidentally, you will find that posting listed as the top-most of two related articles on the right-hand side of the web page linked above. Titled UI embarking on collaborative budget process, that article was published on 04/18/16 — or just over two years ago. Here is the subhead and the first two paragraphs from that piece:
So in April of 2016 Harreld announced a new “values-based budget process”, then in April of 2018 — four weeks ago — the university also announced a “new budget model”. What’s going on here? Well, in the most recent announcement the university does try to connect the prior “new” model to the new “new” model:
As regular readers also know, those “values” were in themselves a sham, and largely reduced to the goal of gaming Iowa’s national college rank. In fact, in the Gazette article quoted above, that objective was explicitly noted, which is why Harreld then euphemized that goal in the intervening month. Likewise, rather than resulting from a collaborative process, Harreld’s four “values” were imposed on the faculty and staff, as were the conditions of the “new” budget model that was implemented a few months later in 2016.
Even the idea that the “new” 2016 budgeting model was collaborative in its implementation was a lie, and the university admitted as much in the body copy of its own press release:
As long as you got with the program, the “new” 2016 budget model was collaborative. If you objected to Harreld’s rigged “guiding principles”, however, then Harreld would simply deny permission to do what you wanted to do. From the point of view of the faculty and staff, it is not hard to imagine that there may have been some friction with Harreld’s “new” authoritarian model, which may in turn explain why the university is now unveiling a second “new” budget model just ahead of FY 2019.
From a prior post on the initial “new” budget model, titled J. Bruce Harreld and Collaborative Budgeting, on 05/11/16:
So Harreld launched a “new”, manipulative, punitive budget model in the spring of 2016, which he laughably labeled “collaborative”, then two years later, in the spring of 2018, the university announced yet another “new” budget model which is now being feebly portrayed as an evolution of the first “new” model. As to when that evolution took place, we could obviously speculate, but fortunately we don’t have to. Not only were changes made to Harreld’s budget model in the summer of 2017 (which marked the beginning of FY 2018), but we also know that another of Harreld’s whiz-bank initiatives had to be overhauled at about the same time.
From the 09/12/17 meeting minutes of the UI Faculty Senate:
It would be easy to blame Harreld for imposing an “unwieldy process” on the University of Iowa, but that’s actually the fault of the Iowa Board of Regents. If you hire someone with no relevant academic experience, and that person admits, up front, that they are going to need a lot of coaching and mentoring to even be marginally competent, it should not be a surprise that the entire campus would then have to help that person do their job — for no extra money, while also doing their own jobs. As to the “new” budget model in 2016, the new “new” budget model in 2018, and the likelihood that the UI community also had to coach and mentor Harreld on that topic in 2017, once again we don’t have to dig deep to find proof.
From the FY 2016 UI Budget Narrative, which was generated in the summer of 2015 — meaning prior to Harreld taking office in late fall of 2015:
From the FY 2017 UI Budget Narrative, which was prepared in the summer of 2016, and represents the first UI budget under Harreld’s control:
From the 2018 UI Budget Narrative, which was rolled out in the summer of 2017, and ends on June 30th of this year:
Note the key change between the description for the FY 2017 narrative and the FY 2018 narrative:
It is clear from the record that after Harreld rolled out his initial “new” budget model in 2016, for FY 2017, changes were made in 2017, for FY 2018 — just as changes were made to the Path Forward process at the same time. Now, however, heading into another budget year, we are not simply being updated about an evolution in Harreld’s “new” FY 2017 model, we are being told that the FY 2019 budget model will also be “new”.
Because Harreld would understandably not want to call attention to the administrative egg on his face, at the recent regent meetings in early April he elided the two “new” models into a single multi-year overhaul. As reported by the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux, on 04/12/18:
For Harreld, the model is now “fully implemented”. According to the official university budget narratives, however, what actually happened is that “additional components to the model were identified”. But again, you can see why a guy who has already earned $2M on a $4M contract might not want to point out that his big ideas keep failing.
As for Harreld being “very comfortable” with the university’s “current direction”, why wouldn’t he be? He keeps getting paid while others fix his mistakes. At which point he then takes credit, as usual.
A week ago tomorrow the Daily Iowan (DI) published a story by Marissa Payne which compared, contrasted and quoted the five surviving legitimately elected presidents of the University of Iowa, plus current sham president J. Bruce Harreld, whose appointment in 2015 was bureaucratic fraud. Three days later, on Thursday of last week, Harreld not only distinguished himself from those former UI presidents in spectacular fashion, but he made administrative history relative to any president the University of Iowa has ever had. Specifically, in order to avoid meeting with a group of UI faculty, Harreld publicly asserted that he was precluded from doing so because of potential legal liability.
The circumstance which prompted Harreld’s hysterical (in every sense of the word) pronouncement would not be surprising to any current college or university president. As state appropriations have fallen over time, the University of Iowa — like many other institutions of higher learning — has shifted more and more of the educational grunt work from tenured or tenure-track faculty to non-tenure-track faculty. For the most part, these non-tenure educators are hired to teach as opposed to also conducting scholarly research — much like faculty at comprehensive universities such as Northern Iowa, or at community colleges across the country.
While that shift has indeed led to savings in terms of total payroll at UI, increases in enrollment over the past few years, if not longer, have resulted in increased workloads for non-tenure-track faculty, with no significant increase in compensation. In short — and again, this is neither surprising nor unique — the University of Iowa is exploiting one class of largely invisible faculty while extolling the “world-class” virtues of tenured faculty stars. Not surprisingly, as a direct response to their working conditions, a little over three weeks ago a group of non-tenure faculty gathered on campus for a protest, then marched to the president’s office to deliver a letter.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 04/18/18:
As far as campus protests go, it was as tame as could possibly be imagined. In response, Harreld did what he always does when there is the slightest potential for bad press. He went into hiding.
As reported by the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux, also on 04/18/18:
As Miller and Breaux reported, the protest was organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), but non-tenure faculty at UI are not represented by that or any other union. In fact, while the SEIU is making a nationwide push to organize faculty on campuses across the country, in Iowa that initiative has little utility because of longstanding and recently passed legislation which is hostile to collective bargaining. From the Nation’s Jack Bittle, on 04/27/18:
The situation in Iowa has something else in common with those states, however, and that is the degree to which Iowa’s Republican governor and legislature have crippled the state economy over the past few years. Coming off two successive years of failed budgets, and having just gambled the state’s future on massive tax cuts which require impossibly optimistic revenue projections simply to break even, there is little money in the pipeline with which to increase salaries for anyone. Conversely, however, that also means non-tenure-track faculty have more bargaining power than they might otherwise, assuming they are willing to strike in unison whether represented by a union or not. If so, the university will not be able to deliver the education that its students are paying for. (It should also be noted that while money is tight, and appropriations have been cut over the past two years, Harreld has pushed through four tuition hikes over that same time frame. As a result, UI is net-ahead at least $34M in overall Gen-Ed Fund revenue compared to FY2016.)
As for the reality of being a non-tenure-track educator at Iowa, we get more on that from Iowa Public Radio’s coverage of the April 18 protest, by Kate Payne:
Two and a half weeks after the initial mid-April protest, non-tenure faculty once again tried to meet with Harreld. From a report by the Daily Iowan’s Brooklyn Draisey, published on 05/07/18 — meaning the same day Marissa Payne’s article appeared about the six living UI presidents:
Between the first protest, which Harreld avoided, and the second protest, which Harreld avoided, Harreld did everything possible to prevent the protesters from meeting with him. Continuing from Draisey’s report:
With the end of the semester in sight, it is not surprising that Harreld ordered his administrative lackeys to stall the protesters until next fall. Harreld’s assumption, apparently, was that he only had to hold out for a couple of weeks, at which point the campus would begin scattering for the summer. As it turns out, however, despite being paid an obscene amount of money to deftly handle such issues, that cynical calculus once again shows just how stupendously bad J. Bruce Harreld is at gauging and responding to situations on the UI campus. (More on the May 4th protest here, from Aimee Breaux.)
Befitting his past as a former business executive, Harreld has betrayed hostility toward organized labor and collective bargaining before — including lying to the UI community about the role of the AAUP on campus — so his determination to evade the non-tenure-track protesters is hardly surprising. Add in the fact that Harreld came to Iowa with no experience in academic administration or the public sector, and that his temperament is that of a pugnacious brat, and it should also not be surprising that Harreld has shown a persistent incapacity to act as a statesman or diplomat on behalf of the campus, community or state that pays his exorbitant salary. Speaking of which, and for context, the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents, which hired Harreld following a rigged search, not only gave him an unprecedented five-year deal on his first contract, they also gave him an unprecedented (for Iowa) $800K per year ($200K deferred). To that we can add full-time staff, an allowance for a car, free use of the UI Presidential Mansion, and other notable perks.
In Draisey’s 05/07/18 report, however, we also get Harreld’s purported rationale for not meeting with the protesters, and instead foisting them off on administrators who were instructed to give them the runaround.
Now, whatever your response is to Harreld’s claim that he could be charged with “tampering”, my immediate reaction was that Harreld is cracking up. Although I certainly do not know the ins and outs of labor law, the idea that Harreld — as the (fraudulent) president of the University of Iowa — could not meet, under any circumstances, with a group of unhappy faculty, strikes me as lunacy. That is, inherently, part of his job, yet Harreld was resolute in asserting that he would not meet with the non-tenure-track faculty protesters under any circumstance.
This is, in fact, how Harreld responds to situations that he does not like. First, he invalidates, and if that doesn’t work, he trolls and belittles. What is particularly amazing in this instance, however, is that meeting with faculty — including unhappy, disgruntled, cranky, even crazy faculty — is part of the job of any college or university president. And yet clearly Harreld believes he only has to do the parts of the job that appeal to him.
The entire DI interview with Harreld was published the following day, on Tuesday, 05/8/18. Here is Harreld’s full reply, in response to a question about the protesters:
Notwithstanding the sheer amount of bloviation, note Harreld’s immediate, instinctive response to the question from the DI:
This is who Harreld is as a man. A brat. A troll. A condescending, arrogant bully. How many opportunities did Harreld turn down to meet with the protesters and make his points clear in person? Instead, he hid out on multiple occasions, then declared in the campus paper that it was the protesters who were being intransigent.
As to following the proper process, Harreld’s first act only minutes after being appointed in 2015 was to tell a premeditated lie to cover for the co-conspirators who jammed him into office. That followed multiple secret meetings with members of the Iowa Board of Regents and members of the search committee, including the former president of the board and the chair of the search. You could not imagine a more corrupt process if you tried, yet here now is Harreld — the illegitimate spawn and enduring stain of that corruption — lecturing others on proper process.
As for meeting with the dean of CLAS, Harreld knows full well that the current CLAS dean is a lame duck who will officially be gone in a matter of weeks, but who has effectively been gone for months. Not only has an interim dean not been appointed — despite the fact that Harreld and interim provost Sue Curry had more than a year’s advance notice to do so — but the dean search that is just getting underway may not bear fruit for another year precisely because Curry and Harreld hope to profit administratively from that delay. To whom, then, does Harreld think non-tenure-track CLAS faculty should appeal? And of course the answer — as Harreld knew full well when he spoke to the DI — is no one.
Finally, we see Harreld’s previously reported comments about tampering, which he prefaced by belittling and invalidating the protesters for going through “the motions”, before adding, “let’s get some facts on it”. What Harreld omitted, of course, is that he could have conjured any relevant facts in an instant, and could have given those facts to the Daily Iowan between the date of his interview and publication. Unlike the protesters, not only does Harreld have access to all of the financial data at UI, but he has full-time professional staff at his beck and call, including a full-time CFO and a full-time accounting department. Harreld himself also holds an MBA — from Harvard no less — yet instead of producing the requisite information, he asserted to the UI community that it was the protesters who were falling down, when they had in fact put forward multiple damning data points about how they have been mistreated for years.
This instinct to belittle and trivialize was equally apparent when Harreld responded to the protests about his illegitimate hire in 2015 — by treating those protesters like children, despite his objective complicity in that fraud. Setting all that aside, however, and remembering that Harreld was hired in part because he was a purported genius at organizational strategy, it is also worth asking exactly what Harreld accomplished by treating the non-tenure-track protesters like second-class citizens. (In fact, Harreld’s repeated invalidation of the non-tenure protestors implicitly validates the basis for their spate of complaints.)
The very next day, on Wednesday, May 9th, at 8:30 in the morning — after being repeatedly ignored and invalidated by Harreld for weeks, only to then be trolled and misrepresented by Harreld in the campus paper — a group of non-tenure protesters went to the president’s office and began a peaceable sit-in. After three hours, still no Harreld. After six hours, still no Harreld. At seven hours, however, the narrative changed.
From Aimee Breaux’s Twitter account – with pics!
[Note especially the world-class burn about “going through the motions”.]
That last tweet was posted at 4:22 p.m., roughly eight hours after the sit-in started. From Breaux’s report later that afternoon, on 05/09/18:
From Paul Brennan at Little Village, on the evening of 05/09/18:
Now, whatever you thought when Harreld was whining about leaving himself opening to “tampering”, I am going to go out on a limb and speculate that it never occurred to you that he made that up. And yet, clearly, he was lying. (Actually, to be fair to Harreld, he is married to an attorney, so maybe he just asked the wrong lawyer and got bad advice.)
Fortunately, Harreld’s two senior advisers — who are paid handsome six-figure salaries to protect Harreld from reality, cover Harreld’s ass, and do Harreld’s job for him — apparently did not want to go on the record themselves in asserting that Harreld was legally precluded from meeting with the protesters. So they did what Harreld should have done weeks ago, which was call the UI Office of the General Counsel, which of course informed them that Harreld was an idiot and should not be listened to.
Continuing, from Brennan’s report:
From KCRG’s Forrest Saunders, late on 05/09/18:
The idea that Harreld had to be personally indemnified against litigation is preposterous on two fronts. First, in acting as the president of the University of Iowa — however incompetently — he is shielded by his status as an employee. We saw that clearly with regard to the abuse and discrimination that Athletic Director Gary Barta heaped on former Assistant AD Jane Meyer, which in turn led to a multi-million dollar settlement not against Barta, but against the university.
Second, you do not have to be an attorney to know that a “written agreement” is only binding on the parties who sign — so who signed this agreement? As previously noted, the protesters are not represented by any union, so they must have signed as individuals. If that’s the case, then any non-tenure-track UI faculty who were not signatories to that agreement would be free to pursue litigation at a later date, and the same would be true for any union or other legal entity which joined the cause down the road. In sum, the likelihood that any agreement between the parties who did sign would hold up in court, or, more importantly, actually prevent a lawsuit, is ridiculous. And yet, everyone apparently went along with this charade to get Harreld to the table.
The obvious question is why. Is this a manifestation of delusion, or did Harreld just get caught lying, so everyone agreed to give him a worthless document in order to help him save face? Either way, if this is what the state employees on the UI campus are doing every day — humoring a deluded or dishonest president by writing worthless legal agreements — it is obviously long past time for the Board of Regents to make a change.
Notably, other than talking with these particular campus constituents, Harreld does not seem to have the same concerns about legal exposure in environments which are equally fraught with risk, if not more so. For example, consider intercollegiate athletics, where the NCAA is not only facing multiple lawsuits, but looming liability and judgments from CTE will eventually kill off the sport of football. Does J. Bruce Harreld insist on written proof of indemnification against legal liability before he talks to athletes at UI? Likewise, what about sexual harassment or assault victims? Does Harreld force anyone who may bring a case against the school to personally indemnify him against future litigation?
Although Harreld and every other university president — if not every government official around the world — would love to compel others to sign away their legal rights before engaging on any issue, I am pretty sure the courts would look askance at such “written agreements”. (Then again, having legalized bribery in the McDonnell decision, it is also possible that the Supreme Court would validate such policies.) In any event, it seems fair to assume that meeting with faculty is part of Harreld’s job, even if he has an aversion to that aspect. (It is also not even clear that Harreld himself signed the agreement, making it more like Stormy Daniels’ celebrated NDA than a binding document.)
In reality, Harreld refused to meet with the protesters not because of any legal exposure, but because he wanted to invalidate their cause, if not each protester as an individual. Had he any genuine concerns about legal liability, he could have simply asked for an attorney from the UI Office of the General Counsel to be in attendance, to make sure there were no mistakes. Instead, Harreld not only repeatedly blew off the non-tenure faculty on the UI campus, he then played the victim in the Daily Iowan, while portraying the faculty as unreasonable and daft:
One day after that quote appeared in print, Harreld had his ass handed to him, while also generating a spasm of negative publicity for the university. That demonstrated incompetence in turn brings us now to a larger point that should not go overlooked, particularly by the regents.
This was nothing. This entire debacle arose from a circumstance that is normal on college and university campuses across the country, yet Harreld could not handle it. He could not simply meet, listen, say whatever he wanted to say, then thank everyone for attending. Instead, he went full-on pucker, then lashed out and belittled members of the UI community who are, in every way, not simply good citizens, but essential to the well-being of the university’s core educational mission. (The very mission which generates the majority of revenue for the university.)
To the extent that Harreld’s idiocy is not a surprise at this point, this is still a warning. Having already proven, on multiple occasions, that he is incapable of leading UI as an academic community, here we have Harreld — the vaunted business executive — exacerbating what should have been a routine labor matter. Instead of expressing respect for the non-tenure-track faculty by meeting with them, he insisted on personal indemnification before doing so, which is itself a bizarre precondition.
If ever there is a moment of genuine crisis on the UI campus, the Board of Regents has ensured that the exact wrong man will be called upon to respond. Two and a half years into his five-year contract, Harreld should have demonstrated basic competency in dealing with the non-tenured faculty on campus, but he did not. Unfortunately, sooner or later his persistent leadership failings will result in worse than embarrassment.
When we last checked in on the fraudulent president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, he had just agreed to meet with a group of non-tenure-track faculty about typical campus concerns ranging from pay to benefits to job security to shared governance. In order to secure that meeting, however, Harreld insisted that the non-tenure faculty sign a “written agreement” that they would not include him as a defendant in any subsequent court proceedings. As noted in the previous post, it is almost a certainty that any such agreement could be voided or evaded, meaning that bit of legal theater was simply a way for Harreld to save face. Having falsely insisted — as the president of the very university that those faculty already work for — that he could not meet with them without exposing himself to a “tampering charge”, Harreld needed a piece of paper to wave around to prove that he had been right all along.
Duly indemnified with a meaningless document that the public has never seen, the long-sought meeting with Harreld took place on the morning of this past Wednesday. In the first press account published that afternoon, the meeting was deemed by the faculty who attended to have been a positive first step, in what is expected to be a protracted period of discussion and negotiation. From the Press-Citizen’s Will Greenberg, on 05/16/18:
In yet another sterling example of Harreld’s incompetence as a leader, instead of moving the conversation to this juncture as soon as possible, he made up an excuse so he would not have to do the job that the people of Iowa are paying him $800K per year to perform ($200K deferred). To the university’s credit, however, cooler heads prevailed — or at least that seemed to be the case from the first report. A short time later, however, also on 05/16/18, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller filed a similar report, which included an important contextual detail:
Now, if you do not know anything about the size of the University of Iowa campus, it is very, very big. Covering 1,880 acres — or almost three square miles — there are dozens of buildings and hundreds of meeting rooms, many of them closer to the main administrative offices than the Department of Public Safety. That department, in fact, is housed in the far corner of a converted shopping mall, off the main campus proper. It is also not known to be the meeting place of choice for high-ranking administrators and faculty members.
At first blush, the decision to hold this particular meeting at the offices of the campus police seems like little more than a punk move. To the extent that we do not know that Harreld insisted on the location, however, it should be equally clear that if he had objected the meeting would have been held elsewhere. In reality, not only does that location seem like exactly the kind of thing Harreld would suggest, it fits perfectly — and, as it turns out, quite literally — with the bunker mentality that Harreld has demonstrated in the past, and particularly so when confronted by members of the UI faculty who are pursuing legitimate grievances.
The next day, in the lede to a report from Paul Brennan at Little Village, on 05/17/18, we got another important detail about the specific location of the meeting:
Not only was the meeting held at the UI Department of Public Safety — meaning the campus police station — but the meeting room in question was in the basement. That in itself is interesting, because I would bet that many if not most of the people who work at the University of Iowa, including many of the high-ranking administrators, probably have no idea that such a meeting space even exists. Not only must that choice have been odd to all involved, but because finals ended two weeks ago, every person in attendance would have been acutely aware that every other possible site for that meeting would have been readily available.
Instead, however, that meeting — which included several of the highest-ranking administrators on campus, who do not usually meet underground — took place in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety. From the reports by Greenberg and Miller, here is a list of the administrators who joined Harreld in the cellar of the campus police station, to meet with nine non-tenure-track members of the UI faculty:
Prior to Wednesday morning, I would have also bet that most of those administrators had never been in the meeting room in question, if they even knew where it was, yet that’s where Harreld wanted to meet. And of course the obvious question is why Harreld made or approved that punk decision. We get an inkling of the answer from Brennan’s report:
To complete the picture of the faculty being “escorted”, it should be noted that in 2007 the Iowa Board of Regents allowed the campus police at all three state universities to carry firearms. While there was certainly no need for the non-tenure faculty to fear for their personal safety at the UI Department of Public Safety, it is nonetheless true that the president of the university insisted on a meeting where UI employees would be “escorted” to the location of that meeting by officers who may have been armed with loaded weapons. And the more one thinks about that particular aspect of Harreld’s decision, the uglier that decision gets.
To begin, recall that Harreld’s prior objections to meeting with the non-tenure-track faculty were entirely legal. Instead of addressing that issue head-on, however, he made up his own excuse, which, when tested, did not even pass muster with the UI Office of the General Counsel. As was the case with the meeting on Wednesday, which was attended by UI General Counsel Reasoner, at any point Harreld could have had an attorney from the Office of the General Counsel sit in on a meeting with the non-tenure faculty, in order to protect both him and the school from potential legal liability. Yet until Wednesday, at no point did Harreld avail himself of that opportunity.
Harreld’s repeated refusal to meet with the non-tenure faculty was premised on his claim that doing so would leave him open to litigation, not that he feared for his personal safety, or feared that a riot might break out. In response, the non-tenure-track faculty signed a meaningless piece of paper, and subsequently made further non-binding promises just to get him to the table, at which point all such obstacles should have been resolved. That Harreld then scheduled the resulting meeting in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety, however, means there must have been some other reason for doing so.
So why did Harreld schedule that particular meeting in the basement of the office of the campus police, then have officers escort the nine UI faculty employees to that meeting? If Harreld was concerned about his physical safety, then just as a university attorney could have attended any earlier meeting, he could have requested that UI officers attend a prior meeting as well. Even on Wednesday, Harreld could have held the meeting at a more amenable location, then requested a security detail for the duration — a service that can almost certainly be provided as a matter or routine. Instead, Harreld made sure the meeting itself took place in the basement of the campus police station.
Given that there were plenty of other available meeting rooms, and the faux legal issues were satisfied, and any security concerns could have been met at any other location, why did Harreld go to the trouble of holding that particular meeting in that particular location — a location which his fellow administrators were not only probably unfamiliar with, but had almost certainly never seen such an assemblage of high-level functionaries? While we obviously (and thankfully) do not have visibility into the workings of Harreld’s mind, it is objectively true that the one thing which differentiates the UI Department of Public Safety from every other location on the UI campus is that that’s where the guns are, and the batons, and the gas, and the restraints, and the UI employees who are authorized to use all of the above. In fact, that department not only represents the arsenal of the University of Iowa, it represents the school’s security force, which — unlike the Iowa City Police Department or the Johnson County Sheriff — ultimately answers to J. Bruce Harreld.
It is of course still possible to see Harreld’s choice of the location for that meeting as relatively benign. Perhaps he was trying to gain a negotiating advantage down the road, through some sort of clumsy intimidation. Or maybe he has a clown-grade neurotic fear of protesters, and needed extra security to keep from wetting himself. Admittedly, both of those explanation are still completely nuts, but in a low-level, pitiable way which does not suggest deep-seated, black-hearted malevolence.
Unfortunately, in the context of Harreld’s conduct over the past two and a half years, his decision to have the non-tenure faculty escorted to the dungeon of the campus security office not only bespeaks a determination to inflame the current conversation, but it represents an escalation of his reflexive need to punish those who do now show due deference to his office. Having avoided and invalidated the faculty for the better part of a month — under a patently false pretext, no less — when Harreld was finally forced to submit to a meeting, he still insisted on demonstrating his administrative dominance. (The non-tenure faculty who participated in that meeting are to be commended for taking the high road, and not overreacting to what was clearly a provocation on Harreld’s part.)
To truly comprehend the mendacity of Harreld’s decision to meet in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety, all we have to note is that it is almost certainly unprecedented in UI history. In the previous post I mentioned a recent article by the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne, which profiled the five living, legitimately appointed UI presidents, and Harreld. Whether you know a little or a lot about Sandy Boyd, Hunter Rawlings III, Mary Sue Coleman, David Skorton or Sally Mason, it is impossible to imagine that any of them would have made the decision that Harreld did. Then again, it is also impossible to imagine that any of those five UI presidents would have allowed the initial situation to deteriorate as Harreld did, let alone abetted that disintegration by lying to avoid meeting with the faculty.
As alluded to above, however, Harreld’s aberrant, deviant response is actually in keeping with his prior response to protests on the UI campus. As regular readers know, only moments after being appointed in early September of 2015, Harreld told a flat-out lieto cover for the co-conspirators who jammed him into office. Over the following two months, up to his first day in office in early November, press reports revealed the scandalous extent to which the presidential search had been fixed in Harreld’s favor, including multiple examples of preferential treatment from the very men that Harreld lied to protect. Throw in a faculty censure for demonstrable lies on his resume, and Harreld was clearly not getting off to a good start.
To say that there were questions about Harreld’s legitimacy on his first day on the job would be a gross understatement, yet just as he did in April with the non-tenure faculty, Harreld resolutely refused to engage the UI community to answer those questions. Instead, he ignored and invalidated those who had legitimate concerns about the manner of his hire. Finally, after four months, in February of 2016, Harreld appeared at what was initially billed as an open forum to facilitate a dialogue between Harreld and the UI community. Unfortunately — and unbeknownst to the campus — Harreld decided to turn that hopeful meeting into dry and dismissive presentation. In short, it was another act of willful denial and invalidation, and predictably it did not go well.
From a post on 04/12/17, looking back at the first year and a half of Harreld’s illegitimate presidency:
In a post about that town hall I also quoted and linked to Nick Johnson’s impression of that gathering, which underscored the degree to which Harreld went out of his way to obstruct those who wanted to attend, and antagonize those who did attend:
The events that transpired over the past month with the non-tenure faculty, culminating in a meeting in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety, were not an aberration. Along with being a liar and a cheat, the current president of the University of Iowa is a bitter, vindictive man. (If you’re still on the fence, you can read more about Harreld’s ill-suited temperament here, here and here. It should also be noted that while Harreld only conducted one town hall in the 2015-2016 academic year, and never conducted another despite having promised to conduct three per year, in a subsequent Daily Iowan interview he actually took credit for holding three.)
Harreld did acknowledge that he had a lot to learn when he was hired, yet here we are two and a half years later and not only has Harreld not progressed, but given the location of last week’s meeting with nine UI employees in good standing, he has clearly regressed. There are any number of problems with holding official presidential meetings in the offices of the campus police, let alone in the basement, but none more so than the fact that the campus police are not Harreld’s personal guards. The officers of the UI Department of Public Safety do not protect the president, they protect everyone in the UI community, and to have the credibility they need to do that job they must not be employed as thugs.
By extension — and with a normal university president this would not even need to be said — campus security must not be asked to function as de facto secret police. Unfortunately, given Harreld’s behavior to date we cannot rule out the possibility that he may cross that line. As to how he might do so, the UI Department of Public Safety has a Threat Assessment Team which is designed to anticipate violence against the school. While it may seem inconceivable that Harreld would ask the campus police to open files on members of the faculty who are not a physical threat to others, given Harreld’s vengeful overreaction to the faculty who tried to meet with him for the better part of a month, it would be perfectly in keeping for him to assert that those faculty are a threat — either to the campus generally, or to himself personally.
I do not know why Harreld insisted on meeting with the non-tenure faculty in a basement room at the UI Department of Public Safety. I don’t know if he was trying to intimidate the faculty who attended, I don’t know if he was panicked, I don’t know if he is given to paranoia, and I do not know if he was simply trying to exact a measure of retribution for having been compelled to attend that meeting in the first place. What I do know is that the decision betrays both incapacity and instability.
As to any future impact from that decision, I suspect almost everyone in attendance would prefer to simply move on. One problem with doing so, however, is that even as Harreld is clearly determined to antagonize some members of the UI faculty, at the same time he is hoping for relief from others in the lifting of the ongoing AAUP sanction of the school. I have no idea how the local and national members of that organization will view Harreld’s actions this past week, but it is fair to say that insisting on meeting with any members of the UI faculty in an armed camp is not what most people have in mind when they think about treating others with respect. That Harreld is the living embodiment of the betrayal of shared governance which led to the sanction of the University of Iowa only deepens the ironies and implications.
You have an administration full of carpetbaggers and academic climbers and then Harreld himself a fraud.
University of Iowa is a 4th rate university with a 6th rate administration. Nothing is going to change as Harreld takes course online, then he will resign after performing his hatchet job.
PS: He never had a clue what his job actually is.
On May 4th, 2017, a Polk County, Iowa jury awarded $1.4M to former Senior Associate Athletics Director Jane Meyer, after finding the University of Iowa guilty of discrimination. In so doing, the jury looked past the petty and belittling testimony of Athletic Director Gary Barta, head football coach Kirk Ferentz, head wrestling coach Tom Brands and others, and correctly determined that Meyer had been treated unjustly by her employer. In reality, however, the vast majority of the abuse heaped on Meyer came from Gary Barta himself.
The very next day the University of Iowa posted the following notice on the Iowa Now website:
Notable in the official statement was that Harreld, the fraudulently appointed president of the university, made no mention of the verdict the day before. In refusing to acknowledge that the “review of university employment practices” was prompted by a costly and damning verdict against the Athletics Department, Harreld immediately set out to obscure the reprehensible behavior of Gary Barta. Countering Harreld’s blatant attempt to whitewash the historical record, virtually every news outlet under the sun (Gazette, RadioIowa, Sports Illustrated/AP, and many more) immediately connected the obvious dots and reported the press release in the context of the verdict.
In the reporting about the employment practices review, Meyers’ attorneys noted that what Harreld was calling for had already been done. From Mark Emmett, writing for the HawkCentral website, on 05/05/17:
On May 18th, 2017, the University of Iowa announced a comprehensive settlement with Meyer and her partner, former UI field hockey coach Tracey Griesbaum, both of whom had filed discrimination lawsuits against the University of Iowa for mistreatment under Barta. The total amount of the settlement was $6.5M, and in posting that news on the Iowa Now website, not only did the Office of Strategic Communications finally connect the obvious dots, but the employment practices review was also updated:
Appropriately, in both the original press release and the settlement announcement, the University of Iowa stressed that the review would begin with athletics. On June 1st, 2017, the university issued another press release, this time announcing the makeup of the committee that would implement and oversee the independent review. Once again, this press release emphasized that the review would be conducted in three phases, and that the Athletics Department would be investigated first:
That press release also outlined the next steps for the committee:
In early July of 2017, just over two months after announcing the $6.5M settlement with Meyer and Griesbaum, AD Barta broke his protracted silence regarding the outcome of the trial and his future at Iowa. From his comments it was abundantly clear not only that Barta was not concerned that he would be fired, but that he viewed the verdict itself as little more than a dispute over administrative differences of opinion. From the Gazette’s Jeremiah Davis, on 07/11/17:
Only two months after coughing up $6.5M that the university did not have to waste on his rank stupidity, the man who was undeniably responsible for that expense had no concerns about his future, was unrepentant about the grief he had caused Meyer and Griesbaum, and was only marginally willing to concede that he could have done better. That Barta felt free to say all of those things affirmed that his little buddy Harreld continued to support Barta one hundred percent — as Harreld had made nauseatingly clear on multiple prior occasions. That Harreld continued to stand firmly behind his pal Barta not only after the verdict, but before the Athletics Department employment practices review even began, was yet another demonstration of Harreld’s slavish devotion to the man.
On July 21st, 2017, another press release appeared on the Iowa Now website. This one announced that the Request for Qualifications (RFQL) was complete, and that the committee would begin soliciting proposals. The phasing of the review, however, remained unchanged:
The press release concluded with more information on the review process, and with the deadline for proposals:
In early October of 2017, while the RFQL process was underway, J. Bruce Harreld found himself trapped at a press availability, where he was finally compelled — for the first time since May — to answer substantive questions about the Meyer verdict and subsequent settlement. Note also that at the time, Gary Barta was “seated two chairs away”. From the Gazette’s Davis, on 10/05/17:
It is a measure both of J. Bruce Harreld as a man and as the president of a major research university which is home to thousands of faculty and staff, and tens of thousands of students, that after paying out a whopping $6.5M that the university does not have to waste on the incompetence of one of its administrators, his judgment about why that happened was that the university, collectively, was “a little sloppy”. Not that Gary Barta, specifically, was sloppy or in any way personally responsible, but that there was some systemic problem that only he seemed to be aware of.
And of course once again, Harreld proffered this defense of Barta without first waiting for an investigation of the employment practices in the Athletics Department, thus effectively predetermining the outcome of that review. Much worse, however, was that precisely because Harreld was determined to keep Barta in an eternal embrace, he was unable to speak to the very injuries suffered by the two women who were on the receiving end of that “sloppy” paperwork. Incredibly, however, Harreld then topped all of that by talking not about discrimination, but about the burden that Iowa faces as a public institution of higher learning.
Where Harreld should have exhibited empathy for Meyer and Griesbaum, instead — as is ever the case — he positioned himself and the other UI administrators as recurrent victims, this time of obligations under the Freedom of Information Act. Were Harreld presiding over a private university he would have been able to draw on his extensive experience in the private sector by simply ignoring the press in every regard. Unfortunately, because the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents rigged the 2015 search in his favor, and in so doing hired a man with zero experience in either academic administration or the public sector, we get this weasel:
On November 9th, 2017 — meaning three and a half months after the RFQL process commenced, and two months and one week after the deadline for proposals — the committee announced that a firm had been selected to implement the review:
Importantly, following the exceedingly diligent process implemented by Snyder, the phasing of the review was once again confirmed:
Through the late fall and winter of the 2017-2018 academic year, by all accounts the formal review conducted by Fredrikson & Byron was focused on the employment practices of the UI Athletics Department. The first visibility that the public had to any progress came in March of 2018, in a Daily Iowan interview of J. Bruce Harreld, on /03/09/18:
Again, this “unfortunate set of events” destroyed the careers if not the lives of two women who were employed at UI. Those women both worked in the athletics department, and they reported directly to Gary Barta, but in Harreld’s bromance-blind eyes his athletics director was entirely free of any blame. What happened was an institutional problem.
In the next question, the DI reporters again connected the dots between the $6.5M settlement and the ongoing employment practices review. In doing so, they prompted both absurdities and revelations from Harreld:
Note how eager — or perhaps desperate — Harreld was to distance himself from the review process by immediately asserting that he “wasn’t involved”. That is particularly interesting because only two sentences later Harreld disclosed that the firms that submitted proposals were “reinterviewed”, apparently after the initial scope of the review was determined. Not only did that not show up in any of the UI press releases, but in November of 2017, when Fredrikson & Byron were hired, there was no mention of reinterviews or of changing the scope.
If we assume that the scope changed in the ten-weeks before the contract was awarded to Fredrikson & Byron, then the firms were reinterviewed, that means the review then progressed from that point. On the other hand, if we assume that the scope was changed and the firms reinterviewed after the Fredrikson & Byron announcement, that means UI omitted any subsequent announcement to that effect.
Again, from the press release on 11/09/17, when the university announced that the contract for the review had been awarded to Fredrikson & Byron:
Snyder’s statement seems to fit with the idea that the scope of the review changed prior to the awarding of the contract, meaning the review would start with the Athletics Department. And yet, in reply to the question from the DI in March, we get this explanation from Harreld:
As regular readers know, if Harreld does not like reality, he simply invents the reality he prefers. For example, after promising to hold three town halls each year, Harreld held a single town hall, then reneged on the rest without announcing that he had done so. Months later, in another DI interview, he then took credit for and enumerated three town halls, the other two of which were merely campus gatherings that he happened to attend in his capacity as the Mad Hatter of UI.
In this instance, however, it turns out that Harreld was explaining the new phasing of the review correctly, because at some point, subsequent to the November press release, the phasing did change. Where the review was supposed to start with the employment practices in the Athletics Department — as repeatedly affirmed in official press releases, and confirmed by Faculty Senate President and committee co-chair Pete Snyder — it later morphed into a different process.
In mid-April — meaning a bit over one month ago, and almost an entire year after the initial announcement that a review would be conducted — the University of Iowa announced the release of the first report. From the Iowa Now website on 04/19/18:
Instead of reviewing the actual employment practices of the UI Athletics Department in the first phase of the review, as endlessly asserted in all prior UI communications, Fredrikson & Byron spent close to half a year comparing university-wide policies — which necessarily included those in the athletics department — to existing legal standards. From page 3 of the 04/18/18 report, which was released on 04/19/18:
Had the Iowa simply decided to conduct a periodic review of its current employment practices, then making sure that the underlying policies were consistent with “state and federal laws” would make sense. But that isn’t what happened, despite Harreld’s year-long attempt to diminish the culpability of Gary Barta. In May of 2017 the university as a legal entity was found guilty of violating the law, but the specific abuses originated with Barta, as was also the case with Tracey Griesbaum. No other facet of the university had those issues, while in that department, under one administrator, two lawsuits had to be settled for $6.5M.
Here again is the prescient comment from one of Meyers’ attorneys, way back on on 05/05/17:
Lo and behold, with one narrow exception, that is exactly what the consulting firm reported upon completing the newly added first phase:
Almost an entire year after launching what was to have been a review of employment practices at the University of Iowa, and was to have begun in the Athletics Department for glaringly obvious reasons, what Fredrikson & Byron produced was instead a review of university-wide policies. Policies that were, in almost every aspect — including those relevant to the Meyer and Griesbaum settlements — already perfectly consistent with state and federal laws. That result wasn’t surprising, of course, because no other department was bleeding out millions in discrimination settlements, while Barta’s department had to settle two such suits.
As to why this superfluous phase was actually imposed, we get an inkling in the next paragraph of the 04/18/18 Fredrikson & Byron report:
By altering the phasing of the review, and thus stalling any investigation of employment practices in the Athletics Department, Harreld and his collaborators on the committee gave Barta an entire year to make sure there are no “gaps between policy and practice” in his department. Instead of getting to the bottom of what happened, the consulting firm was used to whitewash Barta’s abuses. As if to further that cause, the 04/18/18 report also included this note about the Athletics Department — which at first blush seems downright exculpatory:
In fact, however, the appropriateness of the policies which are already in place across the university, and specifically in athletics, makes clear that it was the implementation of those policies — the practices involved — which led to the two lawsuits. That reality, however, is in counterpoint to the narrative that Harreld has been pressing from the beginning, save to the extent that he is willing to allow that some of the paperwork may have been “sloppy”. Even in that light, however, in terms of the abuses perpetrated against Meyer and Griesbaum, university policy was sufficient — meaning Gary Barta was undeniably at fault.
Despite being responsible for ending the careers of two women under his direct supervision, however, let alone the $6.5M cost to the school, with the ever-present protection of a man who was fraudulently appointed to the office of president at UI, Gary Barta persists. Adding financial insult to administrative injury — and again fulfilling Newkirk’s prophecy last May — ten days ago, on on 05/17/18, the University of Iowa issued yet another press release about the review:
So not only will the review of employment practices cost more money, but a new timeline is also being introduced. Incredibly, however, in keeping with Harreld’s desire to protect Barta and the Athletics Department at all costs — whether explicitly communicated or not — that new timeline is actually shorter than the timeline that was initially established last November. From the press release on 11/09/17:
From the press release ten days ago, on 05/17/18:
If the deadline for the original contract was early November, then why does the new, extended contract — which specifically relates to the employment practices in the Athletics Department — end in mid-August, at the absolute latest? The answer is two-fold. First, the review will largely be constrained to the dead zone between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of the fall term, when individuals relevant to such an inquiry may be on summer vacation, or can otherwise be made unavailable without compromising their obligations to the school. Second, and relatedly, mid-August is when the UI CTE program gears up for its first game, and Harreld’s sainted Athletic Director — who never did a wrong thing in his life, except perhaps struggle with a few complicated forms — would not want to be hassled by an ongoing review.
In fact, the subhead of the press release that was put out ten days ago — after a year of screwing around — makes the absurdity of the extension explicitly clear:
The new, mid-summer, time-constrained “compliance assessment” of the Athletics Department was the only reason for the campus-wide review in the first place, which could have been limited to athletics because that is clearly where the problems were. Instead, after dotting i’s and crossing t’s that were already dotted and crossed — at a cost of $90K+, no less — the consulting firm that was hired is only now finally looking at the issues which prompted the review. As for the remainder of the process, which will encompass both academic operations and medical operations on the UI campus, we also get a hint about how all that will likely end:
Given how massive academics and medicine are compared to athletics, it can safely be assumed that additional contracts will need to be extended for six months or more for each, and that the cost will be significantly greater than another $100K for each. On the other hand, given that the remaining phases were never necessary in the first place, and were only included by Harreld to make Barta’s abuses look like something more than a personal vendetta against two female subordinates, it would not be surprising if they were completed in a cursory manner, perhaps for an additional $100K, total, in taxpayer funds.
As noted in the previous post, if you are non-tenure faculty advocating for your rights, not only do you have to force Harreld to sit down at the table, but when he finally relents you get a meeting in the basement of the UI Campus Police. On the other hand, if you’re the head of the Athletics Department, and have already cost the school $6.5M, Harreld will gladly rig a $180K+ employment practices review which is guaranteed to make you look good. Speaking of which, if you want to follow the rest of this bureaucratic farce as it plays out, you can do so here.
In three months it will be three years since a rigged nationwide search was conducted by the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents, culminating in the fraudulent appointment of a manifestly unqualified candidate as president of the University of Iowa. In early September of 2015, former business executive J. Bruce Harreld — who had no prior experience in academic administration or in the private sector, and who had never even been the CEO of a company, let alone a major corporation — was appointed as the head of a multi-billion-dollar research university, for no other reason than three highly-placed co-conspirators were determined to give him the job. Although Harreld is still serving his apprenticeship at a cool $800K per year ($200K deferred), in the intervening years there have been significant changes in the leadership at the board, and in that context it is worth reassessing the integrity and credibility of that institution.
Specifically, the president, president pro tem and executive director/CEO who held office at the time of Harreld’s sham hire are no longer with the board. Their current replacements had varying amounts of on-the-job experience before they assumed those leadership roles, but in all cases they have now served at least two years or more as regents, or, in the case of the XD/CEO, as a paid administrator. The question today is whether the renewal of the board’s three key leadership positions has helped to curb the corrupt crony practices and rank abuses of power which were routine under the old regime.
Fortuitously, the Board of Regents is scheduled to meet this coming week, and among the items on the agenda is the fourth tuition hike in less than two years. From that and other agenda items, and the usual reporting on issues related to the board, we should be able to assess whether the current board has diverged from, or continues to embrace, practices which are antithetical not only to the spirit of the statute which gives the Iowa Board of Regents its considerable authority, but to current board policy.
Whether you pay any attention at all to the Iowa Board of Regents, or more broadly to issues in higher education, you probably still know that the following three things to be absolutely true. First, college costs have skyrocketed, vastly outpacing the rate of inflation. Second, at the same time that costs are going up, state legislatures — which help fund public institutions of higher learning like the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and the University of Northern Iowa — are cutting back on appropriations. Third, in order to pursue a college education, many students are forced to take on massive amounts of debt.
As regular readers also know, however, what is intentionally omitted from this convenient collective narrative is that public colleges and universities are not only increasing tuition out of scale to any legislative cuts, those excessive increases in turn contribute to decreased public funding. Because governors and legislators know that state schools are routinely cheating the students to generate more and more tuition revenue, they also know — and in this they are absolutely correct — that they can cut funding without decreasing the total amount of revenue available to state schools. From the perspective of both the elected officials and school administrators it’s a win-win, because the schools end up with more money overall, while the government has more money to spend on issues other than higher education. (Such as massive tax cuts for the corporate donors what keep those elected officials in office.)
As noted endlessly in these virtual pages over the past two and a half years, in the state of Iowa this larcenous scam is baldly apparent in the communications and documentation originating from the Iowa Board of Regents. As a matter of corrupt routine, the board goes to great lengths to make sure it rarely mentions the total amount of tuition revenue that will be generated from new hikes, while at the same time engaging in histrionics about any legislative cuts that can plausibly (or even implausibly) be blamed for rapacious increases in the cost to students. Flagrant case in point, as of a few days ago we now have the official agenda item for what will be the fourth tuition hike in just under two years. Amazingly, however, despite running a full twenty pages of data and justifications, nowhere in the entire document will you find any mention of the total amount of new revenue that will be generated as a result of these hikes — either overall, or on a per-school basis.
In fact, the only nod to tuition revenue in the entire twenty-page document is this passing mention in the executive summary:
Following that rather obvious admission, the document puts forward a lengthy explanation of recent legislative funding cuts — which, given the second budget collapse two years running, hardly came as a shock. And yet, despite noting that tuition revenue is one of “two key resource components”, there is no similar financial disclosure about the revenue that will be raised from the hikes which are about to be approved. The reason for that routine lie of omission, however, is equally obvious.
Over the past two years, the regents have not simply increased tuition to match any funding cuts. Instead, they not only initiated the first tuition hikes on a manufactured pretext, they continue to raise tuition two to three times what would be necessary to compensate for any actual cuts. In reality, the board is using legislative cuts as a pretext to steal tens of millions of dollars from the bank accounts of students and families.
To underscore the willfulness of the board’s determination to avoid talking about revenue that will be generated from new hikes, note that back in April, the agenda item for the hikes which are now pending final approval did include an estimate of the new tuition revenue that would be generated. From p. 5 of the initial tuition reading:
Even after providing a squishy “projected” number of $24.9M, the board downplayed the increase relative to both the FY2018 funding cuts and the size of the overall regent budget. Because that single mention of new “projected” revenue was apparently too much disclosure, however, only two months later, in the final reading, that entire paragraph has been scrubbed from what is essentially the same document. Here is how that section now reads, from p. 5 of the final tuition reading:
Having disclosed too much information in the initial documentation, the official text for the hikes that will be approved this week no longer includes any mention of the “projected” revenue that will be generated. As to the larger point of this post, such omissions are so common as to represent de facto policy. (You can search endlessly through regent documents, and only on the rarest of occasions is tuition revenue ever detailed, even though that money represents the lion’s share of the “two key resource components” which fund the state schools.)
This is how the Board of Regents operated under former board president Bruce Rastetter, former president pro tem Katie Mulholland, and former executive director/chief executive officer Bob Donley. It is also clearly how the board is still operating under president Mike Richards, president pro tem Patty Cownie, and current XD/CEO Mark Braun. When it comes to reporting tuition revenue, and particularly new revenue from tuition hikes, the board is reflexively deceptive, precisely because disclosing those numbers would reveal how badly they are fleecing the students.
As to that “projected” estimate of $24.9M in new revenue across all three state schools, in a prior post we looked at how the proposed hikes actually fit into the current legislative context, and once again we found that the board was using funding cuts as an excuse to take tens of millions of dollars from students. As to why the board cut any mention of that $24.9M from the final reading, however, there is another possible explanation that goes beyond simple deceit, which I also alluded to in that earlier post:
As we now know, the legislature is indeed funding $8.3M in additional appropriations for the coming fiscal year. Combine that with the “projected” $24.9M in revenue from the coming hikes, and the regents will have $33.2M in new revenue to play with from those “two key resource components”. But what if that $24.9M estimate was not only wrong, but grossly underestimated the revenue that will be generated from the tuition and fee hikes that will be approved this week? Better to hack that text out of the final reading than fess up to such a ‘mistake’….
The Iowa Board of Regents is, by law, the only governmental body which is empowered to set tuition and fees at the state universities, and that statutory license also includes the authority to determine tuition policy. While the regents could set every individual price at each school, in practice the board leaves most of the specifics up to the respective administrators, who may in turn grant individual deans some discretion in pricing their academic products. As demonstrated by the initial and final readings of the coming hikes, the board does retain the right to deny increases, but by the time new hikes are announced, any potential concerns or disagreements have long since been resolved.
Until recently, however, I did not understand where the actual lines of demarcation are in the process of setting tuition and fees. That in turn prompted confusion about a particular passage in the initial reading of the current proposal, which I also referenced in the post back in April. Here is that same passage — which concerns graduate tuition at the University of Iowa (SUI) — from p. 3 of the final reading:
This is the only place in the first or final reading where peer tuition is referenced as the sole impetus for increasing tuition at any of the state schools. Because this justification contradicts the premise that the board only raises tuition in response to legislative funding cuts, or because of other fiscal factors such as inflation, that alone makes the inclusion of this paragraph more than a little odd. Instead of reassuring grad students at UI that their costs are only going up to keep pace with the cost of providing the education they are paying for, the University of Iowa — or, more accurately, the Board of Regents — takes pains to make clear that grad tuition is going up to match the prices being charged by other schools. (Not only are some of those schools halfway across the country, but they are located in areas that have a higher cost of living.)
This market-driven pricing strategy may make sense to a private-sector pirate like J. Bruce Harreld, whose only real objective is making money. For students who are struggling to make ends meet, however, it can’t be fun learning that they have to cough up more money simply because their illegitimate president believes that is what the market will bear. All of which raises an obvious point. Why is that statement included in the document, when it would have been so easy to make some other excuse — like, say, blaming the legislature, even if it wasn’t at fault?
To be clear, in the initial and final readings of the proposed hikes the board does include a great deal of information about the cost of tuition and fees at peer institutions. In fact, as noted in myriad prior posts, Iowa’s three state universities, led by Harreld, are pressing for massive increases in tuition over the next five years, almost entirely premised on market-based arguments. To that end, the inclusion of supporting data makes sense, but the paragraph quoted above also seems to represent the first actual implementation of that market-driven pricing agenda.
As noted in the earlier April post:
As to who has the authority to raise graduate tuition for any reason, what I did not understand until recently is just how much latitude the board does give the schools. From the minutes of the 03/06/18 meeting of the UI Faculty Council — which were posted in May, well after the first reading of the pending tuition increases in April:
Assuming that Harreld’s explanation is factually accurate — and after almost three years on that job, that is still a gamble — he is essentially free to pursue his radical tuition agenda, even if that involves preying on the student body. For their part, when the regents announce an increase in tuition, that merely impacts the base cost of tuition and fees for both resident and non-resident undergraduates. Not only are graduate and professional students sitting ducks, but in the context of this post it is equally clear that the board is granting tacit approval to Harreld’s crusade, while distancing themselves from responsibility.
As to exploiting the undergraduate students at the state schools, a few years ago the regents granted the university presidents another handy mechanism of financial abuse. While the regents set the floor for tuition and fees, the board now allows the schools to charge differential tuition for programs which are deemed to have additional costs. Once again, here the board is using a cost-based rationale for increasing tuition and fees, as opposed to a market-based justification, but the reality is that no one outside of the financial offices on each campus has any idea what a given program actually costs.
This rationale is introduced at the top of page 2 of the final reading:
In addition to the base undergraduate resident and nonresident tuition increases, the universities request the following differential tuition rates for specific higher cost programs:
As you might imagine, the ability to “request” additional tuition for programs which require no actual proof of need is a recipe for plausibly justifiable abuse on the part of both the universities and the board. While former UI president Sally Mason largely avoided differential tuition, predictably, J. Bruce Harreld has increased its prevalence on the UI campus. As the final reading of the current proposed hikes shows, however [p. 2-3], while differential tuition is almost non-existent at UNI, at Iowa State University it has become the administrative equivalent of crack cocaine.
And if you think I’m joking, here is a partial list of the ISU programs which include a supplemental charge for differential tuition:
The abuse of differential tuition at Iowa State is so widespread, in fact, that the school is now trying to impose discipline on that feeding frenzy:
As you can plainly see, differential tuition has spread across the entire ISU campus like a plague, allowing the school to charge more for the same product. Unfortunately, given the board’s clear tolerance for this kind of financial abuse — if not outright fraud — it is to be expected that as soon as ISU perfects the model for siphoning money from student bank accounts, those policies will be adopted by UI and UNI as well.
And speaking of Iowa State…in another agenda item for this week’s meetings, we find the following note about the modification of a key banking relationship:
Why is that noteworthy? Because of this, which we find only if we read to the very end of the same document:
Out of thirty-two financial institutions listed in that agenda item, the only one that shows any requested change in the maximum deposit allowed — to be increased by a whopping $50M — just happens to be the only financial institution at which one of the university presidents is also a member of the board. At the same time — and unlike many if not most public colleges and universities, including UI — we know that the president of Iowa State not only sits on the board of the ISU Foundation, but also effectively presides over that secretive private organization.
Now, if you’re wondering, here is a vivid example of just how wrong that kind of dual role can go, staring former disgraced ISU president Steven Leath. In addition to the carnage detailed in that story, it was only a year and a half ago that Leath found himself embroiled in multiple crony scandals, including travel-expense abuses having do do with the two airplanes he purchased as head of the ISU Foundation. Fortunately, after the board marshaled the entire crony apparatus of state government to keep Leath from being charged with actual crimes, he subsequently resigned to take a job elsewhere — at a higher salary, no less. (Who says crime doesn’t pay?)
Today we have Leath’s replacement — ISU lifer Wendy Wintersteen, who was recently appointed president of the school, and is thus also the de facto president of the ISU Foundation — and it turns out she has an edge that Leath could only have dreamed of. Along with being in charge of a billion-dollar research university, and the assets of that university’s foundation ($1.19B as of 2017), she also has a seat on the board of the private-sector bank with which ISU makes the largest deposits, by far. And now the Iowa Board of Regents intends to increase that deposit limit by 25%, or $50M — meaning that bank stands to directly profit from decisions which are made by Wintersteen, either as president of the school, president of the ISU Foundation, or both. As to whether Wintersteen will profit from that relationship we don’t know, but the board only seems inclined to require disclosure, not forbearance.
Finally, and speaking of bankers and disclosure…this past Thursday there was a follow-up report about a contentious issue which directly impacts the Board of Regents and University of Iowa. Despite that clear linkage, however, one regent has decided — all by himself — that he does not have to disclose a potential conflict of interest because he knows in his heart that he would never do anything wrong. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 05/31/18:
While another board member had no problem completely disclosing her banking relationships, Regent McKibben took a long look at his own situation and absolved himself of any similar obligation:
Among McKibben’s other accomplishments he is also a former state legislator and practicing attorney, along with being one of the senior members of the Board of Regents — yet in his mind he simply does not have to abide by the rules. Instead of erring on the side of caution, let alone correcting his obvious error once it was pointed out, McKibben did what he has always done, which is to consider himself above reproach. As regular readers know, however, that question was asked and answered when McKibben — along with four other regents — agreed to meet in secret with Harreld during the corrupt 2015 presidential search.
This concludes our periodic reassessment of the integrity and credibility of the Iowa Board of Regents. Despite two new board members and a new-ish executive-director, the Board of Regents remains committed to taking as much money as possible from students and their families, primarily by obscuring the amount of new revenue generated by hikes. Instead of insisting on transparency regarding the issues facing higher education in Iowa, the board routinely lies by omission, plays favorites with crony political and business interests, and errs on the side of doing whatever the hell it wants regardless of any policies that are in place.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Just over a month ago, at the tail end of yet another academic year, the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa — J. Bruce Harreld — sat for yet another interview with the student-run Daily Iowan. As with every other interview Harreld has given since taking office in November of 2015, this interview featured Harreld spinning, deflecting and outright lying in response to questions of interest to the UI community. As a general observation, however, perhaps the most interesting aspect of this particular interview was the degree to which Harreld continued to demonstrate his compulsive penchant for taking credit. Truly, there is no problem that Harreld cannot solve in his own mind, whether he has little or nothing to do with the outcome, or the problem remains unresolved.
This interview with Harreld was published on May 8th. Here is the headline and lede from a Des Moines Register story by Kathy Bolton, which was published on May 14th:
As detailed extensively in a recent post, at the time of Harreld’s most-recent interview he was also in the middle of a deeply disingenuous campaign to demonize the non-tenure-track faculty on campus, who have suffered disproportionately even as the university has increased its reliance on their services. After avoiding and actively evading non-tenure representatives for over a month — and in the process provoking protests as a result — Harreld finally agreed to a sit-down, as reported by Paul Brennan at Little Village, on May 17th:
Instead of meeting in any of the hundreds of meeting rooms available across the UI campus, Harreld began contract negotiations with non-tenure faculty in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety, amidst officers who are allowed to carry firearms. And this is the same man who claimed, only ten days earlier, that with regard to faculty salaries, “We’ve gotten most of those behind us at this stage.”
So. Is Harreld completely insane, or only partially insane?
Well, when Harreld says, “Several years ago…the salaries were a real issue with faculty”, he is actually projecting his own administrative agenda onto the Iowa faculty, and in so doing mischaracterizing both their position and what has changed. Like higher-ed faculty across the country, UI faculty were indeed interested in being paid more when Harreld was hired, but that was not why Harreld incessantly talked about raising faculty pay. Instead, Harreld’s oft-repeated rhetoric advocating for more money to keep and hire “world-class faculty” had three specific objectives, and it is those that Harreld now claims to have satisfied — even as faculty compensation is, clearly, still a divisive issue on campus.
First, and most obviously, when the illegitimacy of Harreld’s appointment was made clear in the press, Harreld needed to co-opt — to buy off — as many key faculty as quickly as possible. Promising pay raises to those who supported him most, including giving promotions to faculty who were on the corrupt 2015 search committee, was the quickest way to solve that problem. And of course it also had the advantage of encouraging all faculty to be nice to him, lest they find themselves empty-handed.
Second, Harreld’s initial charge upon taking office — as dictated by then-regents president Bruce Rastetter, who was one of Harreld’s principal co-conspirators — was to improve Iowa’s standing in the U.S. News rankings. As it turns out, faculty pay is not only a factor in those rankings, but as detailed in multiple posts over the past two and a half years, it is one of the easiest factors to manipulate.
Third, Harreld hoped to pit the faculty’s desire for more pay against the students he planned to victimize with aggressive tuition hikes. Indeed, without any economic provocation, and after only eight months on the job, Harreld pushed through a 6.8% hike in base tuition for undergraduate resident students. Now, two years later, he has succeeded in increasing that same base rate a total of 16.4% over that time. The more he soaks the students, the more he can pay the faculty – or at least the relatively few, select, “world-class” faculty, while the non-tenure-track faculty can rot.
Continuing with Harreld’s reply to the first DI question:
There is nothing Harreld likes more than throwing around big words, particularly if they help him obfuscate the truth. If you are not familiar with the various levels of medical care, you can find a good primer here. In short, primary care is when you see your doctor. Secondary care is when your doctor sends you to a specialist. Tertiary care is when your specialist puts you in the hospital for a serious medical procedure, such as a heart bypass. Quaternary care encompasses extremely rare and experimental medicine, and is only offered at highly specialized institutions — such as the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC).
The problem with Harreld’s description of UIHC and UI Health Care is that what he told the Daily Iowan is unambiguously false. In fact, it is so clearly divorced from reality that it is tempting to think Harreld must be a blithering idiot, because the only other option is that he is a conscienceless liar. In any event, no one who had even passing familiarity with the university’s sprawling, comprehensive medical center could possibly have come to this conclusion:
UIHC has multiple clinics for primary and secondary care, in every area of medical practice. From well-child check-ups to routine screenings, to satellite clinics across Iowa City and Johnson County, the University of Iowa provides primary and secondary care to thousands and thousands of patients, and it is utterly baffling that Harreld either does not know this, or feels compelled to lie about it to the DI reporters. In fact, one of the reasons that UI Health Care is teetering on the brink of financial collapse is that it overextended itself into the community, largely at the direction of Jean Robillard — who is not only the former UI Vice President for Medical Affairs and former dean of the UI College of Medicine, but was yet another key co-conspirator who jammed Harreld into office. (The Gazette’s Vanessa Miller has done an excellent job chronicling the administrative failings at UIHC/UI Health Care over the past two years. Here is one such report, from April of this year.)
So what’s going on here? Why is Harreld characterizing UIHC as an exotic academic medical institution when it covers the entire spectrum of patient care? Well, after sitting on his hands for two and a half years, while his boy Robillard drove UIHC into the ground — meaning, explicitly, that Robillard eroded the market value of UIHC — Harreld is now priming the pump to ‘partner with’, or even sell the hospital off to, a private-sector healthcare corporation. And one good way of pushing that idea onto an unsuspecting public is to make it sound like UIHC does not actually take care of healthy patients, or typical medical specialties. Instead, those important tasks would be provided by the for-profit corporate ‘partner’.
One obvious downside, of course, is that exposing patients to a for-profit corporation will lead to exactly the kind of abuse that the Gazette’s Erin Jordan reported on just this past weekend. As it turns out, UI’s air ambulance is not an in-house service, but was contracted out to a for-profit company four years ago, in a secret deal that was never disclosed. (As to how quickly the overall privatization process is now moving, UI just ate $7.5M in order to blow up a prior alliance and make itself available to suitors — after having hired a consultant to find said suitors in the fall of last year.)
Because that’s all super-complicated and nerdy, however, let us now look at an example of Harreld engaging in what we will call Trump-grade lying. In answering the next question from the DI reporters, not only does Harreld misstate facts and omit critical information, but he reaches a truly delusional, self-congratulatory conclusion.
As regular readers know, the facts of Harreld’s sham hire are plain. Three members of the 2015 presidential search committee — former regents president Rastetter, former UI VPMA Robillard, and Harreld’s old private-sector pal and mentor, UI alumnus Jerre Stead — all conspired to spirit Harreld through the search process to a rigged vote by the Iowa Board of Regents. Because of the egregious betrayal of shared governance that took place when the board hired the one candidate who was viewed as absolutely unacceptable by the UI community, the AAUP sanctioned the school for that abuse. While it is true that the board itself was not sanctioned — because the AAUP has no such provisions in its bylaws — it is objectively false that the University of Iowa was not complicit in that abuse. As one of the highest-ranking administrator on the UI campus, Robillard served as both both chair of the corrupt search committee and as interim president at the time of Harreld’s illegitimate appointment. (To underscore the degree of Robillard’s complicity, he personally met Harreld and his wife at the airport during the search, then chauffeured them to campus, where Harreld gave a talk while his wife got a tour.)
As for Harreld’s claim that he “worked whenever our faculty wanted to talk about things”, and that he “spent time with them on how to deal with it”, that claim is both laughable and an outright lie. For obvious reasons, Harreld spent more than a year denying any relevance to the AAUP sanction, including, on multiple occasions, misstating the purpose, standing and history of the AAUP in order to discredit that organization. From the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux, on 06/18/18 (today), reporting on the removal of UI from the AAUP sanctions list this past weekend:
Continuing with Harreld’s reply….
Here we have Harreld at his most Harreld. After giving the faculty 95 percent of the credit for positioning the school to lift the AAUP sanction, Harreld then details, at length, how it was the other 5 percent — comprising his critical involvement — which really made the difference. In reality, Harreld is the living embodiment of the abuses of shared governance which led to the AAUP sanction, which is why now claiming to be the person who resolved that issue is doubly revolting. Whatever feelings of goodwill currently exist among the faculty, administration and regents, the fact of the matter is that Rastetter, Robillard and Stead got away with the bureaucratic crime they committed. As a result, their mole is still in the president’s office at UI, pulling down $800K per year ($200K deferred), and making decisions which affect the lives of tens ouf thousands of human beings.
The legacy of J. Bruce Harreld’s presidency is that cheating pays, and pays well. Except, of course, for the non-tenure-track faculty on campus, who have to put up with Harreld’s hostility and abuse. For more on the removal of Iowa from the AAUP sanctions list, see this report last night from the Daily Iowan’s Emily Wangen. In it you will find, remarkably, that Harreld played almost no role in resolving the sanction against UI. (See also this story from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, as this post was being published.)
Because the DI reporters are razor sharp — and by that I do not mean for student reporters, but relative to any professionals in the country — they followed up with this question:
Again, note the self-aggrandizing positioning. To hear Harreld tell it, he had to put up with a lot of juvenile behavior while patiently explaining how “the process” works. In reality, Harreld precipitated protests by refusing to meet with the non-tenure faculty for a month, even though that’s part of his job. Instead, he made up an outright lie about why he could not meet with the non-tenure faculty, and he stuck with that lie until the only option the faculty had left was to protest his juvenile behavior. And of course when Harreld finally did give in, he then insisted on meeting with the faculty under armed guard.
Two points here. First, note that Harreld immediately reframes the question of non-tenure faculty compensation as a peer-group issue, when it is not. What the non-tenure-track faculty are lobbying for, among other concerns, are raises which compensate for inflation, healthcare benefits, job security, and — ironically — a voice in shared governance on campus. Instead, Harreld ignores all that and pushes his administrative agenda, comparing prices and costs to far-flung peers, including so-called ‘aspirational’ peers, which are not in fact peers at all. (This, again, is part of Harreld’s perpetual push to raise tuition as much as possible.)
Second, Harreld’s “let’s get the data” ploy is a recurrent dodge that he first used even before he took office. Again, Harreld has been the faux president of the University of Iowa for over two and a half years. He has all the data he needs at his fingertips, meaning he already knows that he is screwing the non-tenure-track faculty, which is why he is leaning on them more and more — because they are cheaper to employ. Despite endless talk about having “world-class” faculty at Iowa, Harreld is maximizing a two-tier system of employment which relies more and more on faculty who have little or no job security, who do the bulk of teaching the students that he is fleecing with the promise of “world-class” faculty. (It is, remarkably, a bait-and-switch in which both the students and the non-tenure faculty get screwed.)
Here we have the lunatic lie that Harreld told to avoid meeting with the non-tenure faculty. His assertion that doing his job might expose him to some imagined legal liability was, objectively, nuts. When his “senior advisors” finally got around to calling the UI Office of the General Counsel, to ask whether Harreld could talk with faculty who are also employees of the school, the answer was obviously yes. Meaning Harreld either did not know what he was talking about when he was interviewed by the DI, or he was willfully lying to the DI reporters.
Last August the Iowa Board of Regents convened a Tuition Task Force, during which Harreld presented his plan for five straight years of seven-percent hikes — 41% overall. (A plan, by the way, that is still on the table.) At no time prior to, during or after that administrative summit did Harreld put forth the rationale that he gave to the Daily Iowan in May. Because his rapacious plan went over like a lead balloon, however, he now has to explain it away so he can move on to something more reasonable — like five straight years of 5% hikes, or 29% overall, on top of the 16.4% increase he has already imposed.
To his credit, had Harreld proposed 3.8% hikes as far as the eye can see, there would have been outrage. Having threatened the students with much worse, however, the student body — which is, effectively, hostage to Harreld’s whims — will probably be more accepting of 3.8% hikes. (What should happen is that the state should increase funding, but it will take political change to make that happen.)
Continuing the hostage exploitation from Harreld:
Note the mendacity here, and how easily Harreld uses the students that he is exploiting to gain sympathy for his agenda. If the University of Iowa does not raise tuition, then it does not have to kick back some of that money to the very students it is fleecing for the same degrees. Instead, Harreld actually wants credit for giving back thirty cents on the dollar (and it won’t be nearly that much) while pocketing the other seventy cents. (Imagine Harreld saying the same thing after robbing a bank.)
The next three questions had to do with the results of the second Speak Out survey on campus sexual assault, and in particular a statistical spike in risks for students in the LGBTQ community. It was the kind of subject matter that any university president should be able to handle with grace and respect, and to be fair to Harreld, he got off to a good start:
Lots of thanks and thanking, but then Harreld takes credit for running a biennial survey instead of a quadrennial survey. Not only does that echo Harreld taking credit — after only a few months on the job — for the completion of former UI President Sally Mason’s six-point plan to combat campus sexual assault, but as regular readers know, Harreld actually crapped all over Mason’s plan during his disastrous candidate forum. Unfortunately, because Harreld has a pathological emotional need to be seen as a hero, he then injected his special brand of pettiness with this:
After centuries of being ignored and abused, it is not surprising that students, and particularly female students, and especially LGBTQ students of any gender, might be a bit jaded about whether another survey will product meaningful action. And yet, in conceptualizing that historic dynamic, in Harreld’s mind that distrust becomes “a little attitude” aimed at him and his biennial survey. Well you know who also has “a little attitude” on the UI campus? It’s the pugnacious, petty brat in the president’s office, who got his job by administrative theft, who lies like he breathes, who cannot talk about anything without casting everyone else as ungrateful, hostile or both.
All Harreld had to do was say that students — and particularly those in the LGBTQ community — have been ignored for so long that they do not believe anything will come from participating in yet another survey, but he couldn’t do it — because he can never do it. Instead, he characterized students who are at risk, if not under threat, in a pejorative fashion, so as to elevate his own standing as the great unappreciated solver of problems. (To be clear, I do not say that any of this is conscious, but that only makes it worse. It is Harreld’s reflex, again and again, to position himself as the victim, and others as attackers or ungrateful or stupid.)
To his credit, Harreld bounced back a bit later in his extended reply, and ended up where he should have started: these are complicated questions, and require engaging a community that has been ignored for too long:
The two follow-up questions from the DI had to do with specifics of the Speak Out survey, including responses from gender noncomforming or trans students. In general, Harreld answered the questions well, until this brain cramp at the end of his response to the second question:
So first Harreld takes credit for running a biennial instead of quadrennial survey, then characterizes the respondents as having “a little attitude”, then follows all of that up with, “Let’s not worry about surveys”. Always the bigger man…..
The next question concerned state legislation which could negatively impact the UI College of Medicine and UIHC. Here is the question, and Harreld’s reply in full:
Here we have yet another variation on Harreld’s “let’s get the data” gambit, but what he means in this instance is that he does not want to talk about what might happen. In fact, immediately below his reply the DI added the following note, just to make clear that the full bill, as passed by the legislature, was available if Harreld had cared enough to read it:
The bill was passed by the legislature on May 2nd, but the implications were clear long before final passage. In fact, we can assume that both the UI College of Medicine and the administrators at UIHC — if not also the Board of Regents — gamed out the possible repercussions well in advance, because that kind of policy change is not something you can leave to the last minute. On that very point, the Press Citizen’s Aimee Breax was able to write an excellent comprehensive piece on the subject waaaaaaay back in mid-March, which was followed by another informative story from the Gazette’s Michaela Ramm on April 1st. Meaning over a month before Harreld’s interview, everyone knew what was at stake, except, apparently, Harreld.
The next question from the DI reporters would have been very easy to overlook, because it required tracking something that was supposed to happen, but didn’t happen. To their credit, however, the DI reporters were keeping a watchful eye.
As with all prior comments Harreld has made about the Phase II report, note the degree to which he distances himself from every aspect of that ongoing and protracted campus conversation. The same guy who is so hands-on that he made sure the Speak Out survey was biennial, has nothing to say about the plan to overhaul the entire administrative organizational structure of the UI campus. In fact, to hear Harreld tell it, both here and in other quotes, he has no idea what conclusions the committee may have reached, even though they are apparently now at the point of dotting i’s and crossing t’s.
And of course that is complete crap. Harreld may not have seen a report, or seen anything in writing, or had any meetings about the report, but the idea that he has not talked about the report with interim provost Curry, or with his faculty moles on the Phase II Committee, is ridiculous. They may never give him up, but he pushed his agenda through them.
As to when the report will be released, Harreld’s interview was in early May. It is now the middle of June, and the 2020 Task Force is still radio silent. There has not been a single new progress report in the six and a half months since December 1st, compared to five progress reports in the preceding four months during Phase I. And yet, as the DI reporters noted, not only was a draft report promised months ago, but there were also to be additional forums for the campus to provide feedback on that important conversation.
So what happened? Well, I have no idea, but any errant i’s and t’s were corrected long ago. It may be that Harreld intends to drop a bomb, and is waiting until mid-summer to do so, when the campus will be mostly empty. Or perhaps he and Interim Provost Curry decided to back away from the open warfare they were about to instigate. Either way, the fact that there has been no word about the 2020 Task Force beyond a few vague updates is not what anyone was promised — and of course it’s never a good sign when people do not keep their promises.
The final question in the DI interview concerned a number of opinion pieces that appeared in the Daily Iowan at the end of the semester:
Harreld is right — the pieces were affecting and important. Even better, although Harreld dropped another four hundred words after that, he pretty much nailed the answer and the issues, and I am glad about that because UI students of color are disrespected enough. (And that’s before we get to the yokels and rubes on campus, including particularly the Donald Trump, Kim Reynolds and Steve King supporters, who go out of their way to disrespect anyone who isn’t Cheeto orange or pasty white.)
So there we have it. After two and a half years on the job, Harreld is slowly — slowly — learning how to fake being a university president. As to why he was actually hired by his co-conspirators, however, we simply have to wait for him to reveal his grand designs. On that point, however, and as detailed in a series of posts at the beginning of the year, it is more and more likely that Harreld was installed, at least in part, to replicate the academic hustle that Michael Crow is perpetrating at Arizona State University. In fact, on that front there have been some interesting developments over the past few months, and we will take a closer look at all that in the next post.
Updated 06/20/18: Got a little distracted and forgot to mention this….
At the tail end of his response to the question about implementing the new UI Strategic Plan — which, as we have discussed in prior posts, is almost entirely devoted, on a cost basis, to for-profit research initiatives — Harreld said this:
As regular readers know, “some of that money” was a pathetic two million dollars each of the past two years, and even then that money had strings attached which all but ensure that benefits are returned to the Athletics Department. (Compare that scam to the University of Nebraska Athletics Department, which gives $5M per year to academics, all of it devoted to scholarships for nonathletes.) When Harreld talks about “media rights”, however, what he’s really talking about is football revenue, which makes up the lion’s share of athletics income at the University of Iowa.
The problem with that, of course, is that we now live in an age when football has been conclusively shown to cause brain damage, and even death — as was the case with former Hawkeye player Tyler Sash, whose CTE materially contributed to his death at a shockingly young age. So what Harreld is saying, albeit euphemistically, is that the UI Athletics Department is good at monetizing a preventable degenerative disorder.
To put that in useful context, imagine Harreld celebrating Athletics or any other department for increasing tobacco revenue, or even the black-market sale of mind-warping synthetic marijuana. Unfortunately, not for a moment did it occur to Harreld where that Athletics money actually comes from, let alone that football and CTE represent the kind of massive liability exposure that makes his concern about being sued for tampering seem like the bad joke it always was. Instead, we get a peppy “thank goodness”, because public institutions of higher education are still allowed to make a fast buck turning healthy minds into mush.
Right. So, recall that Harreld told an audience of UI faculty, staff, and students, at his big fake tryout, that he admired a Central American strongman who broke unions by terrorizing people and siccing the cops on them, and who was responsible for, what, 100K deaths or so along the way. The venue for the meeting wasn’t accidental. It was ridiculous, but it wasn’t accidental. Next step for contingent faculty: buddy up with the cops, who I believe have a union of their own.
The problem here is that Harreld doesn’t know — maybe the contingent faculty don’t know — that all they have to do is say no to all the free work they’re pressured to do, and within three months there’ll be a massive tenured freakout. Because the only people left, at that point, to do all that free work for students who are there and expecting to take classes is guess who. Tenured faculty who maybe aren’t so research-productive after all, and might have time in their schedules for teaching 2/2 or 2/3 instead of 1/2. And if they can teach 2/3, why not 3/4….
They’re not going to fire or refuse to rehire all those contingent people if they say no. Finding an entire university’s worth of competent, non-flaky contingent desperadoes in the middle of, as Bill Bryson memorably put it, the biggest plain this side of Jupiter is not such an easy thing to do, especially in disciplines where people can get jobs that pay real money.
I’d encourage the contingent fac to slow-walk their way to better representation and compensation.
For those who are unfamiliar with the slow-motion train wreck that was Harreld’s candidate forum in early September of 2015, you can see the ‘Calderon’ question and answer here. And of course Harreld himself — in his strongman role at IBM — advocated for the metaphorical “[p]ublic hanging of non-performers and culture change resistors” as a means of compelling compliance among those who might dare to resist..
I don’t know Scott Beckner personally, but I had a good feeling about him when he was hired in 2016 — particularly after Harreld’s star-turn as Inspector Clouseau during the Visin debacle. Hopefully Beckner will explain to Harreld that trying to use the Campus Police as muscle in an employment dispute is a bad idea, particularly when said faculty vastly outnumbers both the police and administrators.
Completely agree with this:
The way Harreld has handled this so far, anyone who can should be looking for work elsewhere. Employment is so low right now that there have to be jobs available, including jobs in locations that don’t come with petty tyrants.
Unless Harreld is trying to kill off contingent faculty because he’s about to roll out a big online/distance-learning program, he has badly miscalculated. Particularly now that UI is leaning on contingent faculty more and more.
And now that the AAUP just lifted its sanction, and Harreld is going around saying that shared governance at UI is better than ever, it’s also a good time for contingent faculty to push for more representation, along with more pay.
(As an aside, this all fits with Mike Crow’s playbook down at ASU, which seems to be the template Harreld is following. Cut costs by cutting the proportion of tenured faculty, then have low-wage instructors grind out the majority of the credit hours, while pimping out the ‘name’ profs as justification for more tuition hikes, more entrepreneurial ventures, etc.)
One of the most interesting aspects of the fraudulent 2015 presidential search at the University of Iowa, which culminated in the illegitimate appointment of J. Bruce Harreld, is that the administrative crimes which were committed in pursuit of that objective were mere prelude. Unlike a bank heist, for example, which represents the literal payoff of a carefully planned caper, stealing the presidency of a billion dollar research university is perpetrated in anticipation of a future looting or subverting of that institution. Call it power politics, call it gamesmanship, or call it what it was — lying, cheating, fraud and theft — the entire point of installing Harreld at the head of the UI administrative org chart was that he could then faithfully implement the agendas of his co-conspirators.
As we now know, Harreld paid immediate dividends for the three men at the heart of the conspiracy to rig the 2015 election. Even before taking office, Harreld took up the charge by then-Regents President Bruce Rastetter to increase Iowa’s national college rank by any and every means possible. Without hesitation, Harreld began converting the UI budget model and faculty salary structure to game the U.S. News methodology, which ultimately makes that ranking determination. (There was, additionally, an abortive attempt to sell that agenda through the Faculty Senate, even as one member of the UI faculty was the co-author of a book which exposed the fallacy of such efforts.)
Shortly after taking office in early November of 2015, Harreld granted the naming rights to the new UI children’s hospital to former search committee member Jerre Stead, who was not only an Iowa alum and megadonor, but Harreld’s former business mentor. Suspected but unproven at the time, we now know that Stead was the person who initially brought Harreld to Rastetter’s attention — a fact that Harreld and Stead were both so eager to suppress that they told explicit lies to the press to cover up their prior relationship, and their conspiracy during the search. Oddly enough, however, despite Stead’s extensive experience in the acquisitions industry, and Harreld’s Harvard MBA, that handout was perpetrated without any due diligence as to the market value of said naming rights, thus resulting in the pass-back of tens of millions of dollars in economic value to Stead. At the Board of Regents, Rastetter then ensured that their boondoggle was approved by scheduling a vote that was only revealed at the last possible minute.
At the time it was said that the decision to award the naming rights to Stead was based on prior donations, which were considerable, including a multi-million-dollar donation just prior to Harreld’s shocking appointment. On that particular occasion, the third co-conspirator in Harreld’s sham hire — then-VP for Medical Affairs Jean Robillard — chartered a private jet to speed him to Colorado, where he reportedly secured that donation to help complete the over-budget children’s hospital. Not only did that trip cost the UI Foundation over $10K, but why Robillard had to race to Colorado to secure a check that could have been wired or delivered was never explained.
Speaking of Robillard, his participation in the conspiracy to appoint Harreld paid off a few months later, in early 2016, when he was allowed to kick the dean of the UI College of Medicine to the curb, then elevate himself to that position. Not only was Robillard the chair of the search committee that passed Harreld to the board for the final vote — along with three qualified candidates, whom Robillard used as stooges — but Rastetter made that sure Robillard was also the acting president at UI for the final month of the search, when Harreld was appointed. While a traitor to the UI community, and thus to shared governance on the UI campus, Robillard’s betrayal did allow him to consolidate power over UI Health Care, including the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics — of which the children’s hospital was a major new component. At the Board of Regents, Rastetter ensured that Robillard’s coup was retroactively approved, even though UI gave the board no notice of the change. (Robillard subsequently went on to lead UI Health Care into a financial death spiral, from which it may or may not emerge.)
In sum, the first few months after Harreld’s fraudulent appointment were predictably sleazy. Yet even as Harreld set about paying immediate, ego-gratifying dividends for his benefactors, it was also clear that those crony machinations were relatively trivial. You do not go to the trouble and risk of hiring a former business executive with no experience in academic administration or the public sector — to the point that Harreld himself was forced to admit he actually needed coaching and mentoring to do the job he was hired to do — if you do not have a long-term agenda.
What that agenda was remained unclear through 2016 and 2017, in part because the blowback from the corrupt 2015 search limited Harreld and his co-conspirators. At the same time, there was also a spectacular outbreak of corruption at Iowa State University, which also reached back to 2015 — a banner year for higher-ed abuses in the state of Iowa. All of that also weakened Harreld’s hand because it crippled Rastetter’s power at the Board of Regents, to the point that Rastetter was not reappointed in 2017, despite having been one of the governor’s largest political donors.
As for Harreld’s haul from the heist, he was given an unprecedented five-year deal on his first contract, as opposed to the traditional three-year term. He was also paid a scandalous $800K per year ($200K deferred), which was hundreds of thousands more than had ever been paid to his female predecessor, even though she was fully qualified at the time of her hire, and had eight years of experience when she retired. While giving Harreld $4M over five years for a stolen search was galling enough, the fact that everyone — including Harreld — agreed that he needed to serve a protracted apprenticeship only underscored the magnitude of the crony corruption.
Harreld’s Long Game
Throughout 2016 and into 2017 Harreld continued to monkey with the UI bureaucracy, but his results were meager. By the summer of 2017 his attempts to reinvent the budget process in service of gaming Iowa’s national rank, and to implement a two-committee Path Forward process, had both been reworked by the faculty. And of course until recently, the university was also on the AAUP sanction list — an ignoble designation that was a direct result of the corrupt 2015 presidential search.
Over that same stretch, some things did become abundantly clear. For example, while Harreld was indeed a former business executive, he had never actually been the CEO of anything. Instead, whether at Boston Chicken, Kraft, IBM or any of this other corporate ports of call, Harreld was always implementing someone else’s ideas. He did have a certain facility with administration, in a heavy-handed way, but he was not a visionary, and he was definitely not conversant with the critical issues in higher-ed.
Not being conversant with those issues myself I did a lot of reading during 2016 and 2017, while watching Harreld flail, and over that time I kept running across articles about Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University. In retrospect that wasn’t surprising, because there is no greater self-promoter than Crow, who gets a perpetual assist from the business press because of his entrepreneurial approach to higher-ed. What did not occur to me until late in 2017, however — because I am perpetually slow on the uptake — was that there might be a connection between Crow and Harreld’s hire. That’s when I finally remembered that although Jerre Stead was running a company in Harreld’s home state of Colorado, Stead’s actual home address was Scottsdale, Arizona.
Following that epiphany, in February and early March of 2018 we took a deep drive into a book co-written by Crow and a member of the ASU faculty. Titled Designing the New American University, that book was published in early 2015 — just as the UI presidential search was taking shape — though by that time Crow’s carefully managed legend as a transformational university president was well-established. Even ignoring any professional, social or personal connections between Stead and Crow, because of Crow’s self-promotion it is inevitable that Stead would have known about Crow, if not also the publication of his how-to guide. (See the dated listings at the top of this thread for the posts on Crow’s book — or click here for the first post in that series.)
Finally, in Crow’s book, we found a comprehensive vision for the future of higher-ed at the University of Iowa, which Harreld has so far failed to articulate. It was a huckster’s vision, to be sure, driven largely by untapped student demand in the Phoenix Metroplex, which Crow had identified and set about exploiting over a decade ago. Still, it was a coherent vision, and better yet it came with its own playbook, as published in early 2015. While Harreld cannot grow UI to “infinite scale” — as Crow claims to be doing at ASU, with a straight face no less — he can still implement aspects of the New American University, and in retrospect Harreld has been doing just that for the past year and a half.
The Contingent Faculty Hustle
The most obvious example of Harreld implementing Crow’s plan at UI concerns Harreld’s recent trolling, trivializing and abuse of non-tenured faculty, which we looked at in two posts at the end of May — here and here. While by no means exclusive to Crow and Harreld, Crow is exploiting non-tenure or contingent faculty at ASU on an industrial scale. (As with his disciple at Iowa, Crow loves touting the star, tenured faculty who get him headlines, but most of the actual teaching that the students are paying for at Arizona State — and more and more of the teaching at Iowa — is done by faculty who have little or no job security, and little or no input on campus.)
From Inside Higher Ed, on 01/23/15 — just as Crow’s book was about to hit the market:
If you don’t really care about the quality of the degrees you crank out — and for the most part Crow does not, which is why he has turned ASU into a massive credentialing operation fronted by a respectable academic facade — then the easiest way to make a lot of money is to hire faculty as cheaply as possible, then work them to death. Flash forward three years, and Harreld is fighting tooth and nail to avoid paying contingent faculty any more than he has to, because that will cut into his bottom line. (More money for teaching means less money for sexy new entrepreneurial ventures, which is not what the students are or should be paying tuition for, even at a research university.)
From Iowa Public Radio, on 4/18/18: