A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
02/06/19 — If you haven’t read this story, it’s an exceedingly bad look for the University of Iowa. The best-case scenario is that it describes jaw-dropping incompetence. The worst-case scenario is that J. Bruce Harreld was moved to assist a Chinese student in maintaining his progress toward a degree. (See posts below on 01/02/19 and 01/05/19 for more.)
01/18/19 — The 2020 Task Force Phase II Final Report.
01/05/19 — J. Bruce Harreld, China, and America’s National Security Interests.
01/02/19 — Fresh off Harreld’s obligatory appearance with the UI Football team in Tampa — not far from his multi-million-dollar vacation home in Jacksonville — I was not expecting additional media availabilities until the start of the academic year. Silly me. Here’s Harreld giving an exceedingly conciliatory interview to Chinese media. Related concerns here.
12/29/18 — In Which J. Bruce Harreld Continues His Petty, Bratty, Vindictive Persecution of the UI Labor Center.
12/16/18 — A Slate of Updates About J. Bruce Harreld and the University of Iowa.
12/02/18 — The Secret to J. Bruce Harreld’s Entrepreneurial Success at the University of Iowa.
11/28/18 — The Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne reported today on the deep political and financial connections of members of the Iowa Board of Regents, including particularly President Michael Richards. It is a straightforward accounting of how beholden Richards and a majority of the board are to the Republican party.
11/12/18 — Predictably, J. Bruce Harreld’s Entrepreneurial Insurgency Begins With a Lie.
11/03/18 — The Iowa Board of Regents and the 2018 Elections.
10/24/18 — J. Bruce Harreld at Three Years — Part 4: Stabbing the Faculty in the Back.
10/14/18 — J. Bruce Harreld at Three Years — Part 3: Putting Women at Risk of Sexual Abuse.
10/03/18 — J. Bruce Harreld at Three Years — Part 2: Iowa’s U.S. News Ranking Implosion.
09/24/18 — J. Bruce Harreld at Three Years — Part 1: The Children’s Hospital Construction Debacle. Updated 09/28/18.
09/05/18 — Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center — Part 6: Fighting the Good Fight.
08/26/18 — Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center — Part 5: The Leadership Lie.
08/19/18 — Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center — Part 4: The Motive Lie.
08/12/18 — Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center — Part 3: The Process Lie.
08/07/18 — Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center — Part 2: The Mission Lie.
08/02/18 — Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center — Part 1: The Funding Lie.
In one month it will be three years since J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of the University of Iowa, and in three months it will be three years since he took office in November of 2015. While he has not, apparently, made any truly catastrophic changes, over the intervening years he has undertaken a series of administrative gambits which are designed to prosecute the entrepreneurial agenda of the co-conspirators who rigged his appointment. (Those three men are: former regents president Bruce Rastetter, former UI VPMA Jean Robillard, and longtime Harreld mentor and UI megadonor Jerre Stead.)
Having finally prepared the bureaucratic battlefield to his liking, a little over three months ago Harreld set about using those prior administrative machinations as justification for closing or cutting a number of academic centers and institutes on the UI campus. While it is already being hinted that this is simply the first salvo in a coming barrage, the closings and cuts that were announced put the lie to a claim that Harreld himself made back in 2016. From KCRG’s Forrest Saunders, on 05/17/16:
In retrospect, Harreld the Ogre was clearly lying in order to buy time and curry favor with those on campus who would prove most easily deceived. Armed with a five-year contract paying him $800K per year ($200K deferred), from Harreld’s perspective it quite literally paid to lay low and wait a few years before brandishing his administrative scythe and torch. Ironically, however, when the recent slate of program closings and cuts was announced, one program in particular did bring a lot of people out of the woodwork — in opposition to his plan.
Specifically, Harreld’s decision to axe the sixty-seven-year-old UI Labor Center has not only prompted active opposition, it has exposed what many people suspect was the real agenda behind Harreld’s corrupt hire. Instead of leading the University of Iowa forward as a public research university, Harreld was jammed into office by a small cabal of co-conspirators who see only profit and loss, and who hope to convert the academic mission of the university to that singular entrepreneurial end. (For more on the Labor Center’s history, as well as the current cultural context, see this post from UI professor Shelton Stromquist.)
Predictably, Harreld’s justification for the recently announced round of closings and cuts is economic, yet even a cursory glance at the university’s budget shows that Iowa’s finances are in significantly better shape than they were when he was fraudulently appointed. You would not know that because it has been a cornerstone of Harreld’s propaganda campaign that the state is disinvesting in higher education, and the press has been all too happy to repeat that narrow characterization of the university’s fiscal health. What Harreld persistently omits, however, and what the Iowa Board of Regents omits, and what the press refuses to report even when the facts are at hand, is that Harreld has taken up tuition more than two and a half times the amount of all of the state cuts that have occurred since his sham hire.
As to the procedural mechanism by which Harreld determined the recently announced closings and cuts, that too is not a manifestation of coherent policy or consensus reality, but of the duplicitous administrative machinations that he implemented over the past two years. In particular, the imposition of a ‘new’ value-based budget model, and the development of the new UI Strategic Plan — both in 2016 — serve as symbiotic linchpins of a decision-making process in which stakeholders purportedly have more say in how money is spent. In reality, Harreld himself perverted both the budget model and strategic plan to his entrepreneurial ends, but because they still give the impression of having been arrived at by consensus he constantly refers to them as his guiding lights.
With regard to closing the UI Labor Center, specifically, however, as a result of sharp and aggressive local reporting — at least initially — any such consensus assertion was discredited within twenty-four hours. That in turn exposed the degree to which Harreld has perverted the entire premise of organizational values at UI, to the point that his interpretation no longer reflects Iowa’s core values as an institution, nor the values of the great majority of people who teach, study and work there. (Those in the UI community who genuinely do care about the school’s long-held values would be well-advised to aggressively press that advantage.)
To be clear, back in April Harreld did obliquely serve notice that cuts would be forthcoming, and he did generically single out academic centers and institutes. That obscure warning, however, came in an aside in a press release that was otherwise devoted to a campus construction moratorium, and to ongoing propaganda about generational disinvestment. Although the local Iowa press did quickly ferret out and report on the threat of closures, the university resolutely refused to provide any additional information. That said, the very fact that the UI press release mentioned “centers and institutes” made it clear that Harreld already had specific targets in mind.
Carrying the byline of the Office of the President, here is the relevant passage from that 04/12/18 press release:
The premise here seems straightforward. The state used to pay for programs that it does not want to pay for anymore, but Harreld is not willing to pick up the tab. There are multiple problems with that premise, however, not the least of them being that Harreld’s entire justification for raising tuition 16.4% in less than two years — through four separate tuition hikes — was to replace funding that was cut by the state. As a result of all of those hikes, while the source of some of the university’s annual revenue has changed, there has been no decrease in the total amount of money available to the school, meaning none of the closings and cuts that would follow were necessary to balance the books.
In fact — and as noted endlessly in these virtual pages — Harreld has relentlessly exploited UI students by aggressively increasing tuition a minimum of $2.5 for every $1 in cuts since his hire, meaning the university now has more annual revenue at its disposal than it did before any cuts in appropriations. And here we are not talking about a few million dollars at the margins. Currently, for FY19, the University of Iowa will take in $40M to $45M more in total revenue that it did three years ago, and that’s after accounting for all of the state cuts over that time.
On what basis, then, is Harreld making cuts to campus programs? The answer seems to be that Harreld believes he has the unilateral right to assign the budgets of specific programs to state funding, as opposed to tuition revenue, even though most of the money from both revenue sources goes into the same big pot before it is doled out. There are indeed some programs at Iowa’s state universities which are mandated by the state, but we know about those programs because money from state coffers is specifically restricted to those programs. You can literally look up the line-items for those programs in the state budget, and in some instances the funding of those programs is even memorialized in Iowa’s state code.
Following the vague April announcement of impending cuts to centers and institutes at UI, we took a look at several such programs in a post on 04/25/18. Both the UI Center for Global & Regional Environmental Research (CGRER), and the Iowa Energy Center (IEC) at Iowa State, were funded by a specific law, meaning the linkage between those programs and state funding could be clearer. (For another example, see the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, which also receives restricted funds.)
In all of the recent reporting by the press, however, and everything I have been able to find on my own, there does not seem to be any restricted funding for the UI Labor Center, and that means Harreld’s claim that state funding was the basis for that program is objectively false. He clearly wants people to believe that’s the case, because that gives him a plausible justification for claiming that cuts in stand funding have forced his hand, but even if we set aside the massive infusion of new tuition revenue that association is simply invalid. (The very fact that Harreld has not pointed to a line item in the state budget for the UI Labor Center is telling, because if specific funding had been cut, there is no question that he would have used that legislative action as justification for closing that center.)
In making this false claim, what Harreld is angling for is the right to spend money however he wants. If the state cuts any funding, including generic unrestricted dollars, Harreld wants to pick and choose which programs to associate with those reduced dollars. (At the same time, he also wants to hoard as much new tuition revenue as possible, because all of the money from student bank accounts is unrestricted — meaning he can spend it on the entrepreneurial ventures that he was hired to implement.)
Pushing that false claim in a presentation to the regents in April, Harreld actually asserted that the same students that he has repeatedly exploited for new tuition revenue would be victimized if he did not close or cut funding for centers and institutes on the UI campus. From the Des Moines Register’s Kathy Bolten, on 04/12/18:
Given that Iowa’s increased tuition revenue more than makes up for any state cuts, the audacity of Harreld’s deceit is galling. The same man who has repeatedly punished students by taking more and more money from their bank accounts — or worse, compelling them to take out additional student loans — has the temerity to profess to be looking out for their best interests. As for the idea that students are or would be subsidizing the UI Labor Center, as just noted that longstanding program is not a bureaucratic appendage foisted on the school by deadbeat politicians. Instead, and as we will see in an upcoming part of this multi-part post, the Labor Center has been an intrinsic part of the university’s mission for over half a century.
Only a few days after publication of the post on 04/25/18, the university announced the first center or institute that would be closed. As reported by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 05/01/18:
That single May 1st announcement was followed by two and a half months of silence until mid-July, when the hammer fell on seven more centers and institutes, along with several others programs that had their funding reduced. Interestingly, however, even allowing for the loose criteria that Harreld and the university initially put forward in April, some of the centers and institutes were actually neither, and others — like the UI Labor Center — did not meet the stated criteria for inclusion. From the Iowa Now press release on 07/10/18:
Once again, Harreld stressed that the programs on the list were being closed or reduced because the state would no longer fund them, but where was the evidence that the state had ever specifically funded any of them? At the same time, because they were lumped together as “centers” and “institutes” that reinforced the idea that there was some coherent strategy driving the listed cuts, yet from the actual list it was immediately clear that some of the programs were neither centers or institutes. Instead, the list seemed to be a grab-bag of largely trivial programmatic changes which could probably be pulled together every six months on a campus the size of UI.
Fortuitously, in her reporting on the day of that July announcement, the Des Moines Register’s Kathy Bolten included details about the programs that were being closed or cut. Here is her description of the first center, from 07/10/18:
Clearly a “center” by name, but staffed only by a half-time position. Given how much medicine and education have changed since 1990, it is hardly surprising that the money might better be spent elsewhere, but there is also no indication that the funding for this center ever came with strings from the state. Instead, at one time it was deemed of value by the College of Medicine, but times have apparently changed.
Now consider Bolten’s description of the second program on the list, which does clearly qualify as an “institute”:
As it turns out, there are actually a number of valid reasons for closing the Confucius Institute at UI, not the least of which is national security. Heavily promoted by the Chinese government, Confucius Institutes currently litter the academic landscape in the U.S., having proliferated under the guise of cultural exchange and education.. Unfortunately, they are also extensions of Chinese intelligence gathering, which includes the theft of intellectual property. So much so, in fact, that earlier this year the FBI sent out a nationwide warning about that organization. (Imagine Lenin Institutes popping up on colleges and university campuses across the country and you can see the problem.)
As for the cost of running the Confucius Institute, despite the fact that former Iowa governor Terry Branstad is now the U.S. ambassador to China, and he is super-tight with Chinese President Xi Jinping, there is no evidence that the state of Iowa compelled UI to host that center. In fact, despite the claim that cutting the center will save $154K, it turns out that China itself subsidizes the cost of the UI Confucius Center. From a Daily Iowan report on the FBI warning, by Brooklyn Draisey, on 02/16/18:
So not only has China paid UI to host the Confucius Institute, but in cutting that institute Harreld will pocket a $1.2M endowment. The obvious question is how that fits into Harreld’s claim that the centers and institutes on the July list are no longer being funded by the state, when that particular institute was clearly never funded by the state. And of course the equally obvious answer is that it does not meet that criteria. (As reported by the Daily Iowan’s Emily Wangen on 07/11/18, the current contract for the Confucius Institute expires next year. If UI wanted to renew that contract, however, the Chinese would certainly agree.)
Bolten described the third center or institute on the UI list as follows:
Again, obviously another center by name, so at least it passes that test. As for the budgeted savings, there doesn’t seem to be anyone working for the center in a dedicated capacity, so this seems more like a simple reallocation of resources. Again, because of considerable changes in technology since 2002, it is entirely possible that the original impetus for the center is no longer germane, but in any event this does not seem to have been a state-mandated program.
The fourth program on the list is also a center:
As with the Confucius Institute, the backstory here is important because the AIB campus was actually gifted to the UI in 2015. In a matter of a few weeks, however, then-regent-president Bruce Rastetter glommed onto that gift and directed that it be organized as the ICHE, which would serve all three state’s universities. Thus saddled with an overly broad mission which also put the ICHE in direct competition with multiple institutions of higher learning in and around Des Moines, the ICHE inexplicably struggled to find a foothold in the two short years in which it was in operation.
Was the ICHE ever funded by the state, which then cut that funding? Clearly the answer is no. In fact, although it has been reported that the ICHE lost over a million dollars in its two years of formative operation, it is also estimated that the market value of the property is $20M — meaning the University of Iowa stands to reap a ridiculous 1,900% profit on that gift.
(As an aside, if you believe that all of that money will be devoted to scholarships for students from central Iowa, you have not been paying paying attention to how J. Bruce Harreld does business. Even if the stipulations are legally enforceable, all Harreld has to do is count the aid tied to the AIB campus toward obligations that the University of Iowa already has, which means he can then divert a like amount of cash from the General Education Fund to whatever he wants. And he doesn’t even have to explain what he’s doing with all of that found money.)
Here is Bolten’s description of the fifth program, which is also a center:
In contrast to most of the other programs on the list, the Labor Center is both a mature and robust operation. While the expected savings is substantial, that shouldn’t be surprising given that Harreld is wiping out five full-time jobs. As to whether the state ever funded the Labor Center, then cut that funding, again there is no evidence to support that contention, meaning Harreld’s most basic justification simply does not apply.
The sixth center or institute on the list is actually neither:
The questions here should be obvious. What is this office doing on a list of centers and institutes which are being axed because the state purportedly no longer wants to pay the freight? Did the state ever fund this office? And why is there no budgeted savings listed if this cut has been compelled by a decrease in state funding? Or will there actually be little or no savings when this work is curtailed? (Even the fact that the word ‘position’ is used instead of ‘job’ suggests that no one will be lose any pay when this office is closed.)
The seventh center or institute is also neither:
I don’t know why the University of Iowa has a mobile museum, but here’s an educated guess. 2014 is right around the time that former UI President Sally Mason was compelled to rapidly increase in-state enrollment, due to a performance-based funding plan that was being pushed by Rastetter and former disgraced ISU President Steven Leath. That plan would have redirected tens of millions of dollars from UI to ISU, based on the number of in-state students on campus, so Mason responded by aggressively marketing UI to students across the state. Fortunately, that plan failed in 2015, but sometimes initiatives like the UI Mobile Museum take on a life of their own. In any event, now that Harreld has capped enrollment, there is no need to specifically court Iowa high school science geeks and nerds, so that $190K can be thrown at something else. As to whether the UI Mobile Museum was ever forced on the university by the state, I’m thinking probably not….
Finally, for the sake of completeness, here are Bolten’s short descriptions of the programs that will survive, but have their funding cut:
Over the entire list of seven program terminations and five reductions, the only program that seems to receive restricted appropriations from the state legislature is the State Hygienic Laboratory, which makes sense. If you want to identify diseases and such, you probably want to make sure there is money budgeted for that objective, instead of just hoping it all works out. As to how much that particular program will be cut this year, we don’t have the final FY19 budget yet, but in the governor’s budget recommendations from January [p. 83], she recommended $4.35M for FY19, as against $4.4M in FY17 (actual) and FY18 (estimated). Meaning the total cut will be about $50K, almost all of which is attributable to the collapse of the state budget for two years running. (On that same page you can see that the funding for the Leopold Center at ISU was zeroed out, and that the funding for the UI Flood Center has been cut by $300K+ since FY17.)
What you will not find in the governor’s budget recommendation for FY19, or in any other state budget I have seen, is a line item for the UI Labor Center, because that program is not currently mandated by or specifically funded by the state. It is true that the center’s original mission was given a legislative launch, but over the years the Labor Center has become an established part of the university.
From the History and Mission page of the UI Labor Center website:
Today, after more than sixty years, the Labor Center is an intrinsic part of the academic and research mission of the University of Iowa, and by every account acquits itself well in both regards. And yet, because Harreld has decided that all of the dollars that go to the Labor Center are the same exact dollars that were reduced by the legislature over the past few years, he asserts the right to axe that program. (We will get into Harreld’s motive in a subsequent part of this multi-part post, but the question here is not whether Harreld is pro-labor or rabidly anti-labor. The question is whether labor in itself is worthy of study, and whether the knowledge gleaned from the UI Labor Center is worthy of dissemination by the state, just as the University of Iowa provides information to would-be entrepreneurs.)
Despite the fact that five of the seven program closings do involve centers and institutes, as advertised — thus implying some sort of reasoned decision making process — on closer inspection any purported equivalence falls apart. Of the other three centers, two have only minimal staffing, while the ICHE — which currently employs six — represents a poorly implemented two-year gamble on a new satellite campus. And of course the only institute on the list is a subsidized front for Chinese intelligence services.
What we are left to wonder, after looking at the specific programs that are being closed, is why the UI Labor Center — which is a fully formed and robust part of Iowa’s academic mission — is being terminated alongside six programmatic misfits. In fact, it’s almost as if those other programs were packed around the decision to kill off the UI Labor Center, in order to make that specific decision seem more sensible. Is the UI Mobile Museum really comparable to the Labor Center? How about the Confucius Institute?
As it turns out, pursuing any plausible justification for closing the UI Labor Center not only leads to interesting answers, but along the way Harreld’s entire administrative propaganda operation will unravel in the process. In that context, consider what we have learned in this post alone, about his purported justification for slashing and burning the Labor Center. First, Harreld’s insinuation that the programs he is closing were once mandated by or specifically funded by the state is false. Second, in talking about cuts in appropriations, Harreld consistently omits the tuition windfall he engineered over the past two years, which more than compensates for all of those cuts by a minimum of 2.5 to 1. Third, Harreld’s direct claim that the programs he is closing were funded entirely from state appropriations — as opposed to being funded all or in part by tuition revenue — is also false, because unrestricted state money is pooled in the General Education Fund before it is spent. Fourth, if the entire point of raising tuition was to compensate for state funding cuts — a claim that has been endlessly repeated by both Harreld and the Board of Regents — then by definition there is no shortage of funds for the programs that are slated to be closed. Fifth, Harreld’s claim that he is protecting Iowa’s students is not only objectively false, it is genuinely reprehensible and truly revealing of the ogre he is.
For Harreld to close the UI Labor Center for cause he would need some other justification unrelated to funding. As you may or may not have noticed in several of the quotes above, Harreld and the university did specify criteria that were used to make a qualitative determination about which programs would and would not be funded, but in typical Harreld fashion he not only bungled that as well, he bungled it twice. As it currently stands, the most recent qualitative rationale that Harreld put forward for closing the UI Labor Center is so sharply and absurdly constrained as to prove his malicious intent. We will pull on the thread of that intent in the next post, and Harreld will still fail to present a legitimate basis for closing the UI Labor Center.
For Part 2 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center, click here.
This is Part 2 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center. For Part 1, click here.
In the first part of this multipart post we looked at J. Bruce Harreld’s economic justification for closing the University of Iowa Labor Center — among other recently announced program closings and funding cuts — and it turns out he doesn’t have one. Instead, his strident claim that he was forced to close or reduce multiple programs because of “generational” cuts in state funding is at best disingenuous, and at worst an overt attempt to deceive the public. We can say that definitively because since his fraudulent appointment in 2015, Harreld has increased annual tuition revenue at UI by $40M to $45M over and above all of the funding cuts during that time frame. As to the alleged “generational disinvestment” in higher-ed, like most other higher-ed hacks, Harreld often refers to the past decade or two without also noting that in 2008, the Great Recession took higher-ed budgets down across the country.
In the official press releases and news reports about the recently announced slate of closings and cuts, however — and particularly with regard to closing the UI Labor Center — a qualitative assertion has also been made that those programs are not part of the core mission of the University of Iowa. In press release after press release, and quote after quote from Harreld and spokespersons in the UI media shop, we find claims that the terminated programs are out of step with the tightly focused enterprise that Harreld is now running at UI. And of course that is a valid objective for a leader to have — notwithstanding the fact that this particular leader was hired as the result of a rigged, $300K search, specifically to push an entrepreneurial agenda which is also not a component of UI’s core institutional mission.
As noted in Part 1, the first inkling the UI community had about Harreld’s plan to close “centers and institutes” came in an aside in a mid-April press release. That statement — which was issued by the Office of the President, and signed by both Harreld and Rod Lehnertz, UI’s Senior Vice President for Finance and Operations — concerned a construction moratorium, and other cost-cutting measures, which arose not from generational disinvestment, but from the second straight year of state funding cuts. (Despite those cuts, however, the state increased Iowa’s budget by $3.2M for FY19, which began on July 1st.)
In reality, not only is the University of Iowa taking in tens of millions of dollars in new tuition revenue this year, even after all of the cuts over the past two years are accounted for, but currently the single biggest threat to the school’s bottom line is not a lack of funding from the state, but a $20M+ construction judgment hanging over the school because of flagrant mismanagement during construction of the new UIHC children’s hospital. (For more on that debacle, see this story from 07/11/18, by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller.)
From the 04/12/18 UI press release announcing the construction moratorium and other cost-saving measures, here is how Harreld and Lehnertz justified the program closings and funding cuts that would be detailed in the following months:
That press release appeared on the morning of 04/12/18, and the administrative logic was clear. It was faulty logic, to be sure, if not outright deception because Iowa’s massive infusion of new tuition revenue was never acknowledged, but still — the decision-making criteria about which programs to protect and cut was overt. Because there was, purportedly, less money available, that money would be spent on the core components of the university’s mission, and those components were “education, research, and scholarship”.
Despite various competing interest groups on the UI campus, I cannot think of anyone who would dispute this tight framing of Iowa’s organizational priorities. For hundreds of years, education, research and scholarship have been the core pursuits of colleges and universities across America and around the world. Which of course makes it all the more surprising that on that same day, something else came out of J. Bruce Harreld’s mouth.
The press release on the morning of 04/12/18 was in advance of Harreld’s presentation at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents later that afternoon. While Harreld’s talk covered many of the same topics, his characterization of the core components of Iowa’s academic mission diverged notably in one important respect. As reported by the Des Moines Register’s Kathy Bolten on 04/12/18:
We do not have to engage in forensic analysis to detect the glaring difference between the description of Iowa’s academic mission that was put out by the Office of the President, and the academic mission that was described by the fraudulent president himself. In the former case the core components of the UI mission were “education, research, and scholarship”, while in Bolten’s report the core components are “student learning, research or economic development”. To be precise, however, what Harreld said before the regents on 04/12/18 was that three core components of Iowa’s academic mission were “student success, research, and economic development”. (You can hear that and more here. The slide Harreld is talking over appears at the 1:02:00 mark; the quote about “student learning, research and economic development” around 1:02:40.)
The first terms in each set of mission criteria are roughly analogous. Whatever the difference is between “education” and “student success”, they both clearly relate to teaching and learning. The second term in each set is “research”, so there is rhetorical consensus on that component, though in reality Harreld was hired to lead the charge on applied or for-profit research, as opposed to the basic research that universities have traditionally pursued. (Note that the emphasis on basic research in academia s intentional, and not simply some daft oversight because geeks are too stupid to make money. Precisely because basic research is not expected to produce an immediate return on investment, the money junkies in the private sector tend to ignore it, yet that is also how many future advances — and profits — are born. Without a steady stream of basic research at academic institutions, American industry would inevitably play out all of the current advances that are already in the pipeline.)
With regard to the third term in each set of criteria, however, “scholarship” and “economic development” are clearly not the same thing — not even remotely. Scholarship derives from study and involves the distillation, analysis and dissemination of information that we call knowledge. Economic development is about making money, and is generally not considered part of the core mission of academia for all sorts of reasons, including the aforementioned need for ongoing basic research. (To that we can also add legal prohibitions against public universities competing with private industry, which exist in many states, including Iowa.)
So how is it possible that on the same day, only hours apart, the Office of the President of the University of Iowa, and the fraudulently appointed president himself, referenced two wildly divergent factors as the third component of Iowa’s academic mission? Well, given everything we know about Harreld, the answer should be self-evident. In 2015 the Iowa Board of Regents ran a rigged search in order to appoint a former business executive as president of the University of Iowa, over three eminently qualified academic finalists. That executive had no prior experience in academic administration or the public sector, and to the extent that he had prior academic experience at all it was largely a result of spending six of the seven previous years as a part-time lecturer at the Harvard School of Business.
The only conceivable reason for fraudulently hiring someone like Harreld — as opposed to someone who was actually qualified for the job — is that the Board of Regents literally wanted him to run the University of Iowa like a business. And of course the whole point of any business is making money. Because that would undoubtedly go over like a lead balloon with the UI campus if it entailed the devaluing of scholarship, in the press release on 04/12/18 Harreld paid lip service to scholarship as the third core component. While Harreld must suffer the UI community to collect his monthly $50K checks, however, when he appeared before the board later that same day he made it clear he had not gone native by referencing economic development as the third core component of Iowa’s mission, because the regents write those checks.
Unfortunately, the inevitability of this betrayal merely reinforces the powerlessness that many people felt following the board’s naked abuse of shared governance during the 2015 presidential search. The presidency of UI was stolen, and the guy who now holds that office — who aided and abetted that theft — is perverting the core mission of the university in a way that everyone expected. So what else is there to say?
And the answer is, there is a great deal to say, including the fact that there could not be a clearer wake-up call to the UI community than Harreld’s on-the-record replacement of scholarship with economic development as a core component of the university’s organizational mission. As regular readers know, that radical change is also not surprising in the context of an earlier series of posts concerning Mike Crow’s presidency at Arizona State University, which was almost certainly the template for hiring Harreld at UI. While Crow had the added advantage of pursuing a growth strategy by exploiting an untapped market for higher-ed services, in terms of the organizational focus of that school he also prioritized economic development over scholarship. To that end, most of the teaching at ASU is now done by non-tenure faculty (also called contingent faculty), who are worked like dogs, while tenured faculty pursue the kind of applied or for-profit research that Crow loves to hype. (You can read the first post in that series here.)
As noted in the series of posts about ASU, however, there are two related problems with porting the entrepreneurial spirit to higher education, and particularly so at state-funded research universities. First, economic development is a gussied-up synonym for gambling. While placing financial bets may be the norm in the private sector, where investors know the risks, neither the students who pay tuition nor the taxpayers who fund state appropriations are likely to support entrepreneurial ventures which could lead to considerable or even catastrophic financial losses.
From the final post on Crow and ASU:
The second problem with converting UI into a higher-ed startup incubator has to do with Harreld himself. Whatever you think about the idea of running the University of Iowa like a for-profit corporation, the next question is whether Harreld is the right guy to pursue that objective. His own claim to that standing is largely based on his experience at IBM, where legendary CEO Lou Gertsner put Harreld in charge of the Emerging Business Opportunities (EBO) division. And yet, after Harreld left IBM in 2008, and he had the opportunity to put his own money where his mouth was, he clearly avoided taking that risk.
From later in the same Crow/ASU post:
There is no question that there are faculty on the UI campus who are not only sympathetic to Harreld’s attempt to bring for-profit fever to higher-ed, but who are eager to make out like bandits themselves — even if that means a professor down the hall is denied tenure, or a job. And yet, I can’t help but notice that all of Harreld’s advocates also chose to spend their professional lives in the relative financial security of government service, as opposed to braving the wilds of free-market capitalism. Like Harreld — who is set to make $4M over five years, even if he turns the University of Iowa into a financial crater — his campus supporters are all for taking on risk, as long as they don’t have any personal exposure.
That such a hypocrite is now president of the University of Iowa, and is eager to dispense with scholarship in pursuit of economic development, should be of concern not just to those who have been thrown over the side in the past few months, but to everyone in the UI community. Whatever role education (or student success) and research still play in Iowa’s academic mission, replacing scholarship with economic development means there will be many more scholarly programs which are deemed expendable.
As to Labor Center specifically, the obvious question is how Harreld’s emphasis on economic development factored into his decision to close that program. As detailed in Part 1, many of the other centers, institutes and miscellaneous programs which are being cut or reduced seem marginally relevant regardless of which set of criteria we apply, so it is not really surprising that they are falling by the wayside. With regard to the UI Labor Center, however, that is decidedly not the case.
Here is how the Labor Center describes its own mission:
In terms of education, research and scholarship — meaning the criteria put forward by Harreld and Lehnertz in the press release in mid-April — the Labor Center checks all of those boxes. It does some other things, too, and it is not primarily concerned with teaching Iowa students, but in terms of the academic mission of the university it is clearly germane, and has been for generations. In the context of Harreld’s subsequent inclusion of economic development at the expense of scholarship, while it is true that the Labor Center is not a money-making venture, neither are most of the educational and research programs on campus, meaning Harrled might choose to, or be compelled to, close them on that basis as well.
While Harreld’s shift from ‘education’ in the April press release to ‘student success’ before the board was less radical, as regular readers know, student success is Harreld’s euphemistic term for gaming the metrics which determine Iowa’s national college rank. In that respect, by changing that aspect of Iowa’s core mission Harreld also abandoned education as anything other than a marketing exercise, where educating actual students is subordinated to whatever numbers give Iowa the highest score. To the extent that the Labor Center has little relevance to such metrics, that once again applies to many other programs on the UI campus, making it a poor basis for exclusion. And of course because Harreld included research in both sets of mission components, that also does not help in providing a justification for axing the Labor Center — which is clearly involved in research, including applied research.
Whenever Harreld decided to kill off the UI Labor Center, you can see the problem he faced in achieving that end as a matter of consistent university-wide policy. Despite having rigged both the ‘new’ value-based budget model and the new UI Strategic Plan in his entrepreneurial favor, he was suddenly checked by his own administrative machinations. If he stuck with the academic mission criteria from his press release he had no basis for closing the Labor Center, and if he used the mission criteria from his presentation to the board he would effectively obligate himself to explain why other programs survived.
Keeping all that in mind, then, take a moment and try to figure out how Harreld solved that problem. He wanted to get rid of the Labor Center, but because he is not the dictator of a banana republic, or even the CEO of a banana corporation, he had to have a plausible administrative justification. Having already rigged the money part of the equation to that end, as we learned in Part 1, how did he rig the core components of Iowa’s academic mission to justify terminating the Labor Center? Between the two sets of criteria he had five components to choose from — education, research (mentioned twice), scholarship, student success and economic development — so what did he pick?
A bit less than three months after putting himself in that predicament in April, the university issued a press release which announced that the Labor Center would be killed off, along with a number of other centers, institutes and miscellaneous programs. From the generic pen of the Office of Strategic Communication, on 07/10/18:
Did you see that coming? Are you suitably impressed? Instead of cobbling together a plausible rationale from the five components that he previously mentioned in two competing sets of mission criteria back in April, in mid-July Harreld junked all of those components in preference of a new student-focused rationale that allowed him to jettison anyone who was “not directly tied to student instruction”. Not only was education more broadly no longer a core component, or student success, or research or scholarship, but in his zeal to axe the Labor Center Harreld even kicked economic development to the curb.
In this last-minute, wholesale reinvention of the criteria for terminating the UI Labor Center, we also find perfect symmetry with the rationale Harreld previously put forward for funding programs on the UI campus. From Harreld’s statement to the Board of Regents, as reported by the Register’s Kathy Bolten on 04/12/18:
In terms of both money and mission, Harreld’s position now — after multiple revisions — is that he is closing the Labor Center because he must put the kids first. Meaning the same kids he has mercilessly punished with four tuition hikes in less than two years, totaling a minimum of 16.4%, with many students paying significantly more because of the contemporaneous imposition of differential tuition. On the financial side, Harreld wants to protect all that new tuition revenue from being wasted on a public good, when it can be, instead, gambled on entrepreneurial ventures. On the mission side, just because the Labor Center is heavily involved in education, research and scholarship, that doesn’t mean it meets the high bar of Iowa’s academic mission, which, as of 07/10/18 is now entirely defined as student instruction.
In making such a deeply disingenuous argument for cutting the UI Labor Center, Harreld demonstrates his abiding commitment not to academia but to his entrepreneurial ethos. While professing to put the students first, he exploits them by vacuuming money from their bank accounts, and uses them as human shields against push-back by supporters of the Labor Center across the state. And yet, for all that, note that in making this latest shift that Harreld he has performed yet another administrative switcheroo.
In April, Harreld specifically talked about cutting centers and institutes as programs, then presented various mission criteria to justify exclusion. Three months later, in June, Harreld scrapped that idea and instead focused on a single criterion not at the program level, but at the level of the individual employee. As a result, anyone on the UI campus “whose position is not directly tied to student instruction” is currently at risk of termination on that basis. (What does “directly tied” mean? Who knows? It is yet another undefined term that allows Harreld to do whatever he wants…for the kids.)
Importantly, this new line of attack now allows Harreld not only to pick off individuals, but to gut entire programs from the inside out simply by starving them of staff, instead of taking them on of a piece. And of course as a former private-sector business executive, Harreld knows that the fastest way to cut costs is to get rid of employees, which will also then free up any unrestricted state funds that were use to cover those costs. (The downside, however, is that Harreld’s detractors can now apply the same criterion to programs that Harreld and his collaborators and co-conspirators would prefer to preserve — like, say, all of the community programs at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center.)
In any event, from Parts 1 and 2 we now know why the UI Labor Center is being closed, at least according to the latest update on the official line from the Office of Strategic Communications. What we still do not know is how that decision was made, and who was involved. At the end of the day, Harreld ultimately bears responsibility as the illegitimate president of the university, but he has repeatedly insisted that the decision was a collaborative process. In the next post we will take a close look at the decision-making process that led to the closing of the Labor Center, and you will probably not be surprised to learn that only a few days ago, J. Bruce Harreld changed the official line on that story as well.
For Part 3 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center, click here.
This is Part 3 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center. For Part 2, click here.
Following his fraudulent appointment at the University of Iowa in 2015, J. Bruce Harreld focused on two administrative initiatives. First, he imposed a collaborative, value-based budget model that purportedly guaranteed that all resource allocations would be aligned by four pillars or filters, which were in turn ostensibly arrived at by consensus. Second, Harreld aggressively pushed the campus to complete a new five-year strategic plan which defined three core criteria of the university’s mission, and those too were ostensibly arrived at by consensus.
In reality, what Harreld created in those new administrative paradigms were symbiotic shell games which grant him the administrative latitude he needs to turn the university’s resources to entrepreneurial pursuits, without ever declaring that objective. The sham budget model covers the financial end of his scam, giving Harreld the wiggle room he needs to divert unrestricted revenue by tens of millions of dollars, while the rigged strategic plan provides a justification for reallocating over one hundred million dollars to research — by which Harreld means for-profit, commercial research, as opposed to academic or basic research. Because of mutually referential and ambiguous wording in both the budget model and strategic plan — including, particularly, the universally appealing and remarkably plastic word ‘research’ — Harreld has largely been able to obscure his synchronized administrative fraud.
On the financial side, Harreld claimed that a slate of university programs which were recently closed or reduced in funding had been imposed on the university by the state, but were no longer supported by targeted appropriations. As a result, Harreld asserted the right to close or cut those programs because they fell outside the values of the budget model, yet in Part 1 we showed that his claim was objectively false. With regard to the UI Labor Center specifically, while that program was initially funded by the state decades ago, it is now a mature part of the scholarly mission of the university, and is funded on that basis — in the same way that the community programs at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center are funded for budding citizen-entrepreneurs.
On the mission side, in Part 2 we showed that despite offering various justifications for closing the Labor Center and other programs, each subsequent rationale that Harreld submitted failed basic tests of logic and consistency. Rather than relying on a consensus view of the university’s strategic mission, Harreld cherry-picked justifications until he found one that plausibly allowed him to push through the changes he wanted to make, provided no one looked too closely. Having thus now settled on “student instruction” as the primary mission of the university, the implications of that new, unilateral declaration are both comical and deeply deceitful. Comical, because the same rationale could be used to wipe out programs that Harreld’s minders and enablers want to protect. Deceitful, because the vast majority of the $160M that Harreld intends to blow on the implementation of the strategic plan will be spent not on “student instruction”, but on entrepreneurial research — even though the vast majority of that money will be stripped from student bank accounts through tuition hikes.
In reality, the only consistent objective of Harreld’s administration, which is now deep into its third year, is fraud. That fraud is hard to see at times because of the shell games Harreld has rigged, and even harder to prove because of the ambiguous wording in the budget model and the strategic plan. Having said that, however, the single biggest advantage that Harreld has had in flying under the radar is simply that he has not tried to use those corrupt administrative paradigms to justify specific abuses of power. That all changed in mid-July, however, when he approved the termination of the UI Labor Center for reasons that still do not make sense. It may well be that Harreld can exert sufficient authority to make that death sentence stick, but that in itself will prove there is no consensus vision driving such determinations. It’s all down to brute power, and Harreld is the brute.
The Process Lie
Instead of well-considered and consensus policy driving a robust deliberative process, which in turn reluctantly concluded that the Labor Center would have to close so the university can continue to provide “student instruction”, what we find on closer inspection is that an administrative assassin leaped out of the darkness and stabbed the UI Labor Center in the back. Incredibly, however, even at this late date we still do not know who that assassin is. Despite claims of consensus, including the purported values of the budget model and the mission criteria of the strategic plan, what we find when we look at what happened to the Labor Center is a group of suspects who refuse to acknowledge responsibility for, or even complicity in, that decision.
Thankfully, the list of likely suspects in the closing of the UI Labor Center is quite short. As noted in Parts 1 and 2, J. Bruce Harreld is ultimately responsible for the fate of the Labor Center not only because he is the president of the university, but because the value-based budget model that he imposed gives him final approval of such decisions. That does not necessarily mean, however, that the impetus for closing the Labor Center originated with Harreld, and it is that question that we will endeavor to answer in this post. Who wanted this to happen?
We find confirmation that Harreld is ultimately responsible in the July press release that announced the slate of closings and cuts that will play out over the coming academic year. From the UI Office of Strategic Communication (OSC), on 07/10/18:
It is charitable that the OSC gave equal weight to the president and provost in making the final call, as if there were some genuine independence in the provost’s office at Iowa, but as regular readers know the president in this case actually appointed the current provost, who has been serving in an interim capacity for close to a year and a half. In fact, the interim provost has proven so helpful in pressing Harreld’s entrepreneurial agenda — albeit largely on the sly — that it was only a few months ago that a belated, molasses-like search was even initiated to find a permanent replacement. That search will undoubtedly take most of the coming academic year to reach fruition, at which point the UI campus will have been presided over for two years by an illegitimate president and a toady interim provost, neither of whom were appointed with the consent of the UI community, or as a result of a fair and open search process.
As the highest-ranking academic officer on campus, the provost at a major research university wields considerable power, so of course it has been to Harreld’s great advantage that he hand-picked the provost who is eagerly helping him prosecute his clandestine agenda. For example, here is the interim UI provost — former College of Public Health dean Sue Curry — dutifully aping the same student-centric lie that Harreld told to explain the closing of the UI Labor Center, as reported by KCRG’s Chantelle Navarro on 07/10/18:
Now, as far as Curry’s last point goes, the students would also feel no loss if the Board of Regents fired J. Bruce Harreld and Sue Curry, so maybe she’s onto something there. Then again, the regents are also completely incapable of telling the truth to the people of Iowa, so that’s probably not going to happen any time soon. The sliver lining in Curry’s unwavering loyalty to Harreld, however, is that we can effectively rule her out as the impetus for closing the UI Labor Center. Not only is that program out of her administrative wheelhouse, but she is clearly following Harreld’s lead, not pressing her own agenda.
As to likely suspects other than Harreld and Curry, who may have had a compelling motive to axe the UI Labor Center, the sentence quoted above from the 07/10/18 press release gives us our short list, and on closer inspection it proves even shorter than it initially appears:
As for any executive vice presidents on the UI campus who may have been jonesing to put the Labor Center out to pasture, one look at the UI org chart should make clear that none of the VP’s have any direct oversight of that program, nor would they be likely to unilaterally press for its termination. Like Curry, they may support the decision to kill it because Harreld supports it, or because he told them to support it, but it is unlikely that they had any motivation to lead the attack. On the other hand, when it comes to the question of deans, there we do have the kind of immediate administrative proximity that might breed contempt, because the Labor Center is housed in the UI College of Law.
Interestingly, however, not only does that give us a second suspect to go with Harreld himself — meaning Gail Agrawal, who was dean of the College of Law until the end of June — but it gives us a third suspect in Kevin Washburn, who was appointed to replace her at about the same time that the decision to kill off the Labor Center seems to have been made. Specifically, Agrawal announced her intention to step down way back in August of 2017. Following a nationwide search, in mid-March Washburn was appointed by Harreld to succeed Agrawal, only a few weeks before the 04/12/18 press release announcing the impending closing of unspecified centers and institutes on the UI campus.
As to when the transition of deans took place at the College of Law, there was a two-week overlap just before the main slate of program terminations was announced on 07/10/18, including the closing of the Labor Center. Washburn’s first day on the job was 06/15/18, then two weeks later Agrawal stepped down on 06/30/18. Notably, however, Agrawal is neither retiring nor taking a job elsewhere, but will instead become a member of the law faculty at the college Washburn will now be leading. Admittedly, being on faculty at a university can mean many things, including de facto retirement if a professor has tenure. Whether or not Agrawal will do any teaching or research, however, one service we know she will perform is serving as co-chair of the glacier-like search to replace Interim Provost Curry — proving once against the the UI campus has become an exceedingly small world under Harreld.
In the context of Harreld’s value-based budget model, it is more likely that one of the deans decided to kill off the Labor Center precisely because that model provides the individual budget units with more local control. Because Harreld retained the right of final approval the decision is ultimately still on him, but if Agrawal or Washburn pressed mightily to get rid of the Labor Center, Harreld may have decided to abide by their wishes. Conversely, if Harreld was fixated on getting rid of the Labor Center, one of the deans may have made that request on his behalf, thus shielding him from accountability — perhaps for some future administrative consideration of particular value to that dean.
As corrupt as that kind of horsetrading might be, particularly if the closing of the Labor Center was indeed a capricious or even vindictive act, note that it wouldn’t actually run afoul of the university’s new budget model. Unless of course someone went an administrative bridge too far and also promised to abide by shared governance. But what are the odds of that happening given Harreld’s crack staff?
From the 04/12/18 press release announcing the impending cuts:
Now here’s how all that collegial and collaborative goodness played out in practice, from original reporting as filed by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 07/10/18:
Do you see what’s missing in that explanation? After promising shared governance on the front-end of the decision-making process in April, Harreld once again played the UI community for suckers by pushing changes through without any input from those who would be affected. (At some point you would think the faculty and staff would get tired of being punked by Harreld, but so far he has not paid a price for lying.)
Sherer’s question, of course, is our question. Whose idea was it to sneak up on the unsuspecting Labor Center using shared governance as a stalking horse? Unfortunately, as noted in prior posts, one big problem with Harreld’s ‘new’ budget model — or side benefit, depending on your point of view — is that it actually obscures accountability. A bunch of people gather in a smoke-free room, they cut whatever deals they want to cut, yet no one has to step forward and take the heat for a decision like closing the Labor Center. Instead, it simply appears out of nowhere, with official assurances that nothing untoward transpired.
As to the question, in trying to determine whether Harreld, Agrawal or Washburn pushed for the Labor Center to be cut, Miller’s original reporting seems to do us a great service in that regard. Continuing:
The reason I said “seems”, however, is that sometime after Miller filed that report she went back and revised it extensively. The only reason we still have the initial version is because the link above actually leads to an archived copy on the Wayback Machine. In the updated version on the Gazette site the headline is the same, and the date of publication is the same, but the quote from Sherer, in which she asserts that Washburn denied any involvement in the decision, is now gone.
So what happened? Well, I have no idea. It would have been helpful if the Gazette included some explanation about the changes, but I couldn’t find any, so maybe that’s just how the Gazette rolls these days….
The fact that Sherer was quoted, instead of Washburn directly, gets into hearsay, so perhaps Miller was unable to corroborate Sherer’s statements with Washburn himself. That doesn’t mean Sherer lied — and indeed, she would have to be an idiot to destroy her credibility with such pointless deception — but perhaps Washburn did not intend or want to go on the record about the grisly details of the decision-making process. Or, perhaps someone told him not to talk to the press.
Still, of our three main suspects, Washburn is the least likely to have instigated the closing of the Labor Center, because he had indeed only been on the job three weeks at the time the announcement was made. Though his March appointment occurred a few weeks before the April press release that signaled the impending closings and cuts, even the administrative mechanics of the UI budget process work against Washburn being the culprit, because final budgets were due only three days after Washburn started work. If he was the person who decided to cut the Labor Center, he would have had to convince Agrawal to handle most of the paperwork in her final days on the job, let along convince her of the merit of the closing if she was otherwise opposed.
Whatever due diligence Washburn did or did not do prior to showing up for work on his first day, he would also have to be a real jerk to wipe out a venerable academic center and five full-time employees without at least meeting them first and learning about that program. Unless of course someone else made killing the Labor Center a condition of his hire. So who is Kevin Washburn?
From the Iowa Now press release announcing his appointment:
While there is no mention of labor law in Washburn’s background, note also what is missing. Nowhere do we see any hint that Washburn spent time in the private sector, or that he is fanatically or even lethargically pro-business. In fact, Washburn seems committed to public service, and may even believe that public universities do have a responsibility to disseminate knowledge to the taxpayers who help fund those institutions. (That such an idea is almost routinely characterized as a radical notion tells you just how far we have fallen as a country.)
And yet…there is something odd about Washburn’s role in the closing of the Labor Center, and thankfully that aspect of the story has not changed in the reporting. No matter who decided that the program would be closed, everyone seems to agree that delivering the verdict to Sherer was one of Washburn’s first responsibilities, only three weeks after coming aboard, and a week or so after Agrawal stepped down. If Washburn himself insisted on closing the Labor Center that makes sense, but if not — meaning Agrawal or Harreld ordered the termination, or perhaps both — why did Washburn agree to be, or have to be, the bearer of bad news? (Unless fear is the new currency at the University of Iowa.)
Assuming Washburn did not insist on closing the Labor Center himself, what we still don’t know is when he found out that the decision had been made, and who informed him. Did he know before he accepted the position in mid-March, or did he find out later? According to the university, the official decision was not made until later, but that would seem to imply that Washburn wasn’t consulted even though he was the incoming dean. From Miller’s initial reporting we’re led to believe that Washburn wasn’t in on the decision making at all, but that suggests that he either wasn’t consulted, or that the decision was made before he was hired — meaning before the April press release which said a review was getting underway.
So when did Washburn find out that the Labor Center was slated for demolition? Was he only notified after he showed up for work in mid-June? And whenever he found out, why did he agree to take the heat if he was not responsible for making the cut? Again, Gail Agrawal was dean until 06/30/18, only ten days before the news broke in the press, and only a week or less before Sherer was notified by Washburn.
It is of course entirely possible that Washburn himself does not know who pushed for the closing of the Labor Center. As the new guy he may assume it was in-process, or that the decision really was arrived at out of a pressing financial need, when in fact Harreld has generated more than $2.5 in new tuition revenue for every $1 in funding cuts. As the new dean of the College of Law, has anyone informed Washburn that the school is actually net-ahead about $40M to $45M in general fund revenue compared to when Harreld was hired? (To that point, as a former federal prosecutor, has anyone informed Washburn that the man who appointed him — J. Bruce Harreld — quite literally aided and abetted the theft of the Iowa presidency? Whatever else Washburn may or may not know about the 2015 presidential search, it is objectively true that Harreld would not have that job if the search had not been corrupted in Harreld’s favor by a small cabal of co-conspirators.)
As for Agrawal, it is not possible that she did not know that the Labor Center was going to be closed before she stepped down on 06/30/18. It may not have been her idea, she may have wanted nothing to do with it, and that in turn may explain why she did not serve notice of the termination herself, but she knew. By contrast, however, Agrawal did actually take responsibility for the first UI center that was closed at the beginning of May. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 05/01/18:
Once again we see the generational disinvestment card being played to justify a decision that had nothing to do with the latest round of state budget cuts, and we know that because Agrawal references “the last 20 years”, not the last two years. Even at that, it is also blatantly obvious that dispensing with the Institute of Public Affairs was act of administrative opportunism, and if Schott was not retiring it would probably have found some way to persist. More to the point, and to her credit, Agrawal did not hide behind Harreld’s fake budget process, and instead took personal responsibility for the decision.
With the closing of the Labor Center, however, not only was that program still going strong, but killing it off means five employees will be thrown out in the street, and it’s likely that Agrawal knows all of those employees personally. Even if she was the person who pushed for the end of that program, she may not have had the stomach to deliver the bad news, at least in part because she herself will still be working at the College of Law, and the program will not immediately be terminated. Running into people whose lives you’ve ruined can’t be a lot of fun unless you’re a sadist, but doing so when you are no longer the dean would probably be even worse. And yet…if Agrawal did order the Labor Center closed, then she actually ended up throwing her new boss under the bus, and that might be uncomfortable as well.
While it is more than a little frustrating that we still do not know who decided to close the Labor Center, the fact that nobody on the UI campus seems to know — including the center’s director — has implications for both Washburn and Agrawal going forward. For Washburn, as the new guy he is suddenly in the uncomfortable position of coming off like either an impulsive autocrat of a servile tool, neither of which is likely to inspire confidence in his leadership at the College of Law. If he made the decision he is clearly not owning it, and if he did not make the decision, why is he taking the heat? (As to the related question of who put Washburn in that position right out of the gate, that would be Harreld.)
While Agrawal has been noticeably silent, given that she clearly knew that the Labor Center would be closed, that silence is conspicuous in itself. If she didn’t push for the closing of the Labor Center, did she oppose the decision, or did she simply acquiesce and walk away? It’s hard to imagine she made that decision herself on the way out the door, but on the other hand it’s not at all hard to imagine that she may have done so on Harreld’s orders to ensure a soft landing for herself. (Was Agrawal hired into an open faculty line, or was a new position created for her when she stepped down? Because if it’s the latter, then the $500K in savings that the university has projected would probably pay for Agrawal’s faculty salary for a few years, at which point perhaps she may then decide to retire.)
In any event, were Agrawal simply fading into the academic woodwork that would be one thing, but even though she will no longer be the dean of the College of Law, she is still the co-chair of what will unarguably be the most important search process during Harreld’s tenure, no matter how long that lasts. Choosing the next provost will have far-reaching consequences for the entire university, and of course Harreld being the product of a corrupt search himself, he will do everything possible to make sure he gets someone who is as eager to please as Sue Curry. In that context, were it to come out that she gave the Labor Center the shaft on the way out the door, then stuck Washburn with the unenviable task of not only breaking the bad news, but living with the blowback and glares for the coming academic year, that would certainly undermine confidence in her commitment to leading a fair and open search process.
Regardless of the role that Washburn did or did not play in the decision, he may not want to bear the consequences going forward. From a follow-up report by Vanessa Miller, on 07/22/18:
Whether Washburn is stalling in the hope that the uproar will die down, or he is genuinely considering a change of course, remains to be seen. As for Agrawal, given her long tenure as dean it is hard to see why she would pick such a petty fight on the way out, let alone stick the person who was replacing her — and will be writing her performance evaluations — with the consequences. The one suspect we have yet to put under the hot lights, however, is fraudulent president and consummate liar J. Bruce Harreld…except, after remaining quiet for a month and a half, Harreld now says he had nothing to do with the decision.
For context, here again is what the university said on 04/12/18, when the closing of unspecified centers and institutes was first announced:
And here is what the university said about the decision-making process when the main slate of cuts was announced on 07/10/18, including the Labor Center:
Now compare those statements with what Harreld himself said at the beginning of August, at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 08/01/18:
I don’t know what it’s like working with or for Harreld, but at some point everyone who comes in contact with the man has to realize he is not a leader. Instead of taking responsibility as president, Harreld stuck it to Agrawal, which was bad enough, but he also threw his new hire, Washburn, under the wheels of a bus that Harreld himself was necessarily driving. And we know that because no matter who decided to kill off the Labor Center, what Harreld was asserting to the regents was that multiple deans all came to the same exact conclusion about centers and institutes at the same time, with no prodding from him. But of course that’s not at all what the April press release said, which signaled that multiple programs would be terminated, and that Harreld’s office would ultimately make those determinations:
We will have more to say about Harreld and leadership in an upcoming post in this series, but for now suffice to say that it is not often that we get to see a university president trash two deans in order to save his own sorry hide, yet Harreld accomplished that feat at the Board of Regents without breaking a sweat. While still shilling for his sham strategic plan, and touting the “bottom-up review” of his sham budget process, Harreld made it absolutely clear that he had nothing to do with closing any of the centers on the UI campus, including the Labor Center. And yet, the manner in which this year’s budget process played out — with the deans all following a central directive to close out centers and institutes — is almost exactly how Harreld envisioned his new budget model. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/24/16:
As regular readers know, Harreld later euphemized “national rankings” as ‘quality indicators’, then added a second superfluous category — ‘our future’ — to go with ‘our values’, yet even at its inception his new budget model included review by central administration. In his telling about this year’s cuts to centers and institutes, however, it’s all on the deans, which one again demonstrates that the best thing about the new budget model from Harreld’s point of view is that it absolves him of any complicity or responsibility. In exchange for having a little more control at the margins, every unit leader on campus must now take ownership of every decision, including those that were made by Harreld.
All of which brings us to this bit of riotous bravado, from the same report:
Two-plus years later, of course, not only is Harreld not taking the heat, but no one has stepped forward and acknowledged that they were the person or persons who targeted the UI Labor Center for closure. Washburn is said to have denied responsibility, Harreld has overtly denied responsibility, and Agrawal has fallen silent, as if she is not now only a few doors down the hall at the UI College of Law, still drawing a state paycheck for services rendered. A decision was made, yet somehow no one made it.
So what do you think? Was it Washburn? Agrawal? Or was it lyin’ Harreld…?
From the information we have it’s hard to know who to blame. We know Harreld is a liar, but that doesn’t mean he is lying in this instance. What we’re missing, ultimately, apart from hard facts or a confession, is a compelling motive for closing the Labor Center. Unlike all the other closings and funding cuts, the Labor Center was and still is a robust academic program providing benefits to the university and to the state, yet someone clearly wants it gone. Why? And what is it about the motive for that decision that makes the person or persons responsible not want to be held accountable for their actions? If the closure really was driven by reason and necessity, then someone should have come forward by now and explained the logic behind the decision. That no one has done so suggests that the motive was neither rational, logical, nor in the best interests of the state, but personal, and perhaps even punitive.
For Part 4 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center, click here.
This is Part 4 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center. For Part 3, click here.
The decision to close the Labor Center, along with a handful of other centers and institutes on the University of Iowa campus, was announced in a press release on 07/10/18. Over a month later, however, and despite considerable additional reporting from multiple news outlets, we still do not know who ordered the Labor Center closed, or why. We know what the university has said about that closing, but we also know that what the university has said does not hold up.
As detailed in Part 3 of this multipart post, Kevin Washburn, the new dean at the UI College of Law, which houses the Labor Center, is said to have had no input on the decision. Likewise, the fraudulently appointed president of the university, J. Bruce Harreld, just recently asserted that all of the closings on campus were initiated by the deans, even though it was his office, back in April, which announced that such cuts would be forthcoming. That leaves former law school dean Gail Agrawal as the only suspect, but she has been silent on her role, despite the fact that she remains on faculty at UI, and would presumably be available to answer that very question.
As to why the UI Labor Center is being closed, over the past three months the university and Harreld have put forward multiple rationales, all of which fail upon closer inspection. In asserting that one or both of the deans made that cut, Harreld also persistently stressed the autonomy that UI deans now have in making budget decisions under his ‘new’ value-based budget model. And yet, as just noted, the announcement that there would be cuts to centers and institutes across campus, and the singular rationale for those cuts, emanated from his office in April, well before any specific decisions were apparently made. Harreld also attempted to tie the cuts to Iowa’s academic mission, but after multiple failed attempts — including unilaterally introducing economic development as part of the UI mission — Harreld was reduced to claiming that the programs that were being cut were not relevant to “student instruction”, even as similar programs were blithely allowed to persist.
In endeavoring to understand who specifically pushed for the closing of the UI Labor Center, it makes sense to determine who may have profited from that act of bureaucratic butchery, whether personally or professionally, literally or figuratively. Even if you are an administrative imbecile, you do not just hack out a resource on a whim — let alone one that everyone agrees is otherwise working as intended — and throw five loyal employees out in the street to boot, if you do not have some sort of agenda. It could be a sensible agenda, it could be a petty, bratty, vindictive agenda, but unless we are willing to entertain random acts of chaos, there must be, however thin or indefensible, some motive behind that decision.
Follow the Money
It not only makes sense to adhere to the maxim that one should follow the money in any investigation, but as evidenced by statements from Harreld and UI, that would seem to go to the very heart of the decision to close the Labor Center. Because of generational disinvestment blah blah blah, Harreld insists that UI is now forced to cut programs which are no longer being funded by the state. In fact, Harreld went a rhetorical bridge too far in asserting that state funding to those specific programs was cut, thus leaving UI on the hook. In reality, both the long-term and near-term cuts in state funding have largely involved cuts to the university’s general fund.
As with the identity of the perpetrator(s), however, over a month after the announcement that the Labor Center would be closed, we still do not have any definitive word on where the projected savings will end up. Having stressed both long-term funding cuts and immediate cuts like the $5.4M clawback in the middle of FY18 — meaning the fiscal year which concluded at the end of June — it would seem self-evident that Harreld would funnel any projected savings back into the university’s general fund, to replace funding that is no longer being provided. And that is indeed exactly we find in a report by the Des Moines Register’s Kathy Bolten, on 07/10/18 — meaning the same day that the university announced its slate of cuts to centers and institutes:
While the spokesperson in Bolten’s piece is not identified by name, even if we know nothing about the University of Iowa except what we have learned so far in this multipart post, it should be obvious that there is a problem here — along with two not-so-obvious problems that we will get to in a moment. While Harreld made it belatedly clear that programs were being terminated or reduced if they had little to do with “student instruction”, here we have a UI spokesperson asserting that the state money that was cut related directly to “teaching, research and other programs for students”. So which is it?
The first not-so-obvious problem with that explanation is that even the claimed savings do not all come from state appropriations, and that’s true regardless of the justification being put forward for the cuts. From the Office of Strategic Communication, in the press release on 07/10/18 which announced the slate of closings:
So after claiming that state funding cuts compelled all of the closings, because the state was no longer funding those particular programs — which was itself a lie — it turns out only one third of the total projected savings of $3.5M+ relates to the school’s general fund. Still, the one consistent through-line between Harreld’s claimed justification for the program cuts, and the dispensing of any savings, is that at least part of the money was coming from the school’s general fund — at the expense of the poor students — so that’s where any savings from those programs will go. Except…in the very next sentence from the 07/10/18 OSC press release, we get this:
Here we have the second not-so-obvious problem with the unattributed quote from Bolten’s story. Incredibly — as was the case with a press release from the Office of the President on 04/12/18, and Harreld’s presentation before the board on that same day (see Part 2) — once again we have two official statements from the University of Iowa which do not say the same thing. In this case, however, the pronouncements about where the projected savings will go are entirely contradictory. Either the money is going back into the school’s general fund, or it is remaining with the respective colleges and units, but it cannot be in both places at once.
For the purposes of this post, of course, where that money ends up would tell us a great deal about who had a motive to kill off the Labor Center. For example, the fact that the deans now have more say under Harreld’s value-based budget model is really only relevant if the deans retain control of any funds that they free up by making cuts to other programs. And yet, not only is that not what one of the spokespeople at UI said, it’s not what Harreld himself said when he appeared before the Board of Regents at the beginning of August. Again, as quoted in Part 3 of this post, here is Harreld’s very late explanation for how the cuts were made, and who made them –from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on 08/01/18:
What Harreld is asserting here — which is consistent with the spokesperson quoted by Bolten, who said money from the closings and cuts would be returned to the general fund — is that the UI deans all spontaneously decided that they wanted to cut various programs, then return that savings to the general fund, so Harreld can use it to fund his $160M strategic plan, which will largely be spent on new entrepreneurial ventures. The obvious problem with that scenario is that it ignores the whole aspect of local-control that was supposed to be at the core of Harreld’s value-based budget model. Instead of managing their own budgets, in this scenario the colleges and other units effectively have money taken from them, or at least restricted to to the strategic plan — and that is not local control.
In fact, if you know anything about administrators, you know they would much rather keep funding on their books even if it amounts to waste, because a bigger budget means more muscle, and more flexibility down the road when circumstances change. In that context, it makes sense — as detailed in the 07/10/18 press release — to allow the deans to retain and reallocate any savings, and in fact that could motivate them to make additional cuts Unfortunately, there are two problems with that scenario.
First, it completely demolishes any pretext that the announced program cuts were driven by the need to cut costs, because the colleges and other departmental units will still spend that money on something, which may or may not have anything to do with student instruction, student success, or students at all. Second, with regard to the UI Labor Center specifically, if the money for that program will remain in the College of Law in the future, then the money to restore that program is quite literally in the pipeline. All the new dean would have to do is rescind the closing and everyone would be happy — except for whoever killed off the Labor Center in the first place.
If Harreld gave the order, and the savings was going back into the general fund where he could blow it on whatever entrepreneurial gambles he had in mind, that would make sense as a motive for closing the Labor Center. Likewise, if either the current or former dean of the College of Law ordered the closure, and the savings remains in the college so it can be spent as the current dean wishes, that would also makes sense as a motive. What makes no sense, however, is for Harreld to order the closing of the Labor Center if he will not be able to divert that money to the strategic plan, or for one of the deans of the College of Law to do so if the savings will be passed to Harreld. Unfortunately, because we still do not have the slightest idea what is really going to happen to that money, we are once again at an impasse.
Follow the Other Money
While there is no question that Harreld is scrimping for every dollar he can get — witness his attempt in early 2017 to shift $4.2M in scholarship costs onto students and their families, in part by changing text on the UI website after the fact — the total projected savings from the entire slate of announced cuts, let alone the $550K projected annual savings from the closing of the Labor Center alone, just isn’t that much money. If the school really was in serious financial peril then such cuts might be warranted — albeit on a more consistent basis, instead of cherry picking victims and excuses — but when we step back not only is that not the case in terms of the overall budget, it isn’t even the case with the $5.4M clawback in FY18.
This is part and parcel of the financial shell game that Harreld is perpetually playing: granting himself the right to pick and choose which time frames to reference, and which facts to include or exclude in each time frame. For example, when Harreld talks about generational disinvestment he never mentions the Great Recession, and when he talks about funding cuts over the past two years he never mentions the fact that the state budget really did collapse, albeit as a result of gross fiscal mismanagement on the part of the governor and legislature. Instead of being honest, Harreld instinctively embraces the deceptive narrative, then pushes that false narrative full force.
In order to consider every financial motive for cutting the Labor Center, it is important not to allow Harreld to dictate the terms of that conversation. Whatever generational disinvestment has occurred over the past twenty years, and whatever cuts the University of Iowa has suffered since Harreld was hired, there were also two notable economic collapses that factored into those declines. Because Harreld is a fake university president, however, and singularly focused on converting Iowa from an academic institution into what Arizona State University President Michael Crow calls a knowledge enterprise, he feels perfectly free to omit any facts that are not on-message.
We see this shell game on brazen display in a three-sentence passage in the April press release which announced impending cuts to then-unspecified centers and institutes.
Here, in a press release from the Office of the President, we see Harreld and his boy Lehnertz effortlessly leap from the near-term problem of having to refund $5.4M to the legislature on exceedingly short notice, to some implied connection to chronic neglect by the state. No mention of the state budget collapse in the near-term, and no mention of the national economic collapse which ranks second only the Great Depression over the past century. Just a blithe eliding of two completely unrelated issues into a single deceptive whole. And yet, as noted in multiple posts since Harreld pushed his first big tuition hike through in the summer of 2016, that barely scratches the surface on the amount of critical information that Harreld and his staff routinely omit from messaging to the UI community, and to the taxpayers of Iowa.
In terms of generational disinvestment by the state, and as noted endlessly in these virtual pages, Harreld has compensated admirably for that lack of support by pushing through four tuition hikes in just under two years. As a result, the University of Iowa is now taking in an additional $50M in tuition and fees each year, as compared with the year that Harreld was hired. Even if nothing else changes, Harreld will clear a cool $35M annually in new general education fund revenue, and that means — conservatively — that he is already halfway to funding his $160M strategic plan. And yet, if you read every press release and statement from the University of Iowa, you will find only a pathological adherence to omission of that information.
In terms of the recent state budget cuts, and particularly the $5.4M FY18 clawback, it is almost shocking to see how much relevant financial information the University of Iowa leaves out not only when talking to the press, but when reporting to the Board of Regents. In a moment we will dig into all that, but note that the rhetorical leap Harreld and Lehnertz made from that problem to generational disinvestment was compelled by the contents of the April press release itself. Specifically, while wailing about that $5.4M deappropriation, Harreld solved that problem in a snap:
Simply by delaying construction for five months, Harreld compensated for the entire $5.4M defunding. Because that left him nothing to whine about, however — let alone for anyone to use as a justification for killing off the UI Labor Center — he and Lehnertz moved the goalposts by invoking generational disinvestment. That now brings us to subject of the sheer scale of the University of Iowa budget, and how the Labor Center’s $550K cost relates to the big picture at UI.
As noted by the Iowa Board of Regents at the beginning of August [p. 1], the budget for the entire regents enterprise is $6B. Of that $6B total, fully $4B is represented the University of Iowa alone, both as an academic institution and as a healthcare provider:
In exchange for providing educational services to students and medical services to patients, the University of Iowa generates roughly $2.25B in revenue. For FY19, which dovetails with the 2018-2019 academic year, the university will take in roughly $1.5B in patient revenue, and about $745M in revenue from all sources on the academic side, or another three quarters of a billion dollars. (Notably, the lion’s share of that academic revenue come from the $483M that is generated by tuition and fees — close to half a billion dollars — followed by $215M from the state, and another $50M from various sources.)
Given the immensity of the UI budget (explained here in breezy style), you can see how Harreld resolved a mid-year $5.4M defunding with nothing more than a construction moratorium. Simply by tapping the brakes on renovations and new construction, $5.5M was freed up without threatening any programs on campus. As for the $550K that will be freed up by terminating the UI Labor Center, as the center’s director noted, relatively speaking that money is trivial. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 07/10/18:
In absolute terms $550K is a lot of money, and could be used in many ways, but in the context of our search for a motive for closing the UI Labor Center, it is a trivial amount, and particularly so to Harreld. Whatever the total budget for the College of Law, the Labor Center budget would also constitute a larger percentage — which does suggest that perhaps one or both of the deans were behind the closing — but again that’s only true if that money stays in the college, instead of being returned to the general education fund. In any event, even in the context of only those closing and cuts that were announced over the past few months, it is astonishing how much money the university omits from its various accountings, including information provided to and released by the regents.
Even in the FY19 UI budget put forward by the board at the beginning of August, the snapshot of the overall financial picture at the university is not at all Harreld would like everyone to believe [p. 9]:
After all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth by Harreld over the past year, we come to find that not only was $3.2M of the $5.2M mid-year clawback restored, but because of yet another tuition hike the university will add $5.5M in new tuition revenue on top of that, wiping out the entire funding cut and then some — and that’s apart from the construction moratorium. Add in cost recoveries of $1.9M, and the university budget for FY19 will actually increase $5.4M even after accounting for the clawback — yet note what is still not accounted for in that total.
Where is the $3.6M in savings from closing seven centers, institutes and other programs?
Where is the $1.6M in additional savings from funding reductions to other programs?
Where is the $1.2M endowment from the Confucius Institute, which is being closed?
Where is the expected $20M from the sale of the former AIB campus?
Total all that up and it’s another $26.4M that the University of Iowa may very well profit from over the course of FY19, on top of the $50M that the university will receive in new tuition revenue compared to FY16. Meaning, again, as noted endlessly in these pages, that when it comes to the actual budget for UI, there is no crisis. What there is, instead, is a one-sided propaganda campaign from Harreld, UI and the Board of Regents, in which funding cuts are constantly hyped while manifold increases in tuition revenue are ignored.
As for the projected $20M windfall from the sale of the AIB campus, it has been reported that UI lost several million on that now-abandoned venture, while proceeds from any sale must be used to fund scholarships for students from central Iowa. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 08/04/18:
Because part of the loss for the program on the former AIB campus would have been realized in FY18, however, even that $2.6M number is inflated relative to FY19. As for the scholarships, whether UI determines its need-based and merit-based contributions by a fixed amount, or as a percentage of its unrestricted funds, the money from the sale of the AIB campus will be assigned to that standing commitment, which will in turn free up a like amount from the general fund. Meaning despite that restriction, Harreld will still end up with another $15M in unrestricted funds to play with when the sale finally goes through — while still insisting that the Labor Center must die.
The takeaway from all of this is that money simply cannot be the motive, or at least the entire motive, for closing the Labor Center. As detailed in Part 3, most of the other program closings really are misfits, or legacy programs that have outlived their usefulness, but that is not true of the Labor Center. It is a robust, fully functioning academic center, and its five employees collectively hold decades of institutional knowledge about that subject matter. Even in terms of personal dynamics, it is exceedingly unlikely that either the former dean of the College of Law, or the new dean, would have summarily decided to cut that program, only to have to work alongside those grim furloughed employees for another year, as they waited for the final axe to fall.
Follow the Malice
As to what other motive may have compelled someone to rid the university of the Labor Center, that isn’t too hard to imagine, particularly in a so-called right-to-work state like Iowa. In fact, shortly after Harreld was fraudulently appointed, the statehouse and then-governor gutted Iowa’s forty-year-old collective bargaining law for public employees, even though no one ran on that platform. Likewise, after Johnson County raised the minimum wage, the majority party freaked out and passed a law which made it illegal for any county to raise its minimum wage higher than the state. Such actions are hardly unique in Iowa, of course, as the Supreme Court recently proved by delivering a federal body blow. Throw in radical libertarian groups like ALEC — of which the same former Iowa governor was a founding member — and labor rights are under siege across the country, largely from businesses which seek to dispense with collective bargaining altogether.
Even if that proved to be the consensus view of the three co-conspirators who jammed Harreld into office, however, and the consensus view of the politicians and regents who currently protect and enable him, and even if Harreld gets calls in the dead of night from agents of the Koch brothers, and we found out that killing off the Labor Center was on his to-do list from the get-go, there are two good reasons for side-stepping such shadowy conspiracies. First, entertaining such possibilities effectively absolves Harreld of any real responsibility, and that should not happen. Just as Harreld, the man, is responsible for telling a premeditated and conspiratorial lie only moments after he was appointed, to obscure his longstanding relationship with Jerre Stead, and then for telling a different lie for the same reason on the weekend before taking office, his actions as president are his own, even if he is little more than a tool.
Second, and perhaps obviously, rarely is anyone so incredibly stupid as to come right out and admit that yes, not only are they corrupt, but they are working as a mole for an outside interest which is hostile to the organization they are leading. So the odds are, no matter how closely we comb through Harreld’s statements over the past three years or so, or back to his days as a part-time lecturer at Harvard, or his days working for Lou Gerstner at IBM, that it is unlikely we would ever stumble across a smoking rhetorical gun. On the other hand, as noted in an early post on the Harreld hire — less than three weeks after his illegitimate appointment, at which point the fraudulent nature of the search process had yet to be fully revealed — words are often used to distract.
Harreld has never taken to a soapbox to decry organized labor or unions, but it is interesting to look at what he has said and done since he was hired at the University of Iowa, because his pronouncements and actions are consistently hostile. For example, in May of 2016, only six months into his job — meaning about the same time that he was simultaneously rigging the values of his new budget model, and preparing to do the same to the strategic plan — Harreld invited himself to a small social justice gathering on the UI campus. That quiet little meeting had been scheduled well in advance, but at the last minute Harreld decided to attend, in large part to claim credit for having participated in a second town hall, after the first one blew up in his face.
In the context of the minimum wage debate that was raging across the state at that time, Johnson County had just raised its minimum wage, but the University of Iowa had not followed suit, and the state had yet to preclude such increases. In that context, and because of Harreld’s pathological reluctance to otherwise engage the public on any issue, a Johnson County Supervisor attended that gathering as well, and asked Harreld why the university had failed to raise the school’s minimum wage to that of the increase mandated by the country. Instead of demonstrating a command of the issues at hand, Harreld refused to answer the question, despite purportedly attending the gathering to make himself available to the public. That in turn prompted a walkout of the social justice meeting that Harreld had hijacked. (When he was later told what to say by the Board of Regents, Harreld — through his lackeys in central administration — claimed that the university was not obligated to raise its minimum wage because it was a state agency.)
A month or so later, in June of 2016, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sanctioned the University of Iowa for abuses of shared governance during the 2015 search that led to Harreld’s sham hire. In August of 2016, ten months into his illegitimate tenure at UI, Harreld orchestrated a two-week celebration of himself, which culminated in the official installation ceremony for his fraudulent presidency. Having been silent throughout the summer, that was the first time the press was able to get Harreld’s reaction to the AAUP sanction, and in typical Harreld fashion he used the opportunity to mischaracterize the AAUP as a union, as a means of disparaging its decision. From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 08/22/16:
Tachau was being kind. Harreld is a liar and a cheat, but he is not an idiot. In August of 2016 he knew the sanction was not union-related, but he used that false linkage to denigrate the AAUP’s investigation and decision — and that attempted slight does clearly betray Harreld’s hostility toward workers and labor. Flash forward to the end of 2016, when it was clear that the new UIHC children’s hospital would open behind schedule and wildly over budget, and Harreld offered up another telling explanation for the delay. Instead of laying blame with UI administrators — who mismanaged the project so badly that the university is now fighting off tens of millions of dollars in additional costs in court — Harreld blamed “a number of out-of-state workers who were a little slow to get back into town“. (For more on that disgrace, see this post.)
I mention those three examples not because they are conclusive, but as prelude to a more recent and revealing series of events which took place around the same time that the decision was being made to close the Labor Center. In fact, if you look at the relevant events from April to July, it is almost eerie how Harreld’s ill temper about a labor issue on campus correlated with the decision to kill off that program. While we still don’t know who made that decision, or where the savings will go, and we don’t really know precisely when that decision was made, there was a lot going on at the university between the press release announcing the impending program closings on 04/12/18, and the announcement of the bulk of the affected programs on 07/10/18. Between the deans at the UI College of Law coming and going, the AAUP sanction coming up for repeal, and the latest round of budget cuts, that three-month window included another string of events that may have triggered the decision to close the Labor Center for reasons other than money.
08/25/17 — The university announces that Gail Agrawal, dean of the College of Law, will step down at the end of the academic year.
09/28/17 — A search committee is named to replace Agrawal.
02/27/18 — Non-tenured/contingent faculty meet on the UI Pentacrest to voice concerns about working conditions, pay and benefits.
03/01/18 — After a year-long delay, UI begins the search for a new provost/executive VP. Although she will step down as dean of the College of Law in a few months, Harreld names Agrawal co-chair of the most important search that will take place during his illegitimate tenure as president.
03/20/18 — Kevin Washburn is appointed as the new dean of the College of Law, and is scheduled to take office in early summer.
04/02/18 — Due to mismanagement of the state budget in FY17, for the second straight year the governor and legislature take back appropriated funds from UI — this time $5.4M — to patch yet another budget shortfall.
04/12/18 — Harreld announces a five-month construction moratorium to resolve the $5.4M clawback, along with other cost-saving measures in response to what he characterizes as generational disinvestment by the state. Included is notice of program closures for as-yet-unspecified centers and institutes on campus.
04/18/18 — Having been ignored by UI administration, and by Harreld in particular, non-tenured/contingent faculty march from the Pentacrest to Harreld’s office to deliver a list of demands.
04/23/18 — The full committee is named for the provost search that is being co-chaired by Agrawal.
04/26/18 — The AAUP signals that it may lift its sanction of UI for abuses of shared governance committed during the 2015 presidential search, which culminated in the fraudulent appointment of J. Bruce Harreld.
05/01/18 — The closing of the first center or institute on the UI campus is announced. The seventy-plus-year-old Institute of Public Affairs — which is housed in the UI College of Law — is terminated by lame-duck dean Gail Agrawal, two months before her last day in office.
05/04/18 — Non-tenured/contingent faculty continue to try to meet with Harreld, who rebuffs and evades every attempt at contact, despite being paid $800K per year ($200K deferred) to lead the university. On this day, the protesters march to the presidential mansion, where Harreld resides, and are joined by gubernatorial candidate Cathy Glasson. Glasson is also the president of the SEIU local, and a member of the advisory committee of the UI Labor Center.
05/08/18 — The Daily Iowan publishes another in its series of regular interviews with Harreld. One of the questions asked by the DI reporters concerns the AAUP sanction. Harreld’s answer, as usual, is intentionally deceptive, but he also gives himself the lion’s share of credit for improving shared governance on campus.
05/09/18 — Because Harreld refuses to meet, non-tenured/contingent faculty sit-in at the president’s office and vow to remain until Harreld agrees to a meeting. After a day of back-and-forth, Harreld agrees to meet, in part because the “tampering” excuse he has been using is exposed as a lie by his own administrators.
05/16/18 — Harreld finally meets with faculty employees of the university in order to hear their concerns, but insists on doing so in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety, which includes the only staff on campus who are allowed to carry firearms.
06/15/18 — Kevin Washburn, the new dean of the College of Law, punches in on his first day on the job.
06/18/18 — The AAUP lifts its sanction of the University of Iowa for abuses of shared governance during the 2015 presidential search.
06/30/18 — Gail Agrawal clocks out on her last day as dean of the UI College of Law, but “will continue at the College of Law as a member of the law faculty“.
07/10/18 — The university announces the closing of seven centers, institutes and other programs, including the UI Labor Center in the College of Law, along with funding cuts to five other programs. In the press release announcing the closings and cuts, the Office of Strategic Communication is explicit about who is ultimately responsible:
In response to the announcement, Jennifer Sherer, the long-time director of the Labor Center, expresses bafflement about how the decision was made, and who made it:
08/01/18 — In conjunction with his appearance at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents, Harreld makes clear that the deans were responsible for the announced program closings and cuts, including the UI Labor Center:
Harreld also addresses the fact that there was no shared governance process involved in the decision:
08/10/18 — Despite Harreld’s best efforts, the non-tenured/contingent UI faculty — who, as a group, are critical to the “student instruction” that Harreld cited as justification for killing off the Labor Center — receive additional benefits.
Now, in looking at that sequence of events, particularly between mid-April and mid-July, can you think of anyone — anyone at all — who might have had a petty, bratty, vindictive reason for laying waste to the UI Labor Center? In fact, were it shown that the non-tenured/contingent faculty used the Labor Center as a resource for their negotiations with the school, the odds that such a petty, bratty, vindictive motive may have played a part in the decision would seem to go even higher. On that point, then, consider this, from the ‘About the Center‘ page on the Labor Center website:
Was the Labor Center discussed or even mentioned in passing when Harreld was finally forced to meet with the non-tenured/contingent faculty? How about in any subsequent discussions, either formal or informal? And as far as that goes, we cannot rule out the possibility that someone may have decided to get rid of the UI Labor Center so it would not be available in future negotiations on campus.
Unfortunately, despite the available evidence we also cannot definitively say that one particular suspect on our list ordered the closing of the UI Labor Center. Washburn has reportedly denied any responsibility and Agrawal has remained silent, while Harreld has explicitly blamed one or both of the deans. On the other hand, the very fact that no one in the administrative ranks at UI has the guts to accept responsibility means the university could very well reverse course if additional damning information comes to light. Or, alternatively, they might decide to do so to prevent damning information from coming to light — like, say, who actually decided to close the Labor Center.
One thing we can say with complete confidence, is that for a guy who sells himself as a strategic genius, Harreld’s response to the non-tenured UI faculty, particularly during the critical month of April, was petty, bratty and vindictive. Instead of treating the faculty with dignity and respect, he belittled them in the press and invalidated them as a group and as individuals. In reality the non-tenured/contingent faculty were not asking for perks, they were asking for basic benefits and fair pay, yet Harreld himself turned a reasonable request into a protracted confrontation. Leaving aside the fact that he quite literally made up a lie to avoid doing his job, the fact that he could not find a way to meet with the faculty and negotiate in good faith was, objectively, a failure of leadership. Perhaps not surprisingly, no matter who made the decision to close the Labor Center, that is also demonstrably a failure of leadership, and in that Harreld is singularly responsible.
For Part 5 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center, click here.
This is Part 5 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center. For Part 4, click here.
When J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of the University of Iowa in early September of 2015, the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents promised that he would institute transformational change at a time of unparalleled — and conspicuously unspecified — challenges in higher education. Despite three other eminently qualified finalists for the position, each of whom demonstrated consistent excellence in academic administration over decades, those candidates were used as mere stooges in the charade that led to Harreld’s hire. Only someone from the private sector, it was asserted, could possibly hope to prevent the university from succumbing to the unparalleled — and again, totally unspecified — challenges facing the school.
As to Harreld’s purported unique strength as a candidate, while he had no prior experience in academic administration or the public sector, his co-conspirators championed his experience as a senior executive in the private sector, and in particular his claim to have led organizational change in other large-scale, beleaguered institutions. Now, three years down the road, however, the returns are in, and the most startling revelation about Harreld is that he is an abject failure as a leader. From his incapacity to meet with and answer questions from the UI community in an open forum, to his incapacity to meet with and answer questions from the local press on a routine basis, to his refusal to meet with and answer questions from concerned elected officials in state and local government, Harreld’s presidency has been defined not by transformational or organizational change, but by evasion, duplicity, crony corruption and outright violations of the law. (In early 2017, Harreld tried to stick students and their families with $4.2M in scholarships that the university was legally obligated to pay. That willfully deceptive gambit triggered multiple class-actions lawsuits, and compelled Harreld to back down in a matter of days.)
In sum, the past three years have been a testament not only to the fact that Harreld was the wrong man for the job when he was hired, but that he has proven incapable of growing into the position. As tempting as it may be to accuse Harreld of acting more like a CEO than a university president, however, it is also important to note that Harreld was never a CEO during his decades as a private-sector executive, which is telling in itself. Instead, Harreld always implemented other people’s ideas, and as such never came to terms with what good, effective leadership actually requires — let alone when presiding over a large-scale academic institution.
That is not to say that Harreld does not have an agenda, or that he has not worked tirelessly in pursuit of that agenda on behalf of his minders. It’s just that Harreld’s unstated agenda — converting the University of Iowa into a knockoff version of Mike Crow’s ‘knowledge enterprise’ at Arizona State — is antithetical to the careers and objectives of the vast majority of students, faculty and staff who make up the UI community. Harreld was hired to implement that change by any means possible, but doing so involves subverting the levers of power at UI, not honest leadership.
One big tell that Harreld is not a leader, of course, is the fact that after he left IBM in 2008, he did not lead anything. Whether he wanted to be the boss of a going concern or to start his own company, he had seven straight years to do that, whether by applying for open positions or pulling together investment capital for a new venture. Instead, the visionary J. Bruce Harreld chose to be a part-time lecturer at the Harvard School of Business, then a part-time consultant for a few months, until his old pal, Jerre Stead, offered to install him as the head of Stead’s alma mater. At the time, even Harreld admitted that he would need coaching and mentoring, yet the Iowa Board of Regents gave him an unprecedented initial five-year deal, at an equally unprecedented $800K per year ($200K deferred).
Were Harreld a CEO, or even the dictator of a banana republic, he could slash and burn as he pleased, but that’s not how public higher education works in general, or how the University of Iowa functions in particular. Even though Harreld occupies the president’s office — albeit as a result of fraud — and has the implicit backing of the crony Board of Regents in converting the work product of the university from scholarship to economic development, Harreld is still obligated to present a coherent rationale for the changes he intends to make to programs at the school. If he wants to fire half of his own executive staff, like the purge that former CEO James Gallogly orderedon his first day at Oklahoma University, that’s fine, but ripping out programs that provide a material benefit to the school and to the citizens of Iowa is another story.
In looking at the recent decision to close the UI Labor Center — which has been part of the scholarly mission of the University of Iowa for well over sixty years — we find: no consistent policy driving that decision; that the person or persons who made that decision have refused to step forward and identify themselves; and that the purported financial justification for killing that program is tantamount to administrative fraud. We also know, from Harreld’s most recent comments on the subject at the August meeting of the Board of Regents, that Iowa’s visionary transformational leader has fingered the former and/or current dean of the UI College of Law for that decision, even as it is demonstrable that he and his administration initiated and abetted the process. Nothing says leadership like throwing your subordinates under the bus when you start to feel a little heat.
In order to comprehend the magnitude of Harreld’s failings as a leader in the context of the decision to abolish the Labor Center — whether we agree with that decision or not — all we have to do is step back and look at the big picture. Again, the entire premise of Harreld’s candidacy, rigged as it was, hinged on his claim of expertise in organizational change. We see that in his candidate forum in late August of 2015, we see that in his correspondence with one of the regents [p. 18] who helped to rig his appointment, and we see that in the collaborative research papers that Harreld took sole credit for on his resume , thus earning him the censure of the faculty assembly of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences even before he took office. So at the very least we should have some expectation that Harreld would not only know how to implement his organizational vision, but that he would have some sophistication about leading others through that evolution in a positive and effective manner.
From an interview in 2012 — four years after he left IBM — here is the culture-change process that Harreld followed at that company, including his now-infamous “public hanging” gambit:
Call it transformational change, call it the carrot and the stick, there is nothing particularly surprising here. The idea that culture can be reduced to a control system in any context is anathema, but that is how bureaucracies function. (And of course there are limits to the extent to which anyone can control a particular culture.)
As noted regarding the culture at IBM, leading that organization hinged on communication, and in particular on communicating expectations. Whether dishing out punishment or passing out rewards, the key was to “set the performance bar and to communicate it clearly across the organization”. If people did not know what was expected they could not succeed, and that would hurt the potential of the company. Only by making sure everyone was on the same page could the organization function at its peak.
Look at any successful organization in the world and you will find constant emphasis on communication. Ideally that communication will flow in two directions, but even in instances where there is no dialogue, it is still important to clearly communicate expectations and goals from the top down. For example, in the U.S. armed services, communication about basic skills often occurs in the form of drills, but those drills still require effective communication. In any drill the troops — the students — are first told what they will be doing, then they are told how to do what they will be doing, then they are shown how to do what they will be doing, then they perform that task, then they are told what they just did. As a result, there is zero chance that what is expected will be misunderstood, whether that involves something as simple as shining boots, or more complex tasks.
While Harreld ostensibly needed time to determine which cultural changes to make at the University of Iowa — let alone to receive the mentoring and coaching that he himself acknowledged he needed — we know definitively that he was ready to take the helm only six months into his tenure. By that time, at the beginning of May, 2016, Harreld was already implementing his new values-based budget model, and was just about to launch a hyper-accelerated process for completing the new UI Strategic Plan. While there would prove to be some delays on both fronts, from Harreld’s perspective he was clearly more than ready to go.
As noted earlier in this multipart post, and in multiple prior posts, the new UI budget model and strategic plan currently function as symbiotic shell games in Harreld’s crusade to turn UI into a for-profit knowledge enterprise. Even if his implementation of those documents was malign, however, the fact that they are both now two years old means Harreld has had ample time to communicate his goals to the entire institution. Whatever his intent, there should be no surprises on the UI campus about the direction in which Harreld intends to lead the school, either in terms of what is expected, or what will happen if those expectations are not met.
The University of Iowa is a big ship, and turning to a new compass heading — whether principled or corrupt — not only takes time, it takes leadership. Starting two years ago, every college, department, school and program on campus, and every person working for the university in any capacity, should have been presented with specific steps showing how they could contribute to implementing Harreld’s transformational vision. And yet, two full years after Harreld’s double-barreled documentation of that vision in the budget model and strategic plan, consider how the director of the UI Labor Center responded to her program being terminated.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 07/10/18 — the same day that the slate of program closings and cuts was announced by the school:
There is no leadership model at any level, from parenting to presiding over a nation, in which that outcome would be deemed acceptable. It is, on its face, a demonstrable failure of leadership, let alone after two full years in which critical information about the future of the university, and the future of her program, could have been and should have been communicated to Sherer. Whether that speaks to abject incompetence on Harreld’s part, or outright malice, we will leave to the reader, but here we will simply note the utter asymmetry between Sherer’s position as director of the UI Labor Center, and Harreld’s position as president of UI. When you hold all of the cards, as Harreld clearly does, and people who are subordinate to you — if not at your mercy — do not have access to the information that they need in order to meet your expectations, that’s your fault.
What should have happened, starting two years ago, is that the director and staff of the Labor Center should have received specific direction about what was expected. What should have happened, is that individuals who had invested their working lives in that program should have been given an opportunity to show their value to the institution, within the context of Harreld’s new organizational vision for the university. Whether we agree with that perversion of public higher education or not, it was in Harreld’s interest as a leader to motivate everyone to change in that direction, but he did not do that.
Instead, what we have are two years of business as usual, followed by a surprise attack. Where are the statements from Harreld and central administration about how hard they worked to keep the Labor Center open? Where were the tireless, good-faith negotiations? Where was Harreld’s personal outreach to the labor community, to find a workable solution? Where is the documentation — at the university level, or the college level — showing that expectations were put forward well in advance of the decision, and that the Labor Center failed to meet those expectations?
The very fact that Harreld’s administration summarily executed the Labor Center after sixty-plus years of contributing to the state strongly suggests that Harreld set out to sabotage the Labor Center by keeping the director in the dark as long as possible. Instead of giving Sherer every advantage, he limited the information she had available to her precisely because that’s what you do when you want people to fail.
Were Harreld even a middling leader, clear and consistent policies and expectations would have been spelled out long before this year, based on both his vaunted values-based budget model and the new strategic plan. For well over a year before any impending cuts were announced, every individual and program on campus would have known what was expected, and for programs that were at risk specific milestones would have been agreed to by all parties. And yet, with regard to the Labor Center, neither the former dean of the UI College of Law, the current interim provost, nor the current illegitimate president of the university, made that happen.
From that long view, we now shift our focus to the three-month period between the announcement of unspecified impending cuts in mid-April, to the announcement of specific cuts in mid-July, including the Labor Center. Whatever Harreld and his crack staff failed to communicate to Sherer in the preceding twenty-one months, that three-month span offered the perfect opportunity for his administration to engage any potential programs in that unfolding review process. And of course we know that there was an unfolding review process not only because it was announced, but because the Labor Center ended up on the list of affected programs.
As detailed in Part 2 of this post, on April 12th the Office of the President and the president himself gave conflicting statements about the criteria that would be used to determine the closure of institutes and centers on campus. In the 04/12/18 press release from his office, Harreld described the core components of the UI mission as “education, research, and scholarship”. In his presentation to the Board of Regents on that same day, however, Harreld stated that programs would be judged on the basis of “student learning, research or economic development”.
Whichever set of presidential criteria was in force during the decision making process, the Labor Center clearly met some of those tests, if not all. While the Labor Center undoubtedly had some concern about what Harreld was planning, based on the official statement from the Office of the President — as opposed to Harreld’s divergent statement before the board — there was no clear signal that the Labor Center was at risk. And yet, even if we accept Harreld’s entrepreneurial interpretation of the university’s mission, a compelling argument can be made that the Labor Center still qualifies for inclusion and financial support. From a Press-Citizen letter to the editor by Paul McAndrew, on 08/22/18:
If you have been reading this multipart post from the beginning, however, you know that isn’t the end of the story. After setting out conflicting criteria in April, by the time the main slate of cuts was announced in mid-July, the criteria for inclusion or exclusion had been whittled down to the singular test of “student instruction”. And yet, from all of the statements and reporting after the fact, there is no evidence that this single criterion was communicated to anyone before that justification was put forward in an unsigned press release by the Office of Strategic Communication.
As you might imagine, that new and extremely limited — you might say, targeted — criterion gets Harreld into trouble elsewhere on campus, because there are other centers, institutes and programs that have little or nothing to do with student instruction, yet no one is closing those. From these fumbling, groping, evolving rationales, however, the most important conclusion we can draw is that back in April of this year, when Harreld first promised to either abolish or reduce the funding of centers and institutes on the UI campus, there was no clear policy for making such determinations on a case-by-case basis. And we know that because if there had been, that policy would have been articulated at that time.
Again, there is no measure of leadership by which such a process would be deemed acceptable. It is, objectively, a failing on Harreld’s part, and that’s true even if the former dean of the UI College of Law, or the current dean, or both, made the final decision to close the Labor Center. More to the point, from the perspective of the Labor Center, how could Sherer and her staff not feel singled out? No communication at all, no direction, no carrot — just a long silence punctuated by misinformation, which then suddenly culminated in Harreld hitting them with an administrative stick.
Note also that it was only after that announcement, and after push-back from that announcement, that Harreld explained how the Labor Center might persist under his new, entrepreneurial rule — once again by manufacturing an explanation after the fact. In the July press release announcing the slate of program cuts, the word ‘furlough’ was used three times to explain what would be happening to affected employees:
Nowhere in the official statements from the university, however, or in subsequent reporting by the press, was there any explanation of what a furlough actually meant for the affected employees. As it turns out, of course, ‘furlough’ is a well-known and well-defined term at the University of Iowa, particularly in the HR department, which includes web pages devoted to the topic. Only at the beginning of August, however, did Harreld clarify what he meant by furloughing thirty-odd employees, including five from the Labor Center. From his comments to the regents on 08/01/18, as reported by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller:
Here, finally, Harreld cops to his entrepreneurial agenda. As long as the Labor Center can pay its own way he does not care if it sticks around — and why would he? And yet, in terms of leadership, once again we clearly see that Harreld and his administration hung the Labor Center out to dry, and not just for three months. If this is indeed the new policy for the Labor Center, then it ought to be the new policy for the entire university, but of course Harreld isn’t saying that. Instead, he’s carving out piecemeal exceptions to suit his objective, and the objective of the moment seems to be killing off the Labor Center by any administrative means available.
Again, here is Director Sherer, responding in the press on 07/10/18, to the news that the Labor Center would be closed:
Even if Dean Washburn followed HR’s touchy-feely furlough-notification advice, you can understand why Sherer would be angry. Instead of being giving advance notice — and thus more time — to increase revenue, she was kept in the dark until the last possible minute, then told that her program would be closed. Only after significant push-back from across the state, three weeks later, did transformational visionary J. Bruce Harreld announce that the one way she could save the jobs of her employees would be to suddenly become break-even profitable in less than a year.
How did that happen when Harreld had been pushing the same vision for almost two years? How was the entire campus not put on notice that funding would, in the future, be limited only to programs that were critical to “student instruction”? That would seem to be the easiest message in the world to convey, yet even after belatedly delivering that message to the Labor Center, it has not been implemented as campus-wide policy.
As for Harreld’s persistent claim that a financial crisis ultimately drove the decision to close the Labor Center, not only has that fraud been exposed in prior parts of this multipart post, but in his presentation before the board on 08/01/18, Harreld himself exposed that lie. From Miller’s report:
After relentlessly pleading poverty as a result of what he deems generational disinvestment by the state, Harreld pulls yet another funding switcheroo. It is not that UI does not have enough money to continue to fund the Labor Center, it is that it does not have enough money to do that and fund the strategic plan at the same time. As regular readers know that is also a lie, because Harreld is rolling in tens of millions of dollars in new, unrestricted tuition revenue following four hikes in less than two years, but even if that was the case, notice what is missing. Nowhere does Harreld promise that all of that new tuition revenue, or the money spent on the strategic plan, will be devoted to the same “student instruction” that was the sole justification for terminating the Labor Center.
In terms of leadership, at best this is how hacks operate, and at worst we now have more compelling evidence of malice in Harreld’s methodology. Instead of giving the Labor Center every advantage, he kept Sherer in the dark, then put the onus of responsibility for his failed leadership on her. By rights the Labor Center ought to have two full years to move toward greater profitability, but only after Harreld specifies the funding and mission criteria that will be in force campus-wide.
As damning as all that is, the simplest objective evidence of Harreld’s failed leadership with regard to the closing of the Labor Center is also the most direct evidence we have of his orchestration of the demise of that program by administrative means. Not only did his machinations go to the heart of his illegitimacy as a president, but for that reason it is not possible that he did not understand, and does not understand, the core of the betrayal that he committed. In fact, the administrative means by which the termination of the Labor Center was achieved speak to Harreld’s willful disregard not only for the staff of the Labor Center, but for the faculty of the University of Iowa — who, at some point, must either strenuously object to being treated like suckers, or simply acknowledge that they are.
During the corrupt presidential search of 2015, which culminated in Harreld’s rigged appointment, both the Iowa Board of Regents and the highest levels of UI administration committed flagrant, premeditated, protracted violations of what is called shared governance. While it can be tempting to liken shared governance to the relationship between management and labor, or between politicians and citizens, shared governance is unique to higher-ed precisely because it is designed to protect the academic integrity of scholarly institutions. Some colleges dispense with it — including, notably, for-profit schools — and there are universities which apply different degrees of shared governance, but at root that collaborative relationship protects institutions not only by making sure everyone is invested, but by making sure that administrators do not corrupt the core purpose and mission of the organization.
With regard to Harreld specifically, however, it is critical to remember that he is the living embodiment of an abuse of shared governance which not only rocked the UI campus, but resulted in the university being sanctioned by the American Association of University Professors for two years. That sanction served as a red flag to prospective faculty that Iowa was simply not to be trusted, and deservedly so. By the same token, its repeal only this past summer seemed to signal that the Board of Regents, UI administration, and Harreld himself, had all renewed their commitment to that ideal.
In that context, and given Harreld’s blighted origin as president, you would think his administration would have gone out of its way to ensure that the closing of the Labor Center involved shared governance. And yet, as noted in a timeline in the previous post, what we find when we look at the facts is exactly the opposite. Instead of making sure that shared governance was involved, Harreld and his administrators carved out an exception — a void in the process — to slip the closing of the Labor Center through. Adding insult to injury, only now is Harreld insisting on a more inclusive process.
Again, here is how Harreld and Rod Lehnertz introduced the impending closings and cuts of academic centers and institutes in the press release on 04/12/18:
In making the determination about which programs would be closed, shared governance was not simply acknowledged, it is promised by Harreld himself. That in turn means the Labor Center’s director, Jennifer Sherer, had every reason to believe that if her program was on the chopping block, she would be engaged on that basis during the decision making process. Because she was never brought into that conversation, however, she had no reason to believe that the Labor Center was at risk until the decision to close the center was announced.
Once again, the best possible interpretation of this colossal administrative head fake is that Harreld is incompetent. The worst and likeliest explanation is that deceit was always part of the plan, and shared governance may even have been mentioned because it lulled Sherer into a false sense of security, while Harreld and/or the deans conspired against her. Now compare Harreld’s April promise to the OSC press release on 07/10/18, announcing the specific slate of closings and cuts:
No mention of shared governance — so what happened? Did someone at the Office of Strategic Communication not get the shared-governance memo? Were legions of shared-governance meetings somehow overlooked? Clearly one person who was left out of the loop — after the president of the university promised that shared governance would be respected in the decision making process — was Jennifer Sherer, director of the Labor Center. Again, from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, also on 07/10/18, reporting on the announcement by UI:
Is it possible that Sherer had conversations we don’t know about, which she herself has not talked about because that is to her political advantage? Well, nowhere in any of the press coverage or official statements from UI is there any indication that Sherer or anyone at the Labor Center was consulted before the decision was made to close that program. In fact, while we still don’t know who made the final call, Harreld’s actions after the fact make clear that shared governance was not part of the decision making proces. Continuing from Miller’s report on 08/01/18:
That Harreld instituted corrective action after the decision was made means the process that led to the closing of the Labor Center was improper. Shared governance was promised, it was not provided, yet Harreld’s only response is to encourage everyone to do better next time. Given his admission that proper procedure was not followed, why has Harreld not voided the decision on that basis? He himself — along with his boy Lehnertz — promised that shared governance would be part of the process. At the very least, and particularly given Harreld’s uspect credibility, you would think he would take offense, yet he is happily accepting that admittedly flawed determination. Why?
Whatever you may think of Harreld as a leader, on the question of shared governance he can no longer claim obliviousness about what that means, if he ever could. Not only is his presidency an indelible stain on the history of the University of Iowa because of an abuse of shared governance, but only a few months ago Harreld made it abundantly clear that he himself considers shared governance to be critical to rebuilding trust after the AAUP sanction. As quoted in the previous post, here again is Harreld responding to a question about shared governance in a Daily Iowan interview on 05/08/18 — meaning a month after the April press release that promised shared governance would be part of the review process, and two months before it was announced that the Labor Center would be closed without any shared governance input into that decision:
Maybe you can square that self-congratulatory, bureaucratic basking with what happened to the Labor Center, but I can’t. In April, Harreld promised that shared governance would be part of the review process. In May, Harreld declared that UI was at a “much higher level of sharedness than on many other campuses”. Then, in July, the Labor Center was wiped out by administrative fiat, with no warning and no opportunity to provide input through the shared governance process.
That is, objectively, either a betrayal of Harreld or a betrayal by Harreld, but in neither case is it a demonstration of leadership — and here we cannot offer ignorance or incompetence as a defense. Instead, in this sequence of events we see how much contempt J. Bruce Harreld has for the input of the university as an academic community. Backed by his toads and collaborators — including particularly his loyal interim provost — Harreld had no problem taking credit for raising shared governance to new heights, while at the exact same time he was reneging on his promise because it suited his petty, bratty, vindictive interests.
As a final indictment of Harreld’s failed leadership at UI, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the former head of global marketing for IBM currently presides over a media shop that is a certifiable train wreck — at least regarding official messaging from and about his office. It may be that the Office of Strategic Communication routinely goes off the rails precisely because it has to catch up to or paper over Harreld’s latest blunder or lie, but that’s hardly an excuse. As we have documented in this multipart post, on the issue of the closing of the Labor Center alone, we have: three different criteria put forward as justifications for that decision, two of which appeared on the same day; two different and mutually exclusive explanations for where any savings from the Labor Center closing would end up; and multiple mutually exclusive explanations as to who made the final decision.
Given such pervasive incoherence, there would seem to be only two possible explanations as to how a single decision could be miscommunicated so extensively, and neither of those explanations paints the University of Iowa in a good light. Either the media apparatus at UI is riddled with incompetence on a scale that has no peer in higher education, or what appears to be incompetence is deliberate. In the latter case, one advantage to staking out multiple positions on the record is that you can pick and choose which quotes to point to as proof of your consistency as a decision maker. Obviously that only works if no one bothers to check the record, but people are busy, and even if you get caught you can say that one or more of the statements were wrong, or that someone misspoke. Because such subterfuge is not against the law, as long as your corrupt bosses at the Iowa Board of Regents don’t care that you routinely lie to the press, to the UI community and to the people of Iowa, you don’t have anything to fear. Again, you may look like a colossal idiot from time to time, but if you’re pulling down $50K a month, and you have a $1M bonus glittering on the horizon, you know you’re getting the last laugh.
As for Harreld’s performance as a leader, we are left with a simple question. Over the past two years, did J. Bruce Harreld position the Labor Center to succeed, or to fail? If you lean toward the latter judgment, it is important to consider what might be done to prevent such injustices from happening to others, including perhaps even you, and we will tackle that subject in the final post in this series.
For Part 6 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center, click here.
This is Part 6 of Harreld the Ogre Slashes and Burns the UI Labor Center. For Part 5, click here.
Whether you have read any or all of the preceding parts of this post, the question before us now is what might be done to convince the University of Iowa to rescind its decision to close the UI Labor Center. As detailed in the first five parts, an administrative injustice has been committed against the Labor Center by the illegitimate president of the school, J. Bruce Harreld, by his interim toady provost, Sue Curry, by the former dean of the College of Law, Gail Agrawal, and by the new dean of that college, Kevin Washburn. To whatever extent each is complicit, however, it was Harreld who initiated, facilitated and approved that decision, and as such any effort at recision must ultimately target Harreld himself. Even if Washburn decides to restore funding for the center using the liberty of the new decentralized budget model, Harreld can and will prevent it.
Corruption as Context
As currently constituted, the University of Iowa is a corrupt institution. The locus of that corruption is J. Bruce Harreld, who was fraudulently appointed in 2015 by a small cabal of co-conspirators. In grateful appreciation for putting $4M in his pockets over five years, as well as liberating him from the hell of his own irrelevance, Harreld in turn: lied on multiple occasions to obscure the conspiracy that led to his hire; secured the naming rights to the new UI children’s hospital for one of his co-conspirators in his first two months on the job; and tried to steal $4.2M from students and families by deceiving them about scholarships that the university was legally obligated to pay.
Perhaps no single quote demonstrates Harreld’s malevolence more than this sentence, from a report by the Daily Iowan on 11/02/15 — the day Harreld took office:
Note that only a day earlier, in published local reports, his excellency J. Bruce Harreld told the second of two premeditated and contradictory lies to obscure his long-standing relationship with UI megadonor and alum Jerre Stead. Not only was Stead a member of the presidential search committee, but Stead was also the longtime friend and mentor who introduced Harreld into the rigged UI search process. Harreld initially claimed that it was Purdue University President Mitch Daniels who did so, then later claimed that it was an anonymous functionary at Boston Consulting. To his credit, however, Harreld did tell both of those bald-faced lies in a civilized manner.
In sum, reasoning with Harreld won’t work because the decisions he makes are not driven by reason, they are driven by self-interest and loyalty to his crony conspirators. Railing against Harreld will also fail, because he will — as he has on multiple occasions in the past — simply insinuate that any expression of emotion, no matter how valid, is indicative of insanity. Likewise, appeals to decency won’t work because Harreld is the living embodiment of an indecency that was perpetrated against the UI community, and he has never shown a hint of contrition.
The Clock is Ticking
So how do those who support the Labor Center press the case that the center should not only be given a reprieve, but be acknowledged as an integral part of the university’s core educational and academic mission? Well, in the short term a reprieve may be all that can be hoped for precisely because Harreld is a man devoid of integrity. It doesn’t matter what agreements he makes, because he will lie to anyone simply to buy time to betray them, and supporters of the Labor Center must know that before they engage.
The good news is that even if the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents extends Harreld’s current five-year deal, he is not going to be around forever, and that means the clock is also ticking for him. At the end of the current academic year, Harreld will have a year and a half on his current contract, and a good share of that may be limited by lame-duck status. Even in the next few months it is possible that there may be a sea change in state government if Governor Reynolds is thrown out of office, and for the first time in a decade the regents have to answer to someone who is not a bootlicking servant of business interests. The bad news is that Harreld clearly knows he has a limited window in which to kill off the Labor Center, which is precisely why his decision was sprung at the last possible minute, and the first attempt to push back against that decision immediately ended in failure.
From The Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 07/13/18:
As you can see, this is not going to be an easy fight. Harreld is devoid of integrity, and the administrators who work under him have either allied themselves with his entrepreneurial agenda — including, particularly, SVP of Finance and Operations, Rod Lehnertz, who was the first sell-out on campus — or, like Washburn, they are beholden to Harreld for giving them a job. Because Harreld still has the support of the corrupt Board of Regents, and because he has surrounded himself with corrupt or compliant collaborators, the only way anyone is going to change his mind is by forcing him to do so.
The Leadership Advantage
Importantly, none of the people who are trying to kill the Labor Center have the courage of their convictions, and that includes Harreld, who wasted no time fingering the former dean of the College of Law, and/or the new dean, for that decision. In fact, as we saw in the preceding parts of this post, the only reason the Labor Center is at risk is because the people involved in making the decision were able to work in the shadows, like the administrative cockroaches they are. Which is to say that the antidote to this craven injustice is the same antidote to any injustice: exposing the abuse by shining as much daylight on the corrupt people and process as possible.
If the Labor Center has any advantage, it is not simply the advantage of being on the right side of the truth, but the critical advantage of being led by someone who will speak truth to power. Unlike Harreld and his collaborators, the director of the Labor Center not only has the courage of her convictions, she immediately made clear that she stands opposed to the decision and intends to reverse it. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 07/10/18 — meaning the day the Labor Center decision was announced:
You can read more about Sherer’s background here, and her resolve here. In a few short weeks she has already done an excellent job of marshaling a response to Harreld’s bureaucratic backstabbing, including participating in outreach meetings and convincing others to publicly support the Labor Center and its mission – see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. That’s not only the kind of support you get when you provide a valuable service to the people of Iowa, but the kind you get when you are yourself are a person of integrity.
Contrast that public outpouring with the fact that even Harreld is unwilling to take ownership of the decision to close the Labor Center, and you see the problem facing the university. As exhaustively detailed in the first five parts of this post, the administrators at UI are wrong on the arguments they have put forward, they clearly set up the Labor Center to fail, and their only conceivable means of success is to double down and continue lying to the press, to the UI community and to the people of Iowa. Because Harreld commands the bully pulpit he will likely control the media narrative, but so far Sherer and her supporters have mounted a compelling response.
Behind the Scenes
As noted in the first article in the series of links above, considerable pressure is also being brought to bear in conversations which are not in the public sphere:
The problem, of course, is that despite having the budgetary autonomy to right this wrong, the new dean of the College of Law is doing what Harreld told him to do, and we don’t even have to speculate on that point. From a report last week by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 08/28/18:
As you can see, not only is Washburn unwilling to take the heat alone, he is doing what he can to buy time, albeit probably for all the wrong reasons. Stringing out the decision, waiting for the heat to die down, then gutting the program by any means available are all part of the administrator’s dirty-trick playbook. The problem, unfortunately, is that Harreld holds all of the cards, and as such he is impervious to expressions of concern.
For example, even though Harreld works for the people of Iowa, consider how he responded to a phone call from one of Iowa’s state legislators — as reported by the Gazette’s Miller, on 08/16/08:
When you are the president of a public research university, and you believe you can treat state politicians like pests, it is unlikely that you will respond to pleas for leniency. That does not mean outside pressure should not be applied, of course — it just means it shouldn’t be applied directly to Harreld, because it won’t change his mind. Not only has he already distanced himself from the decision, he has offered what will seem to be a fair proposition to people who know little or nothing about higher-ed in general, or about the University of Iowa specifically. Until there is some compelling reason for him to relent, and to order Washburn to continue to fund the Labor Center, the clock is ticking, and at the end of this year time will run out.
It also goes without saying that 70 attorneys and the combined might of organized labor could make some real noise if they wanted to, but that brings us back to the question of civility. While non-tenured/contingent faculty at UI did protest recently, and subsequently received increased benefits, the linkage there was direct. With the Labor Center, as an academic program, the linkage is not only indirect, it is obscure. Even on the UI campus, as detailed in prior posts in this series, there is a lack of consensus about what the core mission of the university currently is, and what it should be going forward.
On the other hand, that does not mean those 70 attorneys and the might of organized labor cannot exert pressure in other ways, including by taking a long look at their individual and collective relationships not only with the University of Iowa, but with Iowa State, Northern Iowa, and the Iowa Board of Regents. For example, there is an almost constant steam of construction on all three campuses, much of it undoubtedly performed by union shops. I am positive that those members and their businesses would be appreciative, if, after careful consideration, Harreld rescinded his decision and made sure the Labor Center will be fully funded going forward.
And speaking of money, there is also the issue of charitable giving, and how people who normally give to the UI Foundation, the ISU Foundation and the UNI Foundation might be less inclined to do so if Iowa insists on choking off funding for the only Labor Center in the state. In fact, I am equally positive that Lynette Marshall, head of Iowa’s Center for Advancement, would love to hear from anyone who is having second thoughts about gifts they have already made, or may be thinking about making. (Half a million dollars to fund the Labor Center each year could turn out to be a real bargain, and should be viewed in the context of labor’s overall engagement with UI.)
An Academic Pressure Point
As detailed in several parts of this extended post, both the funding and mission conversations at UI are shell games, with Harreld and his crack staff cherry picking numbers or criteria to suit the occasion. There is one conversation that Harreld does not want to have, however, both because it goes to the heart of his corrupt intent, and because it has the potential to galvanize the faculty in opposition. We talked about this at length in Part 2, but here it is again in a nutshell, as revealed by Harreld himself on the same day.
From an official press release by the Office of the President, on 04/12/18, announcing as-yet-unspecified cuts to centers and institutes at UI:
No faculty member in the United States, and perhaps no citizen in America, would object to that description of the core mission of higher education. And yet, here is how J. Bruce Harreld himself described Iowa’s mission to the Board of Regents, also on 04/12/18 [1:02:40]:
As you can see, while the press release from Harreld’s office pays lip service to scholarship for the benefit of the campus audience, when reporting to his superiors he replaced scholarship with economic development, because that is what he was hired to do — to convert Iowa from an academic institution into an money-making machine. Not so coincidentally, part of that plan — which comes to us from Mike Crow at Arizona State — hinges on perverting the meaning of research to mean only profit-driven or commercial research, which is kept under lock and key. That is the opposite of the intent of basic or academic research, which is peer-reviewed and freely shared, and as such is often a prerequisite of academic scholarship.
In Harreld’s radical view, if what you are doing can be turned into a patent or license then it qualifies as research. If, however, new knowledge simply makes the world a better place to live, then that research will not be funded.
Now, perhaps you’re wondering if Harreld misspoke in front of the Board of Regents, albeit in perfect sync with the grand designs laid out by Crow at ASU. Well, if we go back a full year we find the same lip service being paid to scholarship in Harreld’s presentation to the regents’ Tuition Task Force. On p. 20 of that proposal we find the only public document which breaks down the total estimated cost of the new UI Strategic Plan, and included in that budget is $6M specifically for economic development. The only mention of scholarship at all — which is not mentioned in the budget — is on p. 24 of that same PDF, but only as a synonym for the kind of for-profit research that Harreld intends to fund. Scholarship as a public good or an academic end in itself simply does not exist in Harreld’s plan for the school.
As to the Board of Regents, here is how they characterized the mission of the University of Iowa on 07/11/18, in a statement released the day after it was announced that the Labor Center would be closed:
Teaching, yes, research yes, but no scholarship — because scholarship does not generate revenue. This echoing of Harreld’s emphasis on research, and specifically on entrepreneurial ventures which may or may not ever turn a profit, is in turn underscored by the conditions of survival which Harreld dictated to the Labor Center at the beginning of August. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 08/01/18:
Scholars used to live under a ‘publish or perish’ threat, but compared to the entrepreneurial crusade that Harreld is now waging on the UI campus, that will seem like a lark. What Harreld is proposing as a fix for the purported ills of higher education is ‘profit or perish’, yet it should be self-evident that the great majority of scholarship, even if published to great fanfare, will never generate a profit. In making profitability the only means of salvation for the Labor Center, Harreld is signaling that he intends to use that same standard against others, including, eventually, Iowa’s faculty. More and more non-tenured/contingent instructors will be hired to teach the majority of classes, while faculty who pursue classic scholarship will be squeezed out of departmental budgets by the deans, who will be motivated by Harreld’s resource allocations to divert more funding to entrepreneurial pursuits.
From the first paragraph of Part 1 of this post:
Harreld has not (yet) implemented any overtly crazy schemes. Instead, like the cockroach he is, he has spent the bulk of his first three years spreading the disease of entrepreneurial salvation via the human vector of greed. Because academics often know little or nothing about assessing risk in a commercial context, they are even easier to fleece than the little old ladies who are routinely taken to the cleaners by Wall St. boiler rooms. Promise the faculty a cut of the take from their own labor and they will happily avert their eyes as the Labor Center and any other programs are pulled under, no matter what the cost to citizens who may have benefited from that knowledge.
Harreld’s premeditated, orchestrated administrative attack against the Labor Center is the point of a lethal spear aimed at the very heart of academia, and particularly so at a liberal arts institution like Iowa. While you might think that all Director Sherer would have to do would be sound the alarm about this threat, unfortunately that is not the case. Not only are greed and naked self-interest obstacles to the truth, but the reality of higher education is that there is a code of silence which actively precludes such conversations.
Higher-Ed Hypocrisy
In comparing faith and reason it is not wrong to think of the world’s research universities as temples of knowledge, and that is particularly true of America’s quasi-government-funded public schools, including the University of Iowa. Outside of our respective faiths, every aspect of our lives traces back not to a divine text but to the intellectual spirit of inquiry, debate and science embodied in those academic institutions. While medicine, law, politics, psychology and every other discipline — including the study of religion — flows from higher education, colleges and universities also continue to study those disciplines as they evolve, while at the same time training the next generation of professionals who enter those fields, and the academics who study those fields.
In this endless cycle of inquisition and instruction we find a self-correcting mechanism which works against pervasive codes of silence in professions like medicine and law, where the bonds of self-interested practitioners at times supplant allegiance to the truth. Precisely because of the importance of this academic authority, you would think that higher education would be bristling with protections and best practices which ensure that such corrupting influences do not invade the foundations of education, but because human beings are involved you would be wrong. Whether we are talking about intellectual cults of personality, about selling out higher-ed to corporations, or about the infliction of serial sexual abuse against female athletes (Michigan State), male athletes (Ohio State), women (Baylor) or children (Penn St.), higher education is replete with examples in which scholars and administrators failed to self-correct abusive practices.
As with doctors and lawyers, university professors like to rally around the ideals of their profession. As soon as that’s over, however, and everyone has a good glow, they go right back to their siloed intellectual lives, fervently advocating for their careers, their research and their departments in ways that may or may not include fudging data, sabotaging others, or blackmailing, bullying, belittling or sexually harassing colleagues, staff and students. Making matters worse, the pervasive assumption that intellect equals excellence tends to cede power to those who are most adept at lying their academic asses off, as opposed to those who are most sincere and rigorous in their work. As a result, people who should, by rights, be thrown off campus and into the street are instead lionized for their erudite hucksterism.
Whether expressed in a theory, in a proof of formal logic, or through rigorous scientific testing, the cornerstone of all knowledge is reason, and the premise of academia is that we do not just pull answers out of our asses. Instead, we proceed causally, testing and retesting our assumptions. And yet, when it comes to the closing of the UI Labor Center, despite a profusion of rhetoric and rationales, we see none of that. Even as a simple expression of policy, Harreld’s decision — masked as it is by his ‘new’ values-based budget model — makes no sense, yet on the UI campus the overwhelming response to this betrayal of the core precept of education is complicit disinterested silence.
Yes, a few faculty members have spoken up about the corrupt process, but what should be a roar is muted by hypocrisy, and what is a threat aimed at the heart of academia is thus dismissed as a routine administrative act. As the preceding parts of this post make searingly clear, there is no reasoned basis for closing the Labor Center, but because that decision will not affect most of the people on campus, their self-interest compels them to keep quiet and look away. To accept. To permit. To abet.
Even if you are a miserable human being, however, you do not become a university professor if you are not also smart. As such, it can be assumed that the vast majority of faculty on the UI campus do understand that the Labor Center is being railroaded. Still, where we might think that the UI Faculty Senate would perceive the ominous threat to scholarship and object on that basis, what we find instead is yet another doormat facilitating Harreld’s abuses of shared governance. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 08/01/18:
If you are looking for heroes, or even for people who practice what they preach, you will find distressingly few in leadership positions in higher-ed, precisely because the sort of people who rise to such positions are usually conniving political animals for whom everything, including reason, is simply a bargaining chip. Unfortunately, for the time being, that means Director Sherer is on her own. Not only does she have to contend with Harreld’s naked abuses of power, including his flagrant ongoing disregard for shared governance, but she has to contend with the disregard of the Iowa faculty.
Speaking Truth to Power
It is a singular truth about the leaders we respect and admire, including people who advocate for views opposed to our own, that they refuse to abandon or bargain away their principles. In business, politics and even personal relationships, there are times when it is necessary to compromise, but there are also limits beyond which people of integrity simply will not go. In the three years since J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed at UI, I can think of no university leader at Iowa who has demonstrated that quality until now.
I don’t know how much pressure has been brought to bear on Director Sherer in the two months since it was announced that her program would be closed, but given the cast of characters involved I am guessing it has been unrelenting. From those urging her to go quietly, so as not to sully her professional reputation, to those employing more coercive means — including outright extortion about future employment at the university for herself or her staff — there is almost certainly a concerted effort underway to compel acquiescence. To her credit, however, at least in her public statements, Sherer has been unmoved. She believes that the Labor Center not only belongs at Iowa, but that it has, through its work and service, earned that presence.
As to whether the Labor Center deserves financial support from the university, the answer to that question goes to the heart of the administrative fraud that Harreld has perpetrated against the program. What Sherer is looking for is not a handout, but simply a level playing field, and right now she doesn’t have it. She should have been given notice two years ago, when Harreld rigged the ‘new’ budget model and strategic plan to support his subversive entrepreneurial agenda, but instead she was kept in the dark until only two months ago.
To her equal credit, in responding to this premeditated, targeted, concerted abuse of shared governance, Sherer has remained civil. While she immediately made clear that she believes an injustice was done — because an injustice was done — she has not resorted to threats, or otherwise given Harreld any opportunity to discredit her, discipline her, or fire her for cause. In doing this she has preserved her own credibility, at whatever cost to her stomach lining, and it is from that position of strength that she can now speak truth to power in the months ahead.
If Sherer has any advantage — and I believe it is a considerable advantage — it is that she does not actually have to make the case for the Labor Center’s survival, or prove any ill intent on Harreld’s part. Instead, all she has to do is raise the questions that everyone on campus should be asking right now, but are too gutless to confront. In doing this she will have to demand answers not only from the craven administrators who targeted her program for closure, but from the the willfully ignorant faculty leadership that is giving Harreld cover. Fortunately, however, I believe that broadening her inquiry will prove to be an asset to her cause.
Importantly, Harreld and/or the law school deans did not simply decide to close the Labor Center because they had the power to do so. However haphazard and confused their explanations have been, and continue to be, they have argued, multiple times, and in contrary ways, that the decision was reached as a matter of policy. What is that policy? Well, that’s a very good question, and it’s one of the first things Sherer should ask Harreld to explain.
As the president of a major research university, and as an employee of the state, I believe Harreld is obligated to put his policy in writing, so no one else will be surprised when he slashes and burns the next program. From his own prior claim to have elevated shared governance to rare form on the UI campus — which was subsequently obliterated by the sandbagging that Sherer endured — it should be self-evident that this needs to be done. The most likely outcome from asking this question is that Harreld and his crack staff of brigands and vandals will simply refuse to respond, because they cannot produce a policy position which can be consistently applied across the entire campus.
The same holds for the university’s core mission, which has been articulated in multiple ways over this single program closing. What is the core mission of the University of Iowa? Is scholarship part of that core mission, as stated in Harreld’s 04/12/18 press release? Is economic development part of that mission, as stated by Harreld in his presentation to the regents on that same day?
If Harreld and the Board of Regents are supplanting scholarship with economic development, the entire UI community deserves to be told about that seismic shift in priorities. People who are supportive of Harreld’s profit-first agenda will work that much harder to generate positive results, while people who stand in opposition will move on, thus decreasing resistance on campus. Given the obvious upside to making that declaration, then, why has Harreld been reluctant to do so?
On the question of funding, Harreld pushed through four tuition hikes in just under two years, all by pointing to funding cuts and shortfalls over that same time frame. The need to raise more tuition revenue was tied, expressly, to faltering state funding, meaning those new tuition dollars were replacing state dollars — albeit at a gluttonous rate of $2.8 for every $1 in state cuts. And yet, Harreld now asserts that none of that new money, and no unrestricted state appropriations, will be used to fund the Labor Center, because it is not involved in “student instruction”.
As to when Harreld articulated that new funding policy, he didn’t. Instead, he simply asserted it as fact, yet I can find no evidence in the press, in press releases or even in the minutes of the Faculty Senate that such a policy was ever debated or even announced. Instead, it appeared out of nowhere during Harreld’s presentation to the board on 08/01/18, as reported by the Gazette’s Miller:
Whether this edict can be reversed for the Labor Center or not, everyone in the UI community deserves to know what this means for them. What will and will not be funded with “general undeclared state funding” going forward? What will and will not be funded with “tuition” going forward? Will entrepreneurial ventures — including but not limited to private-sector partnerships and for-profit research — be funded from either or both of those revenue sources?
Whatever answers Sherer does or does not get from Harreld, she should then compare his policy statements not only to her own program, but to other programs on campus. For example, how do the community programs at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center (JPEC) fare relative to Harreld’s new guidelines? Do those programs count as “student instruction”, even if they primarily provide services to private citizens? How about the Stead Technology Services Group at the UI Tippie College of Business? Does that unit receive support from state funds or tuition, or is it entirely self-funding?
And speaking of John Pappajohn and his pervasive entrepreneurial influence at the University of Iowa, only a few days ago it was announced that Iowa will open a new “innovation center” in the old UI art building. While the center will ostensibly be funded by private gifts, what about the operating and personnel costs? Will the new innovation center receive any funding from the state, or from student tuition? Will it be “directly involved in “student instruction”?
From the 08/30/18 press release:
How does that goal square with the fact that Harreld is unwilling to help workers solve “real-world problems”, whether either individually or collectively? Or are workers not a part of business and economic development?
Again, it is entirely possible, if not likely, that Harreld and his administrative consiglieres will refuse to answer such questions, but that’s okay. On an academic campus, merely refusing to discuss the rational basis for matters of policy is tantamount to the incivility that Harreld himself decried, and will expose him as the insufferable fraud he actually is. Maybe that will have a galvanizing effect on the faculty and maybe it won’t, but at the very least those who are currently averting their eyes will be reminded that they may have more in common with Harreld than they care to admit.
As to how Sherer can keep the campus and citizenry informed, there are a number of outlets available. First, she can speak to reporters in the press, including particularly the student-run Daily Iowan. Second, she can ask to present her concerns and findings to the Faculty Senate, which should be interested in her perspective on shared governance, scholarship and the public service mission of the university. Third, there is a public comment period during each meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents, and she could use that forum to ask for clarifications or to present her concerns. (For the current academic year there will be six such meetings, the first of which is next week, on September 13th.)
The Labor Center and Economic Development
After months of shifting and conflicting rationales, J. Bruce Harreld settled on the singular criterion of “student instruction” as his justification for terminating the Labor Center. From the 07/10/18 press release, announcing that determination:
As detailed in other posts in this series, that narrow criterion was chosen not because it reflected a new campus-wide policy, but because it specifically targeted the Labor Center, which is not “directly tied to student instruction”. And yet, there are three big problems with using that criterion to exclude the Labor Center from being supported by Iowa’s massive general education fund, which is currently about $750M. The first problem, which we have addressed repeatedly, is that if being “directly tied to student instructions” is a prerequisite for receiving support from either unrestricted state appropriations or tuition, then there should be a lot more programs on the chopping block right now.
The second problem is that the Labor Center is in fact involved in student instruction, albeit not in the sense of hosting formal classes for undergrads or graduate students. From a Daily Iowan letter to the editor by Shelton Stromquist, on 09/03/18:
The third problem, which no one seems to have addressed, is that the very fact that the Labor Center is not “directly tied to student instruction” speaks not to a failure of the center or Director Sherer, but of the university, and in particular the failure of J. Bruce Harreld to practice what he preaches. Rather than cut the Labor Center to save half a million dollars at the distant margin of the school’s $4B annual budget, the university should already be leveraging that reservoir of institutional knowledge for tuition-paying students. Instead, however, the Labor Center has been marginalized in ways that make little sense in a historical context, and absolutely no sense given Harreld’s intention to convert the school into a profit-chasing knowledge enterprise.
As regular readers know, one of academia’s most embarrassing conceits involves the self-selection of peer institutions for the sake of comparison, including peers which are defined as ‘aspirational’ — meaning they are not, in fact, actual peers. In relentlessly pressing for endless tuition hikes now and well into the future, Harreld has constantly referenced various peer groups as justification for raising Iowa’s tuition by thousands of dollars each year, even as the university will still be putting out the same product. This is a market-driven approach to pricing, and one that Harreld — who holds a Harvard MBA — approaches purely on that basis.
Even on an issue as mundane as building a new clubhouse for the university’s Finkbine golf course, Harreld invoked yet another official comparison group — the Big Ten — to make that case. From a Daily Iowan interview published two years ago, on 09/07/16:
While this would seem to be a trivial matter in the life of a university president, not only has Harreld relentlessly pushed for a new clubhouse, but in making the case for that project he lied about the other Big Ten schools. Thanks to his conniving support, however, that project has now morphed into a $10M mixed-used building that will be part of an as-yet undefined west-side real-estate development project. In fact, Harreld’s first move upon sounding the financial all-clear and lifting the recent construction moratorium was not to put his giant business brain to work helping Washburn and Sherer find some way to save the Labor Center, but to get right back to pushing for his new, multi-million-dollar golf palace.
Imagine if the Labor Center had that kind of support from Harreld, instead of being maliciously targeted. In fact, if we follow Harreld’s example and look at labor centers and labor studies at the ten public universities that make up Iowa’s self-selected UI Peer Group, not only do we find that seven of those schools include a labor center or labor studies, but several offer minors in labor studies, and one offers a bachelor’s of science:
University of Arizona, Tucson
James E. Rogers College of Law
Arizona Workers’ Rights Clinic
University of California, Los Angeles
UCLA Labor Center
Labor Studies Minor
University of Illinois, Urbana
School of Labor and Employment Relations Current courses
Indiana University, Bloomington
Labor Studies
Bachelors of Science in Labor Studies
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Center for Labor and Community Studies
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies
Labor Education Service
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
The Ohio State University, Main Campus
University of Texas, Austin
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Center on Education and Work
School for Workers
Clearly, Iowa’s Labor Center is not an anomaly, and unlike Harreld we do not have to lie to make that case. If anything, what sets the UI program apart from seven of its peer institutions is that Iowa’s center is being underutilized as a resource, and that includes ways that would make it more profitable. The Labor Center might never be self-sufficient, but if the program was “directly involved in student instruction” that status would void that requirement, while increasing revenue would still free up more funds at the College of Law.
So why isn’t Harreld insisting that Dean Washburn and Director Sherer explore opportunities that other schools are already exploiting? The answer, of course, is because Harreld really is a tool of anonymous masters, he really is intent on killing off the Labor Center, and he really is a fraud as a university president. To see why, all we have to do is imagine a similar president in the same situation, minus the corrupt intent. Like Harreld, she comes from a private-sector background, has a Harvard MBA, and believes higher-ed needs to look for more revenue on campus.
The first thing our honest entrepreneurial president learns when looking at the UI Labor Center is that neither ISU nor UNI have anything like it, which means she has a monopoly on whatever that market might become. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s something, but one thing the honest UI president knows is that if she grows that center as a business, her market won’t be poached by other schools. In a state of three million people, she can potentially drive profits from the Missouri to the Mississippi, if only she, the center’s director and the dean of the law school can find the right business model.
To help answer that question, our honest university president uses a short-term funding crunch as a pretext to float the possibility that a number of centers and institutes on campus may have to be closed. While no specific programs are named, she puts the word out that the Labor Center may be on the chopping block, in order to gauge the level of state-wide support. Although her gambit does not prompt action from 70 attorneys, or meetings in towns across the state, what she hears first-hand, second-hand and third-hand convinces her that the Labor Center has significant public support.
In looking at the ten members of Iowa’s official UI Peer Group, our honest president discovers that seven of the schools have a similar program, and several of those programs include an academic component. In fact, one peer — the University of Indiana — offers a Bachelor of Science in Labor Studies, with all courses available online, and that little detail makes our honest university president perk up.
One problem with having an academic monopoly in a state two hundred miles wide and three hundred miles across is that the driving time from most locales is measured in hours. If people do not have to travel to Iowa City, however, and can access the Labor Center’s educational offerings online, that only increases the likelihood that UI can effectively drive a profit. And of course that in turn has long-term branding and marketing implications, because it increases the likelihood that parents who are union members will consider donating to UI, or even sending their children to UI — just as farm kids are more likely to go to Iowa State because of its agricultural and land-grant traditions.
Whether Indiana’s program, or something like it, can be ported to Iowa remains to be seen, but our honest university president already knows that she wants to increase the school’s online presence, both as a defensive measure against other regent universities, and against online courses provided by community colleges and national for-profit competitors. She also knows that this movement is already well underway, and that it contributed to the demise of the UI full-time MBA program only last year, which was replaced by part-time programs which meet a continuing education need for business managers. In fact, at the very next regent meeting, she will be formally requesting permission to add a part-time online MBA program.
Doing something similar for the Labor Center would take time and commitment, and in the near term it would run at a loss, but over time a labor studies degree would generate revenue, much if not most of it from low-cost online coursework. Even if it never broke even, however, it would still drive down the overall cost to the College of Law, while building the kind of goodwill that supports the university in other ways. Just having a positive relationship with labor would be of benefit given the endless construction on campus, and the cost to the university of managing those relationships.
That is how someone with a Harvard MBA is trained to think. Unfortunately, back in the real world, the dishonest president of the University of Iowa — who not only holds a Harvard MBA, but was a part-time lecturer at the Harvard School of Business for six years — has done none of those things. Instead, the illegitimate president of UI is not only intent on killing off the Labor Center, he is fixated on building a new clubhouse for the university golf course, which is the academic equivalent of making a fart noise with his armpit. The very fact that Harreld has not proposed exploiting this potential market, including through the expansion of online courses which are already underway on the UI campus, underscores not only the malice driving his decision to close the Labor Center, but the staggering insincerity of his commitment to the entrepreneurial ideals that he consistently extols.
Fighting the Good Fight
Are you a real person, or are you merely the veneer of your professional reputation? Do you stand for anything, or is everything in your life transactional? Is your word any good, or are you always willing to sell out? These are questions everyone in the UI community should ask of themselves.
It is entirely possible that there is no longer any higher calling in higher-ed, if there ever was. Maybe it was all branding and lies to begin with — the idea of public universities functioning as a public good, to provide a return on investment to taxpayers. Whether that was the case in the past, however, that is the argument J. Bruce Harreld is making now, even as he stockpiles tens of millions of dollars in new, unrestricted tuition revenue for purposes that have never been delineated.
As to how Iowa’s finances relate to funding the Labor Center, or any other public good, let’s consider yet another example of the incoherent rationales that have been put forward to justify closing that program. From the 04/12/18 press release from the Office of the President, signed by J. Bruce Harreld and Rod Lehnertz:
Here Harreld and his boy Lehnertz specifically tie the need to close programs not to recent funding cuts by the state, but to “generational disinvestment” over decades. Now, contrast that with the explanation in the 07/10/18 press release by the Office of Strategic Communication, announcing the closing of the Labor Center:
So which is it? Does UI have to cut the Labor Center because of “generational disinvestment”, or because of “back-to-back state budget cuts”? Of are both of those assertions simply lies du jour?
Complicating matters all the more, even the university acknowledges that the Labor Center is already generating substantial revenue, and that closing the program will result in trivial savings during the current fiscal year — which, depending on what day it is, is or is not the reason for closing the program in the first place. From the Daily Iowan’s Emily Wangen, on 07/16/18:
Given that the Labor Center already has $217K from grants and other support, once again we have to ask why Harreld announced that the center would be closed outright. Other programs had their funding reduced if they were already generating support, so why wasn’t there any talk about downsizing — but of course that leads back to the fact that there was no dialogue at all. What should have been an orderly deliberative process was instead a bureaucratic mugging, which is why Harreld and his thugs in administration kept everything secret.
And yet, in terms of alleviating any immediate cash crunch for the school, the decision that was sprung on Sherer and the UI community fails to do even that. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 08/28/18:
Clearly, money alone, either in the near term or over the long haul, did not drive the decision to close the Labor Center. Even at $500K, that amount of funding is trivial, and would only decrease over time if the program included “student instruction” through online courses. In this absurdity we see that the closing of the Labor Center is a gale warning about Harreld’s plan to devalue scholarship and elevate entrepreneurship — even as he does everything possible to prevent the Labor Center from having any chance of proving its worth on the latter basis.
Thankfully, I believe Jennifer Sherer gets it, and that she can alert the UI community simply by asking the right questions, whether or not Harreld responds. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 08/16/18:
The public good that the UI Labor Center is able to do springs directly from scholarship generated by that program. That deep well of knowledge is not being monetized in an educational context, but as other members of Iowa’s self-selected peer group attest, it could be, and clearly should be. As to whether entrepreneurship will supplant scholarship as part of the university’s core mission, that question needs to be answered, and not just by Harreld.
If you are a member of the UI community, and you believe in scholarship and the university’s public mission, but your principles stop short of the university budget, then you don’t have any principles.
A little over three years ago, on September 3rd, 2015, following a purportedly open presidential search that had in fact been rigged by a small cabal of co-conspirators, former business executive and part-time Harvard lecturer J. Bruce Harreld was fraudulently appointed as president of the University of Iowa. Two months later, on November 2nd, Harreld finally took office, meaning we are now roughly thirty-five months into his initial and unprecedented five-year, $4M deal with the Iowa Board of Regents. Splitting the difference between those two ignominious anniversaries, over the next few weeks we will take stock of the board’s decision to gamble the future of a billion-dollar public research university on an unqualified candidate, who himself admitted that he would have to serve an on-the-job apprenticeship in order to be able to do whatever it was that he had been hired to do.
While there is always a lot of news on the UI campus at the beginning of each academic year, and all the more so during the first regent meetings of the fall term, the past few weeks produced a veritable avalanche of coverage about stories old and new. Some of those reports were more prominent than others, some were easy to miss, but taken together they paint a damning portrait of Harreld’s leadership to-date, including his determination to gamble on entrepreneurship at the expense of scholarship and student bank accounts. Whatever apprenticeship Harreld required when he was hired, that grace period also expired long ago, and he is now responsible for the state of the university in matters large and small. Despite having been put forward as a master of transformational change, however, what comes through again and again is that in three years Harreld has learned nothing about being the president of a public university, and has instead warped the job to fit the limitations of both his private-sector experience and pugnacious personality.
For context, readers may want to consider prior appraisals of Harreld’s advancing tenure at UI — one of which we will return to momentarily:
* Bleeding Heartland with a year of posts about the Harreld hire.
* A two-part Ditchwalk look at Harreld’s first year, in the context of his elaborate, multi-week installation celebration.
* The Gazette’s Vanessa Miller with a generous profile on Harreld, on the anniversary of his first full year in office.
* Another two-part Ditchwalk appraisal of Harreld, this time at the eighteen-month mark.
* A year-and-a half assessment by Eric Kelderman at the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), titled, “Iowa Faculty, Resigned to Harreld’s Leadership, Still Waiting for Results“.
* The Press Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, with a report on Harreld’s presidency after twenty months in office.
Whatever Harreld was hired to do — and we still do not have a definitive answer to that question — everyone would agree that he was not hired over three eminently qualified and seasoned academic administrators to make things worse. And yet, indisputably, even in situations which predate his tenure, Harreld has repeatedly brought unwanted but decidedly warranted scrutiny to Iowa, including, ironically, to its business practices. And of course currently no issue documents Harreld’s failings more than the ongoing litigious debacle over the construction of the university’s new children’s hospital, which has resulted not only in a pending judgement against the school for tens of millions of dollars, but in unceasing negative publicity for the university — most of it prompted by Harreld himself.
The Children’s Hospital Construction Debacle
One possible explanation for Harreld’s otherwise inexplicable hire is that the powerbrokers who perpetrated that fraud knew that the planning and construction of the new children’s hospital was a disaster, and they wanted a loyal administrative tool in place to cover up the mess. Not only did former regent president Bruce Rastetter, former UI Vice President for Medical Affairs and interim UI president Jean Robillard, and UI megadonor and long-time Harreld mentor Jerre Stead, all conspire to rig Harreld’s appointment, but they were involved in the children’s hospital from the earliest stages. In fact, on September 1st, 2015 — meaning the same day of Harreld’s rancorous candidate forum on the UI campus — the Board of Regents announced that the total cost of the children’s hospital would be $70M over its original $290M budget. (Gazette coverage of that announcement here; Press-Citizen coverage here.)
Two days later, of course, that disconcerting news was obliterated by the bombshell that Iowa’s next president would be a former business executive who not only had no experience in academic administration or in the public sector, but who — remarkably — had never been the CEO of anything. Despite having faculty support in the single digits, having lied on his resume, and having been censured as a result, Harreld nonetheless began his illegitimate presidency two months later, thus also assuming responsibility for the out-of-control children’s hospital. As regular readers know, only a month later Harreld leapt into action by working with two of his co-conspirators — Rastetter and Robillard — to grant the naming rights to the children’s hospital to his third co-conspirator, long-time Colorado bro-pal Jerre Stead. (Ui press release; Gazette; Press-Citizen.)
Whether Harreld was hired to cover up the gross maladministration of the children’s hospital or not, it would be expected that he would put the best face on that project going forward, including minimizing its massive cost overruns and construction delays. Unfortunately, to do that kind of deft public relations you have to be able to speak to the public — often to and through local reporters — and in that regard Harreld immediately proved spectacularly incompetent. Not only did he he crash and burn at the only town hall he ever attempted, in February of 2016 — after promising three such community-based conversations per year — but on the one-year anniversary of his illegitimate hire, he repeatedly refused to talk to a local higher-ed reporter who was writing a profile about his first year in office.
Specifically, in response to the profile linked to above by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, Harreld refused multiple requests for an interview, and we know that because Miller actually reported that in a separate piece on the same day:
Ironically, in the intervening two years it has been the Gazette’s Miller who has broken multiple stories about the construction of the UI children’s hospital, including the fact that $300K in fake construction was ordered for an open house, only to then be torn out after that public event concluded. In fact, it is not even clear that the hospital was actually safe to enter when the open house was held. (There is still no word about who specifically ordered that $300K to be wasted, or the open house to be held as scheduled despite delays.)
At the end of March, 2018 — constituting two and a half years on the job for Harreld — Miller reported on the result of an arbitration between UI and Modern Piping, a venerable Iowa company that contracted on the children’s hospital. As a result of that arbitration, the university was required to pay some twenty million dollars for work related to frequent change orders during construction. Along with other cost overruns, that award pushed the total cost of construction close to $380M, or almost $100M over budget.
Importantly, all of the money awarded to Modern Piping would have to come from the university’s general fund, and it is that detail which seems to have prompted Harreld not only to seek remedy in the courts, but to use the threat of protracted litigation to compel Modern Piping to accept a disadvantageous settlement. In early June, Miller reported that Modern Piping had accused the university of “bargaining in bad faith“. Days later, as Miller also reported, a judge scolded the university for “missing legal deadlines” for a hearing scheduled for early July. By the end of June, only weeks before that hearing, Miller reported on evidence that Harreld and the university were trying to destroy Modern Piping:
Also note:
Miller previewed that hearing in a report on July 11th, then followed up on the judge’s ruling on August 30th — just as the new academic year was commencing:
It is not often that you see a court deliver a beat-down to a public university, but the Modern Piping ruling was exactly that. Despite being ordered to pay the full amount owed, however, the university appealed the ruling while continuing to drag its feet. In early September, Miller reported that Modern Piping was not only considering seizing assets — including the university’s $140M Jackson Pollock — but that state lawmakers were promising an investigation into the university’s business practices during the next legislative session. A few days later, Miller reported that a judge granted a stay to UI, pending appeal to the Iowa Supreme Court. That appeal will take months at a minimum, and all the while interest will accrue at a rate of thousands of dollars per day.
The first regent meetings of the new academic year loomed on September 12th and 13th, and on the first day of those meetings an outside audit of the children’s hospital was set to be presented. The day before, on the 11th, Miller published another story about the children’s hospital, this one detailing an internal report in early 2017, which had been requested by then-regents-president Bruce Rastetter. Incredibly, the university — which had, by that time, been under Harreld’s control for a year and half — altered critical details of that report so as to obscure the university’s exposure to cost overruns:
Although Harreld was scheduled to give his formal report to the board on the 13th, he also spoke at length on the 12th in the context of the external audit, and widespread publicity about the ugly legal fight the university was waging, and consistently losing, against Modern Piping. In typical cheerleading fashion, he was egged on that day by Regent Larry McKibben, who once congratulated former disgraced Iowa State President Steven Leath for showing the board how one comports themselves after committing, and then consistently denying, serial abuses of school policy, board policy, and state law. Notably, however, on the 12th Harreld did not simply defend the university’s handling of the construction of the children’s hospital, abetted by McKibben he went on that attack — despite prior comments from the university that it “wouldn’t comment on matters in litigation”.
From Miller’s report, which was published on the 12th:
There are two problems with these statements by Harreld. First, as to the claim that he refused to approve a settlement with Modern Piping, we have this from Miller’s reporting on June 29th:
From that reporting and prior reporting on June 4th, it is clear that Harreld and the university repeatedly stalled the promised settlement. As for the motivation, in early 2018 the regents and UI were hit with a second year of de-appropriations, so perhaps there was a cash-flow issue in terms of paying the arbitrated award at that time. When the new fiscal year began on July 1st, however, that shouldn’t have been an issue, yet Harreld not only continued to balk at a deal — even after having his ass handed to him in court — but he ultimately decided to go on offense at the board meeting on September 12th.
The second problem with Harreld’s comments to the board on that day concerns his statement that “any incident would be catastrophic” at the new children’s hospital. While obviously true, the problem with linking patient safety to his refusal to pay the court-ordered settlement is that Harreld opened the new children’s hospital to patients in February of 2017, which was more than a year before he initially agreed to the terms of a settlement in principle. If Harreld had any genuine safety concerns about the construction, which precluded him from consummating a deal with Modern Piping on that basis, then why did he authorize the children’s hospital to begin seeing patients — and thus also begin generating revenue for the school — over a year before those concerns ever became germane to the construction budget?
The question answers itself, of course, while also exposing the cynicism of Harreld’s argument. Along with this muscular demonstration of abject idiocy, however, it is important to note that his statement that “any incident would be catastrophic” could very well prove costly to the university if something actually does happen. In fact, over time it is inevitable that even the most conscientious hospital will make a “catastrophic” mistake, which is precisely why all hospitals and medical professionals carry malpractice insurance. Whether precipitated by the perpetual evolution of medical technology and practice, or simply random chance, sooner or later something bad will happen, and then come the lawyers.
That is, in turn, precisely why the last thing most hospital administrators ever do is talk openly about how there may be a potentially lethal defect in the construction of their facility. There may indeed be a problem, but the normal presumption would be that as soon as it was identified, it would be quietly resolved in a manner that precluded any risk to patients and staff. At the University of Iowa, however, business-genius president J. Bruce Harreld chose to make such a disclosure during a public, on-the-record board meeting which would be widely reported across the state. (That he was egged on by Regent Larry McKibben, who is an attorney by trade, verges on farce.)
But it gets worse. Not only did Harreld make those remarks before the board, but during his presentation on the 12th the regents tweeted out a link to a one-and-a-half page, singe-spaced statement about the university’s dispute with Modern Piping. Attributed directly to Harreld, that unsigned, undated statement was also posted on the UI Medcom website on the same day, and reads in part:
Again: over time, medical mistakes, and even tragic outcomes, happen in the best hospitals. There are simply too many variables involved to prevent all possible negative outcomes due to human error, equipment failure or inadequate policies and procedures. One thing that most people — and thus most juries — presume, however, is that hospitals can make sure the construction of the actual structure is safe, including meeting all of the requisite inspections. And yet, over a year and a half after the University of Iowa children’s hospital started seeing and billing patients, and presumably thus passed all of the required inspections, here we have higher-ed visionary J. Bruce Harreld openly talking about about how “patients, staff, and visitors” at the UI children’s hospital are actively at risk.
To the utter insanity of making that disclosure in public — both because because it openly acknowledges that the children’s hospital is unsafe, and because the argument compelling that claim is idiotic — we can add the spectacle of a university president going on a public tirade about a legal dispute which he not only lost at arbitration, but lost in multiple subsequent rulings in the courts. So how did that all turn out? Well, predictably, six days later, Modern Piping returned serve — which once again involved publicizing the fact that Harreld believes the new children’s hospital is unsafe.
From Vanessa Miller’s report on September 18th:
If you read all of Miller’s reporting it is clear that Harreld, the university and the board were and are trying to use the promise of a settlement, combined with the threat of continuing litigation and the risk of a loss at the Iowa Supreme Court, to stick Modern Piping with unfavorable terms. And to be fair, in the knock-down, drag-out, private-sector business world such gambits are used all the time. The problem, of course, is that the people who use those tactics also develop a reputation — as ably demonstrated by the current president of the United States, who became so toxic to New York bankers that only one department of one major bank was willing to do business with him by the time he ran for office. Whether Harreld ever attempts to translate his business and academic experience into a sunset political career, it is unlikely that the regents wants the University of Iowa to have a similar reputation.
The next day, on September 19th, KCRG-TV — which, like the Gazette, is located in Cedar Rapids, which is also home to Modern Piping — published its own report on the dispute, broadening the reach:
As noted endlessly in these pages, the University of Iowa has plenty of money to pay off this debt. Maybe Harreld is playing out the legal string simply to punish Modern Piping, or perhaps he and the board want to devote that readily available cash to some other purpose, making it advantageous to stall as long as possible. Either way, however, the problem with that is that the negative press coverage will continue, and perhaps even be exacerbated by other legal action against the university, including malpractice suits which seek to leverage Harreld’s incautious comments before the board. To that we can also add reluctance on the part of companies to do business with Harreld and UI, which may in turn drive up costs, or lead to using low-bid contractors who cut corners in order to make a profit. What is the dollar value of that kind of press coverage? What is the economic value of the university’s brand?
The entire deranged premise of Harreld’s fraudulent appointment was that the regents had to hire the only unproven, unqualified candidate because of unprecedented challenges in higher education. Only someone with a long history in the private sector could shepherd the University of Iowa through the perilous economic and cultural waters ahead. (Although, inexplicably, several years later, they had no problem turning the keys to Iowa State over to a home-grown academic lifer.) Unfortunately, while Harreld has indeed conducted himself like the CEO he never was, he has utterly failed to present himself as even a marginally credible university president, let alone as a steward of a venerable public research university which is one of only sixty-two AAU member schools in the world.
To glimpse the damage that Harreld is doing right now, after three years on the job, all we have to do is consider the lede of last Friday’s column by Dave Elbert, writing for the Business Record, which is based in Iowa’s capital city of Des Moines:
Is that how the Board of Regents thought things would turn out in 2015, when they rigged the UI search in order to appoint Harreld? Even in the business community, even at a distance, everyone can see that the university has become a joke. Setting aside Harreld’s freakout at the recent regents meeting, however, the most that Elbert could say about Harreld was that he was at best a non-entity:
As Elbert notes, this wasn’t even Harreld’s fight to begin with. Maybe he was brought in to clean up a mess, maybe he was blindsided once he took office, but in any event, look at how things have progressed on his watch. Endless bad publicity, endless losses in court, to the point that the university and the board are now pinning their hopes on a Hail Mary at the Iowa Supreme Court. If UI wriggles off the hook the obvious benefit will be the financial savings, but what about the collateral damage to the school’s reputation? And of course if the court upholds all of the earlier rulings, Iowa not only eats the cost of the judgment, but takes another self-administered blow to its own groin.
In 2015 the Iowa Board of Regents hired an inexperienced, unqualified, petty, bratty, vindictive man to run the University of Iowa. Because of his innate arrogance, and because he was protected by the power brokers who rigged his fraudulent hire, Harreld accepted the offer of $4M over five years, and promptly began serving his apprenticeship. Now, three years down the line, Harreld has clearly learned nothing, while his petty, bratty and vindictive instincts remain undiminished. For this, the Board of Regents continues to pay J. Bruce Harreld $800K per year, $200K of which is being deferred toward a million-dollar bonus due at the end of his deal.
Update 09/28/18: Two days after this post, Kelsey Harrell at the Daily Iowan published a follow-up story on the UI/Modern Piping lawsuit, which included this:
Along with all of the other reasons why Harreld and the university should solve this dispute as quietly as possible, there is the irreducible fact that the project was mismanaged from the beginning, and all of the responsibility for that mismanagement falls on UI. From radically changing the design at the last minute, to commencing construction without a full set of plans, to making endless changes on the fly, the university could not have chosen a worse method of ensuring every penny was properly spent.
As for Harreld’s complaints before the board at the beginning of September, which were expanded on in the widely-distributed official statement, Modern Piping continues to expose Harreld as a liar:
Multiple administrators at the highest levels of the University of Iowa, including Jean Robillard — one of the co-conspirators who jammed Harreld into office during the rigged 2015 presidential search — should have been fired as a result of this debacle. That everyone was allowed to quietly slip into the woodwork means the university and regents have covered up rather than accounted for their mismanagement, and that further exposes the university and the state if depositions are ever taken.
As has been said many times, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. That Harreld continues to spout idiotic talking points which are instantly refutable speaks not only to his own incompetence, but the degree to which the Board of Regents is failing to do its job, even if it is wholly corrupt. This is not only a fight that should not be public, out of self-interest alone Harreld and the regents should be doing everything possible to make this problem go away, including spending taxpayer money. That they are, instead, digging in with a losing argument and hoping against hope that the Iowa Supreme Court will bail them out on a technicality, suggests there is more at stake that we still do not know.
As you may have heard, the annual U.S. News college rankings were announced in early September, and the University of Iowa took quite a hit. From the Register’s Kathy Bolten, on 09/10/18:
As with any statistical model, there is necessarily some noise generated by the methodology that U.S. News uses to compile its rankings. As a result, a swing of a few points here or there could be within the margin of error generated by the model, and that may have been the case last year. In 2018, Iowa moved up from 33 to 31 among public universities, and up from 82 to 78 among national universities. While positive, both moves were still within the four-point, plus-or-minus margin of error inherent in the U.S. News model.
For 2019, however, the precipitous negative swings in both categories were clearly outside that margin of error. Among public research universities, UI dropped from 31 to 38, a decrease of seven places, and among all national universities Iowa fell from 78 to 89 — a drop of eleven places in a single year. So what happened? Why, in J. Bruce Harreld’s third year as the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa, did the school’s U.S. News rankings fall off a cliff?
A number of factors may have contributed to Iowa’s decline, but in order to understand the specifics we also have to place those rankings in context. What is undeniably clear is that this collapse is in direct contrast to one of Harreld’s repeatedly stated goals, which he began articulating even before he was appointed in early September of 2015. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 09/12/17, just after last year’s modest ranking gains were announced:
To understand the impetus for Harreld’s rankings mania, and why he made improving Iowa’s national rank a core objective of his administration, we must first jump in the WABAC machine and travel back to early December of 2014. With the retirement of former University of Iowa President Sally Mason’s in the wind, but not yet announced, and the corrupt 2015 presidential search still in the planning stages, the then-president of the Iowa Board of Regents, Bruce Rastetter, made a rare appearance before the UI Faculty Senate:
Whether he knew it at the time or not — and given his cursory familiarity with higher education, it is almost certain he did not — what Rastetter was proposing was impossible. Even allowing for the “public” qualifier, which would avoid head-to-head competition with schools like Harvard, MIT, Stanford and John Hopkins, there was and is no scenario in which the University of Iowa could push its way into any list of “top ten public universities”, whether in U.S. News or any other college ranking. That is not a criticism or a failing of the school, but simply a function of assets and resources, which the state of Iowa will never provide. (To underscore the absurdity of Rastetter’s charge, even if someone dropped a billion dollars in cash on the University of Iowa, that staggering amount of money would not be enough to elevate Iowa to “top-ten” status as a public university.)
Following Rastetter’s visit, his goal was first reduced by the Faculty Senate to top-twenty status as a public research university, then further reduced to the vague title of a top-tier school. At that point, while the Faculty Senate and Faculty Council set about generating some sort of responsive action plan, Rastetter went about rigging the 2015 presidential search at UI, in order to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld. Perhaps not so coincidentally, as that fake search came down to the shame wire in early September, Harreld himself pitched the idea of raising Iowa’s rank.
From Harreld’s candidate forum, on 09/01/15:
In the aftermath of Harreld’s shocking appointment two days later, he continued pressing for improved rankings, while the Faculty Senate continued working to respond to Rastetter’s charge. In early 2016, after only five months on the job, and just prior to being briefed — in closed session, no less — on a Faculty Senate Working Group report that had been prepared for his edification, Harreld again floated Rastetter;s original goal. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 03/24/16:
The “national rankings” that everyone follows, of course, are those released by U.S. News, even as, objectively, those rankings are both arbitrary and self-serving of that profit-driven corporation. Still, in terms of Harreld’s aspirations, U.S. News would certainly be the first rankings he consulted, which brings us back now to the present. (For an in-depth look at Harreld’s ranking obsession, and the folly of that pursuit, see here, here, here, here, here and here.)
What follows are the U.S. News Rankings from 2001 until Sally Mason took office in August of 2007. The first number after each year represents Iowa’s rank among four-year national universities; the second number represents Iowa’s rank against public universities. (Note that U.S. News rankings are forward-looking by year, so 2007 covers the 2006-2007 academic cycle, and as such was released the year before Mason’s tenure began.)
2001: 41; 20
2002: 43; 24
2003: 58; 21
2004: 57; 19
2005: 60; 21
2006: 53; 21
2007: 64; 25
Because the U.S. News rankings are data-driven, that means most of the data for a given year comes from the preceding year. Although Mason took office in 2007, the first rankings that would have reflected any data derived from her policies would have been 2009 — meaning the rankings for the 2008-2009 academic year, which would have been compiled using data from the 2007-2008 academic cycle. Even that association would be a stretch, however, because Mason would only have been able to make minimal changes to the metrics which inform the rankings. Over time, however, her policies would take hold, and we would find that reflected in the rankings over her full tenure as president.
Here then are the rankings for Mason’s eight years at UI:
2008: 64; 24
2009: 66; 26
2010: 72; 28
2011: 72; 28
2012: 71; 28
2013: 72; 28
2014: 73; 29
2015: 71; 30
As you can see, in the first three years there is a drop of eight points in the national ranking and four points among public universities. It’s a decline, but not hugely so, and after the first two years the numbers become remarkably stable despite all of the variables involved. As to what caused the decrease in 2008 and 2009, it is impossible to say with any certainty, but the most likely culprit would be the catastrophic damage to the world economy that was precipitated by the Great Recession.
Now here are U.S. News rankings for the four years of Harreld’s tenure as Iowa’s illegitimate president — the fourth being the current 2018-2019 academic year, which ends next June.
2016: 82; 34
2017: 82; 33
2018: 78; 31
2019: 89; 38
As you can see, although there is a precipitous drop in Harreld’s first year — meaning academic year 2015-2016 — he did not take office until November of 2015. By rights those lower numbers should belong to Mason, because they would have been compiled from data covering 2014-2015, which was Mason’s final year. On that point, however, Mason served the last half of that year as a lame-duck, having publicly announced her decision to retire in January of 2015. In reality, after she announced her retirement, Mason seems to have performed little more than a ceremonial role until she left office. As such, between VPMA Jean Robillard, who became the interim president in August, and regent fixer Mark Braun — who was rotated to Iowa at the beginning of the sham search, and is now XD/CEO of the Board of Regents — it is likely that any changes Rastetter wanted to implement were set in motion even before Harreld was appointed.
What we can say, as was the case with Mason, is that there was a drop when Harreld took over, but in the first three years the numbers stabilized, and even ticked up last year for Harreld. Unlike Mason, however, in Harreld’s fourth year, the numbers plummeted far beyond anything Mason experienced. And that’s true despite the fact that Harreld explicitly made increasing Iowa’s national college rank a central goal of his presidency.
To no one’s surprise, Harreld has avoided taking any responsibility, and is instead blaming recent state funding cuts for the drop — thus continuing his relentless campaign of lying about the financial resources that the university has at its disposal. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 09/12/18:
While funding was indeed cut over the past two years, in response to two straight years of state budget shortfalls, it is objectively false that the University of Iowa has less money than it did when Harreld was hired. As regular readers know, after four tuition hikes in just under two years, Iowa will generate $35M-$40M more in revenue this year, as it did last year, compared to the 2015-2016 academic cycle — and that’s true even after all state funding cuts are accounted for. Because all of that new money is derived from tuition it is also effectively unrestricted, meaning it can be used on whatever programs Harreld desires, including rigging the metrics which underpin the U.S. News rankings.
While we don’t know, definitively, why the rankings fell off a cliff this year, we can state with absolutely certainty that money was not the problem. That does not necessarily mean, however, that Harreld is entirely responsible. Muddying the waters is the fact that U.S. News reformulated its rankings this year, changing the weighting of several metrics compared to prior years, and tossing out one factor all together. From Politico’s Benjamin Wermund, on 09/10/18:
Were U.S. News primarily concerned about the informational value of its rankings, it would have included a second ranking this year, showing how each college fared using the old model. At a bare minimum, that would have given some visibility to how changes in the underlying model affected this year’s rankings, and that would help students and families. (If this year’s ranking under the old formula was consistent with prior years, but the new formula showed a spike or drop, then it could reasonably be inferred that the change was due to the updated methodology.)
Unfortunately, because for-profit media often use a facade of journalism as a pretext for generating mountains of cold hard cash — and college rankings are a cash cow for U.S. News — we have no such visibility. In fact, on the main page for this year’s rankings, there is no mention at all that the methodology was changed. Instead, students and families may suddenly find that a school that was under consideration is now ostensibly much better or much worse, but have no idea why. Likewise, on the “About the Ranking/Methodology” page, there is no note or link suggesting that the methodology was changed for 2019. Only when we drill down to “How U.S. News Calculated the 2019 Best Colleges Rankings“, do we find this:
As to how those murky changes affected the rankings for the University of Iowa, not only would we need to know how the university would have fared under the old model, but we would also need some visibility to the steps Harreld has taken to game the U.S. News methodology over the past few years. (Having set out to consciously improve Iowa’s national ranking, he may very well have exacerbated this year’s collapse.) In the Politico article linked above there is a link to a prior article by Wermund, which does explain why U.S. News changed its methodology:
As detailed in the book Engines of Anxiety, which was co-written by UI professor Michael Sauder, one of the best predictors of student success is the wealth of families that students come from. More money means less risk of having to drop out after a bad semester, little or no need to work a job while taking classes, and it even correlates with better preparation in high school. For all those reasons, until this year the simplest way to generate positive student-success metrics for the U.S. News rankings was to accept wealthier students, as opposed to students with fewer assets to draw on.
With this year’s compensatory adjustments to the U.S. News methodology, what we might expect to see is a decrease in rankings for schools which tended to favor wealthier students — and that’s particularly true if those schools also massaged their reported data in order to game the rankings. That doesn’t mean pricey schools like Harvard, Princeton or Stanford would take a big hit because they would still dominate many of the other weighted factors in the U.S. News methodology, but even if all of those schools dropped in lockstep their relative rankings might not change at all. Down among the riff-raff in the rankings, however, increasing the cost of tuition — which, in itself affects which students will be able to attend a particular school — could result in some jockeying in the rankings.
What we do know about J. Bruce Harreld is that he has been consistent if not obsessed in pursuing three related goals over the past three-plus years. First, as he infamously exhorted during his candidate forum in 2015, he vowed to take Iowa from “great to greater” as an institution. Indeed, the entire premise of his candidacy, as articulated by both his co-conspirators and by Harreld himself, was that at a time of unparalleled (but unspecified) challenges in higher education, only someone with his deep understanding of organizational change could keep the university from descending into mediocrity [10:38]:
Later, in that same forum, after multiple mentions of taking Iowa from “great to greater”, we get this [32:37]:
Because there are no objective metrics by which anyone might define a Midwestern Ivy, Harreld initially adopted Rastetter’s 2014 charge to raise Iowa to a “top 10 public research institution”. That ranking-related objective is in turn the second consistent goal that Harreld has had over the past three years, and of course the dominant rankings are compiled by U.S. News. (As regular readers also know, Harreld wove Iowa’s national ranking into the very fabric of the ‘new’ budget model that he unveiled in early 2016, at first nakedly so, then euphemistically, as “quality indicators”.)
While it is possible to improve the ranking of a college or university simply by massaging the data that is reported, almost every school is engaged in gaming the rankings at that level, if only for defensive purposes. (If everyone is cheating, and you play fair, you’re going to get crushed.) To make a real move in the rankings, however, requires a substantial increase in assets and resources — meanings tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars being devoted not simply to improving the school, but specifically to improving the data that feeds into the U.S. News rankings.
That leads us to Harreld’s third consistent goal over the past three-plus years, which has been raising tuition by any and every means available. As a result, not only has tuition increased 16% over the past two years, but Harreld is still pushing a plan to increase tuition another 41% over the next five years. Of course, the more costly it is to attend Iowa, the more likely it is that the students who attend will come from families of greater rather then lesser means, and that will inherently improve Iowa’s student success metrics. Or at least it would have, until U.S. News decided to mute that bias in its 2019 rankings. (For additional delicious irony, note that Arizona’s State’s president, Michael Crow — who was almost certainly the template for what Harreld is doing at Iowa, if not the genesis for the conspiracy that led to Harreld’s hire — has long advocated for these changes in the ranking metrics. Meaning he just screwed bro Bruce.)
It may well be that Iowa’s U.S. News ranking will bounce back next year, whether as a result of random chance, or because of aggressive counter- gaming on the part of Harreld and his crack staff. It may also be that this year’s drop was indeed the result of some combination of statistical noise and changes in the underlying methodology. On the other hand, it is also possible, if not likely, that Iowa’s sharp drop was exacerbated by Harreld’s unrelenting pursuit of the three goals described above, all of which skewed the university toward elitism – and, implicitly, to wealthier families.
What is beyond dispute, is that for three years — covering the entirety of his tenure at the University of Iowa — Harreld has focused on improving Iowa’s national rank, and in his third year Iowa’s national rank dropped more than it has among all national universities in a decade, and more among public universities than it ever has. Given that the U.S. News rankings, however flawed, are one of the few metrics by which we will ever be able to objectively gauge Harreld success, in that context Harreld’s transformational vision for the school is failing. That Harreld has already strip-mined tens of millions of dollars from the bank accounts of students and families in order to fund that failed initiative — which also necessarily precluded some low-income students from attending what would otherwise have been the school of their choice — is all the more damning.
Instead of going from great to greater, Harreld is leading Iowa from great to crater. While it is possible that next year’s U.S. News ranking may show improvement, it is also possible that there may be another precipitous drop. One thing we can say with absolute certainty, however, is that if Iowa’s rankings do improve substantially, Harreld will not credit increased state funding, any change in the underlying methodology, or statistical noise — even if all of those factors contribute to any gains. Instead, he will take full credit himself, just as easily as he denied any responsibility this year.
From 41 to 89; From 21 to 38. In 18 years? Could a university even scheme to drop that much?.
In the amount of time it took a kid born in the new century, to graduate from high school, the U of Iowa has dropped at a precipitous rate a significant amount.
The story is not just Harreld, although he is the buffoon left holding the bag. It is a concerted effort by Branstad/Reynolds and Rastetter plus idjoit administrations.
No wonder this state is a Trump supporting state: It is vastly under-achieving at an intellectual/academic level. ASk Anti-Ed, Stupid-promoting Rep Booby Kaufman.
Conclusion: GIve it up. The Univ of Iowa is a lower-level state institution without any innovative programs. Pass it up if you want your students and family members to achieve at a high level. Run of the mill place.
Further, forget the state of Iowa putting together a bright new future. Higher education isn’t helping advance intellectual pursuits in Iowa.
Hello West Virginia!
Even if you pay scant attention to the news, you probably know that women in large numbers, and some men, are speaking out against sexual harassment and assault in American society. This revolution — and that is not too strong a word for it — includes women across the political spectrum. Even among evangelicals (as opposed to fundamentalists), there is an open revolt against men who use religious teachings, including the convenient presumption of divine male dominance, as a means of sexual exploitation.
In that context, it should not be surprising that women on college campuses have been leading this cultural charge. In fact, they have been so successful that one woman — Betsy DeVos, who is both the current Secretary of Education and a fundamentalist wretch — is determined to roll back protections for victims, who are disproportionately female, under the guise of being more fair to the accused, who are disproportionately male. Still, despite such setbacks, there does seem to be general agreement that women should not simply be ignored when they claim to have been victimized, and organizations should not only have a confidential process in place for reporting abuse, but policies for investigating and adjudicating claims which fall short of, or are not pursued in, a court of law. (Anyone who feels aggrieved by such policies can and should take their case to the courts, where due process is properly guaranteed as a matter of law.)
Despite being an alumnus of the University of Iowa, in the summer of 2015 my awareness of my alma mater was minimal, and my understanding of the Iowa Board of Regents was non-existent. All I knew was that Sally Mason was retiring after eight years as president, and I had high hopes for her replacement on two related fronts. First, I hoped that the new president would aggressively address the binge-drinking culture at UI, which routinely elevated Iowa to the #1 rank of party schools in the country — along with killing a student every year or two from alcohol poisoning. I also hoped the university would be more aggressive about combating sexual harassment and assault, which of course correlated with alcohol abuse.
Although I didn’t know the specifics, I did know that Mason had gotten into a scrape with the regents over sexual assault a year or two before. From the AP, on 03/01/14:
While Mason subsequently apologized and tried to advance that cause, I felt her authority was diminished precisely because she had been compelled to act, as opposed to having a passion to do so. As for attitudes about drinking on the UI campus, Mason failed utterly in addressing that problem, and that was by far the greatest failing of her administration. With the board having taken her to task, however, and both binge drinking and sexual assault much more in the public consciousness than they had been even a decade before, when Mason herself had been hired, I genuinely hoped that the next president of the University of Iowa would make gains on both fronts.
Imagine my surprise, then — if not molten fury — when the regents decided to hire a carpetbagging dilettante who had zero experience in academic administration or the public sector. Rather than backing up their high-minded rhetoric about the importance of providing a safe place for students to learn — which they brandished with delight while hectoring Mason about her bungled response to an interview question in the Daily Iowan — the regents hired a long-forgotten former business executive who knew nothing about combating binge drinking or sexual assault in a higher-ed setting.
Because those issues derive not from a school’s mission but from human failings, they may seem peripheral to the operation of a public research university. That does not diminish their importance, however, or the obligation of administrators to address those problems. In fact, quite the contrary. Precisely because binge drinking can lead to long-term negative health and life consequences, or even death, it belongs at the top of the list of concerns that any governing board would have in hiring a new president. Likewise, because sexual harassment and assault can lead to emotional torment — including suicide attempts and substance abuse — experience dealing with that issue in higher education also belongs at the top of the list of minimal qualifications for any college or university president.
As I came to learn after J. Bruce Harreld’s shocking hire, however, not only had the Iowa Board of Regents been fundamentally corrupted by then-governor Terry Branstad, but their prior attack on Mason for her own lack of resolve about campus sexual assault was purely opportunistic. Instead of being concerned about the victims, the board president and president pro tem used Mason’s gaffe as an excuse to embarrass her in public, with the clear intent of driving her from office. (A gambit which ultimately proved successful at the end of that same year, when Mason decided she would resign from UI in August of 2015).) In hiring Harreld, let along using a sham, $300K taxpayer-funded search to do so, those same corrupt regents proved that they deemed sexual abuse — which disproportionately affects women, and particularly young women — to be a trivial presidential concern.
That is not to say, however, that Harreld himself was oblivious to the importance of that issue. To the contrary, while going through the motions of a presidential search that had been rigged in his favor, Harreld talked a good game about campus sexual harassment and assault. In fact, during his candidate forum on 09/01/15 — only two days before his done-deal appointment — Harreld came out strong and decisive on the subject of campus sexual assault, unlike the wishy-washy predecessor he was already destined to replace [58:07]:
The six-point plan that Harreld disparaged was Sally Mason’s plan to combat campus sexual assault, which was in the final stages of development when Harreld was hired. While Harreld openly derided Mason’s plan — and thus both the woman and experience that led to its formulation — the origins of that plan reached back to Mason’s botched interview question in 2014, which led in turn to protests on campus and a cynically opportunistic rebuke from the Iowa Board of Regents. (During his first year in office, Harreld would eventually take personal credit for the completion and implementation of Mason’s plan, while omitting any mention of Mason.)
Setting aside what we have come to learn about Harreld over the past three years, including the fact that he will lie about anything, in 2015 his position on sexual harassment and abuse could not have been clearer. No excuses, no fooling around, no hiding behind legal issues. If someone is deemed to have done something wrong, then “we actually go after the person who caused the problem and deal with it, deal with it quickly”.
Only two days after taking a hard line against campus sexual assault in his candidate forum, and despite having no experience doing so, the contemptible Iowa Board of Regents handed Harreld the keys to the UI kingdom, along with an unprecedented five-year, four-million-dollar contract. In exchange, Harreld openly acknowledged that he would have to serve a protracted apprenticeship in order to be able to do the job that he had just been hired to do. Except, apparently, when it came to sexual abuse, which Harreld expounded on to the Iowa football team only one day into his tenure as president-designate.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 09/04/15:
Apparently oblivious to the fact that male athletes around the country, and at the University of Iowa, have been some of the highest-profile abusers over decades, Harreld’s cornball speech not only revealed that he had a cartoon conception of what a university president does, but he also had no awareness of the reality of sexual abuse in a higher-ed setting, or anywhere else. In fact, only as a result of last-minute interactions with members of the UI community — meaning beyond those conspiring to lever him into office — did Harreld understand that there was a “firestorm of issues around sexual abuse”, as if that was unique to the University of Iowa in 2015.
Still…even if only out of belated political self-interest, Harreld did take a clear and uncompromising stand against sexual abuse. Instead of leaving it to women to solve that problem — including former UI President Sally Mason, and her overly-wrought six-point plan — Harreld made clear that “the men that are here need to send the message that it’s not right, and we take action”. And in his rhetoric at least, Harreld proved to be prescient.
In the coming months and years, many Americans also took an increasingly firm stand against sexual harassment and assault. While embodied in pop culture as the MeToo Movement, and almost immediately dismissed as a liberal or feminist cause by insecure men, the fight against sexual abuse included conservative media figures like Gretchen Carlson. In Iowa, in fact, the issue of sexual abuse in state government had already been brought into public view years earlier, not by a radicalized feminist, but by the former communications director for the Iowa Senate Republican caucus.
From the Des Moines Register’s Grant Rogers, on 07/18/17:
Having battled her own political party for more than four years — which was and remains the dominant political party in Iowa — Anderson can hardly be accused of trading in a pop-culture cause that did not yet exist when she pushed back against her mistreatment at the hands of powerful Republican legislators. On the same day that Anderson’s award was announced in 2017, Iowa’s female Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, who rose to that office a few months earlier following the abdication of Branstad, had this to say:
A few weeks later, on 08/02/17, Reynolds amplified her comments about her “zero tolerance” policy:
On 01/09/18, with the MeToo Movement having exploded in the intervening months, Reynolds delivered her first condition-of-the-state speech, and addressed sexual harassment in her remarks:
Like Harreld in 2015, but with the added advantage of the MeToo Movement to guide her politically, Reynolds took a hard line against sexual harassment and assault. Whether she ever anticipated having to act on behalf of abused women, or was inoculating herself against a problem that she may have known about in advance, in mid-March Reynolds followed up on her commitment to protect sexual abuse victims in state government.
From the Register’s William Petroski, on 03/24/18:
While Reynolds did take decisive action, she also made two self-serving decisions. First, she took advantage of the fact that she could, as governor, fire Jamison without cause, thus omitting any obligation to due process. Second, she used the confidentiality of the complaints against Jamison to initially squelch any subsequent investigation. That not only allowed her to obscure the extent of the rot at IFA, but the degree to which she herself had failed to control Jamison, who was a long time friend and political ally. (Reynolds was ultimately forced to hire an outside legal firm to investigate Jamison’s conduct at the IFA. Report here, appendix here.)
Still…Reynolds did act to protect Jamison’s victims from further abuse. She may have been motivated by her personal history with him, or by the fact that, as the head of the executive branch, she was open to the charge of allowing the IFA to run amok, but she did not try to split legalistic hairs or hide behind faux obligations to due process. Apprised of a serious problem, she acted immediately to expel the perpetrator from her administration.
In Petroski’s report, Republican House Speaker Linda Upmeyer reiterated Reynolds’ policy:
On 03/26/18 — meaning two days later — Reynolds herself reiterated that point during her weekly press conference:
While there is obvious rhetorical synergy between Harreld’s tough-guy talk in 2015, and Reynolds’ subsequent statements about sexual harassment in state government, Harreld and Reynolds are not mere peers in public service, each determined to “set an expectation” in their relative spheres of influence. Instead, they have a hierarchical bureaucratic relationship in which Kim Reynolds is also effectively Harreld’s boss. We don’t think of university presidents that way in Iowa because the Board of Regents is, at least putatively, an independent agency, and the regents do the official hiring and firing, but like the IFA, the Board of Regents is part of the executive branch of Iowa state government, over which Reynolds presides.
We know that in a purely administrative context from this report by the Legislative Services Agency [p.5 – emphasis added]:
Executive branch departments: Administrative Services, Aging, (Department for the) Blind, Civil Rights Commission, College Student Aid Commission, Commerce, Corrections, Cultural Affairs, Drug Control Policy, Economic Development, Education, Educational Examiners, Ethics and Campaign Disclosure, Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Human Rights, Human Services, Inspections and Appeals, Iowa Communications Network, Iowa Finance Authority, Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System, Law Enforcement Academy, Lottery, Management, Natural Resources, Parole Board, Public Defender, Public Defense, Public Employment Relations, Public Information Board, Public Health, Public Safety, (Board of) Regents, Revenue, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and Workforce Development.
We also know the regents are part of the executive branch because the governor appoints each of the nine regents. While the president and president pro tem of the board are then elected from and by the appointed members, what many people do not know is that the governor retains the right to dictate who controls those leadership positions — and that’s apart from controlling them indirectly, by packing the board with sycophants. Iowans learned that startling lesson in 2011, when then-governor Branstad insisted that David Miles and Jack Evans resign as president and president pro tem, respectively, so two of Branstad’s political cronies could take their places. That in turn radically altered the initiatives that the board pursued, including the implementation of the fake presidential search which culminated in the fraudulent appointment of J. Bruce Harreld. (While Branstad’s actions were not without controversy, there was and remains no statutory means of preventing any governor from exerting such control.)
Most of the administrators, faculty and staff at each of the three state universities work for those individual schools. With regard to the presidents at Iowa, Iowa State and UNI, however, they work not for the schools they lead but for the Board of Regents — which, as just noted, is part of executive branch of Iowa government. Because of that direct chain of command, it is not only the case that Reynolds could order the firing of a university president if that individual engaged in sexual harassment, but it is clear that Reynolds expects the presidents of those schools to hold every state employee at Iowa’s universities to her same high standard.
As for J. Bruce Harreld, while he has consistently sold out women on the UI campus by expressing unwavering support for Athletic Director Gary Barta — even after Barta was found guilty of discriminating against two former female employees, thus costing the university $6.5M in cash — as of late March, when Reynolds’ fired David Jamison, Harreld had not been tested on the issue of sexual harassment. In April, however, that all changed.
Here is the lede from a report two months later by the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux, who broke the story on 06/25/18:
Whatever the nature of the picture-taking, the fact that Nock was issued a “criminal trespass warning” and “harassment warning” makes clear that the campus police took the situation seriously. That in itself was welcome news, because who is and is not allowed to take pictures at a given location often turns on complex legal issues — and that’s assuming there are any applicable laws on the books, which is not always the case. For example, a few years ago you may have heard about a notorious void in the legal system, which became national news when an Oregon man was arrested for taking pictures under the skirt of a thirteen-year-old girl. Here’s how that case turned out not as a matter of policy, decency or common sense, but as a matter of law:
With the passage of time most communities have caught up with the technological sophistication of the degenerates who perpetrate such crimes, which is why a teacher in Oregon was recently convicted of that same abuse. With regard to Nock, however innocuous his photos may or may not have been, there was a big red flag in Breaux’s report. Whatever Nock was doing — including whatever he thought he was doing, meaning his intent, to how that was perceived by others — if you want pictures of women working out, you can get an endless supply from the internet in seconds. That Nock wanted his own pictures, taken by him, of women he saw in real life, not only would have been concerning back in the day, but in the internet age it is particularly concerning because it means the act of taking those pictures was meaningful to him.
The other notable aspect of Breaux’s lede is that Nock was cited on “April 25”, meaning a month after Governor Reynolds fired Dave Jamison from the IFA, following complaints from two women in that agency. Unlike the Nock case there was no police investigation of Jamison — just an immediate termination, based on charges that were corroborated but unsubstantiated. That decisive action was also followed, immediately, by multiple public statements from Reynolds and others, including the Republican Speaker of the House, which also predate the warnings given to Nock.
As employees of the state, if not also of the executive branch, in April of 2018 everyone at the University of Iowa — from Harreld to Nock to the UI campus police — could not have been given a clearer zero-tolerance directive about what Governor Reynolds expected in such situations. All of which makes this, from a bit later in Breaux’s report, utterly inexplicable:
So…in late April Nock had a “criminal trespass warning” and a “harassment warning” filed against him by UI campus police, and instead of being terminated on the spot, two weeks later the university shoveled $20K at him to “teach a summer course and lead an accelerator program that helps UI students launch their own businesses”. Then, a few weeks after that — while Nock was still barred from the UI Rec Center — he was given a new three-year deal, at the same time that the #MeToo Movement and Governor Reynolds’ firing of Dave Jamison were resonating loudly in Iowa media.
Even if Iowa was determined to retain Nock, one would think he would have been suspended without pay for a period of time, then reinstated on a probationary basis. Not only did that not happen, however, but Iowa actually rewarded Nock by guaranteeing him job security for three years, which is something many part-time faculty do not have. As to who made those decisions, among the principals who would have had knowledge of, if not signed off on, Nock’s continued employment, we can include J. Bruce Harreld, president of the university, Sarah Gardial, dean of the Tippie College of Business, and Cheryl Reardon, Harreld’s Chief HR Officer.
As to what those administrative geniuses were thinking we do not know, because even at this late date none of them have been quoted in the matter. The reason we know they were all involved or at least apprised, however, is because of the part of the offer that included Nock helping students start their own businesses. As regular readers know, that entrepreneurial focus was not only the basis for Harreld’s sham candidacy in 2015, it was almost certainly the impetus for the conspiracy that levered him into office. Whatever else Harreld and his administrative flunkies do and do not care about at Iowa, starting new businesses — and in particular, doing so through the business college — is at the top of their administrative objectives.
As to the timing of the original complaint against Nock, Breaux makes clear that it came after Jamison’s firing in late March, and after Reynolds’ hard-line statements about her “zero-tolerance” policy for state government:
As for Harreld, here again is his own uncompromising, hard-line stance from two and a half years earlier, at his candidate forum:
And here is Harreld’s statement three days later, to the Iowa football team:
The university did take action in response to Nock’s conduct, but that action was schizophrenic in the extreme. On the one hand, the campus police — after investigating the claims against Nock — barred him from any recreation center on campus, and slapped him with two warnings. At the same time, UI administrators not only ignored all that, they rewarded Nock despite his conduct, which in turn prompts an obvious question. To what extent did Harreld, Gardial and Reardon do their own due diligence before offering Nock a summer contract, let alone giving him a new three-year deal? Because at the very least the campus police did give the administration cause to look into Nock’s past. (Hold that thought.)
Following the summer doldrums, as the 2018-2019 academic year was getting underway in late August, Breaux filed an update to her June story, which greatly expanded on the accusations against Nock. In fact, one woman — who reported her own run-in with Nock — was so angry about the university rewarding Nock for his bad behavior, that she conducted a solitary protest on the UI campus. From Breaux’s Press-Citizen report on 08/27/18:
That a second investigation of Nock was opened by the UI Office of Equal Opportunity & Diversity made clear that someone was determined to do due diligence, even as the powers that be were determined to give Nock a new, long-term deal. It is equally clear from Breaux’s report, however, that this follow-up investigation produced information which — by any measure, let alone the standard adhered to by Reynolds, and professed by Harreld himself — should have precluded any further employment of Nock at Iowa.
On 08/30/18 — meaning three days after Breaux’s expansive follow-up report — the Daily Iowan’s Jordan Prochnow reported on a collective protest against Nock and UI that same day:
If only from the craven perspective of public relations, that protest, and the earlier one-woman protests by Reimer, were not a good look for the school. Given the larger social context, however, and particularly the governor’s strong stand against sexual abuse in state government, the decision not only to retain Nock, but to give him an extended, three-year deal, was beyond inexplicable. Perhaps not surprisingly, at the highest levels of Harreld’s administration, the only consistent response was stonewalling.
Continuing from Prochnow’s report:
Here again are Harreld’s bold words from his candidate forum in 2015:
The next day, on 08/31/18, the Gazette’s higher-ed beat reporter — Vanessa Miller, who has followed the university for years — added important context to the Nock story:
Given the larger social context about sexual abuse, and Governor Reynolds’ decisive action and comments about sexual abuse, and Harreld’s bold, no-excuses promises about sexual abuse when he was hired, the only possible explanation as to why Jeffrey Nock remained on staff at UI at the end of August is that one or more high-ranking administrators were protecting him. Any other part-time member of the faculty would have been gone the moment they were cited by campus police, but Nock not only remained on the payroll, he was rewarded with a long-term deal. Even more incredibly, when all of the above was reported in the press in late June, prompting a solitary protest over the summer, then small-group protests at the beginning of the fall term, Nock was still not fired by central administration, by the business college, or by the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center.
For additional context, remember that in 2014 the Iowa Board of Regents used a botched interview question — all of one sentence — as a pretext for excoriating Sally Mason in public, after similar protests and press reports took place. With regard to Nock, however, not only did UI administrators not “take action”, but the regents remained silent as well, and this despite the fact that the first regent meetings of the new academic year were scheduled for the UI campus on September 12th and 13th. Five months after the university’s initial April investigation, with a second investigation ongoing, damning reports in the press, and a growing on-campus response to the inaction of administrators, Harreld got a free pass from the board.
As for Nock himself, however, the dissonance and negative publicity apparently proved too much. From the Daily Iowan’s Marissa Payne on 09/13/18:
Payne also filled in a bit more detail about Nock’s history at Iowa:
Four days later, on 09/17/18, the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux followed up on the Nock firing, and in so doing also pinned down the date of Nock’s termination:
The 11th of the September, of course, was the day before the two-day regent meetings on the 12th and 13th, suggesting that the board had indeed insisted that Harreld resolve the problem, albeit without publicly pointing out his jaw-dropping incompetence and hypocrisy. Then again, had the regents not met on those dates, or had those meetings been scheduled elsewhere, it’s worth wondering if Jeffrey Nock would have been fired at all.
Continuing from Breaux’s report:
On that same day, 09/17/18, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller also filed a report on Nock’s firing, and in so doing brought the absurdity of the university’s intransigence into focus:
Given Harreld’s tough talk in 2015, in combination with the expectations set forth by Governor Reynolds in early 2018, the moment Nock was cited by UI campus police it should have been clear that he needed to be terminated. Instead, the University of Iowa, at the highest levels of administration, insisted on paying him to ostensibly do nothing, despite clear damage to the school’s reputation and morale. And of course the obvious question is why? What was so damn important about that particular part-time lecturer?
We find the answer, improbably, in an extensive interview with Nock that was published on Medium.com, on 02/13/18 — meaning a month and a half or more before the April complaint was filed. In the quote just above from Miller, and in prior reports by Breaux, it was noted that, along with his teaching duties, Nock had been contracted to “lead the summer accelerator program” — meaning the summer of 2018. What the university seems to have omitted, however, in multiple descriptions of Nock’s role on campus, is that he was already an important piece of the startup culture that Harreld himself had been hired to develop and promote.
From the opening paragraph of Nock’s Medium.com interview:
As regular readers know, building new businesses was not only Harreld’s claim to fame at IBM, but that particular employment experience was one of the main justifications for hiring him over three fully qualified finalists. Entrepreneurship is also the foundation of Mike Crow’s ‘New American University‘ at Arizona State, which was in turn, almost certainly the impetus for the conspiracy to install Harreld at Iowa. In that critical context, Jeffry Nock was not just some part-time teacher at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center (JPEC), he was Harreld’s point person for student ventures, and liaison to the local Iowa City startup scene. Whatever relationships Harreld hoped to develop and exploit when he arrived in 2015, Nock was already building those relationships when Harreld was hired. As such, you can imagine how reluctant Harreld would have been to kick Nock loose from UI, and particularly the Founder’s Club, just because Nock got caught creeping on a few women at one of the university’s recreation facilities.
Continuing with the Medium.com interview:
If you have any familiarity with Harreld at all — whether from posts on this site or personal exposure — you can see why he would have been eager to protect Nock. Combine entrepreneurial enthusiasm with snob appeal and you have the very definition of J. Bruce Harreld, both as a businessman and as a man. The idea of losing such a kindred spirit to a few non-criminal violations of school policy must have been frustrating to Harreld, so he did what any motivated bureaucrat would do in that situation. He gave Nock a long-term contract, thereby letting Nock know that the powers that be considered his transgressions against women to be trivial.
Continuing:
To understand the philosophical convergence between Nock’s mindset and Harreld’s, compare Nock’s sentiment that “if you’re not growing, you’re dying”, to Harreld’s sage words during his candidate forum [10:38]:
Whether Harreld and Nock ever talked, and in particular whether they ever talked after Nock was cited by UI campus police, we will never know. What we can say, however, is that the university intentionally played down Nock’s role on campus, to the point that every published report implied that he was a run-of-the-mill part-time faculty member who, incidentally, would also be assuming some new responsibility for “lead[ing] an accelerator program” at UI. In reality, Nock had been involved with the Founder’s Club for years, and of course that role also met the broad test of “administrative and/or service functions” — meaning, technically, UI spokesperson Hayley Bruce was not lying outright when she made that intentionally cagey statement to the press.
To whatever degree Harreld, Gardial and Reardon worked to protect Nock from any real consequences of his actions, even as campus police cited him and a second internal investigation took shape, it is possible if not likely that there was another player involved. As regular readers probably know, not only is John Pappajohn still alive and kicking, but he actually made his fortune as a venture capitalist — meaning by investing in new businesses. Although he is almost universally treated with the special dopey reverence that otherwise sane people reserve for the wealthy, the entrepreneurial centers that he has established at each of the Iowa regent universities give him an early look at, and an early opportunity to invest in, hundreds of new business ideas each year.
Whether Pappajohn was told about Nock’s run-in with campus police in April, or learned about it when it was publicly reported in late June, by the beginning of August he had to know what Nock had been accused of, yet Nock was not terminated. Like Harreld, Pappajohn was not quoted in the press, but simply by virtue of Nock teaching a course at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, his name — unlike Harreld’s — was associated with Nock’s warnings from the UI campus police. Had Pappajohn wanted Nock terminated on that basis alone, it is hard to imagine that Harreld, Gardial and Reardon would have stood in his way. (If you’re wondering how engaged Pappajohn is with UI these days, the September issue of Iowa Alumni Magazine has an in-depth article about Pappajohn’s art collection, which would have been in-process for months.)
Whether Harreld wanted to keep Nock and convinced Pappajohn to go along, or Pappajohn wanted to keep Nock and convinced Harreld to go along, or they both wanted to keep Nock and were in cahoots, the fact remains that no one got rid of Jeffrey Nock until there were protests at Iowa. Instead, for whatever reason, Nock was effectively treated like a ‘made guy’ in the UI entrepreneurial community, until growing negative publicity and outrage proved too much. Despite tough talk about sexual harassment and assault all the way around, and everyone pretending to be stand-up citizens and all-in on campus safety, Nock was protected until doing so was no longer viable.
As nauseating as might be to think that Harreld was the driving force in trying to retain Nock, bowing to the self-interested whims of a wealthy donor would be even worse. Although university presidents are often tools of such powerful benefactors, they are still expected to draw the line at overt threats, including particularly threats which are covered by school policy. So whether Harreld was acting on his own, on behalf of Pappajohn, or in league with Pappajohn, it is still Harreld’s fault that Nock was kept on the books for five months, after he should have been terminated for cause. That doing so also proven that Harreld’s jut-jawed stance on sexual abuse was nothing more than empty rhetoric merely confirmed that Harreld’s word means nothing.
Even allowing for Harreld’s worst instincts, however, and acknowledging his obvious disregard for the safety of women on campus, you would think someone at Iowa, or at the Board of Regents, or John Pappajohn himself — a venture capitalist steeped in assessing risk — would have pointed out that the potential downside of retaining Nock was vastly outweighed by an possible future returns. Not only was there reputational risk to the University of Iowa, but there was financial risk if Nock continued harassing women, or worse, and someone sued the university on that basis.
Although the administrators at Iowa succeeded in minimizing Nock’s role on campus, that in itself betrays consciousness of guilt about the decision making that was going on behind the scenes. Whoever was calling the shots, they initially believed that the university could weather the storm and keep Nock and his institutional knowledge on staff. In fact, the only reason Nock was ever terminated was because one woman realized that Nock was a bigger threat than anyone at UI was willing to admit, and waged a committed solitary protest until others joined in. Without her determination to protect the women on campus that J. Bruce Harreld and his allies were all too willing to leave at risk, Nock would have still been employed at the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center on 09/21/18, when the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux filed the following story.
What would have been a bombshell if Nock had not been fired ten days earlier was instead almost completely overlooked, perhaps in part due to the shocking nature of the report itself. In terms of the implications, however, Breaux’s reporting should have received a great deal of notice precisely because of what it revealed. If not for the conviction of one woman in the UI community, Jeffrey Nock would still have been employed by the University of Iowa, by the Tippie College of Business, and by the John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center when Breaux’s story broke. That in turn would have triggered a public relations disaster that would have rightly involved Harreld, Garidial, Reardon and Pappajohn, who all put Nock’s welfare above the safety of women.
We are now three years into the J. Bruce Harreld experiment, and that experiment is, unarguably, a failure. By his own stated criteria, J. Bruce Harreld is a failure as a university president because he failed to act in response to a documented case of sexual harassment, thereby putting women on campus at risk. By Governor Reynolds’ stated criteria, Harreld is also a failure as an employee of the sate of Iowa for putting women at risk. And by anyone’s criteria, Harreld is a failure as a man for knowingly leaving women at risk, either in the cynical hope that nothing worse would happen, or in the belief that Nock was simply too important to let go, despite his abuses.
In retrospect, hiring someone who knew nothing about academic administration was a bad idea, but even if we give Harreld a pass on everything else, his response to the UI police report on Jeffrey Nock was not simply incompetent, it was dangerous. Back in April, Harreld had all the information he needed to justify terminating Nock based on existing UI policy. If he was unsure, he also had complete authority to order an in-depth investigation — much like the investigation subsequently initiated by the UI compliance office — which would have turned up all of the damning information that would spill out in the press in the following months. Instead, because J. Bruce Harreld cares about starting new businesses more than he cares about protecting the women at Iowa, he gave Nock a new three-year deal at $80K per year, while paying lip service to campus safety.
Well, I mean come on. The timing of his firing all but guarantees UI got tipped off that the story from Nock’s past was going to come out.
What is so spectacularly routine about situations like this is that at some point one or more of the key players must have had a heart-to-heart with Nock, where they asked him, in complete confidence, whether there were any other skeletons in his closet. And of course he lied to them, which they will now all see as the real betrayal, as opposed to their incapacity to prioritize the women on campus ahead of their entrepreneurial agenda.
I agree that UI probably got tipped off, perhaps even by Breaux, because reporters have an obligation to ask for comment before they run a story. Had it not been for Reimer’s protests over the summer, however, which then prompted Breuax’s follow-up report, I don’t know that the earlier police report would have ever come to light. And of course the fact that UI never seemed to care enough to look for prior bad acts — which they could have easily done through the campus police department — only confirms the administrative commitment to protect Nock.
I also still wonder if UI didn’t reach some sort of settlement with Nock to keep him from coming back at them for breach of contract. A few state bucks to compel him to sign an NDA, so Harreld, Gardial, Reardon and Pappajohn can sleep peacefully, knowing he won’t be able to talk….
Presidential searches at colleges and universities are usually described as closed or open, though in practice most open searches are a hybrid of those two theoretical extremes. In a closed search, a relatively small search committee and/or governing board — comprising, at most, a few dozen individuals — performs all of the work in secret, then simply announces the new president of the school. Not surprisingly, closed searches are prone to crony abuses of power in which the narrow (and narrow-minded) interests of politicians, businesspersons and wealthy donors take precedence over the academic concerns of students, staff, faculty and — if the school is public — of the taxpayers who help fund that institution of higher learning.
Because colleges and universities are ostensibly collegial institutions, even in the most closely held closed searches there is usually some committee representation granted to students, faculty and staff, albeit in a way that allows them all to be easily marginalized. In fact, in some searches the students are represented not as full voting committee members, but either as non-voting members or members with only one-half or one-third vote. The defense of such abuses of power is that the students still get a seat at the table, but if students don’t have a full vote then that seat is intended to be worth nothing, no matter how earnestly students might make their case.
In theory, an open search would be entirely open, meaning the school — and thus the public — would be informed about each candidate who applied for the presidency of an institution. In reality, because most applicants will not make it past the initial cut-down process, the initial screenings in a typical open search are also done in secret, thus ensuring that most candidates do not suffer any negative consequences with their current employers. Only when the committee winnows a dozen or so semifinalists down to a few finalists (usually two to four) are those candidates revealed as they are brought to campus for a forum with the greater academic community.
Because of the secrecy of the early part of an open search it is still possible to corrupt that process, but it is much more difficult to get away with a true abuse of power as compared to a closed search. In an open search, at the very least, you can compare apples to apples, while in a closed search the committee and/or governing board will always insist that the winning candidate was by far the best person available.
The implicit benefit of an open search is that it allows the campus and greater public an opportunity to provide feedback that the final decision makers could not acquire any other way, and that in turn facilitates a more informed decision. If the committee or board favors a particular candidate, but that candidate fares poorly in their appearance before the community, that serves as a warning that there could be trouble down the road. Likewise, if one or more candidates are deemed acceptable to the greater community, the final decision makers would avoid the potential tensions of a shotgun appointment by choosing one of the preferred candidates.
There are of course all kinds of cross-currents involved in any search, but the general distinction between closed and open searches is that closed searches dictate a selection, while open searches strive for consensus. As such, the very fact that a governing board chooses to conduct one kind of search over the other says something about the intent of that search. If a board is simply going to impose a new president on a campus it doesn’t make a lot of sense to hold an open search, because that strongly implies that the consensus of the campus will be factored into the final choice. Unfortunately, if there is an expectation that an open search will be held — which is more likely at a large public institution — then the governing board may make it seem like they are interested in reaching a consensus, when in fact they already know that they will be dictating the appointment.
Regardless of the type of search, the legal authority to hire a university president is invested in the hands of a few people, whether that group is politically appointed as a matter of state code, or privately appointed as a matter of corporate bylaws. In that strictly legal context, those vested with that authority can choose to involve or not involve others, and that decision will necessarily have downstream effects on community support, donor support, and the overall morale of the institution being governed. If you know going in that the people who are in charge of your school are despots and tyrants, you not only won’t be surprised when they dictate who will be president, you will avoid investing yourself emotionally precisely because you know you have no say. Conversely, if your input is welcomed and respected, and you are given a meaningful say in the outcome, you will be incentivized to participate more and to care more about your school.
As you might imagine, the tensions inherent in such power dynamics are not unique to a given school, or even to education. In a representative democracy the citizens elect political leaders who are imbued with statutory rights that the voters themselves do not have, including the ability to pass laws and even to impose martial law. While such decisions can be made with legal impunity, however, that does not mean there will be no price to pay if those powers are abused. (Even dictators have to be aware of the mood of the populace, lest they literally lose their heads.)
In higher education, the process by which such tensions are buffered on most college and university campuses has been formalized into what is called shared governance. Prior to 2015 I had not heard that term, but as I quickly came to learn that concept was central to the fraudulent 2015 UI presidential search that led to the illegitimate appointment of J. Bruce Harreld. While shared governance does not confer a legal obligation on a governing board or presiding administration, it recognizes that running roughshod over the faculty, staff and students on any campus is a short-term solution with long-term negative consequences. (At the very least, if a school is known to be governed by people who have no interest in the opinions of the people who are being governed, that will have an effect on who chooses to teach, work and study at that institution.)
Shared Governance and the 2015 UI Presidential Search
In keeping with tradition, in 2015 the Iowa Board of Regents initiated an open search for a new president at the University of Iowa. It was the first such search at Iowa in eight years, and it was sold by the board as a fair and inclusive process consistent with shared governance. That framing was particularly important because the outgoing president was herself the result of a divisive search process, which had at the time conclusively demonstrated that the Board of Regents had no real commitment to shared governance. Specifically, the search process that was first initiated in 2006 was thrown out entirely when the regent president was unable to slip his preferred candidate through the search committee to his waiting board. Instead of choosing from among the finalists selected by that committee, as had been agreed to in advance, the regent president blew up the initial search, then launched a second search which ended successfully in 2007.
While the 2015 Board of Regents was comprised of different members, the faculty at Iowa were wary about the new search precisely because of the betrayal that occurred in 2007. They were further concerned when the new board president — who happened to be a crony political hack appointed by the then-governor — initially proposed minimal faculty involvement. After some push back the regent president added a few more faculty members, but even at that the faculty equaled only one third of the twenty-one-member committee, thereby effectively marginalizing faculty input.
Still, until the last possible minute the 2015 UI presidential search played out as expected. When the search transitioned to the open phase the first three finalists to be revealed, and to visit the campus for an open forum with the UI community, were veteran academic administrators who were qualified in every way. Then, with only three days left before the final vote by the regents, the fourth finalist was revealed to be a former business executive who had no experience in academic administration, no experience in the public sector, and, incredibly, no experience being the CEO of any business. That candidate was of course J. Bruce Harreld.
To say that Harreld’s candidate forum went poorly would be an understatement. That he was revealed last, and that his appearance on campus took place less than forty-eight hours before he was appointed (no less as a result of what was later revealed to be a rigged vote), made it blatantly obvious that the regents were pulling a literal fast one on the UI community. While the full extent of the corruption would only be revealed in the coming months, even at the time of the board’s sham appointment it was abundantly clear that the regents had once again betrayed any conception of shared governance in making their decision.
The worst possible outcome of any open search would not only be to ignore the will of the community, but to choose the one candidate the community actively despised — which is of course exactly what the Iowa Board of Regents did in 2015. As determined by a campus-wide survey, Harreld was not simply the fourth-ranked preference, he was actively unwanted by all but a minimal faction of those who responded.
That J. Bruce Harreld was imposed on UI was, objectively, a betrayal by the regents no matter how shared governance is interpreted. Well before it was revealed that Harreld received scandalous preferential treatment from key members of the search committee and the Board of Regents, it was clear that the board gave no weight at all to the response of the UI community. Three of the finalists were eminently qualified, one was deemed unqualified, and the board gave the unacceptable candidate the job.
From a legal standpoint, of course, the regents had the right to make that decision. As for anticipating any negative consequences, the board either deemed the risk worth taking, or failed to consider the implications. While Harreld was given an initial and unprecedented contract worth $4M over five years — while at the same time acknowledging he would have to be coached and mentored just to do the job he had been hired to do — the board’s betrayal produced protests on campus, a censure of Harreld for lying on his resume, and an investigation by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which serves as a watchdog for the higher education industry.
In the weeks following Harreld’s sham appointment, more and more information was revealed about how corrupt the entire search process had been, including secret meetings between Harreld and five members of the nine-member Board of Regents. Those meetings took place at the private place of business of the board president, and were not even revealed to the other four regents until weeks after Harreld’s appointment. In response to the public outcry about those meetings, one of the participants — president pro tem Katie Mulholland — finally confessed the true depth of the board’s contempt for the UI community, and for shared governance.
From the Press-Citizen’s Jeff Charis-Carlson, on 09/25/15:
By any measure, in any context, the word ‘governance’ does mean ‘decision making’. That the president pro tem of the Board of Regents denied that reality — and in so doing invalidated the very concept of shared governance throughout the regents enterprise, including at Iowa’s two other state universities — was a shock in itself. That the individual making that statement personally participated in the rigging of the search in Harreld’s favor merely served as acid on the open wound that was the UI campus.
In response, a member of the UI faculty wrote an op-ed in the Press-Citizen one week later, on 10/02/15:
What Mulholland and the regents apparently did not know, but would soon come to learn, is that the AAUP takes abuses of shared governance quite seriously. In fact, they have investigators who look into such abuses, and two were dispatched to Iowa shortly after the Harreld appointment was made. True to form, and despite insisting that they had adhered to shared governance in every way, the key players involved — including key regents and the interim UI president, who, notably, also chaired the search — all refused to be interviewed by the AAUP investigators.
As the weeks passed, and more revelations about the corrupt search appeared in the press, an ad hoc AAUP committee busied itself reviewing the facts of the Harreld hire. On 11/02/15, two months after his sham appointment, Harreld began serving as the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, and on his very first day he responded to the outcry about his corrupt appointment by telling the Daily Iowan how he expected to be treated:
Now, as regular readers know, it is a hallmark of Harreld’s genteel incivility that he routinely seeks to marginalize the voices of others by insinuating that their shock or rage is out of proportion to whatever abuse of power he was party to. Leaving his mendacity aside, however, it is worth dwelling for a moment on his oddly articulated phrase about being bitten “in the nose”, both for what it means, and for what it says about Harreld himself.
What Harreld wants is for people to be honest with him rather than scheming behind his back. And of course it is not hard to see why that would be advantageous. Once Harreld knows what another person cares about or hopes to achieve, it is that much easier for him to motivate, manipulate, exploit, bribe, oppose or destroy that individual.
Interestingly, however, in all the reading I have done about every statement Harreld has ever made, I have never seen him commit to that standard himself. By encouraging everyone else to unilaterally disarm by “bit[ing] him in the nose” instead of “stab[bing] him in the back”, while at the same time reserving the right to lie to anyone’s face, Harreld would gain an enormous advantage as an administrator, over and above the raw power conferred upon him by the regents. What Harreld also omitted at the time that he uttered that quote is that he himself abetted the fraud that was perpetrated against the UI community, which is what caused people to react with such passion in the first place. Not only did Harreld lie about the origins of his candidacy on the day he was appointed — to hide his long-standing relationship to one of the members of the search committee — but he lied again on the weekend before taking office, for the same reason.
The AAUP Sanction
In early December, just over a month after Harreld took office, the AAUP released its final report on the 2015 UI presidential search, and the conclusion was blunt:
Protected as he was by the very people who rigged the search in his favor, and taking liberal advantage of his personal right to lie with impunity, Harreld brushed off the AAUP report as incidental and inapplicable to his presidency. Six months later, during its annual summer meeting in 2016, the AAUP took the unprecedented step of placing a school of Iowa’s stature on its list of sanctioned schools. While carrying no legal penalty, that demerit served notice to prospective faculty that the Iowa Board of Regents and University of Iowa could not be trusted to honor their commitment to shared governance, and instead merely paid lip service to that concept.
Flash forward an entire year, during which the university and regents did little or nothing to demonstrate contrition, let alone a renewed commitment to the principles of shared governance, and at its annual meeting in 2017 the AAUP left the UI sanction in place. Thus duly informed that apathy and neglect would not result in the lifting of that penalty, the University of Iowa, in concert with the Iowa Board of Regents, set about documenting and demonstrating compliance with the AAUP’s shared-governance standards.
In early 2018, after a lot of hard work and consensus building, there were not-so-subtle hints that the AAUP would lift the UI sanction at its annual meeting. As for Harreld, while he made positive statements about shared governance during the intervening years, during the critical months leading up to the 2018 vote he became considerably more positive and active. For example — and as detailed in a recent multi-part post — in an April press release Harreld promised to include shared governance in the process by which various centers and institutes on the UI campus would be reviewed, pending possible closure.
From a post on the Iowa Now website, on 04/12/18, signed by both Harreld and Iowa’s SVP for Finance and Operations, Rod Lehnertz:
Almost a month later, during one of his semi-annual interviews with the Daily Iowan, on 05/08/18, Harreld was positively effusive about the renewed trust and faith in shared governance on the UI campus, including his own pivotal role in facilitating the improved relations:
Sure enough, a little over a month later the AAUP removed the University of Iowa from its list of sanctioned institutions. As reported by the Daily Iowan on 06/18/18:
Because of committed communal effort in the best shared-governance tradition, after two years of professional censure the AAUP removed Iowa from the sanction list. Shortly afterward, the UI Faculty Senate released its Presidential Search Best Practices Documents — which, like shared governance itself, fail to carry any legal obligation, but formalize the process that Harreld’s co-conspirators perverted in 2015:
Almost three years after a corrupt search by the Board of Regents prompted sanction by the AAUP, and after diligently working on shared governance on the UI campus for over a year — and conducting successful and compliant searches at the other two regent universities — the damage from the 2015 UI presidential search was finally repaired. What Katie Mulholland claimed was “honor[ing] the shared governance of the university faculty and staff” was revealed to be a fraud in itself, and her belief that “shared governance is really different from shared decision-making” was discredited. The board of regents and UI administrators had the legal right to act with impunity, but by definition doing so would be a violation of shared governance, particularly in the context of a presidential search.
J. Bruce Harreld Strikes Back
While everyone was patting themselves on the back for a job well-done, however, a funny thing happened to the shared governance that Harreld had promised to implement back in April, while reviewing centers and institutes for possible closure. In early July — meaning about a month after the AAUP sanction was lifted — the university announced that a number of programs would be closed, including, notably, the Iowa Labor Center, which at almost seventy years old was still going strong. Not only was the staff of the Labor Center stunned by that decision, it was immediately clear why they had no inkling that their program might even be on the chopping block.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on 07/10/18:
The shared governance process that Harreld had promised as the lifting of the AAUP sanction hung in the balance, which he knew would favorably influence that result, and to which he signed his name, was never actually implemented. And the only possible interpretation of that fact is that Harreld knew he would not have to deliver on that promise before that promise produced the result that he wanted. And to his credit, he was right. Oblivious to his then-ongoing betrayal, and coerced by his promise and laudatory rhetoric, the AAUP was duped into lifting the sanction against UI.
But it gets worse.
As detailed in another recent post, during the August meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents, Harreld not only failed to take responsibility for the lack of shared governance afforded to the Labor Center staff, he made it seem as if there was some unanticipated administrative void in a process that he himself voided. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 08/01/18:
From the moment Harreld was appointed in September of 2015, and even including the corrupt six-month search which preceded his hire, Harreld has been blessed, year after year, with a string of Faculty Senate presidents who were eager to serve his aims. From abetting Harreld’s coverup of the conspiracy that led to his illegitimate appointment, to denying that UI administration, at the highest levels, was central to that conspiracy, Harreld has been repeatedly abetted and encouraged by the very body that should have served as a check on his power. Add in the fact that Harreld himself has never paid any price for running roughshod over shared governance, and it is entirely possible that he genuinely believed that he could, with impunity, implicate the Faculty Senate in his own failure to implement a shared governance process that he had promised the UI community.
If there had not been, and continues to be, significant outcry about the unilateral decision to close the Labor Center, perhaps Harreld would have gotten away with his brazen scam. Likewise, if Harreld had not promised, in a signed press release, that shared governance would be part of the decision making process, he may have been able to lay blame with subordinates in central administration, or perhaps with the outgoing and incoming deans of the College of Law, in which the Labor Center currently resides. Having personally promised that shared governance would be part of the process, however, while at the same time touting enthusiastic support for shared governance in service of removing the AAUP sanction, Harreld’s premeditated betrayal of shared governance, and his subsequent bureaucratic cop out, was too much for the UI Faculty Senate to ignore.
From the Daily Iowan’s Caleb McCullough, on 10/09/18:
From the UI Faculty Senate statement:
While Harreld is not specifically named in the statement, the implication is clear. At the same time that Harreld claimed to have elevated shared governance to “a much higher level of sharedness than on many other campuses”, his administration was intentionally denying the very shared governance process that he himself had promised. That Harreld then attempted to rope the Faculty Senate into assuming responsibility for his failure to deliver was simply too much to take, particularly after the Faculty Senate had worked so hard to remove the AAUP sanction.
While relatively mild as such things go — particularly when contrasted with campus protests, or a formal vote of no confidence by the faculty at large, or sanction by the AAUP — the statement released by the Faculty Senate was clearly a rebuke. As for Harreld’s response to that rebuke, if you knew nothing about the man you might think he would be contrite or apologetic, or otherwise indicate an eagerness to repair the damage he had clearly just done. As regular readers know, however, that’s not who J. Bruce Harreld is.
On more than one occasion I have described Harreld as a petty, bratty and vindictive man, and I mean that as an objective appraisal. Where most college and university presidents learn the subtle art of diplomacy, let alone demonstrate humility and magnanimity, Harreld’s operative managerial mode is not simply dominance, but belittling those who oppose him. With that in mind, take a moment and consider how Harreld responded to the statement from the UI Faculty Senate. Or, if that’s too open-ended, try to imagine the one thing Harreld should not have said after having betrayed his own promise to implement and respect shared governance.
Whatever your thoughts, I predict that you have erred — perhaps badly — on the side of civility. Here is how Harreld actually responded to the Faculty Senate, from his most recent Daily Iowan interview, on 10/16/18:
Having been caught red-handed betraying shared governance himself, and having tried to stick the Faculty Senate with responsibility for his own contemptuous disregard for the UI community, the defense offered by the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa — a little over three years after his fraudulent appointment, which precipitated a two-year sanction by the AAUP for betraying shared governance — was to quote, almost word for word, the infamous insulting defense of that administrative abomination by former regents president pro tem Katie Mulholland. And to save you a scroll, here again is what Mulholland said on 09/25/15:
Without question, this is the purest example yet of Harreld being a petty, bratty, vindictive man. Here he is not simply disagreeing with the Faculty Senate, he is kicking the UI faculty in the teeth, on purpose. Instead of working to mend fences, Harreld is shredding the trust that the Faculty Senate and UI community worked to rebuild. And of course here too it is worth remembering Harreld’s call for civility on his first day in office:
In a little over a week it will be three years to the day that the incoming illegitimate president of Iowa called on the campus to be honest with him. And yet, only now are we learning, after three years of professing to support shared governance, that Harreld does not adhere to the AAUP’s definition of that term. All along, what Harreld failed to point out to anyone, including the Faculty Senate, was that while he was professing respect for shared governance, he considered it nothing more than a formal opportunity for members of the university to express an opinion.
Incredibly, however, even that jarring admission does not explain why Harreld failed to implement shared governance regarding the UI Labor Center and other programs. If, as Harreld now claims, shared governance is not shared decision making, then why was it omitted after having been promised? If listening to the Labor Center staff would have conferred no obligation on Harreld, why did he himself refuse to grant the labor center employees a chance to be heard?
As for Harreld’s definition of shared governance, how many meetings has he participated in over the past three years, in which he chose not to mention that critical distinction? How often did he voice support for shared governance, when he does not actually believe in shared governance as defined by the AAUP? How many opportunities did he have to be honest with the UI community, yet choose to remain silent, even as he was serving as the “integration point”, as the “coordination point”, for bringing greater “sharedness” to the UI community than at most other schools?
J. Bruce Harreld: Back Stabber
So let’s review. In 2015 the Iowa Board of Regents committed a brazen betrayal of shared governance in order to fraudulently appoint J. Bruce Harreld. That monstrous contravention of norms resulted in the sanction of the University of Iowa by the AAUP, which was unprecedented for a school of Iowa’s stature. After two years, and concerted effort on the part of the UI Faculty Senate, the sanction was removed in the summer of 2018, whereupon Harreld revealed that he himself had intentionally betrayed his own promise to implement shared governance. After being rebuked by the Faculty Senate for failing to do so, Harreld’s response was to utter, almost verbatim, the same invalidating statement that regent Mulholland uttered just over three years ago.
And if you’re wondering, the answer is no — there is zero chance that Harreld regurgitated Mulholland’s sentiments by chance. Among his previous positions in the private sector, Harreld served as the head of global marketing for IBM, and as such he understands the importance of choosing his words carefully. Having been publicly rebuked by the Faculty Senate only weeks earlier, Harreld was clearly spoiling for an opportunity to even the score, even as he remained unrepentant in precipitating that confrontation. All of which brings us, again, to the glaringly obvious conclusion that Harreld simply has the wrong temperament for a university president.
Even academic administrators who genuinely feel they have been wronged are able to fake humility and magnanimity in public. For Harreld, however, the opposite is true. Even if he himself precipitates a conflict, he blames others for their reactions. Whether demonizing people as unhinged in response to his objectively fraudulent hire, or trivializing shared governance after duping the Faculty Senate into removing the AAUP sanction, it isn’t enough for Harreld to assert his authority, or even to win. He has to treat people like garbage, and do so publicly.
This need to belittle — this pugnacious instinct — has been a hallmark of Harreld’s presidency from the beginning. He cannot take the high road, he cannot be the bigger man, and he cannot lead anyone other than a sycophant. Any perceived slight, any testing of his authority, triggers a pathological response, and that’s true whether the matter is trivial or vital to his objectives.
There is no way for Harreld to walk back his statement that “shared governance does not mean shared decision-making”. That was the entire point of the AAUP sanction, and implicit in working to remove the sanction was an admission on the part of Harreld, UI administration and the Iowa Board of Regents, that shared governance — whether promised or dictated by professional norms — is shared decision making. And yet, only weeks later, in an unequivocal statement, we now have Harreld declaring that will not be the case on the University of Iowa campus.
While Harreld clearly reacted out of spite, however, that does not mean he does not also have some strategic administrative goal in mind. Meaning, specifically, a goal which requires marginalizing the authority of the UI faculty. As regular readers know there are currently a lot of pieces in play behind the scenes, any of which may require that Harreld betray shared governance:
* The search for a new dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (CLAS) — which is not only the largest college on campus by far, but one that Harreld would like to hack to pieces — is coming to fruition. As of today, all four finalists have been announced, and the fourth will hold their open forum on campus tomorrow. It has been stated that interim provost Sue Curry will make the final decision, but having appointed Curry himself it is inevitable that she will choose the candidate that Harreld believes is most amenable to his objectives, whether that candidate is preferred by, or even acceptable to, the CLAS faculty. (One also wonders if the candidates are aware of Harreld’s latest disclosure.)
* As for hacking CLAS to pieces, the once-fearsome 2020 Task Force — which was charged with reorganizing the entire UI campus — has been dormant for eleven months, but that does not mean conclusions were not reached before the committee fell silent. Where Harreld and Curry intended to jam through reforms with an interim CLAS dean, it may be that they now intend to do the same thing with a permanent hire who will be professionally beholden not to the faculty, but to them.
* As for Curry, the search for a permanent provost is also underway, and here Harreld will not only make the final decision, he has already instructed the search committee to send him two finalists at most. While Curry has repeatedly been declared out of the running, it should be clear from Harreld’s conduct to-date that he would have no problem claiming that neither of the submitted finalists were better than Curry, then giving her the job on a permanent basis. (Update 10/25/18: The minutes from the 09/11/18 Faculty Senate meeting state, “Harreld has indicated that he would like to hear from the search committee members their views on two to four candidates, who should not be ranked.” That’s a change from prior official statements.)
* As for Harreld’s administrative objectives, for the past three years he has been laying the groundwork for spending tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on corporate/for-profit research. At the April meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents Harreld specifically omitted scholarship as a part of the core mission of the University of Iowa, and instead substituted economic development. That steady encroachment continued at the most recent regent meetings in September, with yet another advance of his for-profit agenda.
From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 09/13/18:
The phrase “innovation and commercialization” speaks to risky profit-making research that used to be reserved for the private sector, but which entrepreneurial types like Harreld are now increasingly using universities to subsidize — often by diverting money from taxpayers and/or tuition-paying students. Currently, Harreld’s budget for his feel-good UI Strategic Plan is about $160M, of which the vast majority is slated to be spent of research and profit-making ventures.
* Finally, there is the massive and mysterious west-side real estate development project, which may include a hotel, retail space or senior living. While outside the purview of the faculty and shared governance, it is entirely possible that in keeping with his entrepreneurial bent, Harreld’s plans may also consume UI resources. By now the university should have chosen a preferred developer from plans that were submitted in August, but the fact that there has been no announcement suggests surprises ahead.
Whatever Harreld is up to, if anything, what is truly astonishing is that in publicly rubbing the nose of the Faculty Senate in the fact that he played them for suckers, his words now have the same effect as the AAUP sanction that was just repealed. Despite repeatedly talking about hiring world-class faculty, his statement of categorical disregard for shared governance now gives any prospective member of the UI faculty the exact same reason to steer clear. Like the sanction itself, Harreld’s words serve as a red flag that he believes shared governance represents nothing more than a formal obligation to listen before doing whatever he was going to do anyway.
In October of 2015, in response to Katie Mulholland’s assertion that “shared governance is not shared decision making”, I wrote a post about what happens when the opinions of others are ignored by those in positions of power. That post involved an analogy about buying a new couch, precisely to show the importance of building consensus and honoring input in any such dynamic, regardless of the stakes involved. It’s one thing to simply provide an opportunity for people to express themselves — as now occurs, say, during the open-comment portion of regent meetings — and quite another to partner with others in reaching solutions, which is the premise and purpose of shared governance. In the latter case, if you ignore everything your partners have to say, there will inevitably be a price to pay, as was clearly the case with the AAUP sanction in the summer of 2016.
Even if we set aside the corrupt nature of the 2015 presidential election at Iowa, it is self-evident that the Board of Regents willfully ignored the UI community in appointing Harreld. It is equally undeniable that they had the legal right, but no one would argue that in doing so that the regents honored shared governance. Instead, the decision to hire Harreld demonstrated a complete disregard for shared governance, which Mulholland then belatedly tried to excuse by claiming that “shared governance is really different from shared decision-making”.
Now, today, three years after Harreld was hired, and coming up on three years after he first took office, Harreld has obliterated the campus-wide efforts to rebuild trust in shared governance that took place over that time. Despite the AAUP sanction, and the recent rebuke from the Faculty Senate for having consciously betrayed shared governance in another matter — while he was, at the same time, professing to have been the “integration point” for a “much higher level of sharedness than on many other campuses” — Harreld just proved that he has been lying to the faculty all along. Because what J. Bruce Harreld just said is that Katie Mulholland was right.
It’s still just so amazing to me that so many of the people who wind up in charge have such limited ability to think for themselves.
What exactly do they think they’re doing? Is it just Dan Quayles all the way down?
Even if the appointment of J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa in 2015 had not been subsequently exposed as a fraud perpetrated by a small cabal of co-conspirators, it still stood as a radical departure by the Iowa Board of Regents. While other non-academics have been appointed to preside over large universities — notably Bruce Benson in Harreld’s home state of Colorado, and Mitch Daniels at Harreld’s alma mater Purdue — every example involves someone who has either been the CEO of a large, successful corporation (Benson), or someone with extensive governmental experience (Daniels), or both. As a perpetual second-banana in the corporate world, and as someone with no experience in academic administration or the public sector, Harreld’s appointment was not simply unprecedented for Iowa, it was unprecedented for the country. That he also had no ties to Iowa underscored the mercenary nature of his hire.
Other notable examples include now-retired David Boren at Oklahoma, who was both a governor and U.S. Senator from that state; and his recent replacement, James Gallogly, who was both an alum at Oklahoma and the former CEO of LyondellBasell, and brought that company back to global prominence after bankruptcy. Perhaps the closest comparison to Harreld’s hire was Margaret Spellings at North Carolina, who, like Harreld, also included a stint at Boston Consulting in her bio. Spellings was appointed shortly after Harreld, also as a result of a rigged search, yet she was also the former Secretary of Education under G.W. Bush. Interestingly, Spellings surprised UNC just over a week ago when she announced that she will retire in March, with two years left on her five-year contract.
Iowa Government and Crony Corruption
In the three years since Harreld’s shocking appointment to his own five-year deal, I have been looking for the bottom of the crony corruption in the state of Iowa, and I still have not found it. As a result of former Republican governor Terry Branstad’s six terms in office over thirty-five years, Iowa state government — and, particularly, virulent enclaves like Story County, which is home to Iowa State University, which is also under the purview of the Board of Regents — has become infused with self-perpetuating crony corruption. For example, as Bleeding Heartland pointed out recently, when former Iowa State President Steven Leath got caught using two school-owned aircraft for personal travel on a routine basis, State Auditor Mary Mosiman — who was the former auditor of Story County, before being appointed to fill a vacancy in the state office by Branstad — only looked into the matter on a cursory basis, even as it was blatantly clear that Leath had violated school policy, board policy and state law.
The fact that Leath also hired several former Republican state legislators for cushy six-figure jobs, without advertising those positions or conducting a competitive search, or that he paid the former presidents of the ISU Foundation over a million bucks to keep them quiet about his abuses of power, should have been enough to get Leath canned. Under the Branstad-Reynolds administration, however, that barely constituted news. Then again, given that Branstad appointed Bruce Rastetter — his largest political donor in 2010 — to the Board of Regents, then crowbarred Rastetter into the presidency of that purportedly independent board, explains how the regents themselves became so thoroughly corrupt. (Rastetter not only enabled and abetted Leath’s abuses of power, he fronted Leath over a million dollars to purchase land that Leath could not afford on his own. And of course Rastetter was one of the three main architects of the fraudulent 2015 presidential search which afflicted Harreld on the University of Iowa.)
Having paid little attention to Iowa politics until 2015, only to then realize the extent of the corruption in state government, I was astounded by abuses of power that were seen as routine. For people who were involved in state government, however, it really did seem as if everyone treated such such abuses as a perquisite of Republican dominance. For example, even when a Republican staffer sued her own party for sexual harassment — ultimately winning a seven-figure judgement after three years — there was no serious effort to prevent further abuses. So it was not a surprise when the man who fired her, Republican legislative leader Bill Dix, had to resign six months later because he got caught making out with a lobbyist — in a bar no less.
Flash forward only a few days and Governor Kim Reynolds — who had been promoted to that office when Branstad resigned and fled to China in advance of a crushing budget shortfall — was compelled to fire the director of the Iowa Finance Authority for rampant sexual abuse at that state agency. It not only turned out that Reynolds and the IFA director, Dave Jamison, were old pals, but he was also the former treasurer for Story County. (Recent reporting by the Des Moines Register’s Jason Clayworth details a much broader “‘toxic’ environment and a ‘culture of secrets’ at the state Capitol“.)
The truth about the crony corruption in Iowa is that it has become the norm in both business and politics, to such a degree that I do not think most Iowans realize just how bad it really is. Then again, maybe it was always this bad and I was just oblivious, but what we can say for sure is that after Branstad and Reynolds took office in 2010, they did nothing to beat crony corruption out of state government, and everything possible to enable abuses of power in service of their own agendas. And there is no more glaring example of the disastrous impact of that corrupt intent than the Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees the three state universities.
The Iowa Regents and Crony Corruption
The nine members of the Board of Regents are appointed by the governor to six-year terms. The appointments are staggered so that three regents come up for appointment every two years, though in practice there is some variance. For example, if a regent resigns before their term is complete, the governor appoints a new regent to fill the remainder of that term, but that interim appointment will often them be continued for a new six-year term.
As memorialized in state code, the regents are chosen from the citizenry and serve as volunteers. In practice, more often than not, they have crony ties to the governor who appoints them. Because Branstad was elected for the fifth time in 2010, and Reynolds now occupies the governor’s office, all nine of the current serving regents were appointed by that political pair, with Reynolds having made the most recent interim appointment earlier this year. As to the purportedly independent nature of the board, state code also dictates that the regents be split evenly between the political parties, and by gender, but because Branstad was a conniving rat he figured out how to subvert the clear statutory intent of the political criterion.
Instead of appointing five Republicans and four Democrats, as might be expected, Branstad appointed a majority of Republicans followed by a plurality of Independents, including people whose registration had been Republican until shortly before their appointment. (Voters in Iowa can switch party affiliation at any time, thus allowing a corrupt governor to evade partisan restrictions for any governing board.) Because it was not enough to simply pack the Board of Regents with political cronies, however, Branstad elevated his main political backer to one of the open positions in early 2011. In fact, Rastetter was quite blunt about the fact that he asked to be appointed as a reward for having given Branstad big bags of money, and that in turn served notice to anyone with business before the regents that crony corruption would be the order of the day. (As detailed in the previous post, Branstad also bulldozed the leadership of the board out of the way so Rastetter could become president pro tem, then president the following year.)
Flash forward to 2017, and with Rastetter’s term set to expire the conventional wisdom was that he would definitely be reappointed by Branstad. Having attracted a great deal of negative attention over the prior six years, however, minority Democrats also made clear that Rastetter would face a bruising re-confirmation battle in the state senate. On that basis — and at very real risk of a failed nomination, which would not only generate additional negative publicity but expose political weakness — Rastetter announced that he would not seek a second term on the board. Instead, Branstad gave Rastetter’s seat to casino owner Mike Richards, who also happened to be a big-money donor to the governor, as well as Rastetter’s long-time political ally.
To say there was no difference between Rastetter and Richards would be an insult to Richards, who was at least housebroken. As with Rastetter, however, Richards’ main qualification for becoming a regent was that he was a loyal Republican operative. Like Rastetter before him, Richards served for one year before being elevated to president of the board last April, along with Patty Cownie as president pro tem in her fourth year. (For her part, Cownie is the mother of Republican state representative Peter Cownie, who is also on the ballot this Tuesday, and is himself part of the corrupt Republican political machine in the state.)
And that’s where we are today — with a Branstad-and-Reynolds-packed Iowa Board of Regents, which owes its allegiance not to the taxpayers of the state or to the faculty, staff and students at the state universities, but to the crony Republican machine that permeates state government. That also includes the board staff, which is headed up by long-time regent fixer Mark Braun, and was expanded into the state schools under Rastetter, to act as a monitoring and intelligence-gathering service for the benefit of Branstad’s operation. And of course that also includes J. Bruce Harreld at UI, who was so lacking in experience and temperament that he never could have achieved the position he now holds on the merits of his own candidacy.
The 2018 Iowa Governor’s Race
After following this putrid partisan muck for years, including watching the entire apparatus of state government pervert itself to avoid confronting Steven Leath’s literal crimes against the state, I too succumbed to the belief that crony corruption is woven into the fabric of Iowa. Branstad’s domination as governor over literal generations, and the Republican party’s current domination of state government, made any relief seem impossible. Even if a state employee openly broke the law, repeatedly, they would only pay a price if they were a political foe or liability. (At the University of Iowa, the Athletic Director discriminated against two women in that department, which ultimately cost the school $6.5M. Not only did Harreld give the AD a massive raise before those cases were resolved, but after the fact he swore undying allegiance to that same AD.)
At the beginning of 2018, I was aware that the current governor, Kim Reynolds, would be up for election in November. Not re-election, because she had been handed the job by her predecessor, but of course one big reason for that crony handoff from Branstad was that it gave Reynolds the inherent advantages of incumbency, to say nothing of allowing her to leverage her party’s stranglehold over the state and federal bureaucracies. At the same time, her little-known Democratic challengers were all sorting themselves out, and the tide of nationalism was rising, making it seem all but impossible that Reynolds would falter at the polls on Election Day.
Interestingly, however, Reynolds left the door open on two related fronts, perhaps in part because she herself felt the same sense of inevitability. First, despite clear evidence that Branstad’s imposition of Medicaid privatization was a disaster for Iowans, Reynolds refused to scrap that program. Second, and in keeping with the first point, Reynolds projected a relentlessly sunny outlook despite obvious hardships for many Iowans, including difficulty prying desperately needed Medicaid services from greedy, conscienceless, for-profit providers.
In early June, the Democratic party settled on Des Moines scion Fred Hubbell as the challenger, and although he was not a firebrand he was steady and matter-of-fact in the great understated Iowa tradition. While Reynolds served as her own relentless cheerleader, and transparently so, Hubbell drilled in on the very real problems in the state that Reynolds refused to acknowledge. At any time Reynolds could have distanced herself from Branstad’s legacy, and promised to do better, but she either didn’t have the political capital or wasn’t given permission by her backers.
At some point during the summer, well before the recent gubernatorial debates — during which Hubbell further acquitted himself, while the irrepressible Reynolds reinforced her deluded image — it became clear that Hubbell was a viable alternative. He might not win in November, but it suddenly seemed possible that he could, and that was a sea change from six months earlier. In fact, not only was Hubbell competitive, but the Dems also had a great candidate running for State Auditor, a great candidate running for Secretary of State, and they already had the Treasurer’s office and Attorney General’s office in the bag. Meaning, for the first time in a generation, the Republican party might take a real beating. (Both houses of the Iowa legislature will likely remain Republican, but could lose seats.)
A Telling Change of Schedule
At the very least, what seemed inevitable in early spring — meaning a Reynolds victory, and another four years of crony corruption — suddenly seemed uncertain. Perhaps not surprisingly, public-facing facets of the Branstad-Reynolds machine began to evidence that uncertainty, and none more so than the Iowa Board of Regents. To be sure, the regents did not start openly wailing that the regime which appointed them all might be swept out of power, but during the September meetings the following announcement betrayed the board’s uncertainty:
Having paid close attention to the regents since the fall of 2015, I do not remember the board vacating two meetings and replacing them with one, and that includes the 2016 election cycle. The purported justification for doing so is that the fiscal picture for the state is still murky after two years of state budget cuts, including mid-year cuts to the regent schools. Having been burned by those mid-year de-appropriations — which purportedly forced the regents to enact tuition hikes only months before the upcoming school years — the board has been trying, unsuccessfully, to set tuition earlier in the fiscal cycle. The problem with that, of course, is that if you don’t know what the legislature and governor are going to give you, then you don’t know how much to charge the students to compensate.
Oddly enough, however, in September the regents killed off the October and December meetings and replaced them with a November meeting — at which, inexplicably, the board then committed not only to setting tuition for next year, well in advance of any resolution of the state budget, but also for years to come. From the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breax, on 09/13/18:
While acknowledging that the board will increase tuition regardless of any new appropriations, that uncharacteristic honesty obliterates any claim that the October and December meetings were cancelled because of fiscal uncertainty. Not only is the board not waiting to set tuition policy until the state budget is determined, but that won’t happen until late spring at the earliest. As to the current health of the state budget, only two weeks after the board’s announcement about the schedule change, the governor announced that the state had a surplus of $127M from the prior fiscal year, which would certainly have been known internally.
Flash forward to a few weeks ago, in mid-October, and the three-member state Revenue Estimating Conference — which includes two crony appointees from the Branstad-Reynolds political machine — followed up with a rosy pre-election estimate that revenue growth will be gangbusters in the current fiscal year, further indicating that state funding will not be an issue going forward. With zero evidence that there will be budgetary disruptions this year, and a firm commitment to raising tuition already on the schedule, we are once again left with an obvious question. Why did the regents cancel the October and December meetings?
To understand the real motive for killing off the October meeting, all we have to do is look at the 2018 mid-term elections that will take place on Tuesday. Unlike 2016, this year the governor’s office is in play, and since the governor appoints the regents, and has authority over that division of the executive branch, it is not surprising that the board decided to fall silent. As to the actual dates of the November meetings, the board subsequently specified that the two-day meetings would be held on November 15th and 16th, or ten days after the election of the next governor of the state of Iowa.
As for clearing the December meeting, the next meeting after the new November meetings will now be on January 15th and 16th, as previously scheduled. As to why those dates were chosen, the Iowa Constitution specifies that the first day in office for a newly elected governor is the “first Tuesday after second Monday of January” — which, in 2019, happens to be January 15th. Meaning between now and either Hubbell or Reynolds taking office in January, the only scheduled meeting of the Iowa Board of Regents will take place twelve days after this week’s elections. After that, there will be two months for the new governor and regents to get on the same page before anyone has to say anything.
Why The Regents Retreated
If Reynolds is elected then obviously nothing changes. At the meetings in two weeks the board will roll out whatever tuition hikes it has already decided upon, then use the following two months to beg for scraps from a woman who has shown every inclination to slash higher-ed funding, thus pushing more and more of the cost of a college education onto students and families. However, because that in turn allows the regents to raise tuition out of scale to any funding cuts — two and a half times more, over the past three years — her anti-education agenda is fine with the current board, which has no problem making it harder for students to attend the state schools. (The ability to increase tuition without representation by duly elected officials is an awesome power, and one that the governor and legislature are thrilled to have available to them by crony proxy.)
On the other hand, if Hubbell is elected on Tuesday, the magnitude of the changes that the current board will have to contend with — starting immediately — will be nothing short of seismic. As for next year’s tuition hike, and long-term plans to increase tuition on an annual basis regardless of state funding, the board may either have to hold off on those plans, or risk pushing them through and irritating the new governor. And Hubbell has already sent clear signals that he is not happy with choices that the governor, legislature and regents have made in the past, which may in part be why the regents decided to go into hiding before the election.
On at least one occasion, whether in campaign stops or debates, Hubbell has specifically mentioned both the Leopold Center, which is at Iowa State University, and the Labor Center, which is at Iowa. Although the Leopold Center still exists, and is charged with helping farmers implement sustainable agriculture — which helps them make a profit while preserving the value of their land — that program was defunded by Branstad and like-minded Republican legislators in FY17. (While the Republican party sells itself as the friend of rural Iowans, it is in fact entirely beholden to BigAg, and routinely sells out Iowa’s family farmers for its corporate benefactors.)
Likewise, as detailed in multiple prior posts, the University of Iowa recently decided to kill off its Labor Center, which aids Iowa’s workers, and has for almost seventy years. None of the purported justifications for doing so holds up on close inspection, but that hasn’t stopped Harreld and regents president Mike Richards from aggressively pressing ahead with that closure. (Along with hating on family farmers, Iowa is notoriously hostile to workers and unions. Not only is Iowa a so-called ‘right-to-work’ state, but during FY17, Branstad and the Republican legislature also killed off Iowa’s collective bargaining rights for public sector unions, even though no one had run on that agenda.)
Even though the Leopold Center and Labor Center were and are well-respected scholarly programs at the state’s two AAU research universities, the Iowa Board of Regents rolled over like crony logs when political interests called for their demise. That complicity, however, also indicates that as of a few months ago the regents fully expected Reynolds to win, as she may still do on Tuesday. With Hubbell in charge, however, he has made it clear that he intends to reverse those changes, and that obviously gives Richards and the partisan majority on the board reason to pause.
From Hubbell’s campaign Facebook page, on 07/18/18:
From an op-ed by Art Cullen in the Storm Lake Times, on 09/12/18:
Whatever inroads the Branstad-Reynolds political machine made in liberal Johnson County when the regents imposed J. Bruce Harreld on the University of Iowa, they pale compared to the generational stranglehold that crony Republican politicians and corporate agriculture have had on Iowa State in Story County. To have a prospective governor openly talking about beating back that calcified, toxic influence has to be unnerving to those who make a living sucking on the government teat, or exploiting the students, faculty and staff at that school. And yet, on Tuesday that may be the reality that awaits them in early January, only two short months away.
Although the Iowa Board of Regents is, ostensibly, an independent agency, and Hubbell would still be hamstrung by a Republican legislature, the pressure he could immediately bring to bear would be harrowing compared to the familiar embrace of the Branstad-Reynolds machine. The immediate crony concern, of course, would be that Hubbell was taking office just as the legislative session was getting underway, putting him in prime position to change governmental priorities. Even if Republicans control both chambers of the statehouse, the governor’s office in Iowa comes with a potent line-item veto, meaning Hubbell could strike out crony projects and use that money to restore funding to the Leopold Center, to the Labor Center, and to other higher-ed programs that are under siege.
Hubbell and the Iowa Regents
Three months after the next governor takes office, at the end of April, 2019, three regent appointments will expire, meaning a third of the board will either be replaced or reappointed. The current regents whose six-year terms will conclude are Larry McKibben and Milt Dakovich — two of the five regents who fixed the 2015 UI search in Harreld’s favor. Also open will be the seat held by Jim Lindenmayer, who was appointed last year to fill out the term of Subhash Sahai, who resigned with one year to go. If Hubbell is elected governor, it would be expected that he would replace all three regents with citizen volunteers who were more amenable to his vision of higher education and, hopefully, a whole lot less amenable to crony corruption and abuses of power.
As a bonus, however, the next governor will also appoint the ‘student regent’, who is indeed a student at one of the state universities, but serves as a regent with full voting rights. This oddity will occur because although the current student regent graduated last year, state code allows that regent to continue serving on the board for one year, even if she happens to be working halfway across the country. With that fourth appointment, the next governor will be one seat short of having appointed a majority of the board after only four short months on the job.
Because Branstad and Reynolds perverted the intent of the statute that governs the regents, there are now five Republicans, three putative Independents, and only one Democrat serving on the board. Because the Democrat was a recent appointment, however, and the four seats that will open up are represented by two Republicans and two Independents, Hubbell could appoint four Democrats and still be in compliance with the requirement that no more than five regents hail from any particular party. That, in turn, would, instantly give the Democrats a five-member majority on a board that has been dominated by Republicans for close to a decade.
In 2021, the two seats currently held by president Richards and president pro tem Cownie — both Republicans — will also be up for appointment, at which point Hubbell could appoint moderate Republicans or Dem-friendly Independents to replace them. While Richard and Cownie both have two-plus years to serve, however, and a year and a half in their leadership roles, that does not mean they will continue as president and president pro tem until the next regularly scheduled elections for those positions, which will occur in April of 2020. As detailed in a recent post, and as established by Branstad’s ruthless precedent, the governor wields considerable control over the board leadership, even though the leaders are elected by the regents themselves:
In this you can see the existential administrative threat to Richards if Fred Hubbell is elected. Thanks to Branstad’s abuses of power — which he used to install Rastetter as president pro tem, then to lever him into the presidency a year later — Hubbell has every right to do the same to Richards and Cownie. And he absolutely should, right after he makes four new appointments, because the president of the regents sets the agenda for the entire board. Rather than fight a Republican fixer every step of the way, whose loyalty is to the political machine that got him the presidency in the first place, Hubbell should ask Richards and Cownie to step down from their leadership positions, then have his new majority replace them with the regents that he prefers.
As to the specifics of that bureaucratic maneuver, here again we find a fortuitous coincidence. It is a laudable convention of the Board of Regents that new members effectively serve a one-year probationary period in order to come to terms with their responsibilities. As such, Hubbell would need a new Democratic majority of the board to appoint a current regent to succeed Richards as president, who would fill out the final year of his two-year leadership term. And of course the obvious and only choice would be Nancy Dunkel, the lone Democrat currently serving on the board, who is also a former state legislator, and by then will have served two years.
As for the position of president pro tem, however, that could be filled by one of Hubbell’s new appointees this spring, who would be, ideally, the person he then wants to assume the presidency in 2020, when the leadership positions are up for election. (And yes — if you’re wondering, that’s exactly how Branstad pushed his biggest donor into the job.) After one year under Dunkel, early in Hubbell’s third year he would not only have the leadership team he wanted in place, he would then be able to replace Richards and Cownie — assuming they didn’t just quit instead of serving faithfully in the minority. That would leave almost two full years in office with six loyal members of the board, which should be enough get almost anything done.
Hubbell and the Board Office
While all of that is eminently doable, if you know anything about government employees, particularly in corrupt governments, you know they are resilient at surviving elected officials and political appointees. As long as the dominant political power burrows like-minded servants into the professional administrative ranks — thereby greasing perpetual corruption with paychecks drawn from the treasury — they can retain power even if there is a seasonal change in the political preference of the electorate. Meaning it is not just the regents that Hubbell has to worry about, it is the staff in the board office, which is currently under the auspices of long-time UI and regent fixer Mark Braun.
While Braun was hired by uber-corrupt former regent president Bruce Rastetter, and seems to get along swimmingly with Rastetter’s political ally Richards, I don’t know if Braun has to be cut loose. What I do know is that when the former Executive Director/Chief Executive Officer of the board, Bob Donley, retired, the regents only interviewed one person for the job, and that was Braun. Even before that, however, the regents were working around state code to pay Braun more than he was legally allowed to make, which was also more than the former XD/CEO was making at the time. And of course Braun not only knows where the bodies are buried throughout the regent system, he certainly has the goods on plenty of the people in state government, as well as the power to hire and fire the board staff.
All of which is to say that in order to truly liberate the Board of Regents from the crony corruption that is destroying higher education in the state, it may be necessary to make administrative changes as well, bringing in not only new blood, but blood that is not infected with crony political toxins. Hubbell may very well have the right ideas, but without committed and loyal foot soldiers to implement his plans, they are going nowhere even if he is elected. And of course if the person who runs the regents is determined to opposes Hubbell’s ideas, four years is but a blink of the eye for an administrative zombie pulling down a healthy six figures.
Whatever Hubbell and his appointees on the board might decide to do about Braun, the depressing truth is that it can be very hard for a new governor, and particularly a one-term governor, to make real inroads in an entrenched and corrupt bureaucracy. If nothing else, all public employees quickly learn how to say yes without actually doing whatever they promise to do. Multiply that kind of foot dragging and insubordination by multiple layers of corrupt administration, and no matter how often the governor requests or even orders changes, those changes may not happen.
This is not to say that things have not improved under Richards and Braun, as opposed to the pugnacity and arrogance displayed as a matter of routine by Rastetter and Donley. Where Rastetter imposed a truly Orwellian public comment process on the citizens of the state — which involved speaking into a camera and producing videos that no regent was ever obligated to view — Richards replaced that bureaucratic middle finger with a public comment period during regent meetings. Likewise, where Donley routinely appeared in public comments, Braun has made himself all but invisible, despite the immense power he has in terms of implementing policy.
The problem with these changes, however, is that they really only affect the surface impression one has of the board. If Richards and Braun want to do the wrong things by way of the citizens of the state, or the faculty, staff and/or students at the state schools, they still have the same unchecked power at their disposal, and the same long-term loyalties guiding them. Note also that while Rastetter was an arrogant jerk, that also meant he was his own worst enemy. Richards and Braun are much smarter about keeping up the appearance of sensible, straight-laced public service, but that makes it all the more difficult to know what they’re doing behind the scenes.
Peak corruption under the Rastetter regime occurred during the ‘planegate’ scandal, which featured former ISU President Steven Leath. For months on end there were new disclosures about crony corruption at Iowa State and at the Board of Regents, until finally the entire apparatus of state government was excusing and absolving Leath’s blatant abuses. While Richards and Braun have done better, they have done nothing about lingering problems, particularly at the University of Iowa. Not only is Harreld still president, but litigation resulting from construction of the new UI Children’s Hospital is an open wound. Combine the two and things get exponentially worse.
For example, at the most recent board meeting the regents actively encouraged Harreld to go on the attack about a legal ruling in favor of a contractor on that construction project — which was not only badly managed, but went massively over budget by a minimum of $90M. Among the arguments that Harreld offered, on the record, was his belief that the hospital is unsafe as a result of slipshod work and missing documentation, even though the university opened the hospital for business a year and a half earlier. As a result of this administrative self-immolation, we will almost certainly see those very public official statements in future negligence or malpractice suits against the University of Iowa.
The 2018 Wild Card: Iowa State Auditor
The ongoing litigation and murky facts surrounding the construction of the UI children’s hospital underscores the degree to which corruption of any stripe often hinges on money. Who gets state contracts, who gets hired across myriad departments, and, critically, who keeps an eye on the state’s books? Along with electing the governor on Tuesday, Iowan’s will also elect the heads of a number of state offices, including, importantly, State Auditor. And here there is not only a viable Democrat running against incumbent Mary Mosiman, but that candidate — Rob Sand — may actually represent a bigger threat to entrenched crony interests than Hubbell ever could.
Mosiman is a CPA, and as noted above, rose through the crony ranks in the Republican enclave of Story County. Sand, on the other hand, is not only an attorney, but a former Iowa assistant attorney general, and as such knows firsthand how the state bureaucracy insulates itself from accountability. Case in point, as the ‘planegate’ scandal was exploding just over two years ago, Sand opened an investigation at the AG’s office. In short order, however, because the AG represents the Board of Regents in litigation, the board simply called up the AG’s office and Sand’s investigation was shut down.
The very fact that Sand is now running for State Auditor, when he could be doing other things with his life, is a tell. As an attorney, investigator and prosecutor, Sand not only knows that money is often the root cause of corrupt acts, it is also the best way to track and expose abuses of power and crimes. Because the auditor’s office has statutory authority to look into the books of every aspect of state government, Sand’s candidacy may scare the Republican political machine a lot more than putting up with Fred Hubbell for four years.
Although Hubbell is not a career politician, by virtue of his extensive business experience he is very much a manager and administrator. As such, he figures out what he wants to accomplish, then implements that plan with a combination of leadership and delegation. If you’re a crony Republican who has burrowed into the state bureaucracy, even if you disagree with Hubbell’s agenda you can still use your position to steer state money toward your crew, or otherwise profit until the 2022 election.
Sand, on the other hand, is a hunter, and he set his sights on the auditor’s office because that’s where he will find the tracks that lead to criminal prosecutions. For that reason alone, if Sand wins on Tuesday I expect to see some state employees retire, who — under either Reynolds or Hubbell — might otherwise have remained on the public payroll. (While they might be able to stall or distract or appease a governor, they won’t be able to prevent Sand from looking into their books. And the first department that might see some resignations would be the auditor’s office, where the hiring of crony CPA’s may have abetted the Republican political machine for years.)
Among Sand’s targets, high on the list is taking a hard look at Medicaid privatization — with subpoenas, if necessary — which has had no public accounting precisely because Mosiman is a partisan hack. Among the other state programs and institutions that he would inevitably look into, however, would be the Board of Regents, which has a combined budget of over $6B, and of which the University of Iowa and UIHC account for $4B. As for Iowa State, while the board has quietly gone about cleaning up the obvious corruption from the Rastetter years — including putting crony political hires out to pasture — that school is still the wild west.
For example, among the questions that have never been resolved, precisely because Iowa State was allowed to bury its own inquiry, is whether it is even cost-effective for the school to own its own plane. As State Auditor, Sand could not only answer that question in an apolitical way, but the entire crony might of the regents, administrators and donors at ISU would be powerless to stop him.
To underscore the extent of the crony ties in Iowa, when the Board of Regents realized it could not simply ignore the ‘planegate’ scandal, it insisted on conducting an in-house audit, as opposed to being audited by Mosiman’s office — who dutifully complied, despite her superseding authority. When the final board audit was released, to his credit the board’s Chief Executive Auditor, Todd Stewart, refused to provide Leath or the board with any legal cover, but his report did abet Leath’s avoidance of prosecution. (Either Stewart edited the report so as to obscure Leath’s blatant violations of state code, or he allowed someone else to do so, but in either case he signed his name.) All of which means you will not be surprised to learn that although Stewart retired last year, just this past week he came out in support of Mary Mosiman.
I don’t know who will win any of the races that will be decided on Tuesday. What I do know is that if Fred Hubbell is elected governor, the impact of the Board of Regents will be immediate, and will increase in the following months. What I also know is that if Rob Sand is elected, people are going to be indicted, and some of those people are going to prison.
I began writing this post last Thursday, thirty-six hours after the most momentous mid-term elections in our nation’s history. As you probably know by now, the House of Representatives flipped from Republican to Democratic on Tuesday night, and on Wednesday morning the president fired his Attorney General, replacing him with a fervent sycophant who is eager to kill off the Mueller investigation. Adding insult to injury, that fervent sycophant turns out to be a three-time graduate of the University of Iowa, complete with a Communications BA, an MBA and a JD.
As the state level, the currently appointed Iowa governor, Kim Reynolds, was also elected to her first, full, four-year term on Tuesday. As a result, and as noted in the previous post, the decade-old Branstad-Reynolds machine will remain in control of all aspects of the executive branch of state government. And of course that’s particularly important regarding the nine-member Iowa Board of Regents, which Reynolds can now restock with her own sycophants.
On Wednesday night, barely twenty-four hours after the elections, I sketched out this post as an update to the previous post. My naive assumption was that I would publish at the beginning of this week, in advance of all of the news that will inevitably spill from the coming two-day regent meetings this Thursday and Friday. As anticipated in the prior post, on this past Thursday morning the board also posted its agenda for those two-day meetings, but I resisted my normal perusal of the line items because I knew the press would pull out any interesting tidbits. What I failed to anticipate, however, was how eager the fraudulently appointed president of the University of Iowa — J. Bruce Harreld — would be to commence his entrepreneurial insurgency, now that the political coast was clear.
As regular readers know, the entire justification for hiring Harreld over three academic administrators who were eminently qualified for the position, was that at a time of unprecedented transformation in higher education, Harreld’s experience as a senior business executive was desperately needed. Oddly enough, however,, this same imperative did not subsequently apply at the University of Northern Iowa, or at Iowa State University, which both hired new university presidents following Harreld’s sham hire at Iowa. Specifically, Harreld’s experience at IBM, as one of a bunch of second bananas working for legendary CEO Lou Gerstner, was held out as a prime example of Harreld’s business acumen, thus compensating for the fact that he had zero experience in academic administration or in the public sector.
To give Harreld his due, for a time he did run IBM’s Emerging Business Opportunities (EBO) division, which used IBM’s massive capitalization and world-wide technological resources to pursue new revenue streams. At roughly the same time, that eternal financial motivation was also the prime driver in Arizona State’s entrepreneurial transformation into what ASU President Michael Crow called a ‘knowledge enterprise’, and there is considerable evidence to suggest that Crow’s vision was the template for Harreld’s hire at Iowa. Unfortunately, because converting a public university to the cause of profit making is antithetical to its academic mission — and Harreld himself was otherwise objectively unqualified for the job — the only way that IBM Harreld could be jammed into the UI presidency was for a small cabal of co-conspirators to rig the search and selection in his favor.
As regular readers know, those co-conspirators were: former regent president and UI alum Bruce Rastetter; former UI VP for Medical Affairs and interim UI president Jean Robillard; and Iowa alum and mega-donor Jerre Stead. Notably, not only did all three sit on the 2015 presidential search committee over which Robillard presided, but Harreld was an old friend and mentee of Stead’s, and it was Stead who recruited Harreld as a stealth candidate. Six months later, after rigging the final vote in Harreld’s favor with a majority of the Board of Regents, J. Bruce Harreld became the president of a billion dollar research university, and promptly set out to convert the school into a for-profit publicly subsidized business incubator.
Iowa Announces a New Hire
That’s where we have been for the past three years, waiting for business genius J. Bruce Harreld to pull the trigger on his grand entrepreneurial plan. To be sure, over the past few months he has aggressively laid the groundwork for that change in presentations before the board. Notably, that includes replacing ‘scholarship’ with ‘economic development’ in the school’s core mission, and, more recently — and more explicitly — introducing ‘innovation and commercialization’ as core institutional goals. All of which is to say that I was not surprised by the news the university pushed out Thursday morning, even as the unbridled post-election eagerness caught me off guard. Where I presumed an administrative lull prior to the upcoming regent meetings, during which Harreld’s entrepreneurial agenda would be officially sanctioned, he was instead off to the races.
From the Iowa Now website, on the morning of 11/08/18:
If you did not know that UI was looking for a new “chief innovation officer”, or even that such a position exists, that’s not your fault. I have been paying close attention to the university for the past three years, and the only mention I ever saw of such a search comes from a report by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, all of two weeks ago, on 10/26/18:
Miller’s extensive article previewed Harreld’s grand entrepreneurial plan, and in so doing broke a lot of news I had not seen anywhere else — including the fact that Iowa was “hunting for a new ‘chief innovation officer”. Not only was Darsee’s hire announced only two weeks later, but as the press release also made clear, Iowa’s new new chief innovation officer was actually appointed seven days before Miller’s report was published:
Not only was Darsee appointed on October 19th — meaning he already had the job when Miller reported, on the 26th, that Iowa was “hunting for” a new chief innovation officer — but the UI press release also asserts that Darsee’s hire was the result of a “national search”. Given the administrative exodus at UI following Harreld’s sham hire, one additional national search wouldn’t draw a lot of attention, except even the most obscure searches tend to be reported in the press. In fact, Miller herself has written extensively about the ongoing searches on the UI campus, and at no point prior to the 26th of October — which was after the search for chief innovation officer had already concluded — did Miller report that such a search was underway.
Currently, of course, Iowa is finishing up national searches for a new UI Dean of Students and a new dean of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, while a national search is also underway for a new UI Provost, along with a search for a new UI Chief Diversity Officer. Those searches, in turn, follow other recent national searches for a new UI Vice President for Medical Affairs, a new UI VP for Student Life, and on and on. From a Gazette report by Miller only three months ago, on 08/27/18:
What is consistent about many if not most of the national searches on the UI campus is that they are publicly announced, a search committee is appointed, that committee puts up a website, then the search plays out over months, often culminating in an on-campus visit by the finalists. With the new chief innovation officer, however, not only do we have no evidence that any of that was done, but the only report that a search was even underway came a week after the search had already concluded. And that report was not on the Iowa Now website, but in the local press — meaning most of the people in the UI community inevitably missed that notice.
Instead of an orderly and open search process, and frequent updates from university administrators, two weeks ago the Gazette posted the only notice of an ongoing search for a new chief innovation officer. In reality, however, the search had already concluded, meaning there was never any advance notice that such a search was underway, which is pretty remarkable for a search that was purportedly national in scope. (At the very least you would think there would have been job postings to attract applicants, but after multiple searches I have found no such postings.)
While I am confident that the wordsmiths at the UI Office of Strategic Communication could offer a nimble defense as to what constitutes a “national search”, the very fact that those specific words were used raises an obvious concern. As just noted, whatever national search Iowa engaged in to find its new chief innovation officer, that search had little in common with the other national searches that have been and are being conducted. That in turn means those specific words may have been used precisely to mislead the public and the UI community about how Jon Darsee was hired.
As it turns out, there are two useful clues in the quotes above from the 11/08/18 UI press release, and both of them lend credence to the idea that there was no national search for a new chief innovation officer — at least in the sense that the term implies. First, the title of chief innovation officer is lower case, and that is almost certainly not an accident. As a matter of style, many job titles at UI are capitalized precisely because they are cabinet-level appointments, which the chief innovation officer is clearly not.
Second, we know that for a fact from this quote in the press release:
You can see the current UI Org Chart here, which shows that the UI VP for External Relations is a cabinet-level position currently held by Peter Matthes. If we then click over to the current VP for External Relations Org Chart — which has not yet been updated to include Darsee or the chief innovation officer position — we find that there are six direct reports to Matthes. Of particular note, two of those reports concern people who are charged with leading UIVentures (or, in the press release, UI Ventures), which is one of the profit-making initiatives that Darsee will now oversee.
Specifically, Paul Dymerski is listed as the Director of UIVentures, and Jordan Kaufmann is the UIVentures Director of Startups. While the press release does not say what will (or has) become of them and their jobs, it is clear from the press release that Darsee will now report directly to Matthes, so the possible repercussions would seem pretty clear. Either Dymerski and/or Kaufmann will continue in their current positions and report to Darsee, or be reassigned, or be taken out into the countryside and set free.
How Jon Darsee Was Hired
As to the manner of Darsee’s hire, despite the uncertainties the press release is explicit in one important regard, which is that a national search — whatever that means — was conducted, and as a result of that process, Darsee was selected as the new chief innovation officer. And of course given the number of successful entrepreneurs in America, that framing suggests that Darsee beat out some serious competition, and must, in his own right, have dominated the specific criteria that were included in the job description that Miller referenced in her report. And yet, for some reason, all of that took place in secret, and we don’t have to speculate about that.
On the Iowa Now web page hosting the press release about Darsee, there is a linked article titled, “Focus on research amplified, expanded in search for new vice president”, which was published on 06/28/18 — or four months before Darsee was appointed. If you read the entire article, it talks about the former position of VP for Research and Economic Development being split in two, but nowhere does it describe, define, or even mention what the second of the two new parts will become:
As to the new, separate, economic development role, this is the only vague reference in that article to what would, four months later, be revealed as the chief innovation officer position:
There is in fact a great deal of info in that article about the search for a new VP for Research, including a link to the search committee page and info about the new position description. As for hiring a new chief innovation officer, however, or any search or search committee for that hire, there is no mention — which does with Harreld’s claim that discussions were ongoing.
From all of the above, then, and particularly Harreld’s statement that, “his office is working with campus leaders to determine next steps”, the only logical conclusion is that at the end of June of this year, the national search for a new chief innovation officer had not yet begun. Maybe Harreld had an inkling of the job title, and maybe he was relatively certain of the scope, but the process of refining and integrating the new position was still underway. And because we know Darsee was appointed as a result of that national search, that means Darsee was identified as a candidate sometime between August and early October, leading to his eventual appointment on 10/19/18.
Continuing from the press release announcing Darsee’s hire — and after two paragraphs lifted directly from the July press release — we get the following info on Darsee himself. (Note: as you read this, you may hear the signature sound of a phonograph needle being raked across a revolving record.)
So…the guy that Iowa hired to be its new chief innovation officer — after a national search no less — not only turns out to be an alum, but an alum who was already on the UI payroll. Setting everything else aside, in terms of simple probability it would seem very unlikely that the exact right person on the entire planet for this new, critical, far-reaching position would be someone who not only graduated from the school, but someone who was already working part-time for the school, and had been “for the past year”. Then again, we don’t want to leap to any conclusions, because the press release does say that he was working part-time as a consultant, and he could have been doing that from some exotic, far-flung location.
In his favor, Darsee does have experience with startups and startup culture, so we’re not talking someone who is objectively unqualified — as Harreld was when he was hired as president. Continuing from the press release:
To this we can add that Darsee himself suffers from atrial fibrillation (AFib, or AF), which he has talked about openly on the internet. (More on that here, here, here and here. Whether Darsee did that in conjunction with any profit motive at iRhythm, or as part of his responsibility as an evangelist, if that helped people live a healthier, happier life, it’s all to the good.)
As to how Darsee went from retiring at iRhythm in 2017, after “the firm’s successful IPO in 2016”, to consulting part-time for the University of Iowa in 2018, that’s obviously an interesting question. At the very least that consulting opportunity would seem to have given him, if not the inside track for the new position of chief innovation officer, at least enhanced visibility to whoever ultimately made that hire.
We get some of the answer in the very next sentence at the end of the paragraph quoted above:
Again, while Darsee certainly seems qualified for the position, a national search would have turned up other candidates in the U.S., or even in Iowa, who were just as qualified if not more so. Yet following the national search for a new chief innovation officer at Iowa, the person who ended up getting the job had already been on the UI payroll for the better part of a year.
The obvious question, of course — particularly given Harreld’s assertion that Darsee moved back to Iowa to “give something back to his alma mater” — is when Darsee and his wife made their move. That’s important because we have already nailed down the fact that Iowa’s national search for a new chief innovation officer could not have begun until July of this year, at the earliest. And as it turns out, we find the answer to that question in an ‘Iowa View’ column in the Des Moines Register, written by Darsee himself. (The November UI press release announcing Darsee’s hire describes him as a “frequent Iowa View contributor”.)
The column in question was published on 11/14/17, or almost exactly one year ago today.
So in mid-November of 2017, at the absolute latest, Jon Darsee and his wife knew they were moving back to Iowa, though it’s possible they may have made the decision, or even the move, earlier than that. And indeed, later in the column we find the date of the actual relocation nailed down:
If Darsee wrote that column in November, then he and his wife moved back to Iowa City in July of 2017 — which means they knew they would be making that move even earlier than that. As to when they arrived, that was just over a year before the 06/28/18 press release announcing that the position of VP for Research and Economic Development would be split in two, with the economic development function yet to be worked out.
So when did Darsee start working at the University of Iowa? We find that in a short biographical note at the close of the column:
From Darsee’s own pen, then, we have him in Iowa City, working for the University of Iowa — at least part-time — in November of 2017, at the absolute latest. The column does not say that Darsee moved back to Iowa City expressly to work at UI, but that is what Harreld said in the UI press release about Darsee’s hire. And of course as regular readers know, one of the best things about J. Bruce Harreld is that he routinely forgets which lies he needs to tell, leading to all sorts of unintentional disclosures, like this:
You can come at that sentence any way you want, but there is no reading of Harreld’s statement which is not causal. Darsee moved back to Iowa “to give something back to his alma mater and his home state” — meaning he came to Iowa City, in July of 2017, expressly to work for UI. There may have been, and almost certainly were, other factors involved, but in terms of his subsequent hire as the new chief innovation officer — which seems, instead, to have been a sizeable promotion — there was cause and effect.
And yet, that still doesn’t make a lot of sense. Did Darsee really uproot his entire life to take what Iowa now describes as a part-time consulting gig? From the November press release, Darsee is said to have been consulting with multiple companies at the same time, and he clearly did not have to relocate to do that work. So why, in July of 2017, did Darsee relocate to Iowa City, when the University of Iowa was still a full year away from splitting the position of VP of Research and Economic Development in two?
In fact, at the time that Darsee moved back to Iowa City, in July of 2017, Dan Reed was still employed at UI as the VP for Research & Economic Development. Only two months later, after Darsee was in Iowa City — and only two months before we know Daree was working at UI “to help foster innovation” — was it announced that Reed would vacate that position. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 09/21/17:
While Reed reportedly stepped out of the VP role due to a health event, he remained employed at UI for over six months. In his place, in October of 2017, Harreld appointed the dean of the UI Graduate College, John Keller — a committed loyalist — to handle Reed’s VP responsibilities on an interim basis. Fortunately for Reed, in May of 2018 he bounced back from his health event and was hired as the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Utah.
Of course, given the amount of time that Utah would have needed to conduct a national search for a new VP for Academic Affairs, it can be assumed that Reed actually applied for that job shortly after his health event in September of 2017 — which, again, was only two months after Darsee moved back to Iowa City. All of which suggests that whatever his health event was or wasn’t, it was not the only reason that Reed stepped down as the VP for Research and Economic Development at UI, while continuing to work for the school in multiple other roles for half a year. Instead, it looks very much as if Harreld cleared Reed out and gave his job to a trusted administrative lackey, so Harreld could then cut the job in half and give the economic development responsibilities to someone else.
While a cynic might suspect that Harreld booted Reed from the position of VP for Research and Economic Development because he knew Jon Darsee had “return[ed] to Iowa to give something back to his alma mater”, we don’t actually have to wonder about any of the personal or professional motives involved. We know, from Harreld’s own words, that in July of 2018 — a full year after Darsee moved back to Iowa — that Harreld was still, “working with campus leaders to determine next steps for coordinating economic development units and activities”, meaning he literally could not have known that he wanted to hire someone like Darsee at that time, let alone a full year earlier. And of course we know from the November UI press release that Darsee was hired after a “national search”, which also could not have been underway prior to July of 2018, at the absolute earliest.
Unless, that is, Harreld and the University of Iowa are lying about all of that. We won’t ever know, of course, because Harreld is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth, but it is obviously not outside the realm of possibility. In fact, if you have been following higher-ed in Iowa for the past few years, Jon Darsee’s hire at the UI may be ringing a few bells about a several hires that were made at Iowa State under former disgraced president Steven Leath.
From the Gazette’s Miller on 11/06/15:
From Miller on 07/07/16:
As Miller subsequently reported, following a lengthy investigation, such waivers are not at all uncommon at ISU or UI, and are indeed often used to make sure that a particular person ends up with a specific job. From the Gazette on 08/14/16:
If you read that report you will find varying degrees of plausibility regarding the justifications that were used to avoid advertising or a search, and simply hand out a state job. As to the specific positions mentioned above, however — which were given to former Republican state legislators — there is no question that they were crony hires, designed to enrich those individuals with six-figure, taxpayer-funded paychecks. (Perhaps not surprisingly, those crony hires proved to be the tip of the iceberg of abuses of power which Leath had committed at Iowa State, and a little over a year later he was gone.)
As to how all that relates to the hiring of Jon Darsee at the University of Iowa, there are a couple of factors to keep in mind. First, in those crony hires at ISU it was immediately clear that no search was undertaken, while UI is claiming that a national search was conducted before Darsee was hired. The fact that Darsee was already working part-time at UI, and had indeed moved back to Iowa City to, “give something back to his alma mater”, makes it look bad, but that doesn’t mean it is bad.
For example, Darsee may have taken the consulting job simply to augment his income, while giving back after retiring from iRhythm. He could also have had some inkling that there might be a bigger opportunity down the road, or perhaps the consulting work was an audition of sorts, but no formal offer would be made until the national search concluded. (It isn’t uncommon for part-time workers or consultant to prove to be a valuable member of a team, and thus find themselves promoted to full-time status.)
On the other hand…we have a former alum who moved back to Iowa City, who also played on Iowa’s beloved 1981 Final Four basketball team, and it is not at all hard to imagine a mega-donor pulling a few strings to get Darsee in the door — just as another megadonor helped rig Harreld’s hire in 2015. And of course it’s also possible that the position of chief innovation officer was already in the works when Darsee returned, over a year before that new role was officially announced. As for the national search that Iowa claims to have conducted, that could be as trivial as contacting one other person in another state and asking if they wanted to apply for the job. Even if a more comprehensive search was attempted, however — and there is no indication that it was — the job description that Miller mentioned in her 10/26/18 report could have been tailored to identify Darsee as the best candidate.
Fortunately, whether there was or was not a national search will be easy to determine. If there was such a search, that means other candidates were contacted about the new position, and were given an opportunity to ask questions and apply. In particular, as directors at UIVentures, both Paul Dymerski and Jordan Kaufmann should not only have been aware of the new position — because that person would become their new boss, assuming either or both were not transferred to other positions, or terminated — they should have been given the opportunity to apply for the position themselves.
That is of course why there are hiring policies at any large organization, and particularly so when public money is used to pay the salaries. You can’t simply shut out other candidates because you want to give a cushy six-figure job to one specific individual, and that’s particularly true if it looks like you’re handing out jobs to white bros with inside connections. Other candidates, both internal and external, must have the opportunity to apply for the job, and that’s true even if the organization is fundamentally corrupt.
Having said that, it will be extremely easy for the University of Iowa to prove — in documents and records, and in contacts with other candidates — that there was a national search conducted prior to Darsee’s hire, even though the search itself was never publicized, and the position does not seem to have been advertised. On the off chance that there was no search, however, the obvious question would be why the school felt the need to claim that a national search had been conducted when it had not. Even if Darsee was a crony hire, Iowa could simply say that he was already working for the school, he had the right qualifications, and he was promoted on that basis. It might look bad, but it wouldn’t be a lie.
Guardrails and Good News
So let’s review. According to Darsee himself, he moved back to Iowa City in July of 2017. According to Harreld, Darsee made that move “to give something back to his alma mater”, meaning the current relationship between Darsee and the school began more than a year before his recent appointment. According to UI, however, it was only after Darsee had already been working for the better part of a year — or perhaps even an entire year — that Iowa created the new position of chief innovation officer, which then prompted a “national search”. As a result of that search, the exact right person for the the job — in the entire United States — was determined to be Jon Darsee, who, according to the Des Moines Register, had moved back to Iowa City over a year earlier, to “help foster innovation” at his alma mater.
As with every crony abuse of power implemented in the regents system over the past three years, and particularly in service of converting higher-ed to the entrepreneurial cause, there is no chance that any of the individuals involved in this hire are going to step forward and admit that the hiring of Jon Darsee was a done-deal over a year ago — just as the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld was a done deal before he ever submitted his tattered three-page resume for the Iowa presidency. That does not mean Darsee is not qualified for the job, or even that he himself is complicit if it turns out that Harreld and UI are lying about the manner of his hire, but in any event Darsee himself should be concerned for reasons that we will get to momentarily.
Objectively, it is an established fact that J. Bruce Harreld will lie to anyone’s face. We saw that only moments after he was appointed, when he lied about the origins of his candidacy, and we saw that a year and a half later, when he tried to steal $4.6M from students and families by terminating scholarships that the university was legally obligated to pay. (In attempting that scam Harreld immediately provoked two class actions lawsuits and backed down in less than a week.)
As for Darsee, there is certainly nothing wrong with using his skills to advantage, or networking with donors, or anything else he may have done position himself for this opportunity. He couldn’t hire himself, and if the university lied about the manner of his hire that’s on them. As to how he might feel about that possibility, however, we have some visibility into that as well, from his Iowa View column:
As for the exceptions in Iowa, all we have to do is look at the cesspool of corruption that is state government, which I have been writing about now for over three years. And yet, even across the population of the state, I tend to share Darsee’s romantic view of Iowans. Unfortunately, J. Bruce Harreld is not from Iowa, he is not an alum, he isn’t even a liberal arts grad, and he came to the University of Iowa not because of any ties to or love for the state, but because his old white bro Jerre Stead wanted him to convert the school into a billion-dollar, state-subsidized, for-profit startup incubator.
Harreld was — and still is — a carpetbagging dilettante who would never have been hired on the merits of his own candidacy, and in that he is distinct from Darsee. The fact that Darsee will be pulling down a taxpayer-funded salary of $240K for a job that does not seem to have been advertised, and did not involve the type of national search common to other administrative hires at Iowa, is cause for concern, as is the scope and budget of this new endeavor. (Interestingly, for FY2017 — which is the most recent reported year for salaried states employees — Paul Dymerski made $139K, and Jordan Kaufmann made $110K. Between them, that’s $249K , or about $10K more than Darsee will be making as chief innovation officer.)
As we learn more about Darsee and this new position we will inevitably return to these matters, but there is one thing that Darsee himself might want to keep in mind. If he was hired on a crony basis, and this really is a donor-driven long-con by individuals who want to use state funds to defray the risk of developing products which they can then profit from, it is worth noting that crony jobs don’t always survive changes in administration.
Although Kraig Paulsen managed to survive Leath’s departure at Iowa State — and, indeed, he milked the state for hundreds of thousands of dollars before holding his first meeting as the “leader of a new ‘Supply Chain Initiative’ — Jim Kurtenbach wasn’t so lucky. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 12/01/17:
At least it wasn’t a health event….
As I have noted more than once over the past few years, I did not understand just how corrupt Iowa had become — as a state, or as a university — yet that realization prompted not only disgust but also morbid curiosity. In following the corrupt Harreld hire to its origins I have been looking for the bottom of the corruption, but only after Election Day did it occur to me that there is no bottom. With Reynolds elected to her first full term, and the Branstad-Reynolds machine perpetuating itself for another four years — including restocking the Iowa Board of Regents with cronies — there is really no stopping whatever Harreld and his minders intend to do.
For example, on the board’s to-do list this week is unveiling the regents’ plan to brutalize students with annual tuition hikes into the foreseeable future. Delayed over a year by budget cuts and political uncertainty, the board now has the green light to sock students with recurrent tuition hikes regardless of any increase in appropriations — which will in turn discourage the legislature and governor from passing along any new money. (If the state schools can make their annual nut by gouging the students, that means the state can give enact more corporate tax cuts and crony giveaways.)
That corrosive fiscal dynamic will, in turn, grant greater license to Harreld’s entrepreneurial insurgency, because everyone embraces the fantasy of a Hawkeye startup producing a financial windfall in the billions. And make no mistake, that is what Harreld spent the past three years rigging the ‘new’ UI budget model, so money in the millions can be diverted to that cause.
Such risky expenditures would normally be problematic, of course, because of the school’s academic mission, but Harreld has that covered. Because state appropriations and tuition are both pooled in the General Education Fund before they are disbursed, all of those dollars become unrestricted cash unless they are targeted to a specific purpose by the legislature. As it stands now, all eleven colleges will be charged for participating in the school’s new innovation center, which will in turn allow Harreld to skim plenty of money for Darsee to gamble on startups. (And as with Harreld’s EBO days at IBM, the misses will quickly be forgotten, while any hits will help convince everyone to invest even more money in for-profit ventures.)
Again, there is no stopping any of this. The best we can hope for now are robust guardrails that will minimize the school’s exposure to risk. In that, however, there was some good news over the past week, on two fronts.
First, although Harreld took multiple runs at injecting his entrepreneurial insurgency into the academic heart of the university, every such effort has so far been rebuffed. From attempting to reorganize the entire structure of the campus, to attempting to put off the hiring of a new dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (the school’s largest college, by far), or attempting to put off the hiring of a new permanent provost, Harreld has repeatedly been compelled to change course. (And that is no small feat, given that his hand-picked interim provost was all-in on all of the above.)
While we still don’t know the results of those two critical searches, what we do know from the bifurcation of the research and economic-development missions is that the latter is now almost entirely segregated from the school proper. It will still consume a lot of resources, and most of that money will be flushed down the drain, but at the very least, at some point in the future, the whole program can be ripped out by the roots without doing any damage to the school. And of course that could happen sooner rather than later. depending on how corrupt Harreld’s administration turns out to be.
Speaking of which, the second bit of good news is that although Reynolds was elected as governor on Tuesday, her crony and enabling State Auditor was defeated by Rob Sand. As noted in the prior post, Sand is not only a former Assistant Attorney General for the state of Iowa, with a long history of investigations and prosecutions, but he has already made clear that he intends to use the powers of the auditors office — which includes issuing subpoenas — to make sure state government is being run fair and square. And as I noted in that post, one of Sand’s formative experiences involved having the Iowa Board of Regents compel him to drop an investigation into Iowa State President Steven Leath, who had repeatedly violated state law.
We will, again, inevitably come back to all of this in future posts, particularly as more information about the miraculous retroactive hire of Jon Darsee becomes public. It is entirely possible that Darsee himself is an innocent, and sincere about his entrepreneurial convictions, but the manner and mystery of his hire is certainly a bad look for a university president whose credibility has been tattered since he was hired. What we can say for certain, thankfully — and, indeed, for the first time since I have been writing about the Harreld Hire — is that if anyone at the University of Iowa tries to pull a fast one with state money, they are going to pay for their corruption.
Over the past three-plus years, since a small cabal of co-conspirators used a fraudulent search to install J. Bruce Harreld as the illegitimate president of the University of Iowa, we have been following the slow, methodical conversion of UI from a public institution of higher learning to a student-subsidized, state-run corporation. In the past year alone we fingered Arizona State as the template for Harreld’s entrepreneurial insurgency, where president Michael Crow converted that school into what he calls a ‘knowledge enterprise’. Devoted to leveraging knowledge not for the sake of education but for profit, a ‘knowledge enterprise’ like ASU simply becomes another means of economic growth, and has no intrinsic value — either for the citizen-students who attend the school, or for society.
At the University of Iowa, over the past month, we have seen three facets of Harreld’s for-profit plan come to fruition. At first blush they may seem unconnected, but they are in perfect alignment with the proposition that profit-making now trumps knowledge. That the University of Iowa is, nominally, a public institution, would seem to preclude such perversions, but as we have documented over the past three years, the Iowa Board of Regents — which orchestrated Harreld’s sham hire — is itself corrupted by the same predatory entrepreneurial ethos. Money talks, while the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, or for society, is for suckers.
There is no simpler demonstration of the board’s willingness to ignore truth and fact in pursuit of its crony objectives — including the conversion of the state schools into engines of economic development, which are now largely subsidized not by the state but by hostage students — than the regent biography of the current crony board president. Appointed a little over a year and a half after Harreld’s fraudulent hire was rigged by Richards’ predecessor, if you visit the regent bio page for Michael Richards you will learn that he is a former physician who went on to run various companies in the aerospace and medical industries. What you will not learn — because that information is simply omitted — is that Richards currently owns and operates a casino, or that he is a major and long-time donor to Republican politicians.
Likewise, if you visit Richard’s bio on the website for his casino, you will find no mention of the fact that he is currently the president of the Iowa Board of Regents, which is a $6B state-run enterprise. That is the reality of the Iowa Board of Regents, and has been for much of the past decade. If objective truth gets in the way of the political and business cronies who run that governmental body — both officially and unofficially — then objective truth is ignored. Officially, political megadonor Mike Richards is not a casino operator, even though that is literally what he is doing at this very moment. Instead, he is a kindly old former physician, former businessman and former entrepreneur, who simply wants to give back to the state that made all of that possible.
Students are Customers
The premise of state-funded higher education is that by subsidizing the cost of a college degree for its citizens, the state benefits economically in the long run by having a more-educated populace. That benefit is admittedly indirect, but all available evidence suggests that it is also substantial. The more educated the citizens of a given state tend to be, the more innovative and productive those citizens are in an increasingly competitive world. That in turn increases the tax base for the state, which can then be used, in part, to subsidize the cost of a college education for the next generation.
In this conception, the idea of the citizen is clearly distinct from the idea of the customer. The citizen is a critical component not only in the economic life of a given state, but in the functioning of society and government. The customer is simply a source of revenue, and as such is to be exploited for as much revenue as possible in each transaction. (Even if that inevitably leads to the assumption of debt, to say nothing of the risk of personal bankruptcy.)
While such distinctions may seem semantic or philosophical, they are not. In fact, no single factor is more relevant to the pricing of higher education as a product than the intent of the state in providing that product. If what the state wants in return is a well-educated and informed citizenry, saddled with the least amount of debt — thus freeing up earnings for investment — then the state will do everything possible to keep the price of a college degree as low as possible. Over time, that will guarantee the greatest possible return both in terms of the societal and cultural health of the state as a community, and the wealth and vitality of the state as an economy. Conversely, if all a state cares about is soaking its students for as much money as possible, then adopting the entrepreneurial ethos and charging as much as the market will bear is the obvious and only solution.
While the Iowa Board of Regents has been steadily moving toward entrepreneurial exploitation since Harreld was fraudulently appointed in September of 2015, at its recent meetings in mid-November the board threw off any remaining pretense that state-run higher-ed is a public good. As regular readers know, in August of 2017 the board launched a Tuition Task Force to determine tuition policy for the next five years — which was pushed back yet another year because of state budget cuts, and because of uncertainty about the recent gubernatorial election. (Tellingly, the governor ordered her administration to steer clear of that predatory task force.)
A little over two weeks ago, on November 15th, the board finally unveiled and approved its five-year plan for tuition hikes, which unabashedly treats the students at the state universities like cash cows. Under the prior citizenship model, which was in force until Harreld was hired, the state universities determined their operating costs, then requested sufficient appropriations from the state to cover those costs. If the state fell short, for whatever reason, only then did the regents increase the price of tuition to compensate — but only to compensate for that shortfall. Over the past three years, however, including two years of failed fiscal management by the governor and state legislature, the regents used funding shortfalls both real and imagined as a pretext to increase the cost of a college education at the three regent universities. (While wailing endlessly about funding cuts and mid-year deappropriations, the board passed four hikes which increased tuition between 2.5 and 2.8 times as much as all state cuts combined.)
Instead of working to save students money while providing a college education during a time of economic instability — which was itself precipitated by gross political mismanagement of the state budget — the regents used a self-inflicted governmental crisis as an excuse to transfer tens of millions of dollars from student bank accounts to the state schools. Continuing that penchant for predatory pricing, but now memorializing it as board policy, the new five-year plan makes price increases not only the norm, but provides for additional increases if the state fails to compensate for the cost of inflation. From the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux, on 11/15/18:
Not only will the Iowa Board of Regents no longer wait to find out how much money the state plans to contribute before increasing the cost of tuition, but the price of a college degree will increase regardless of any increase in state funding. Even if the state provides a massive windfall in a given year, the regents have already locked in a 3% increase each year for the next five years, along with an inflation adjustment if the state does not cover that cost. (While inflation is currently running around 2% — thus the high-end estimate of 5% in the quote above — if inflation explodes the regents will simply increase tuition that much more to cover that cost.)
As for justifying this predatory pricing, the regents put forward everything from false comparisons with self-selected peer institutions — meaning, again, that the price of an education now correlates with whatever the regents believe the market will bear — to outright lies. Although a long-term price increase has been Harreld’s goal since he was hired by former regent president Bruce Rastetter, who was one of the three key co-conspirators who rigged Harreld’s appointment, it is current president and casino owner Mike Richards who perpetrated this five-year raid on student and family bank accounts. That is interesting in itself because Richards previously differentiated himself by keeping a low profile and avoiding flagrant abuses of power, to say nothing of bone-headed policy decisions. Now, however, in explaining his rationale for increasing tuition for five straight years — regardless of any additional contribution from the state — Richards has established a new standard of idiocy at the Board of Regents. (And as regular readers know, that’s saying something.)
Specifically, Richards characterizes the new tuition regime as a response to student and family demands for “predictable” tuition. In fact, that is not at all what students and families have ever asked for, and is instead willful deception on his part. What students and families objected to, for two straight years, were last-minute tuition hikes only months before the new school year began. Even at that, however, it was also understood that most of those last-minute hikes were directly related to the collapse of the state budget, meaning there was no expectation that those last-minute hikes would become the norm. Predictably, however, in those funding cuts Richards saw only another profitable opportunity to lie to the people of Iowa.
From the nauseatingly disingenuous official policy statement by regents president Mike Richards:
Note that critical third sentence. By taking a specified amount of new tuition revenue from students and families every year, the board does indeed provide “predictability” — but not for its beleaguered ‘customers’. Instead, the board provides predictability for itself and for the legislature (which Richards pointedly mentions in the first sentence), thus avoiding hard questions about taxation and appropriations. In fact, precisely because they now all know that students and families will provide a 3% revenue increase each year, plus the cost of inflation if the state refuses to pick up that tab, the governor and legislature will know that the regents have their costs covered before each session beings. If the state wants to contribute more it can — but why would it? (The board’s new tuition policy actually provides a disincentive for the state to appropriate any new funds, even to keep pace with inflation.)
Interestingly — and tellingly — in the same official statement Richards then veers to the broader subject of this post, and indeed the unspoken premise of his crony appointment, and of Harreld’s fraudulent hire:
This in turn explains what that board’s new, predictable tuition revenue will be spent on. A few million will be returned to the students in the form of financial aid, but the board also clearly intends to spend real money — meaning millions of dollars — on funding for-profit entrepreneurial ventures, particularly at Iowa and Iowa State. Because the board knows it will never be able to convince the state to put taxpayer funds at such obvious risk, the regents have decided to strip-mine that start-up capital from students and families, under the pretext of predictable tuition.
Incredibly, however, in explaining how the new “predictable” tuition policy differs from the prior method of setting tuition each year, Richards actually makes clear that nothing has changed. In fact, none of the board’s new policies makes tuition any more predictable on an annual basis than prior years, except to the extent that students now know they will take a hit each year regardless of legislative support. Even the idea that last-minute tuition hikes will no longer take place is a lie, as Richards himself makes clear:
If you made it your life’s work it would be impossible to find, or even to write, a more ludicrous statement than, “We will set tuition once.” (For context, note that the supposed scourge of last-minute tuition hikes only began under Bruce Rastetter in 2016, when he pushed through a massive $56M tuition hike on the pretext of a $1.7M shortfall in state appropriations. During that budget cycle the board originally requested $20M, then announced it would settle for $8M when the state budget proved tight. When the board was ultimately given an additional $6.3M in addition to the state’s standing appropriations, Rastetter used that minuscule shortfall as an excuse to go berserk, substantially increasing tuition only a few months before the beginning of the next academic year. Over the the following two years there were indeed additional tuition-hikes, including last-minute hikes, but as noted those hikes came directly from the collapse of the state budget.)
Here is how tuition used to be set by the board:
1. Announce tentative tuition hikes for the following academic year in the “fall or winter” of the current year.
2. Wait for the governor and legislature to hash out the budget over the winter and into the spring.
3. Give a “second and final reading” of tuition hikes for the coming academic year as late as June, but also in April or even as early as February.
Now here is the new tuition policy as it exists in Richards’ deluded mind:
1. Wait for the governor and legislature to hash out the budget over the winter and into the spring.
2. Give a “first reading of tuition in April”.
3. Give a “second and final reading of tuition in June”.
Do you see what’s missing? Do you see why Richard’s statement that the board will only “set tuition once” is the most imbecilic thing you have ever read? The whole point of the new tuition policy is not only that it puts forward a “first reading” of tuition policy six or eight months in advance, but years in advance! Meaning it is literally no different in implementation than the process the board is purportedly replacing!
Here is the new tuition policy not as Richards explained it, but as it will actually function for the next five years:
1. Announce tentative minimum annual tuition hikes for the following five years in the “fall or winter” of 2018.
2. During each budget cycle, wait for the governor and legislature to hash out the budget over the winter and into the spring.
3. Give a second reading of the proposed tuition hikes in April of each year.
4. Give a third and final reading of the proposed tuition hikes in June — two months before school starts.
The board’s new tuition policy is, literally, one giant “fall or winter” advance notice of tentative tuition hikes. And yet, not only will that first reading still have to be adjusted based on appropriations later in that cycle, it will also have to be adjusted relative to inflation. That means the 3% minimum hikes that students and families now know to expect can easily turn into 5% or 6% or 8% hikes with only a few months’ notice. That’s the same short notice that Richards and the board are using to justify taking millions of dollars in additional tuition revenue in exchange for nothing of value at all.
But it gets worse.
Do you see what else is missing? Nowhere does Richards explain what happens if the state actually cuts funding. And why wouldn’t it, now that the state knows the regents will, “predictably”, make bank every year? If the board insists on a 3% annual revenue increase, plus inflation, and the state cuts funding 2%, does the board add another 2% to the standing 3% hike, then add in an inflation adjustment? And of course if that is the case, that will also only take place a few months before the bills start coming due for the next academic year.
Objectively, charitably, Richard’s official statement betrays either idiocy or contempt for the intelligence of the people of Iowa. In advance of any demonstrated need, each year for the next five year the Board of Regents will take more and more money from students and families, while potentially also levying an inflation charge. Literally the only thing that has changed is that the board has precluded any possibility that tuition will go up less than 3% over the next five years. As to the maximum increase, that will still be determined at the last minute, despite Richard’s laughable claim of providing “predictability” for students and families.
To be fair to Richards, however, most of the argument and rationales that he and the board have put forward for taking more money from students actually originated with J. Bruce Harreld, who has been both tireless and remorseless in pushing for higher tuition prices. And why not? Having himself been guaranteed $4M over five years for pushing the entrepreneurial agenda of his co-conspirators, it’s no skin off his nose if students end up poorer or deeper in debt, or even unable to attend a state university.
Having guaranteed himself a 5% revenue increase for each of the next five years, whether all or only most of that money comes from student bank accounts, Harreld was in fact his usual miserable self in commenting about the board’s new tuition policy. From the Daily Iowan’s Kelsey Harrell, on 11/17/18:
As regular readers know, this deceptive and dismissive statement is simply par for the course because Harreld is a petty, bratty, vindictive man. Even when he has gotten everything he wanted, he has to invalidate the people he has victimized. As for “the facts” — including the fact that Harreld himself orchestrated this state-wide taking of money from students — the regents have simply granted the state universities a revenue increase every year for the next five years, plus inflation protection. In exchange, the students get little or nothing in return, while much of the additional revenue at the University of Iowa will now be diverted to risky entrepreneurial ventures.
Knowledge is a Product
If the students at UI are now simply customers, then what they are buying — a four-year college degree from an accredited institution — is simply another product, albeit one that will cost thousands of dollars more for the exact same piece of paper. As such, everything the university can do to increase the sale of that product, while decreasing the cost of that product, is to Iowa’s bottom-line advantage. Cheaper faculty, larger classes, anything that minimizes costs will be pursued precisely because it will generate more money for the school, whether the students actually learn anything or not.
In that context, if knowledge no longer has any value in itself, and exists simply to be sold, then any knowledge which is hostile to the university’s bottom line must also be dispensed with. And that brings us to the second entrepreneurial grift that the Board of Regents brought to fruition at its November meetings, which was the official termination of the UI Labor Center after sixty-plus years of loyal service to the school and the state.
Having covered all angles of this con in a series of posts at the beginning of the current academic year, we do not need to rehash the stream of bureaucratic lies which facilitated this administrative lynching. However, it is important to note that there are two clear motives behind Harreld’s decision to kill that program. First, there is the greater cultural tide against unions and workers, which has been particularly hostile in Iowa, including the sudden stripping of public-sector collective bargaining rights two years ago.
In that context it is hard not to see the decision to close the UI Labor Center — which has existed for almost seventy years, and currently features five full-time professionals devoted to teaching and scholarship on the subjects of labor, labor law and worker’s rights — in crass political terms. As a so-called right-to-work state, let alone one that survives largely on the backs of itinerant and/or undocumented workers, there are powerful incentives to demonize and trivialize workers and organized labor in Iowa. Interestingly, however, despite taking an axe to worker’s rights over the past few years, and specifically imposing a draconian new certification requirement on collective bargaining units, the crony ties between business and government failed to produce the collapse that they were clearly looking for.
From the Des Moines Register’s William Petroski, on 10/29/18 — or only a couple of weeks before the regents voted to officially kill off the Labor Center:
The UI Labor Center returns a public good each year to thousands of workers in the state, helping to improve their lives while educating them on their rights. Because those lives and rights are hostile to the bottom-line profits of business and industry, however, the Labor Center must die, so workers can more easily be exploited. Even if we ignore that political dynamic, however, it is clear that killing off the Labor Center is being done precisely because the knowledge it contains is a bottom-like threat to the university itself.
Continuing from Petroski’s report:
As detailed in a post back in May, Harreld’s personal antipathy to unions borders on paranoia. Not only did he outright lie to avoid meeting with contingent faculty on campus — who were not yet officially recognized as a bargaining unit — but when he was finally checkmated into meeting with that group, he did so in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety, surrounded by armed campus police. And yet, across the entire state, there is no greater repository of knowledge about workers and worker rights that the UI Labor Center, which is why it must die.
In fact, as reported by the Daily Iowan’s Katie Ann McCarver only last week, on 11/28/18, the Board of Regents and one of the main UI campus unions just began negotiations for a new contract:
Despite the state’s hostility toward unions, and Harreld’s particularly potent malevolence, as a state-funded university it was still necessary for Harreld and his administration to justify the closure of the Labor Center on a more substantive basis than ideological loathing. As a result, Harreld cynically settled on using the student body as a defense of his punitive action — as detailed in the initial press release announcing the closure, on 07/10/18:
In messaging both before and since, Harreld and his sycophants in central administration have used broader terms like ‘student success’ to excuse this abuse of power, but here the justification is policy-specific. Because the Labor Center is “not directly tied to student instruction” — meaning the selling of four-year degrees to UI’s student customers — it will no longer be supported by the school. And yet, the university immediately attempted to conflate those two concepts in the text that immediately followed:
As a professional propagandist, it is not surprising that Harreld tried to pull a fast one by equating direct student instruction with the university’s “academic mission or student success”. As it turns out, however, the Labor Center actually meets both of those latter tests. Not only is the Labor Center deeply involved in scholarship, but many students use the center — including students who belong to collective bargaining units on campus.
Because Harreld is a compulsive chiseler, the original UI press release also contained an outright lie, which is that the Labor Center is or ever has been exclusively funded by student tuition:
Along with tuition revenue, the school receives a large state appropriation which also goes into the university’s general fund. As such, some of the money that supported the Labor Center came from the state as well — at least on a percentage basis relative to that whole fund. Because that would weaken Harreld’s student-first lie, however, the word weasels in the UI Office of Strategic Communication simply left that out for his rhetorical benefit.
As it turns out, however, that funding lie was so overt that Harreld was forced to walk it back before he secured the closing of the Labor Center. From his semi-annual interview with the Daily Iowan on 10/15/18:
Here you can see Harreld’s retreat. Where before he made it sound as if the student body was funding the entire Labor Center, here he notes that only two thirds of each gen-ed dollar comes from students, with the other third coming from the state. (Actually, 10% comes from miscellaneous sources.)
In truth, Harreld could have allocated the entire cost of the Labor Center to the general appropriation from the state, thus preventing a single tuition dollar from being spent on that program, but of course he didn’t want to save the program. He just wanted to use the sainted students — meaning the same students he has brutalized with multiple tuition hikes since he was hired, and will now continue to brutalize with automatic hikes for the next five years — as an excuse for doing the wrong thing. And yet, because the lies that Harreld tells are quite literally compulsive, he ended up telling the one lie that he had to walk back.
Flash forward to early November, and the board’s official death penalty for the Labor Center, and we find Harreld also walking back the university’s attempts to broaden the justification for that hostile act. From the DI”s Katie Ann McCarver, on 11/16/18:
After trying for months on end to expand that justification to the vague concept of ‘student success’, Harreld was also forced to acknowledge, once again, that the specific rationale for refusing to fund the UI Labor Center was that it did not “directly relate to the education of our students”. While narrowly true, there are of course a great many other programs associated with the gen-ed fund that also have nothing to do with student instruction, and that rationale puts Harreld in a significant box going forward. As a matter of policy he can use “student instruction” as the criteria by which gen-ed funds will be disbursed, but he will not be able to do so selectively.
Harreld Hires a Frontman
Under the guise of putting students first — both by imposing unending “predictable” tuition hikes, and refusing to spend sainted tuition revenue or state funds on a public good — Harreld has injected the cynical ethos of the modern American entrepreneur deep into the academic marrow of the state’s flagship public university. Students are now customers, degrees and knowledge are now products, and both are to be monetized as much as possible, short of triggering mass campus protests or the revocation of the school’s accreditation. As an incidental byproduct of championing the students, however, Harreld will also bank an obscene amount of new, unrestricted revenue, which he can now gamble as he sees fit.
As regular readers know, this windfall is on top of massive amounts of new tuition revenue that Harreld has already raised over the past three years. While UI does its best to bury such facts — and Harreld literally never mentions tuition revenue totals, despite constant harping about state cuts — we know that he has increased tuition 18% or so over that time. That in turn is already generating an additional $35-$40M in new gen-ed revenue over and above all of the state funding cuts during that same time period. Now, with Richard’s new “predictable” tuition plan, tuition will go up another 16% at minimum over the next five years, and as much as 20-25% depending on the degree to which students are also obligated to compensate for inflation.
Even using back-of-the-napkin math, next year the University of Iowa will generate about $50M more in total revenue than when Harreld took office in late 2015 — all of it from tuition increases. While UI will return some of that money in financial aid, that will only serve to distract from the reservoir of funds that the university will spend but never account for. And yet, despite all of the administrative obfuscation, we do have some insight into where a significant amount of that new revenue will go each year.
In keeping with Harreld’s background as a second banana at IBM, and with the Arizona State template as his guide, Harreld will now sink millions of dollars — from the gen-ed fund of a public university — into for-profit startups and other risky ventures. That was his calling card as a candidate, and the aspect of his background that his co-conspirators emphasized when they rigged the election in his favor, and as I can tell after digging into his background for three years, it’s the only thing he’s actually qualified to do.
To that end, and as detailed in the previous post, Harreld just hired Jon Darsee to run the for-profit wing of what is a non-profit, state-run university. In fact, after conducing what was purported to be a “national search”, Harreld not only hired a former UI alum, but that alum had already been on the payroll for the prior year, on a contracting basis, doing the same job he has now been hired to do full time.
To be fair, however, if you’re going to go to the trouble of fleecing millions of dollars from UI students each year, so you can put that money at risk in the hyper-competitive marketplace of ideas, you’re going to need someone to exploit all of that state-funded larceny, and Darsee is Harreld’s new Harreld. As to the specifics of Darsee’s hire, however, and his role at UI, we learned more from several press reports over the past few weeks, which shed even more light on the ludicrous nature of his appointment and employment.
As detailed in the prior post, Darsee was said to report to the Vice President for External Relations. However, in an update early last week to a recent article by the Press-Citizen’s Aimee Breaux, we find there was more to the story:
While the official org charts for central administration and the office of the VP for external relations have still not been updated to include Darsee’s role or direct reports, we now know Darsee will have unfettered access to Harreld, and vice versa. And in terms of holding Harreld accountable for the millions of dollars that he and Darsee will inevitably flush down the toilet, that’s obviously a good thing. Having orchestrated the state-sanctioned taking of tens of millions of dollars from Iowa students and families, in part to fund a for-profit startup incubator, it also makes sense that Harreld would want to keep his new toady close at hand, so as to be able to direct the investment of those millions as Harreld sees fit.
The most interesting aspect of Breaux’s original report, which was initially published on 11/21/16, is an assertion of fact that she makes at the end — albeit presumably after interviewing Darsee for her story:
In using the word “unprompted” without quotes, Breaux makes it seem as if that is an established fact, and that Darsee had no idea he would be given a full-time, six-figure job at UI. As regular readers know, however, J. Bruce Harreld himself also lied about the origins of his candidacy for the UI presidency, and he did so specifically to cover up for the former alum and megadonor — Jerre Stead — who helped rig his ascendancy to that office. In Harreld’s initial telling, he had no interest in the job at all, and was only introduced to the process by Purdue President Mitch Daniels. Two months later, after that lie blew up in his face, Harreld said someone at Boston Consulting mentioned his name to the 2015 UI presidential search committee, but that was also a lie. In reality, it was homeboy Stead — who was literally on the search committee — who picked Harreld for the job.
Even from the facts as we knew them when Darsee’s hire was first announced, it was likely that his path was similarly greased by an influential backer. We don’t know who that might be — although John Pappajohn certainly springs to mind — but the idea that a former alum simply fell into a six-figure job at his alma mater, with what we now know to include a direct report to the fraudulently appointed president, is not credible. Which brings us now to another recent report, this time by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 11/22/18:
This is not only the first mention of a “five-member search committee”, but the very premise of such a committee is absurd. Search committees at UI — particularly for positions in central administration which report directly to the president — are not only substantially larger, they are also publicly named. As to who made up that rigged, rubber-stamping committee, it certainly did not matter. Darsee was going to be hired no matter who the other candidate was, and we know that because Darsee had already raked in a quarter million dollars working part-time, then began in his new position on the very day of his appointment. (One imagines he did not have to shift a pencil on his desk.)
Because the crony nature of Darsee’s hire would be blatantly obvious to everyone, a long-time UI spokesperson added the kind of spin you only get from people who know their own six-figure salary is safe no matter what drivel spills forth:
The reason Iowa didn’t need a search firm is because that would almost certainly have turned up a more qualified candidate than Darsee — at additional cost to the school no less. But it gets better.
Where to begin…? After a “national search”, Iowa hires a guy who’s already on the payroll, who is an alum, who just happened to wander back to UI out of the goodness of his heart. And yet, despite giving said wonderful guy a quarter million dollars each year to work tirelessly on behalf of the alma mater he loves, said wonderful guy will also continue to moonlight as a consultant, for profit. Even more amazing, however, is that the university is somehow casting this intrinsic conflict of interest as an asset, as if UI could not work with or learn from Oxford Sciences without allowing their new boy to remain on another institution’s payroll.
Why has UI slaved itself to a for-profit business incubator associated with a foreign university? I have no idea, but the first thought is that someone somewhere must be getting a helluva kickback, because that kind of relationship makes no sense. Unless of course your new boy doesn’t really know what the hell he’s doing — and, like Harreld when he was hired at Iowa, will have to serve an open-ended apprenticeship before he’s actually qualified to do the job he’s already being paid to do.
This is truly ludicrous. This is the result of a “national search”? A guy pulling down a quarter million dollars to learn on the job, from a foreign university — which almost certainly does not conform to the requirements of business development at public institutions of higher learning in the U.S? As to where Darsee’s salary is coming from, we get that at the close to Miller’s report:
On the latter point — that this new position does not require regent approval — consider that in the past year four new deans have been appointed at the University of Iowa’s eleven colleges, with a fifth search still in the works. The salary of the new dean at the UI College of Law is $350K, the salary for the new dean of the College of Public Health is $320K, the new dean of the College of Education is making $305K, and, because its students are mostly young women who go on to care for the sick and infirm, as opposed to pursing the kind of back-slapping, glad-handing, male-dominated careers the earn more money, the salary for the new dean of the College of nursing is $274K per year.
In that context, at an eye-popping $240K per year, Jon Darsee quite literally qualifies for a low-end, dean-like salary, yet as far as I can tell he has no direct supervisory or managerial role, and no responsibility for educating anyone about anything. Instead, he is simply there to make money for the school, and as such will be paid by the “Regents Economic Innovation Fund”.
Now, if you’ve never heard of that fund, join the club. Fortunately, because the Board of Regents is still an arm of state government — as opposed to a private concern run by shadowy cronies who tell Richards and Harreld who to hire and what to do — there are still publicly available records that fill in the blanks. For example, in a document titled “FY 2020 OPERATING AND OTHER APPROPRIATIONS REQUESTS“, from the September board meeting, we find that the regents are requesting an additional $4.4M for economic development for FY2020, to go along with a standing appropriation of $8.7M [p.1; details p.2].
As for the specific fund in question [p.5]:
Clearly, all of Darsee’s salary is coming from state money — meaning money contributed by taxpayers — as opposed to Iowa’s sacred tuition revenue. What should be equally clear, however, if not announced with a blaring klaxon, is that none of this economic development has anything to do with “student instruction”, which Harreld held out as necessary for discretionary spending from either tuition revenue or state appropriations. The technicality that allows Harreld to blow state money on Darsee’s salary, however, is right there in the quote from Harreld about closing the Labor Center:
The pertinent question, of course, is whether any tuition dollars, or comingled gen-ed funds, will be spent on innovation and economic development, and given the magnitude of the campaign that Harreld has outlined, particularly with regard to the UI Strategic Plan, it’s hard to see how they won’t. It’s not clear how anyone will ever get an actual accounting of where all the new tuition revenue goes, and whether any of it will be hosed down the drain in attempting to launch new products, but as we will see in a future post, there is some hope that such a public accounting may be possible.
The Secret of Harreld’s Success
In this post we looked at three apparently separate events which transpired over the past month: increasing tuition at the state schools on an annual basis for five years; closing the UI Labor Center; and hiring Jon Darsee to oversee innovation and economic development at Iowa. In fact, however, those events are inseparable in two important ways. First, as detailed above, they are part of Harreld’s conversion of the University of Iowa from an academic institution into an engine of economic development. Where ideas and knowledge once reigned supreme, money is now the final arbiter of what will and will not be funded outside of the requirements of accreditation.
From the perspective of for-profit research and business incubation — which, over time, will pervert the very soul of the school and the scholarship it produces — all three of those events are in fact one event. The tuition increases provide compulsory venture capital from students and families. Killing the Labor Center not only cripples workers across the state, but benefits the university in its own contract negotiations, this producing even more capital. And of course we now know Jon Darsee was hired to front for Harreld in directing where that capital will be spent, including which in-house research will and will not be funded based solely on its potential for returning a profit.
The second way in which all three events are inherently related goes to the very heart of the cancer that is Harreld’s administration. Along with being focused on economic exploitation instead of education, all three of these events — like Harreld’s presidency itself — are premeditated lies. What Casino Mike characterizes as “predictable tuition”, and what Harreld callously describes as “good for students”, is in fact state-sanctioned theft. Money in student and family bank accounts is being taken simply because the regents want more money, not because of any specific need.
In terms of closing the Labor Center, the purported justification is also a lie, because the university blows tens of millions of dollars on elective pursuits and programs which are not “directly related to student instruction”. And finally of course we have the Darsee hire, which was not the result of a national search, and was instead a crony appointment driven by a person or persons unknown, which Harreld is now papering over with yet more lies about a “five-person committee”.
And yet none of this should be a surprise, because we already know that Harreld would never have been appointed on the merits of his candidacy. Precisely because they could not make the case for the perversions he is now implementing, his co-conspirators — including the former president of the regents, the former interim president of the university, and an entrepreneurial megadonor — rigged the process in his favor. They cheated, then they and Harreld lied to cover up that fraud.
Now, three years later, the lies are metastasizing throughout the board and the University of Iowa, because that’s the only way Harreld can sneak this inherently risky entrepreneurial agenda past the taxpayers of Iowa. Harreld is not an honest person, he’s a liar and a cheat, and he was fraudulently appointed at Iowa to implement a massive grift. The only questions now are who will profit from the decisions that Harreld makes, and whether Jon Darsee knows that he just signed up take the heat.
Maybe it is a romantic notion, but the president of a university, let alone a public university, should be able to lay out the reasoning for the programs he wants to implement. Instead, with Harreld, who is the living embodiment of a lie, we get deceit. Everything — from tuition hikes to program cuts to hires — is a lie, and all of it is designed to support his entrepreneurial agenda.
Following the election of Kim Reynolds to her first full, four-year term, and the imposition of mandatory tuition hikes by the Iowa Board of Regents for the next five years, November sealed the fate of high-education in Iowa well into the next decade. In fact, because Reynolds will eventually appoint all but two of the nine members of that board to revolving six-year terms, her crony political influence on that body will span a decade, even if someone succeeds her in 2022. As for the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld’s illegitimate presidency is indeed producing the administrative fruits that he and his co-conspirators imagined when he was imposed on the UI campus, and there is little reason to believe that agenda will be checked by anyone.
In that context, it seemed to me that the board and university would not only have smooth sailing after the November elections, but would clamp down on public disclosures all the more, if not fall silent between the regent meetings in mid-November and the next scheduled meetings in early January. To the contrary, however, not only does relevant news continue to spill forth, but, inexplicably, Harreld is still fighting one particular battle that he has already won. Why that is happening, and how it fits into the big picture of public-funded higher education in Iowa, I do not know, but it is certainly curious.
What follows, in chronological order, are a number of stories we have tracked in the near or distant past, which reappeared in the press over the past two-plus months. We will take a closer look at some of these issues in the next few weeks — particularly excerpts from Harreld’s Daily Iowan interviews — while others will simply serve as background information or updates. (I may also add additional stories to this post between now and the end of the year.)
Raise.Me Update
In early March of 2016, after only four months on the job, J. Bruce Harreld threw himself into the statewide rollout of a partnership between the University of Iowa and a micro-scholarship startup called Raise.me. Then and now, that press offensive represented the most-focused PR campaign by Harreld to promote any initiative, yet even at the time it didn’t make a lot of sense. Upon closer inspection, in fact, not only did the program prove to be dubious, but the main advantage for the university seemed to be improved data scraping about students.
A few months ago, the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller updated that high-tech partnership in a story published on 10/01/18:
Because familial wealth correlates positively with student success in college, and thus also with improved national college rankings for the schools those students attend, one of the quickest ways to improve a school’s rank is to enroll wealthier students. Because Harreld tied the Raise.me program to a negative indicator of familial wealth (school lunch programs), and involvement in the Raise.me program has subsequently fallen off, it’s worth asking whether the whole point of Iowa’s involvement in the Raise.me program was to allow Harreld to identify students from less-affluent families, then exclude them in order to improve the school’s ranking. (Based on the slate of tuition hikes that Harreld has already pushed through in three years, and the five years of additional hikes that he just secured from the Board of Regents, it is self-evident that students will have to pay significantly more for the exact same degree they were getting before Harreld was hired.)
October DI Interview with Harreld
Despite an almost pathological aversion to the press — which, in itself, is a rare quality in the president of a public research university — Harreld does speak with some regularity to the student-run Daily Iowan. In prior years we have taken a close look at Harreld’s responses to multiple incisive questions by the DI reporters, but for this interview we focused almost exclusively on Harreld’s persecution of the UI Labor Center, and his consequent petty, bratty, vindictive betrayal of shared governance only months after UI was removed from the AAUP sanctions list for violating same. The full October interview is here.
October DI Interview with Gary Barta
For a variety of reasons — including particularly his flagrant discrimination against two former athletics department employees, and the punishing $6.5M jury award that followed — Iowa AD Gary Barta has given few interviews to the Daily Iowan over the past three years. On 10/22/18, however, up popped an extensive interview with Barta, and one issue in particular deserves notice:
Until last summer Barta was steadfast in opposing alcohol sales. Having opened the door to the idea in July, however, we can now see him clearly laying the groundwork for that change in policy. As for Barta’s claim that alcohol sales would not be approved for revenue reasons, that’s laughable on its face, like the time he said he didn’t discriminate against those two women in his office….
While it is a very good thing that the UI athletics department is wholly self-supporting, that also provides an incentive for Barta to look for new revenue wherever he can find it. Like Harreld and his money-grubbing tuition hikes, Barta not only knows he won’t have to share any alcohol revenue with the academic side of the ledger, but that money will be unrestricted, meaning he can spend it on whatever he wants. Underscoring Barta’s disingenuous arguments in support of alcohol sales is the blatantly obvious fact that the words “fan experience” are a euphemism for ticket sales. If people are watching the game on TV in a sports bar, that’s money lost at the gate.
(For context, early this year Oklahoma University hired a Harreld-esque president — meaning someone from the private sector, who had no prior experience in academic administration. Between firing six administrators on his first day, and gutting another fifty staff positions at the beginning of November, the new OU president suggested that one means of stemming OU’s budget woes would be to allow alcohol sales at sporting events. It’s the money.)
Finally, let’s pay particular attention to Barta’s idiotic definition of acceptable alcohol use as “safe, legal, and responsible”. Yes — of course — if everyone behaves responsibly while watching a ritual war play out in front of them in real time, then there aren’t going to be any problems. Historically, however, there is a persistent correlation between alcohol consumption and irresponsible behavior at sporting events, which is why alcohol hasn’t been sold at Kinnick. Given Iowa’s equally persistent reputation as a party school, and to continue making gains in fighting the entrenched binge-drinking culture which fueled that reputation, Iowa should not allow alcohol sales at games, no matter what the fans are doing to themselves in the parking lot.
November Interlude
The three stories above reach back to October. In November we had the elections, followed quickly by a joyous Iowa Board of Regents socking the students at Iowa and Iowa State with five years of guaranteed-minimum three-percent tuition hikes. The board then also gave J. Bruce Harreld its blessing in killing off the UI Labor Center, despite protests near and far.
Flashing forward to December….
The 2020 Task Force Phase II Final Report
Between August and December of 2017, the Phase II committee of the 2020 Task Force posted regular updates. After the December 1st progress report, however, the committee fell silent for over a year. On December 6th of 2018, after a great deal of uncertainty, the committee delivered its final report, and it is a very strange document indeed. (You can find the 2020 Task Force website here, which includes additional info, plus a link to the final Phase II report.)
We will be taking a close look at the final report in an upcoming post. In the meantime, check coverage from the DI’s Marissa Payne on 12/06/18, and the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller on 12/14/18.
The New $10M Finkbine Clubhouse
On what turned out to be a busy news day, Miller also updated the story of the new $10M Finkbine Clubhouse on 12/06/18. Hilariously, the university’s plans for an all-inclusive golfing extravaganza will have to be scaled back, because all of the bids came in over budget. (And we still don’t know which donor is shelling out all of that money.)
The $10M clubhouse is interesting in itself, but that project also relates to a large real-estate development on the west side of campus, which Miller also updated in her reporting:
Prior post about the clubhouse here; prior post about the real estate development here.
Harreld Calls for More State Support
Also on 12/06/18, radio station KCJJ reported that Harreld was calling for more state funding:
As regular readers know, the snob-appeal at the end is pure Harreld. In his elitist world view you’re either golden, or you’re nothing.
Still, it’s important to flag this reporting for two substantive reasons. First, because Harreld once again told an obvious and easily refuted lie. Tuition at UI has already increased 18% over three years, and will now increase a minimum of 16% over the next five years — and more if the state does not cover the cost of inflation. Second, it is not a surprise that Harreld is now openly talking about increasing state funding — after having said, as recently as 2017, that UI did not need any more state appropriations — because he just locked up a guaranteed new revenue stream with his tuition hikes. With that new revenue coming in, however, Harreld has disincented the governor and legislature from providing any additional state funds, and that includes inflation adjustments. (As noted in multiple prior posts, the tick-tock of raising tuition, then complaining about lack of state support, benefits everyone. The school ends up with more revenue overall, albeit pilfered from student bank accounts, while the state retains more money that it can devote to corporate tax breaks.)
The Children’s Hospital Court Saga
Harreld’s desperate, last-ditch attempt to avoid an arbitrator’s ruling continues to play out in the courts. The Gazette’s Vanessa Miller updated the university’s pending appeal on 12/07/18, then reported on oral arguments the following week, on 12/13/18. (Having secured a new flood of tuition revenue from student bank accounts, the university is in better position to pay off the pending $17.6M judgement, but of course Harreld would rather keep that cash on hand, so he can spend it on whatever he wants.)
The Labor Center Is Not Dead Yet
If any story surprised me after the November regent meetings, it was this one. Harreld rigged the termination of the UI Labor Center, then got the regents to sign off, yet despite that sanction he was whining like a bratty baby a month later. From the Gazette’s Miller, on 12/10/18:
While it is not news that Harreld is being personal and petty, given that he holds all the cards it is still baffling. All he has to do is keep his mouth shut and mind his own business, and the Labor Center will almost certainly die. About the only thing I can think is of that despite having gotten his way, he is taking a great deal of heat behind the scenes — and indeed that possibility seems to be confirmed in the next story.
December DI Interview with Harreld
I was also surprised when the DI published a second interview with Harreld only two months after the interview in October. My impression — which was wildly wrong — was that Harreld tended to give two extended interviews each year, and here he was again in only as many months. In fact, as Marissa Payne, the DI’s managing editor, pointed out to me: “Harreld has given the DI 13 sit-down interviews since his 2015 start – two per semester, four per year. (Year 1, he gave three.)”
In thinking over how I got that so wrong, I probably just tend to remember the interviews that I write about at length, and that was probably two per year. As to why the December interview seemed so quick, I do think it was a shorter gap than other years, but I also think the November elections produced a kind of time-dilation factor in my head. In any event, this DI interview was conducted on 12/07/18, then published on 12/12/18 — meaning it bridged Miller’s report just above — and once again Harreld was ranting about the Labor Center:
We will dig into all of this in an upcoming post, but if several regents are involved in ongoing discussions, then this is clearly not a done deal — even though it is, administratively, a done deal. (By temperament Harreld is a brat, and brats are, by their very nature, incapable of knowing which battles to lose. The odds are still heavily in his favor, but he may end up making committed enemies by killing off the Labor Center.)
The Student-Housing War is Here
One quirk of the new west-side UI real-estate project is that the university has no interest in building any student housing, but it’s not hard to see why. Put up more student housing on one side of campus and you compete with your own dorms on the other side. And no university administrator wants empty dorms.
We looked at the Iowa City student-housing market back in mid-July, in the context of a planned, large-scale, private-sector development just off the UI campus. That project was given the general go-ahead in the months that followed, but still to be determined was the maximum allowable height of the new residential towers. On 12/13/18, the DI’s Caleb McCullough reported that the city approved the full fifteen-story implementation, which will feature 1,000 new units for 2,000 to 3,000 students, depending on occupancy.
Needless to say, that sudden increase in supply may very well take a big chunk of revenue off the table at UI. That in turn is why, as noted in an earlier post, Harreld has floated the idea of making on-campus housing mandatory for the first two years of study. (In keeping with the theme that it’s never about the money, when of course it’s always about the money, UI administrators are already trying on-campus living to student success.)
While this private-sector development sets a new bar in terms of sheer scale for Iowa City and Johnson County, it also holds the promise of taking price pressure off housing near the campus and downtown — which has been a big problem for students for decades. As for the university, the school just recently opened two new dorms, while also capping then decreasing enrollment, so concerns about generating revenue from room and board are very real. In fact, UI already has one remote dorm — the Mayflower — which is running at partial occupancy.
Additional background:
04/25/16 — Gazette article on the Mayflower.
09/05/18 — DI article about Pentacrest Garden Apartments being approved by IC.
09/06/18 — DI article on the opening of the Rise apartments.
09/08/18 — Enrollment down at UI and ISU — AP corrected version.
09/10/18 — Press-Citizen report on the Mayflower running at 60% occupancy.
09/11/18 — DI article on Pentacrest Gardens pushing for full height of buildings.
Looking Ahead to the New Year
Along with posts about the Labor Center and the 2020 Task Force Phase II final report, in the coming weeks we will follow up on prior posts about J. Bruce Harreld’s entrepreneurial insurgency at UI. That in turn will put the question of money front and center, which is fortuitous given that former Iowa assistant attorney general Rob Sand is taking over the state auditor’s office in early January. (I have some questions for him.)
In the previous post we updated a slate of stories from the first three years of J. Bruce Harreld’s unfolding fraudulent presidency at the University of Iowa. With regard to two of those stories — including Harreld’s premeditated administrative termination of the UI Labor Center, and the oddly hostile Phase II final report of the 2020 Task Force — we also noted that we would be taking a closer at those subjects. In this post we will document Harreld’s continued abuse of both the Labor Center as an academic institution and objective truth as a core tenet of education, and in the next post we will tackle the gripy final report of the Phase II committee.
Following the sucker-punch announcement in July that the venerable UI Iowa Labor Center would be closed at the end of the current fiscal year, we inventoried all of the ways that Harreld used his pilfered administrative authority to achieve that end. In a series of posts in August and early September (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) we detailed the blatant lies Harreld told to justify axing the Labor Center, including lying about the methodology of the overall program review, lying about the new budget model, and lying about his own involvement in that decision. Unfortunately, because the only check on Harreld’s power comes from the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents, which is itself dominated by political and business cronies who are hostile to workers and labor, it was a foregone conclusion that the regents would approve closing the program at their November meeting, which they did.
Despite having achieved his ignoble end, however, only a few weeks later Harreld was inexplicably back on the attack against the Labor Center, in two separate press outlets over five days. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 12/10/18:
As regular readers know, Harreld is consumed with portraying himself as the smartest guy in the room. In routinely appreciating his own genius, however, he also regularly outs his abuses of power precisely because he assumes that everyone else is just too damn dumb to catch on to what he’s really doing. The condescending quote above is a perfect example of that, because not only does it show Harreld looking down his pugnacious nose at the very people he abused, but it is another lie designed to ensure that the Labor Center dies next summer.
To begin, note that without batting an eye Harreld flips from furloughing “them”, meaning the five-person full-time staff, to furloughing “it”, meaning the program itself. As it stands now, while employment with the university is up in the air for the current Labor Center staff — who may be transferred to other positions, as some of the employees at the UI Alumni Association were when Harreld summarily killed off that program — as of the November board meeting, the program itself has been terminated. Speaking of which, the regents are also apparently confused about the difference between “closing something and furloughing it”.
From the pertinent agenda item for the regent meetings this past November, which passed on the morning of 11/16/18, following a perfunctory vote:
The reality of Harreld’s furlough ploy is that it allows him to look like he’s giving the Labor Center a chance while he continues to do everything in his power to ensure the demise of that program. Even better, while furlough status obscures Harreld’s menace, it simultaneously puts the onus on the Labor Center employees to save themselves from Harreld’s abuse. As is often the case with Harreld and his administration, however, we find unintentional confirmation of that ploy in what seems, at first, to be an entirely separate story about another administrative abuse at Iowa, but in fact involves the exact same scam.
This past Wednesday it was reported that three former veteran officers at the UI Department of Public Safety were suing the university for age discrimination. As to the specifics of those claims, note the gambit employed by Public Safety Director Scott Beckner — who was hired by Harreld in June of 2016, following yet another administrative debacle — in a report on that case by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, on 12/26/18:
The reality of a furlough at Iowa is that it represents an attempt to avoid policies and procedures which otherwise keep administrators from firing whoever they want on any given day. Harreld wanted to kill off the Labor Center, Beckner wanted to get rid of older and pricier employees — and what do you know but they both somehow independently opted for the same ‘furlough’ ploy. In the latter case, that bit of cleverness just landed UI in court — though to be fair, there may be some synergies involved because everyone is suing Iowa these days. In the former case, even after securing the official bureaucratic “closing” of the Labor Center by the board which governs the state schools, Harreld is still pitching a bratty fit because the employees who will be out of a job in six months refuse to play along and treat him as their savior.
As a reminder, here is what Harreld actually did to the UI Labor Center — even before the fake furloughs were announced — to kill off that venerable program. First, back in April he promised that centers and institutes would be reviewed in concert with the shared governance process on campus. That turned out to be an overt lie, which is why the Labor Center director and staff had no idea they were even on Harreld’s hit list until the closing was announced. Second, Harreld claimed that the final decision was made by the new dean of the UI College of Law, using the greater budgetary discretion provided by the ‘new’ UI budget model. That in turn was also a lie, because Harreld reserved the right to make the final determination about any cuts. (Had the new dean opted to continue funding the Labor Center, Harreld would have overruled him.)
Continuing from Miller’s report on the Labor Center, from 12/10/18:
Again, Harreld makes it sound like there is an ongoing conversation about the status of the centers and institutes that he closed, but that’s not the case. As of November, the regents approved Harreld’s desire to close those programs. If those programs want to continue to exist, not only do they have to agree to Harreld’s terms as a precondition — and in the case of the Labor Center, that means becoming self-funding in less than a year — but critically, as we will shortly see, Harreld also gets to approve that change of status.
To underscore Harreld’s hostility to the Labor Center as an academic program, note that from April to July he intentionally kept the Labor Center in the dark about the possibility that it might be closed, thus depriving the staff of the opportunity to attempt to meet his subsequently revealed terms. That is not what you do when you want people to succeed, that is what you do when you want them to fail. Despite Harreld himself working at every turn to sink the Labor Center, however, the director and staff are determined to persevere:
Here we can see how important the four months between April and July really were, and why Harreld kept the Labor Center in the dark. While the director should not accept Harreld’s abrupt funding cut — which is predicated on multiple lies — he did cleverly deny her four months during which she could have advocated for the survival of her program. And yet…despite having achieved his objective, Harreld is still kicking the Labor Center in the teeth:
Like J. Bruce Harreld himself, the Labor Center is almost seventy years old. However, where Harreld is a carpetbagging dilettante who had no association with the state prior to being imposed on the UI community by a small cabal of crony conspirators, the Labor Center has been a fixture at the school for the span of Harreld’s entire life, and has been doing good works across the state the entire time. In that context, having carpetbagging garbage talk about how he is :willing” to allow that venerable academic program to use Iowa’s brand, or give them office space, is not only repugnant, it betrays Harreld’s contempt for public education. That he then openly characterizes the response of the Labor Center as infantile — after he himself victimized that program, and is driving five full-time employees out of their jobs — betrays the practiced instincts of a bully.
As noted above, however, it’s worse than that. Instead of simply taking a cold-hearted administrative stand in opposition to the Labor Center, Harreld is now positioning himself as the program’s final hope for deliverance, if only the staff would wise up and realize that he himself is the answer to their prayers.
Where to begin…? First, note that Harreld is once again trying to change the conversation, to get the Labor Center to accept the injustice of the funding cut he imposed. (To their credit, the Labor Center has flatly rejected Harreld’s false claim that they are not an academic program.) Second, who can blame the Labor Center for rejecting an offer of help from the person who is killing that program? Harreld put a match to the Labor Center and is watching it burn. Third, any pretense that the final decision was made by the new law school dean is now completely gone. Harreld is clearly saying that he will not allow any gen-ed fund dollars to be spent on the Labor Center, even if the dean of the College of Law is willing to do so. Finally, and in keeping with Harreld’s core values, all of this also serves as ass-covering, so Harreld can claim he tried to save the victims that he drowned with his own hands.
All of which now brings us back to the fact that in early December, Harreld should have been enjoying a twisted giggle because he had, officially, killed off the Labor Center. All he had to do for the next seven months was go through the motions and keep his mouth shut, and the director of the Labor Center would almost inevitably fail to replace the funding that he would no longer provide. At worst the program might limp along for a year or two, but over that time Harreld could move the offices into the basement of an old building, and otherwise make the lives of the staff a living hell until they threw in the towel.
So why was Harreld still taking swings at the Labor Center, over and above trying to cover his own backside? Well, two days after Miller published her article, we got the answer to that question in one of Harreld’s regular interview with the student-run Daily Iowan. (Although that interview was published on 12/12/18, it was conducted on 12/07/18, meaning Harreld’s responses predate the quotes that Miller published on 12/10. I don’t know if Iowa released a transcript of the interview to other news outlets, including the Gazette, or whether UI launched an impromptu public relations campaign to broadcast the arguments that Harreld made will talking to the DI, but the overlap is worth noting.)
Fittingly, the closing of the Labor Center was the first topic raised in the 12/07/18 DI interview. Betraying his malice and disdain, Harreld skipped any phony laments about state budget cuts and instead blamed his victims right off the bat:
Setting aside the fact that every single justification Harreld has put forward for closing the Labor Center is a provable lie, note the consistency of his messaging between this interview and his comments in the Gazette three days later. It’s not that he sandbagged the Labor Center (which he did), and gave the staff a short window in which to respond (which he did), it’s that the ungrateful rubes in that program have not taken him up on his fake offer of salvation. As to where these fits of bile came from, we get the answer in the next paragraph:
It’s not often that we get any genuine visibility into what is happening behind the scenes at the University of Iowa — which both Harreld and the regents are treating more and more like a private corporation these days, as opposed to a governmental institution — but this passage from Harreld is a real eyeopener. While Harreld states that “no one from the Labor Center has reached out” to him personally, at the same time he does allow that the Labor Center has reached out to pretty much every other constituency that might intercede on their behalf — and it’s a formidable list. Not only are the “Labor Center leaders” pushing back, but there are “state officials”, “administration members” and, “in some cases”, “Board of Regents members” who are involved.
Equally telling is the offhand way that Harreld says, “I am aware” of all of those conversations, because one of the things those people are probably doing is calling up Harreld and asking him to reverse course . To be clear, the leadership at the Iowa Board of Regents, and the greater political apparatus in Iowa state government, are lethally hostile to workers and labor, so Harreld has plenty of backing, but closing the Labor Center is clearly not going the way he thought it would. To the extent that he himself is feeling some heat because of his determination to close that program, that may very well be why he suddenly decided to vent his spleen to the press, despite having already won that war.
As for Harreld’s self-professed fundraising prowess, note that other than his toxic ego needs there is nothing preventing him from proactively making calls and finding money for the Labor Center. He has effectively stated that he can raise the required funds almost effortlessly, but he won’t do that until the staff of the Labor Center get down on their knees and beg him for help. (For the record, there is no evidence that fundraising has picked up since Harreld took office, and indeed he has faltered in raising money for the new art museum, which is once again on hold.)
Ultimately, however, what Harreld is offering is merely a restatement of the ultimatum he delivered back in July:
It’s actually hard to track all the different ways that Harreld is sabotaging the Labor Center, and that includes this ploy-within-a-ploy. On one hand Harreld insists that the Labor Center must pay its own way, which would mean it would be solely up to that program to pay the bills as they came due. On the other hand, Harreld is saying it’s not enough just to find money on a year-to-year basis — the Labor Center must prove, in advance, that it has a “long-term, sustainable source of funding” in order to remain on campus. So which is it? If the University of Iowa is merely a governmental landlord, why does Harreld get to insist on the right to approve or disapprove of that program’s finances?
Here of course we see the real point of Harreld’s determination to kill off the Labor Center by any means available. He knows full well that he rigged the entire justification for cutting funds to that program, which means the next UI president will almost certainly restore gen-end funding if that program is still around. Because that is not what Harreld’s political and business minders want, he has to do whatever it takes to make sure that program dies while he can still run roughshod over whatever is left of UI as an academic institution.
On that point, it is also worth noting the stark contrast in leadership between the petty, bratty and vindictive J. Bruce Harreld, and Labor Center Director Jennifer Sherer. Harreld literally holds all of the cards, he has achieved his objective of closing the Labor Center, yet he is still pitching a deeply dishonest recitation of the facts to the press. By contrast, despite being on the receiving end of Harreld’s constant abuse, Sherer has conducted herself with dignity and respect for the university as an academic institution. In so doing she has proven she is precisely the kind of committed, can-do administrator that the university should be supporting and empowering.
Whatever happens between now and June, it will be an interesting six months….
I intended the next post to be a review of the Phase II report of the 2020 Task Force at the University of Iowa, and that post is still in-process. Following up on a brief note I posted in the index to this thread, however, I wanted to take a closer look at the recent interview that UI president J. Bruce Harreld gave to Chinese media. Published online on 01/02/09, that interview not only seems exceedingly conciliatory at a time of significant tension between the two countries, as well as aggression by China on multiple fronts, but it raises important questions about why Harreld is promoting Chinese interests ahead of American national security.
After posting a few of the thoughts that follow in a Twitter thread , I kept an eye on Iowa media to see if there would be any follow-up, but there has been no attention paid to Harreld’s interview. Then again, with the Des Moines Register recently gutting its news staff, and morphing into little more than a right-wing propaganda operation in service of the powers-that-be in state government, there doesn’t seem to be any news outlet in the state that covers higher-ed in a national or global context. (That’s particularly problematic given that the Board of Regents, and Harreld in particular, are always talking about the University of Iowa being a ‘world-class’ institution — unless of course that’s just hype.)
As noted in these virtual pages on multiple occasions during 2018, the FBI has not only issued warnings about Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, but specifically about the Confucius Institutes that China has insinuated on college and university campuses across the United States. As regular readers know, the UI is host to a Confucius Institute, which until a few months ago, was not only funded by the Chinese government, but subsidized by the people of the Iowa. From Tim Johnson at McClatchy, on 02/14/18:
Note that this warning preceded Donald Trump’s trade war by six months, and clearly related to national security concerns about intellectual property theft and espionage. While there was no official response from the Iowa Board of Regents or from Harreld, shortly after the McClatchy report the Daily Iowan’s Brooklyn Draisey provided significant local detail on 02/16/18. From that reporting, here is the sum of the official response from UI administration:
Flash forward to July of 2018 and the UI Confucius Institute appeared on a list of centers and institutes that the school intended to close in the coming year, but national security was not a factor in that inclusion. Instead, the university was cutting off any state support for those programs, compelling them to either self-fund or close. Several months later Trump launched his ego-driven trade war with China, immediately killing soybean exports from Iowa farmers — a major financial hit that ironically triggered billions in federal subsidies.
At the same time, Chinese interference in American politics, and ongoing concerns about IP theft and espionage, led the FBI to issue another warning in mid-December. From Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post, as reprinted in the Gazette on 12/12/18:
In that overarching context, then — and with Harreld having avoided any comment about the Confucius Institute on campus — it was more than a little jarring to read this only a few weeks later, on 01/02/19:
In the past we noted, with some incredulity, that Harreld himself claimed to have a “multicultural background” simply because people in his family spoke Mandarin. Clearly, however, his involvement with China is considerably more extensive than has been previously reported. Leaving aside the stark difference between the Chinese-sponsored Confucius Institute on the UI campus, and the world-renowned, home-grown IWP, what Harreld disclosed with familial pride is that he is personally exposed to multiple points of pressure that could be applied by the Chinese government, either directly to him or indirectly to family members. And yes, that’s all very cloak-and-dagger, but recall the February warning from FBI Director Wray:
Not only has there never been a public national security conversation about the Confucius Institute at Iowa, but now we learn that Harreld has deep ties to that country which could not only materially affect his disposition to that particular program, but which objectively leave him exposed to coercion that other college and university presidents would not be exposed to. On top of an implicit or explicit threat to cut off the steady supply of highly lucrative Chinese students to the school, the Chinese government could influence Harreld through his extended family, both in the U.S. and China.
Given that we do not know the origins or purpose of this interview, it’s not only worth asking who facilitated Harreld’s exceedingly conciliatory remarks, it’s worth noting that this interview appeared in Chinese media just as America’s relationship with that country is devolving. And of course the larger global context is equally disturbing. At the same time that China — an autocratic, communist, anti-democratic country — is threatening the nascent democracy of Taiwain, including with the use of military force, J. Bruce Harreld is selling sunshine and rainbows about America’s “most severe counterintelligence threat”:
If you’re wondering why the president of a multi-billion-dollar public research university in the American Midwest is talking about sharing and cooperating on infrastructure with China, join the club. Were I in the State Department or Pentagon — which are both wrestling with China’s determination to project new infrastructure into the South China Sea — I would want to know what Harreld was talking about. In fact, if I was a member of the Iowa Board of Regents, I would want to know why one of my university presidents was giving an interview to China that not only seemed at odds with America’s national security interests, but with the current economic and political context between the two countries.
The simplest explanation, of course — as alluded to above — is that Harreld slobbered all over China out of fiscal self-interest:
While there is a long and storied tradition of proffering shameless flattery in pursuit of wealth across all civilizations, history teaches that doing so also carries a price, and particularly so with autocratic leaders. That Harreld’s gaudy flattery undercuts warnings from the FBI is an obvious concern, because it gives China cover in its disputes with the U.S. Again, only a few weeks after the FBI warned that China is trying to “influence American discourse”, up pops Harreld calling China “a wonderful country”.
Chinese students are indeed good for Iowa’s bottom line, which is probably why the regents will stay mum about Harreld’s embarrassingly enthusiastic interview. Note, however, that even a crass profit motive does not excuse willful blindness regarding Iowa’s exposure to China’s intelligence services. As for the idea that any trust is being built between the two countries, particularly at a personal level, not only does that statement reek of the “naiveté” that the FBI warned about, but only days before Harreld’s interview appeared online, we learned just how inconsequential personal relationships really are to China, even between prominent governmental leaders.
As you may or may not know, the current ambassador to China is former Iowa governor Terry Branstad, who took that job, at least in part, because of his personal friendship with current Chinese president Xi Jinping. So how is that working out for Branstad, for Iowa, and for the United States? From Jane Perlez and Luz Ding, writing for the New York Times on 12/30/18 — or three days before Harreld’s laudatory interview appeared in Chinese media:
So the NYT reports that Terry Branstad — a personal friend of the Chinese president — is snubbed by China, then a couple days later China publishes an interview with Harreld in which he which he gushes about his personal and familial relationship with that country. But it gets worse. Only one day after Harreld’s interview was published, the State Department updated a prior travel warning. From CNBC’s Dan Mangan, on 01/03/19:
Set aside everything we’ve learned about J. Bruce Harreld over the past three years, and if you wanted to create a college or university president who was vulnerable to Chinese exploitation, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a better mix than than someone who was desperate for cash on one hand, and who had immediate familial ties to China on the other. As to this particular interview, whether Harreld was seduced or coerced, or simply functioned as a useful idiot, it doesn’t take paranoia to see all of the ways that China might insinuate itself into the University of Iowa.
Speaking of which….while Harreld continues his all-out campaign to kill off the UI Labor Center — despite the overwhelming benefit that program provides to workers in the state — only a few weeks ago he signaled that the Confucius Institute may be able to buy another five years on campus. From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, less than a month ago, on 12/10/18:
From earlier reporting by the Daily Iowan’s Brooklyn Draisey there is indeed an endowment that has been built up over the years, but that money is actually sitting in the UI Center for Advancement:
I am not an expert in the dark art of laundering money through a university foundation, so perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between an endowment and a “quasi-endowment”. But if that money is sitting in the UI Center for Advancement — which is the university’s separate, non-profit, fundraising organization — then at the very least someone should make sure the university does not in fact have legal control over those funds. Because if that is the case, then allowing the Confucius Institute to draw against those funds would mean that Iowa was still subsidizing that program.
If Iowa paid heed to the FBI warnings, and ordered the closure of the Confucius Institute on that basis, who would keep that $1.2M endowment? If the answer is the university, then one obvious question would be why Harreld decided to do the Confucius Institute the favor of giving back that money. (If that money does belong to the Confucius Institute, why has it accrued over the years? What was the original point of that endowment?)
To those specific concerns, let us now add something we do know about J. Bruce Harreld, which is that he is literally for sale. To whatever extent he might draw a line between selling out the people of Iowa and selling out the United States, it is objectively true that his first act — only moments after being fraudulently appointed in September of 2015 — was to lie to the press, the people of Iowa and the UI community about the origins of his candidacy. Two months later, Harreld then told a completely contradictory lie for the same reason: to obscure his prior longstanding relationship to UI megadonor Jerre Stead, who was one of the co-conspirators who rigged Harreld’s hire. In exchange for abetting that fraud against the people of Iowa, Harreld will be paid $4M over five years by the people of Iowa .
If you are looking for a man of integrity, J. Bruce Harreld is not your man. If you are looking for a man who is not only vulnerable to Chinese influence, but might actively abet Chinese goals, J. Bruce Harreld meets the criteria — which brings us to a larger point. Who at the Iowa Board of Regents, in Iowa government, or in the federal government, is responsible for looking into the origins of Harreld’s recent interview with Chinese media? At the exact same moment that the FBI and State Department are issuing serious warnings about China, and China is snubbing former Iowa governor and current U.S. Ambassador Terry Branstad, Harreld is embracing that same country. Why?
Questions that need answers:
* Does anyone in Harreld’s extended family have exposure to the travel restrictions that the State Department warned about? Has anyone been threatened with, or affected by, a so-called “travel ban”?
* Why has Harreld ignored official national security concerns about the UI Confucius Center?
* Who contacted Harreld about giving this interview, and when?
* What was the basis for the interview, and was it granted through the UI Office of Strategic Communication, or some other official UI contact?
* Specifically, what infrastructure projects was Harreld talking about?
* What points of contact — official and unofficial — has Harreld had with Chinese officials, whether about the Confucius Institute or other subjects?
Again, if you have any doubts about how far J. Bruce Harreld might go to placate China, consider this final quote from the interview in question:
This is the same man who, in May of 2018, not only lied about his obligation to meet with contingent UI faculty, but when he was finally compelled to do so insisted on holding that meeting in the basement of the UI Department of Public Safety, which is manned by armed campus police. This is also the same man who, in early 2017, attempted to illegally shift $4.2M in tuition costs onto students and families, by reneging on scholarships that Iowa was legally obligated to pay. And of course, as noted above, Harreld is also waging a very public war to kill off the UI Labor Center, while at the same time bending over backwards for a communist country with familial ties.
Despite — or perhaps all the more so because of — his illegitimacy, it is Harreld’s responsibility, as the president of one of sixty-two AAU research universities in North America, and the responsibility of the Iowa Board of Regents, to make sure U.S. national security concerns are taken seriously. The indignant rejoinder to this post would be that Harreld is an upstanding citizen who would never knowingly undermine the United States, yet one reading of the interview in question makes clear that he just did. In terms of propaganda value alone, in the current geopolitical context everything Harreld just said, let alone the choices he is making on the UI campus, runs counter to America’s stated national security concerns, and that in turn gives China an ally in its determination to “influence American discourse.”
In January of 2017, the then-provost of the University of Iowa, P. Barry Butler — who had risen through the ranks while giving three decades of service to the school — did a very strange thing. Though he had already applied for one or more jobs out of state, and was intent on joining the administrative exodus that followed the corrupt 2015 hire of president J. Bruce Harreld, Butler launched a comprehensive review of the entire academic structure of the UI campus. Sure enough, two months later Butler was gone, yet the ponderously named Academic Organizational Structure 2020 Task Force would live on…and on.
Phase I of the UI 2020 Initiative was to be conducted by a small cabal of college deans. Curiously, of the four deans who were ostensibly appointed by Butler, all four also happened to be enthusiastic supporters of the eminently unqualified J. Bruce Harreld. (Included were: Tippie College of Business dean Sarah Gardial, who was a member of the corrupt search committee which facilitated Harreld’s sham hire; Sue Curry, then dean of the College of Public Health; Alec Scranton, dean of the College of Engineering; and John Keller, dean of the Graduate College, who would prove to be useful to Harreld in multiple ways in the coming years.)
Following Butler’s late-February announcement that he was jumping ship, Harreld appointed Curry as his loyal interim provost, meaning she would also oversee Butler’s orphaned campus-wide review. Curry in turn appointed Dan Clay — whom Harreld hired in early 2016 as dean of the College of Education, in part because of Clay’s entrepreneurial advocacy — to take her vacated spot in the dean quartet. Flash forward six months, and on 09/08/17 those four objective and unbiased deans submitted their objective and unbiased Phase I report to the objective and unbiased Curry.
We took a brief look at that report in a short, restrained note on 11/11/17, titled, Interim Provost Sue Curry’s Crusade to Destroy the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. More substantive posts on Curry and the Phase I committee followed over the next month or so (see here, here and here), all of them focused on the fact that their report was designed to give Curry, and thus Harreld, an excuse to break up the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), which is heart and soul of the University of Iowa as an academic institution. Needless to say, that objective — albeit furtively presented — engendered considerable pushback, thus underscoring one of the disadvantages of public higher education, as opposed to presiding over a private higher-ed banana republic. If you are going to rig a review process to produce a fake consensus, which can then be used as a plausible excuse to wreck the place, at some point you actually have to commit that intent to print. Despite protestations to the contrary, the September, 2017 Phase I report made clear that CLAS was being targeted for sweeping changes by Curry and her four horsedeans, in the corrupt interests of the shadowy J. Bruce Harreld.
Even before the Phase I report was officially submitted, however, in August of 2017 Curry signaled her bit-champing determination to give the second phase of the campus-wide review the bum’s rush. Not only would a larger, more diverse Phase II committee begin work almost immediately, but that second phase would conclude with a comprehensive report “early in the spring semester” — meaning early in 2018. (That blazing pace in turn echoed Harreld’s prior rush to produce a new strategic plan, which he now uses as purported proof of campus-wide consensus on his entrepreneurial agenda.)
Following the release of the rigged Phase I report in September of 2017, Curry updated her original charge to the Phase II committee that October. Specifically, that group was to “combine campus input with the Phase I report to generate a second report for the Offices of the President and Provost”. Over the next two months, into early December, the Phase II committee produced four regular updates, all in anticipation of rapidly concluding that campus dialogue, issuing a final report, and getting on with the business of killing Iowa as a liberal arts university. But then a funny thing happened. After an otherwise innocuous update on 12/01/17, the 2020 Task Force fell silent…for over a year.
Only on 12/06/18 — meaning just over six weeks ago — was the Phase II final report released. (Daily Iowan coverage here; Gazette coverage here.) Whatever that report purported to be, however, or was intended to be in service of Harreld’s darker motives, what emerged was a very strange document indeed. Not only did the Phase II final report diverge wildly from Butler’s original charge, it also diverged from Curry’s revised charge, and even from the Phase I report.
The Phase II Final Report
Like the Phase I report, the Phase II report runs roughly four pages, single-spaced. However, where the Phase I report was signed by the four deans who drove that stage of the process, the Phase II report is generically introduced:
While both documents were almost certainly prepared by individual authors, then passed around for comments and suggestions from members of their respective committees, it would be particularly beneficial to know just who was behind the musings in the Phase II report. (Based on seniority, the most likely suspect is Tom Rice, who chaired the thirteen-member Phase II committee.) The reason for that, incongruously, is that where the Phase I report maintained some authorial distance on conversations that were recounted and conclusions that were reached, the Phase II report is decidedly more personal.
It is also not clear how seriously the author(s) took the Phase II report. Whether because the malicious intent of the Phase I report was thwarted, or because the process became moribund over time, the Phase II report may have been bashed out simply to meet a lingering administrative obligation. Having said that, the Phase II final report is not a generic document, a banal document, nor a perfunctory document. It is in fact a document with an agenda, albeit one that is completely divorced for the original intent of the 2020 Task Force.
Because critical context is omitted, the Phase II report is not a scrupulously honest document, but in working through the report section by section we will find that it is also not a pro-Harreld document. To the murky question of authorship, and the equally murky question of motive, we can now add the murkiness of the task force timeline. As noted above, the original schedule called for the Phase II report to be produced “early in the spring semester” of 2018. In the Phase II final report, however, we find this at the end of this first paragraph:
Given that the Phase II committee went dark for over a year, clearly the timeline changed at least twice. As “ambitious” as the end-of-semester goal may have been, however, the original timeline was breakneck, and was intended to produce a final report, at the latest, in February or March of 2018. Why that original timeline was extended several months by Curry, let alone why it apparently lapsed for another six months, we do not know, but something obviously happened along the way.
‘Our Charge’
As for the objective of the Phase II committee, you can find Curry’s original charge here, which is generally restated in the first full paragraph of the final report:
In every aspect the Phase II report was intended to be an elucidation of the more general Phase I report, and to provide a road map which would inform the reorganization of the entire UI campus. The specific objectives were still largely undefined — save for breaking up the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences — but reorganization was clearly the goal. In that context, the first sentence in the second paragraph of the Phase II report not only comes across as abrupt, but as a virtual non sequitur:
If we dig into the updates posted by the Phase II committee we do find a call to bigness, but one that is still connected to reorganizing the academic structure of the UI campus. From the 10/19/17 progress report by Tom Rice:
From the 11/06/17 progress report, which is attributed to the full committee:
The 12/01/17 progress report — which was the final communication from the Phase II committee for over a year — does not mention big ideas, but does mention ASU president Mike Crow. And as regular readers know, Crow himself is Mr. Big Ideas in the higher-ed industry:
Any original call to ‘think big’ was tied to the objective of campus reorganization. Following the release of the Phase I report, however, that appeal was also used to reinforce the big idea in that document — meaning the dismantling of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Indeed, at the same time that the Phase II progress reports were being added to the 2020 Task Force website, Curry was beginning to take heat behind the scenes for that radical proposal, including particularly from the Faculty Senate. (Notably, the anti-CLAS bias in the Phase I report also dovetailed with Curry’s stated plan — almost certainly at Harreld’s behest — to delay hiring a new CLAS dean for a year or more, thus further weakening that college.)
When the Phase II report was finally released a year later, the idea of thinking big in service of campus reorganization was gone, and what we got instead was a think-piece on thinking big itself. From the conclusion of the opening section of the Phase II report, here is how the original overall objective was recast, from reorganization to conceptualization:
The Phase II final report is not a report about campus reorganization. It is instead a meditation on thinking about big ideas like campus reorganization, and it is more than a little cranky on that point. For the remainder of this post we will assume for the sake of argument that ‘thinking big’ was the original charge, or an updated charge, of the Phase II committee, even as that claim is dubious on its face. (More likely, in the fall of 2017, Harreld and Curry were still fishing for a plausible justification for breaking up CLAS, and hoped to use the Phase II process to identify and sell that new rationale.)
‘Our Listening Tour’
The first paragraph in this section recounts information from the four progress reports that were added to the 2020 Task Force website. In the second paragraph we then get specifics about the magnitude and subject matter of the campus-wide Phase II conversation:
Whatever the original charge was or was not, the complaint here is clear. The Phase II committee — or at least the author(s) of the Phase II final report — wanted big ideas that would “take a decade or more to implement”. Instead, they were bogged down with “ideas that could be accomplished in five years or less”, meaning generally within the current UI strategic plan.
So where did the UI community come up with the crazy idea that the Phase II committee was looking for ideas that could be implemented sooner rather than later — which would in turn position the school to advantage in the decades ahead? From the 11/06/17 progress report:
If you grouse about the responses you get, then you better be able to point to the place where you told everyone what you wanted. As far as I can tell, however, nowhere on the 2020 Task Force website is there any statement about limiting feedback to big ideas which have implementation time frames longer than five years. Then again it’s not hard to imagine why no one thought to write that down, for a host of reasons that we will touch on shortly.
As to the kind of responses that the Phase II report claims the committee wanted all along, those too prompted additional gripes:
Not only did the Phase II committee not get a lot of big ideas, which was frustrating, but the big ideas they did get were “without sufficient detail” to “assess” and “make recommendations” — which the author(s) of the Phase II final report also found frustrating. Which of course raises another obvious question. What exactly was the Phase II committee looking for?
Apparently, the answer is that they wanted big ideas which would not only take more than five years to implement, but they wanted those big ideas finalized — or at least fleshed out to the point that a yay or nay could be made immediately following presentation. And yet, even though we now have a clear elucidation of what the Phase II committee claims to have wanted all along, even if you take a minute you may find it hard to come up with any suggestion that would not have prompted a gripe as well.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no method to this madness. Consider this passage, which immediately follows the above quote:
Whatever move the four crony deans thought they were teeing up against CLAS in the Phase I report, these two sentences are a stern rebuke. And yet, while that is a big idea that would probably take more than five years to implement — meaning it satisfies the Phase II committee’s belatedly stated criteria — the very fact that additional extensive study would be required is incomprehensibly cited as a justification for not pursuing that idea in the context of the 2020 Task Force. Confused? Join the club.
But it gets better — or worse if you’re Harreld:
Here is Harreld in the Daily Iowan on 12/08/16, just over a year after taking office:
Not only is it a second direct rebuke of Harreld, but when the author(s) of the Phase II report state that the idea of branding Iowa with its writing programs is “not new”, they are not kidding. Dig around on the UI website and you will find a web page for a Writing University Task Force, which includes a robust final report — from 2006. (It is a very good report, in part because it underscores the sheer labor involved in making such a change, which is dwarfed by the idea of breaking up CLAS into disparate colleges.)
Continuing from the Phase II final report:
From Harreld in the Daily Iowan on 09/06/16, just over a year after his fraudulent appointment:
Anyone even remotely familiar with higher-ed — and, indeed, any kind of research — knows that interdisciplinary conversations often produce important and unexpected advances. Not only is that premise a big part of Mike Crow’s pitch about his ‘New American University’ at Arizona State (which was, more than likely, the impetus for Harreld’s sham hire at Iowa), but as discussed in a related post, academic interdisciplinary research has a storied history in Building 20 at MIT.
Following the third straight rebuke of Harreld in as many examples, the author(s) of the Phase II report added a fourth in the closing sentences:
Over the first three years of Harreld’s fraudulent presidency, nothing has been more central to his vision for the future, and his claims of success, than the implementation of Iowa’s ‘new’ budget model. And yet, here the concern is raised that Harreld’s budget model may actually get in the way of the interdisciplinary research he wants to foster. While I am still not clear about the objective of the Phase II final report — despite having read it through multiple times — if the goal of this section was reducing Harreld to presidential mush…well, mission accomplished.
‘Barriers to Big Ideas’
Having griped about the paucity of big ideas that were presented to the Phase II committee, then griped about the lack of completeness of the few big ideas that were presented — including gutting all of the big ideas that J. Bruce Harreld has pushed over the past three years — the author(s) speculate about why big ideas might be in short supply at UI. In fact, with refreshing candor the Phase II report points out that it may not have been a good idea for the four deans who wrote the Phase I report to have set their sights on — or at least tipped their hand about — dismantling CLAS:
From the outside looking in I think that’s accurate, but it still comes across as an indictment of the greater UI community, when the entire premise and structure of the 2020 Task Force is clearly responsible for any disconnect. If you are in the second phase of a two-part process, and the first phase includes the radical dismantling of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, then it’s not wrong to think that’s probably going to be a big part of the second-phase conversation. By the same token, if you don’t advertise what you’re looking for in the second phase, including seeking big ideas which reach beyond the five-year cycle of the strategic plan, you’re probably not going to get that specific type of response. But wait — there’s more….
From the second paragraph of this two-paragraph section:
While I obviously think this is correct, I think it falls short of exhaustively describing the ‘Barriers to Big Ideas’ at the University of Iowa. Not only are there inherent barriers to big ideas in higher-ed, but at Iowa those barriers are exacerbated by institutional liabilities which do not afflict most other schools. And of course chief among them is the fact that the current president at Iowa was imposed on the school by a small cabal of co-conspirators, who used a rigged search to achieve that corrupt end.
While there are probably a few academics here and there who do enjoy producing turnkey big ideas merely for the intellectual challenge, it is fair to assume that the vast majority of people who might be willing to engage in that kind of deliberation would probably have some personal if not professional motivation for doing so. In fact the importance of investment in producing productivity and process gains seems readily acknowledged by almost everyone, so it is probably not a stretch to imagine that such a relationship holds true in academia as well. The more people care about the outcome of a big idea, the more likely they are to advocate for and pursue that big idea, despite inevitable systemic obstacles and intransigence.
All of which is to say that if the Board of Regents had set out to kill long-term, big-picture thinking at the University of Iowa, it could not have done a better job than it did by disempowering the UI community during the fraudulent presidential search in 2015. Whether individuals on campus were excited about Harreld’s bastardized hire, or aghast at his bastardized hire, everyone knew that a crony crime had been committed, which in turn made clear that the only meaningful currency in the regents system was brute political power. And that was only a little over three years ago.
‘Encouraging Big Ideas’
This entire section of the Phase II report is one long block paragraph, which suffers precisely because it avoids the elephant of corruption in the room. As a general conclusion the quote that follows is not wrong, but because Iowa as an academic institution is defined by crony corruption, there is no point in trying to encourage big-idea thinking — unless those big ideas already align with the corrupt agenda of the current administration. Speaking of which, that may also explain why all three of the cited examples speak to Harreld’s narrow cause of entrepreneurial innovation.
As detailed in multiple prior posts, while Mike Crow is his own cult of personality at ASU, almost all of his success derives from pursuing a strategy of perpetual enrollment growth and degree dilution. Whatever he can sell, he’s selling it, but because he does not have — or until recently did not have — much competition in the Phoenix metroplex, that cynical approach produces results. The Cornell-Technion partnership is, as you might expect, an attempt to leverage IP to generate revenue, and as such is less a big idea that a massive gamble. (While Cornell bills itself as “the federal land-grant institution of New York State”, it is in fact a private school, which means that big idea is not particularly applicable to a state school in Iowa.) Finally, as for Purdue’s purchase of Kaplan, that is yet another tech play, this time along the lines of News Corp buying MySpace — which didn’t turn out too well for Rupert Murdoch. (Purdue is not going to ‘own’ online education in the U.S.)
Perhaps sensing their own overreach, the author(s) of the Phase II report follow-up with this:
Throughout the Phase II report there is an implicit assumption that big ideas will evolve from and be implemented by institutional consensus. In the three examples above, however, and in almost every example you can think of in other industries, that is decidedly not the case. The driver of change at ASU is Mike Crow, who is treated like a god because he generates an absurd amount of cash. The driver of the Cornell-Technion partnership was former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg, who not only had extraordinary power in that role, but more money than god in his bank account. Finally, as for Purdue, that academic powerhouse is helmed by Indiana’s own Mitch Daniels, a golden boy who will preside at that school for as long as he wants.
What the Phase II report seems to be arguing explicitly against, yet implicitly for, is giving individual leaders wide-ranging latitude to gamble assets on entrepreneurial ventures. While that fits perfectly with the corrupt intent behind Harreld’s hire, the problem with implementing that approach over the long-term is well-understood in every industry. In Hollywood, for example, the first thing a new studio mogul does when taking over is kill off all the old green-lighted projects, whether they made sense or not. Why? Because if they turn out to be a hit, all the credit will go to the person they replaced — and that will look even worse if their own projects falter in comparison.
Long-term planning at a college or university should derive from and rest with the greater academic community, and there is a simple reason for that. Other than turning an institution over to a single leader for decades — like Mike Crow, who has presided at ASU for 16 years — that is the only viable way by which such plans might ever reach fruition. Not only has such long-term leadership not been the trend at Iowa, however, it is questionable whether investing such power in one person on an open-ended basis is a good idea. (See also David Boren at Oklahoma, who was beloved, but left a mess after twenty-four years on the job.)
With regard to the University of Iowa and Harreld specifically, only a few months after the Faculty Senate convinced the AAUP to lift its unprecedented sanction of the school, the very small, very petty and very bratty J. Bruce Harreld uttered the exact same anti-faculty line that former regent Katie Mulholland used to justify the abuses that led to that sanction. From the Daily Iowan interview of J. Bruce Harreld on 10/15/18:
Even if you know nothing about higher-education, or about shared governance as an academic term of art, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Harreld’s blunt assertion to “all of his colleagues on campus” was not so much a poke in the eye or a slap in the face, but a cackling kick to the groin. In that context, who in their right mind would ever try to propose, let alone persistently advocate for, a long-term big idea on the UI campus, when they know full well that the school is being run by a petty, bratty, vindictive man? Whether Harreld is at UI solely for the money, or is equally interested in meeting his all-too-apparent ego needs, none of that speaks to the greater good, or to any deference on his part to long-term collective planning.
While the following is undoubtedly true, everything that the regents and Harreld have done over the past three years works against this laudable goal:
Speaking of suboptimal….
‘Selecting and Supporting Big Ideas’
Long before anyone at UI frets about “choosing suboptimal ideas”, the campus has to come to terms with the fact that it has suboptimal leadership at the Board of Regents, in the board office, and in central administration. To all of those personnel deficits we can also then add uncertainties about the ‘new’ budget model. (More on that here; independent supporting counterpoint here.)
Despite the note in the Phase II report about how the new budget model may be impeding the kind of interdisciplinary research that is so important these days, the author(s) of the Phase II report are quite hopeful about the new budget process, even as they recognize that it has yet to prove stable.
While Harreld is getting (and taking) a lot of credit for the new budget process, that is actually the continuation of a well-established trend in higher-ed, which is not without a downside. While more individuals are involved in determining where money goes and what it is used for, that also means more voices will be working in opposition to each other. By definition, decentralization means big ideas are even less likely to be pursued at the university level, precisely because some constituents will lose out.
Defining a set of rules or processes that would objectively review programs for downsizing or deletion would not only be a monumental task, but there are a host of programs at any college or university which cannot be curtailed precisely because they are required for accreditation. Even viable elective cuts could not be left to a purely democratic process, however, because that would inevitably lead to feeding frenzies in which aligned factions preyed on weaker programs. For any review process to be established on a long-term basis — as a precursor to generating resources for new ‘big ideas’ — there would not only have to be great faith in that process, but in the leaders making those decisions. On the question of leadership, however, the Phase II report is notably silent. (The word ‘leadership’ appears only once, and only in the context of multiple administrative positions which are “in flux”.)
‘Conclusion’
After three and a half pages of grumpy mixed messages and telling omissions, we arrive at a conclusion that should have appeared in the first paragraph of the Phase II report:
As the report notes, between state funding cuts and other uncertainties on campus — including the unacknowledged instability embodied by Harreld himself — there is no motivation for anyone to think beyond the nearest horizon, yet the problems at UI go well beyond that. While there are undoubtedly sincere individuals who would be willing to tackle long-term issues, the last big idea the Board of Regents acted on was hiring a deceitful carpetbagging dilettante to run the state’s billion-dollar flagship research university. Until the regents are serious about giving the UI community a mandate to look well into the future, and commit to hiring presidents who are themselves confident enough to allow the UI community to work toward such goals, Iowa is treading water at best, and more likely losing ground.
So what’s the solution? Well, unfortunately the conclusion of the Phase II report mimics its own complaints and offers no specifics — despite, apparently, having had a whole year to come to terms with that problem:
I think everyone would agree on that last point, at least until one of those big ideas threatened their territory. In that spirit, we will now push past all of the grousing and consider what such a process might look like. Perhaps not surprisingly, it does not look like anything the University of Iowa or the Iowa Board of Regents are currently doing, or will probably ever do….
Thinking Big at UI
We will now accept the restated premise of the Phase II report, and assume that we want to implement a big idea which falls outside the normal, five-year, strategic-plan time frame. Even before we settle on the specific big idea we intend to pursue, what are the predicates for success? What do we have to have in place, regardless of the idea itself, to have any chance of realizing that goal?
Apart from any other consideration, it is axiomatic that nothing will ever happen over the long-haul without institutional stability. That does not mean the same people have to be in place the entire time, but if stability is not a point of organizational focus, then by definition the school will be perpetually distracted by everything from academic trends to administrative crises. To be sure, even if you have the right people in place when the truly unexpected happens — as former UI President Sally Mason proved, when she responded simultaneously to both the Great Recession and catastrophic campus flooding in 2008 — you may have to set aside long-term priorities to deal with those emergencies. If you have the wrong people in place, however, even in the most favorable context there will be a tendency for mission drift and short-term thinking, and that’s apart from the corrupt, crony whims of the Iowa Board of Regents.
Speaking of which, consider the stability of the University of Iowa over the past three years, following Hareld’s sham hire. Not only did the regents perpetrate a fraud against the UI community, setting off shockwaves that still resonate on campus, but that contemptuous, destabilizing act precipitated both the sanction of the school by the AAUP, and an unprecedented exodus of administrative talent and consequent loss of institutional knowledge. While Harreld and his supporters would almost certainly characterize those departures as cleaning house or clearing out dead wood, the fact remains that a sudden spasms of transitions occurred not in an orderly fashion, but precisely because the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents imposed Harreld on the campus by administrative fraud. Instead of stability, the University of Iowa endured, and continues to endure, administrative uncertainty.
As noted at the beginning of this post, one of those key departures was former provost P. Barry Butler, who left in late February of 2017. Incredibly, only now — almost two years later — are Harreld and his loyal interim provost about to hire a new permanent provost for the school, thus betraying either staggering incompetence or more ill intent. (For context, note that after Harreld was hired the Iowa Board of Regents also replaced the presidents at both Northern Iowa and Iowa State University, for reasons that were respectively mysterious and nefarious. And yet, neither school experienced the administrative upheaval that continues at Iowa to this day.)
To the extent that Harreld and the regents have been pursuing one big idea over that entire time frame — meaning killing off UI as a liberal arts university, and converting the school to the cause of economic development — it is critical to note that this is not the result of a consensus-driven process, but a testament to crony corruption. Without three highly placed individuals perverting the 2015 presidential search at Iowa, there is no chance that Harreld would ever have been appointed on the merits of his candidacy. Yet there he is, slated to earn $4M over five years as a result of that orchestrated administrative betrayal.
This particular big idea has in turn informed a number of key hires that Harreld has made, and will almost certainly be the determining factor in choosing a new provost, who will persist at UI long after Harreld is gone. While Harreld is busy hiring entrepreneurial hustlers wherever he can, however — including Dan Clay as the dean of the College of Education, and Steve Goddard as the new dean of CLAS — there is not only no campus-wide consensus that this is a good idea, there is every reason to believe that the increased exposure to risk will lead to financial losses down the road. (The question is not how much money will be made, but how much will be lost.)
For any campus-driven big idea to progress from conception to implementation over a decade or more, not only would the regents have to abstain from hiring intemperate and emotionally needy presidents, but the presidents who were hired would have to understand that institutional stability was of primary importance. Certainly some positions would change according to other considerations, but what has happened under Harreld is sheer institutional chaos. The resulting uncertainty has in turn negatively impacted recruitment, to the point that there have been two failed administrative searches over the past three years — for Dean of Students and Chief Nursing Officer — even after the university paid search firms to help recruit the best people. (That Iowa is one of sixty-two AAU research universities, yet cannot recruit top-flight talent, is a direct result of the stain of Harreld’s hire.)
Attendant to, if not pillars of, institutional stability, are personal and professional values like integrity, credibility and trust. Can members of the UI community count on the individual and collective word of the regents, and of the president and his administration? Currently, objectively, the answer is a resounding no, for myriad reasons that have been exhaustively documented in these virtual pages over the past three years.
If you want people to stick their necks out and advocate for a big idea over the long-term, and you want them to invest time and energy in shepherding that cause, then you not only need to provide the necessary organizational stability, you better make sure that anyone undermining that initiative faces consequences. Unfortunately, the regents have made it clear that J. Bruce Harreld will never face any consequences, even if he tells overt lies to the UI community. As a result, anyone on campus with a truly good big idea will either wait for Harreld to leave, or, more likely, leave themselves, and take their big idea to a school that is not hostage to crony corruption.
A Case Study
From Harreld’s hucksterish candidate forum to his claim of sole authorship on co-written papers — which prompted a UI faculty censure even before he took office — Harreld has presented himself as a visionary in the field of organizational change. In reality, of course, Harreld’s primary assets are the backing of the corrupt Board of Regents that jammed him into office, and his willingness to lie to the UI community about anything. To put a bow on all of the reasons why big ideas are never going to get off the ground while Harreld is in charge at Iowa, we will now take a look at the punchline to the Phase II report, which you have already encountered if you gave that document even a fleeting glance.
Despite the fact that the 2020 Task Force ran for an astonishing twenty-three months — from inception in January of 2017, to release of the final report in early December of 2018 — J. Bruce Harreld insisted at every stage that he knew little or nothing about the ongoing work of the Phase I and Phase II committees. Whether that was true or not will never be known unless interim provost Curry comes clean about their private discussions, but we don’t need her to confess to expose the absurdity of his claims. Consider the following exchange with Harreld, from a Daily Iowan interview that was conducted on 12/07/18 — meaning the day after the Phase II report came out — then subsequently published on 12/12/18:
So according to Harreld himself, the day after the final report was released he was not only aware of its conclusions, but fully abreast of the Phase II process. Because the crack staff at the DI are a savvy lot, however, the reporters who conducted the interview followed up with a rather obvious question:
In typical Harreld fashion he then blathered on for several more paragraphs, even though he had not actually read the report. Later, the DI added a few additional comments from Harreld, after he got around to reading the report — or at least claimed to have read the report — but through all of that he never mentioned one salient fact. Here is the actual last line of the Phase II final report, which appears in italics on page 4:
That’s right. The report that Harreld said was “released yesterday”, was actually submitted six months earlier. So what happened between June of 2018 and early December, when the report was finally dusted off? Well, not only was the new dean of CLAS announced only three days before the final report was released, but the super-secret UI committee hunting up a new provost was closing in on its slate of finalists at the same time. If Curry and Harreld knew that they had already identified two administrators who would help dismantle CLAS from the inside, then releasing the Phase II report — and abandoning their frontal assault — makes perfect sense.
In any event, this is the clown show that used to be the University of Iowa. A report is released six months after it was formally submitted, yet no one recognizes that the report itself contains that damning admission. In that, however, the big idea that was the 2020 Task Force is simply a microcosm of what was supposed to be another big idea — meaning hiring a completely unqualified president from the private sector, to do a job he had never done before. In reality, and assuming that Harreld leaves in 2021, the best-case scenario is that the regents will have wasted five years and $4M on a modified budget model that could have been implemented by anyone. The worst-case scenario is that the school never truly recovers, and Harreld precipitates its national decline.