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Harreld Hire Culture Update

September 17, 2015 By Mark 2 Comments

I don’t remember what I was doing eight years ago, but what retired University of Iowa professor Harold Hammond was doing was filing suit against the regents for violating the state’s open-meetings law during the search that ultimately led to the hiring of Sally Mason:

In a 2009 settlement, the search committee admitted to violating the open meetings law in four different ways, including by failing to give proper notice of meetings and discussing matters in closed session that were required to be discussed openly. The university promised that in the future, presidential search committees would “take thorough and sufficient steps” to comply with the Open Meetings Law. The school also paid Hammond’s legal fees of $66,000.

While it is of course surprising that a suit had to be brought to compel an august body like the regents to comply with state laws, or at least to promise to comply with those laws in the future, it is distressing that they went right back to business as usual during the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld. Which is why Professor Hammond is suing them again on the exact same grounds:

The petition filed by Harrold Hammond, an emeritus professor in the College of Dentistry, adds another layer of controversy to the search, which ended earlier this month with the selection of former IBM executive Bruce Harreld. It asks a judge to void actions taken by the 21-member committee, which vetted dozens of candidates before recommending four finalists to the Board of Regents.

So if you’re scoring at home, that’s two corrupt searches, two corrupt outcomes, two corrupt Boards of Regents. Given the gap in time and the change in personnel you would think it would be hard for such malfeasance to persist, so I find it difficult not to wonder if there are people in key positions of authority in the state today who were also in key positions of authority the last time this happened.

For all the talk about the cultural problems on the campus of the University of Iowa, and there clearly are cultural problems facing the students, it appears that the university may be rotting from the head down. That’s particularly worrisome given the close association between acting president Jean Robillard and the head of the Board of Regents, Bruce Rastetter, both of whom paid special attention to J. Bruce Harreld as a candidate. Could it be that there’s a persistent cultural problem among the students because the people in charge can’t stop treating the University of Iowa like their own professional duchy, slush find or research park?

One would hope that the adults in any room always have the best interests of their charges at heart, but when it comes to choosing the president of the University of Iowa that doesn’t seem to be the case. And yet maybe the most disturbing part about the whole sordid mess is the abject incompetence. I mean, if you’re smart enough to rope Christina Bohannan in at the last minute in order to give your preferential treatment of J. Bruce Harreld the appearance of propriety, how do you bungle everything else? How does your hand-picked, personally groomed candidate stand up in front of a room full of people, talk about transparency and building trust, and forget to mention the transformational change that took place in his heart, mind and soul when he and his wife visited the University of Iowa campus only a few short months before? Better yet, how do you conduct meetings in secret when you got sued for doing the exact same thing last time, and lost?

I know there are people in high places in Iowa who are afflicted with feelings of inadequacy because they want to be major players in a sexy state like California or New York. And I know those feelings of inadequacy drive them to do corrupt things in furtherance of their frustrated desires. But it seems to me that plenty of states are so far ahead in terms of corruption that Iowa might as well throw its lot in with the fine, upstanding crowd. And a good first step would be removing Bruce Rastetter from the Board of Regents, replacing Jean Robillard as the acting president of the University of Iowa, giving J. Bruce Harreld the opportunity to withdraw from the position that was offered to him before he is deposed, and freeing the remaining members of the regents from whatever oath of secrecy or pledge of confidentiality or double-secret probation is being used as a pretext to keep them from speaking to the press and explaining why we should still have faith in them.

After that, we can get on with the business of hiring a president through a transparent process that produces a fully qualified candidate who is prepared to hit the ground running on day one, instead of an unqualified carpetbagger who will need to spend years engrossed in remedial instruction while also stitching back together the tattered shreds of his personal credibility. Because as it stands now, the regents have decided to pass on a sure thing and take an unnecessary $4,000,000, five-year gamble on J. Bruce Harreld — a man who needed a cabal of power brokers to grease his candidacy, who used Wikipedia as a resource in researching the university, who submitted a resume that contained false information, and who failed to mention that he had been invited to the campus two months earlier by the acting head of the university who was also the head of the search committee. All qualities which, in five costly years, may seem like blatantly obvious indicators that J. Bruce Harreld was not the man for the job.

You know, the same kind of indicators that would get almost any college kid bounced out of a work-study interview no matter who they knew.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Harreld

Harreld Hire Credibility Update

September 15, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

Regarding today’s report that J. Bruce Harreld visited the University of Iowa to speak about “transformational change” several months before being selected as the new president — and specifically that he had lunch with Jean Robillard, the head of the search committee, and Bruce Rastetter, the president of the regents — while the news itself is damning, so is Harreld’s omission of that fact during the open forum which was held for the benefit of faculty, staff and interested stakeholders.

I don’t know whether Harreld’s visit to Iowa City on July 8th was his first visit to the University of Iowa or not, but at the time Harreld was reportedly not a candidate for the position of president. So on some level, one would think that visit must have created quite an impression if he subsequently decided to apply for the job.

When Harreld later found himself in front of a hostile crowd, and was trying to win them over, why did he not mention the fact that he was wowed only a couple of months earlier when he apparently got his first glimpse into all that the University of Iowa is and can be? Instead, as has been noted, Harreld’s only comment about researching the university is his now infamous reference to having looked up the school on Wikipedia. Was there simply no opportunity for Harreld to mention his prior visit, including his lunch with Robillard and Rastetter, or did he intentionally avoid doing so?

I don’t know, but after watching the whole presentation I believe I can state with some certainty that he did not mention (or, if you prefer, disclose) either. What follows are timing marks where Harreld had what might fairly be described as a conversational opening to talk about the process that ultimately brought him to Iowa.

6:00 — Begins speaking.

10:25 — Mentions the “medical school”.

13:00 — Mentions “prior meetings here on campus”.

1:05:45 — Makes mention of medical research, and indicates that he is familiar with someone seated in the audience who is associated with same.

1:13:38 — Takes a question from someone on staff at UHIC.

1:19:00 — Answers a question about transparency, and whether he is doing or has done work for the regents.

1:26:42 — Answers a question about the need for transparency in a different context.

1:30:44 — Makes reference to Wikipedia.

Harreld spoke extemporaneously for a half hour before taking questions, and seemed comfortable doing so. He laid out his vision, stayed on message, and never once referenced notes — though he may have had prompts that were not visible to the camera. Except for the slip-up regarding false information on his resume Harreld showed no problem with recall.

So how does someone with Harreld’s grasp of the facts, having once helped save IBM from itself, and apparently having been blown away on a brief visit only two short months before, omit that transformational moment from his personal narrative? If you’re on the faculty or staff, or you’re a student, it’s one thing to consider the impact of today’s disclosure in terms of the regents, but another to wonder why Harreld himself didn’t disclose those same facts when he clearly had an opportunity to do so.

When asked why he was applying to be president of the University of Iowa, Harreld had a consistent answer. On multiple occasions he said, “I think I can help.” Fair enough. It’s clear that J. Bruce Harreld has been around the block, and if he’s willing to share the benefit of his wisdom and experience over five mean Iowa winters we should take the man at his word until given reason to do otherwise.

Speaking of which, it does seem that someone with Harreld’s wisdom and experience would know that omitting prior contact with the head of the search committee and the president of the Board of Regents might look bad, even if nothing shady was going on. And, as a leader, we might rightly expect Harreld to defuse even the appearance of impropriety by disclosing that contact. Because if that information did come out later, it very well might make people have second thoughts about J. Bruce Harreld’s personal credibility, integrity, and commitment to transparency.

Or is that just how business is done?

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Harreld

Harreld Hire Fairness Update

September 15, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

Among the questions I asked in the previous post, regarding the recent hire of J. Bruce Harreld to be the new president of the University of Iowa, was whether there was a level playing field for all candidates. Apparently not:

The businessman picked as the next University of Iowa president had visited campus two months earlier at the invitation of the presidential search committee chair.

The university confirmed Monday that Bruce Harreld visited University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics on July 8.

A spokeswoman says Harreld spoke to about 40 people at the invitation of university vice president Jean Robillard, who was leading the 21-member committee searching for the next school president. Harreld wasn’t paid.

Harreld’s visit, first reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, raises more questions about whether he was given special treatment during the search. Critics say Harreld was unqualified but the Iowa Board of Regents hired him anyway.

It’s not clear whether Robillard was asked to extend an invitation by someone, but I’m sure we’ll get an answer once everyone gets their stories straight. You know, like the Governor did the other day when he said he supported Harreld 100%, but also added that he had absolutely nothing to do with the hire. Even though Harreld was also the only candidate who spoke to the governor personally.

Branstad’s spokesman denies the governor had input into the decision, but he acknowledges that Branstad called Harreld, which he didn’t do with other candidates. It happened, said Centers, after Harreld asked Regents President Bruce Rastetter about Branstad’s “support for the university.” Rastetter is close with Branstad.

Support for the university indeed.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Harreld

Anatomy of the Harreld Hire

September 13, 2015 By Mark 4 Comments

As an alumnus of the University of Iowa, the recent hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be the new president of my alma mater gives me pause. In the aftermath of that hire there has been an outpouring of frustration about the hiring process and selection, voiced immediately through votes of no-confidence in the Iowa Board of Regents by both the faculty and students. Chief among the complaints seems to be that the hire may have been a backroom deal brokered by a malevolent force on the Board of Regents, who is disinterested in whether the university can meet its core responsibilities as an institution of higher learning.

While I sympathize with anyone’s frustration in trying to get the truth out of a politically appointed bureaucrat, plausible deniability is a cornerstone of all political chicanery, and can at times approach high art. So the idea that a smoking gun might suddenly appear and reveal the entire hiring process to have been deliberate fraud is unlikely at best. In fact, attacking the regents would only play to the board’s strengths given their control of the hiring process, their secrecy, and particularly their institutional ability to deny and delay until everyone just runs out of indignation.

From time to time, however, bureaucrats — and particularly politically appointed bureaucrats — forget that while they’re cooking the books or lying to the people they purportedly serve they’re still obligated to meet a minimum standard of competence. They don’t have to be rocket scientists, or even rock scientists, but they do have to meet basic tests of accountability, particularly when working in government.

In questioning the mechanics of how Harreld was hired, a crime is being alleged. It may be that an actual crime took place, having to do with hiring practices and government regulations and things I know nothing about, or that the crime was metaphorical. It is frustrating that we will probably never have access to the information that would allow us to determine who, specifically, engineered such a crime, but we don’t have to know whodunnit to know that a crime took place.

The Board of Regents unanimously agreed to hire Harreld at a salary of $600,000 for each of five years, plus $1,000,000 in deferred compensation, meaning Harreld will be paid a minimum of $4,000,000 under the current contract. What makes that particularly remarkable, and factors into the outrage at his hiring, is that J. Bruce Harreld is demonstrably unqualified for the job. That the Iowa Board of Regents insisted, unanimously, on hiring him anyway, obviously calls their own competence into question.

The usual bureaucratic dodge is to say that there was ample opportunity to ask questions and raise objections during the hiring process, that the decision has been made, that it will not be reversed, and that it is now incumbent on everyone to move past any sour grapes and work together as professionals to make the University of Iowa great. As a factual matter, the four finalists for the position did each appear in an open forum and answer questions from stakeholders, and those forums did take place before the regents came to their unanimous determination. If people wanted to raise objections so the regents would factor those concerns into their own decision-making process, they should have made their voices heard.

Preliminary results from the AAUP survey show Ohio State University Provost Joseph Steinmetz with the most support and J. Bruce Harreld, former IBM, Boston Market Company, and Kraft General Foods executive, with the least support.

Of the more than 440 UI faculty members who responded to the AAUP survey — a voluntary poll conducted online that asked the same 10 questions for each candidate — 98 percent said they believe Steinmetz is qualified to be UI president.

Among faculty, only about 3 percent thought Harreld is qualified. The other two candidates — Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov and Tulane University Provost Michael Bernstein — also received high marks from the faculty, with about 94 percent calling Bernstein qualified for the job and 91 percent saying so of Krislov.

Of the 230-plus students, staff, and community members who responded to the AAUP poll, about 95 percent said they thought Steinmetz is qualified for the job, followed by Krislov at 84 percent, Bernstein at 80 percent, and Harreld at 4 percent.

Fair enough. Rather than dwell on the past we will look to the future, and in particular the future graduates of the University of Iowa who are now being led by a man who was not simply the least qualified of the final four candidates vying for president, but unqualified for the position. Because in insisting that they had the right to hire whomever they want, the Board or Regents has not only undercut the very premise of the institution that Harreld now leads, they have eviscerated the criteria by which the students at that institution are judged on a daily basis.

[ Read more ]

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Harreld

WordPress Editor Jump Fix

September 8, 2015 By Mark 105 Comments

For the past six months or so I’ve been bedeviled by an intermittent problem in WordPress that has made me insane. Until today I was unable to figure out what was causing it or how to stop it, but I believe I have the fix if you’re bedeviled too.

The problem only happened on longer posts, but not consistently so. I would be typing and editing as usual, then suddenly the cursor would jump one line higher than the editing window, meaning I could no longer see what I was typing. I could confirm that the cursor was in that location by scrolling up a line, but if I edited any text it would jump up again, making it impossible to see the line I was working on. (This happened using the text editor in both normal and distraction-free modes, and the visual editor.)

My memory is that the problem began when WP changed its default settings to accommodate mobile screens and tablets. One key feature of that change was dumbing down the interface and slaving the scroll bar and mouse wheel to the post as a whole, instead of assigning functions depending on the location of the cursor, as had been the case.

If you are having this problem, click on SCREEN OPTIONS at the top of the WP screen while editing a post. A settings menu will drop down, at the bottom of which you will find a checkbox, checked, and beside it the following ironic text: Enable full-height editor and distraction-free functionality.

For real distraction-free functionality, uncheck that checkbox.

Not only should that solve the jumping problem, but if you work on a desktop it will give you back scroll-wheel control of the editing window when the cursor is in that space, instead of defaulting to scroll the whole page. (The scroll wheel will still move the whole page when you move the cursor outside the editing window.)

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: tools, Wordpress

Boot Hill: Origin of the Deathmatch

September 6, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

The other day I ran across mention of yet another Western-themed game, which prompted me to once again think back to the earliest days of the pencil-and-paper RPG, and a truly great Western-themed game that I played on numerous occasions. As was always the case, however, I couldn’t find any mention of it online, because it turns out I was misremembering the name.

The game that I thought was called Gunfighter was in fact called Boot Hill, and if you played it even once you’ll remember. Unlike any other pencil-and-paper game of its time, Boot Hill was about unrelenting action. You looked at a map of a small frontier town, the DM gave you an area to start from, you made your choice, the other players made theirs, and the clock started ticking.

An entire game might last a half-hour, or maybe an hour at most if players were extremely cautious, but in game-time each battle was often a matter of only seconds, maybe a few minutes at most. And it was riveting. Even today I still carry memories of the imagined places and battles in my mind, and they all took place forty years ago.

I don’t know if anyone has ever connected the dots, but I’m willing to bet that Boot Hill was one of the earliest — if not the earliest — deathmatch games, albeit in paper-and-pencil form. If you enjoy pencil-and-paper gaming and can find it, preferably in one of its earlier incarnations, you might enjoy it for its ease of access and relatively short duration. Or you can just keep playing over and over until the sun comes up.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive

The User Experience as a Service

September 3, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

Reading up on the latest tech news during the Windows 10 rollout and the launch of Intel’s Skylake processors reminded me just how far we’ve come in ceding control of our online lives to a few self-interested corporations. If I hadn’t lived through it I might be shocked, but it’s still pretty disquieting.

Now, the internet being its usual binary self, raising questions about privacy in the digital age is seen by many as equivalent to donning a tinfoil hat, but I don’t agree. Being naive about or flagrantly irresponsible with your rights is your business, but acting as if what’s happening at a cultural level is inevitable or even healthy is itself an indicator of insanity. Particularly with regard to children, and how few protections seem to be in place to allow them to have an online life that is not personally identifiable in perpetuity.

The marketing aspect of all this invasive technology is pretty straightforward. If a company talks about improving the user experience, what they mean is that the changes they’re making are for the express purpose of data rape. Likewise, when a company talks about a product as a service, what they mean is that you’re going to keep paying for the same thing over and over but never actually own anything. The Windows operating system is now a service, but because it was given to many users as a free upgrade the ongoing costs will be derived from improving the user experience — meaning harvesting massive amounts of user data, some of which may never have been available before because that data originates at the level of the operating system.

A few days ago I said I thought Microsoft might get into anti-trust trouble with the government after goading by Google or Amazon or some other miffed data scraper, but in the intervening days I’ve revised that opinion. The information grab that Microsoft is attempting is so unprecedented, and penetrates not just into the homes but the psyches of the individuals who use Microsoft’s products, that I think the federal government will be forced to intervene.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Microsoft

UX Design is the New SEO

September 1, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

If you spend even a little time reading about tech you know there are always trendy buzzwords skulking around, looking to leech money out of naive or desperate pockets. Six months ago, after having my head in the sand for the better part of a year, I belatedly noticed a big push to extol the virtues of UX Design (aka User eXperience Design), which currently seems to be the focus of a number of companies that service the technology industry.

What is UX Design, or UXD, or UX, or Design? Well, that’s a good question. The broad answer is that it’s the art and quasi-science of how users interact with whatever you’ve got, though these days it’s primarily discussed in terms of software. If you have a product, and it can be used — or even just experienced — then by definition there are design elements intrinsic to that relationship whether you have paid much attention to them or not. If you make your living based on the effectiveness of that relationship, then UX Design is critical to your lifeblood. Or so the argument goes.

If that also sounds like a bunch of conceptual hooey I wouldn’t disagree, but don’t take it from me. Here’s the ISO explaining what the user experience encompasses.

According to the ISO definition, user experience includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use.

As you can see, UX Design can cover just about anything you want it to cover, meaning it’s a wonderfully pliable concept if you’re trying to terrorize people into hiring you to solve all those UX problems they didn’t know they had. In that sense UXD is the new SEO because it can be used to instill fear, particularly in the hearts of people who don’t understand it. (And just in time, too, given that SEO seems to have run its cash-cow course.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive

Windows 10 and Productivity Risk

August 26, 2015 By Mark 2 Comments

While there are certainly plenty of arguments for and against Windows 10, for users who treat their desktops, notebooks or tablets like nothing more than large-display smartphones many of Windows 10’s new features make sense. If you’ve already thrown in the towel and become a co-dependent computer user, nothing Microsoft is doing with Windows 10 is any different than what Google, Amazon and others have been doing to you for years. Picking up on a subplot in the previous post, however, the rollout of Windows 10 should give anyone pause if they use their computer to create.

The problem with Windows 10 is that there’s a big difference between having badly-behaved or data raping apps on my computer and having a badly-behaved data-raping computer. The operating system on my machine isn’t just another program, it’s the most privileged program from an administrative standpoint, meaning it must be the most secure. Windows has always been full of holes, and its registry is a mess, but with some care it was possible to keep the bad guys out, whether the bad guys were hackers or high-gloss Silicon Valley corporations. Windows 10 changes all that, because Windows 10 is designed to serve Microsoft’s competitive needs first and user needs second.

I do not think of my computer as simply a large-display smartphone. My computer is used for productivity — meaning mostly writing, but also other tasks. From that perspective, whatever advantages Windows 10 offers, it also includes several serious drawbacks regarding productivity and security, and one feature in particular that is a deal breaker. Fortunately, I believe Microsoft will ultimately be compelled to change that feature, at which point Windows 10 might become a viable option.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents

How to Preview Your Book in Word

August 23, 2015 By Mark 16 Comments

Maybe everybody else figured this out years ago, but I’m passing it along in case other self-publishing writers are still stumped….

I write in Microsoft Word. Specifically, I use Word 2003, which is the last version of Word prior to the introduction of both the ponderous ribbon interface and the defaulting of all MS Office docs to the web-happy in-house .docx file format. (When Office 2007 debuted I decided I was done learning new productivity tools, particularly when the people making those tools were repeatedly and unrepentantly inclined to radical and proprietary changes that did not benefit my productivity. See also Windows 8.)

When you format a document for printing as a book, the first page of your document will become the page of your book that appears on the right-hand side when the cover is opened. Thereafter, all left-hand pages will be even-numbered, all right-hand pages odd-numbered. When previewing your book in Word, then, what you want to see is the first right-hand, odd-numbered page all alone on the right side of the screen, followed by pairs of left-and-right-hand pages showing the correct pagination and formatting (particular the gutter margin) as you scroll through the document.

In Word 2003 there are five different view modes available under the View menu — Normal, Web Layout, Print Layout, Reading Layout and Outline — and not one of those views will give you what you’re looking for. Normal view only shows one page at a time, inline. Web Layout shows the entire doc as an endless scroll. Print Layout will show two side-by-side pages, or more if you zoom out, but the first odd page will always be on the left when it should be on the right. Reading Layout, which does show two pages side-by-side, like a book, also incorrectly puts the first right-hand page on the left. And of course Outline view shows the entire document as a single-page outline.

Way back when I formatted my short story collection, the only way I could figure out how to force Word to display the first right-hand page on the right side of the screen was to add a dummy page at the beginning of the doc (effectively page zero). The problem with that hack was that Word would then display all of the correctly numbered and formatted right-and-left-hand pages on the wrong side of the screen. For example, page two, which should have a larger gutter margin on the right side of that page, would correctly display on the left of the screen, but because Word then counted that as page three of the doc the larger gutter appeared on the left — meaning the outside of the two-page display. Worse, headers and footers were also affected and had to be scrupulously ignored.

Although I repeatedly searched for a solution, I could not figure out how to get Word to display the first page of my doc as a single right-hand page, followed by the correct side-by-side view as if I was reading a book. Because I’m now monkeying around with another book I recently found myself confronting the same problem, and again I refused to believe that Word could not somehow be configured to give me the view I needed. So I did yet another series of searches, and this time I found the answer, which was apparently there all along:

It *does* work, at least in Word 2003 (and every previous version AFAR). I
have a four-page test document. If I select “Mirror margins” then switch to
Print Preview and choose 1×2 pages, I get page 1 on the right. Paging down,
I get pages 2 and 3, then 4. Same if I check “Different odd and even.”
Either of those settings has the desired result.

So there you go. In Word 2003 and earlier, and perhaps later, set Mirror Margins in the Page Setup dialogue, then select Print Preview under the File menu. (It doesn’t even matter what View mode you’re in at the moment.) The first page of your book-formatted doc will appear alone on the right side of the screen, followed by side-by-side-pages the rest of the way as you scroll.

If that works in later versions of Word, please drop a note in the comments. I don’t want any other writers wasting time trying to solve this completely contrarian problem.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing, Writing Tagged With: formatting

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