Looking back over the past week it still strikes me as exceedingly odd that Iowa State University President Steven Leath is the only person — as far as I can tell — who has given Regents President Bruce Rastetter even the teensiest alibi against the charge that Rastetter rigged the election of President-elect J. Bruce Harreld at the University of Iowa. It makes sense that the governor would keep his distance, given that part of Rastetter’s role as a political fixer is to be a disposable firewall, and it makes sense that acting Iowa President Jean Robillard would want to keep his options open in case he has to turn on Rastetter to save his own skin, but still — nobody else?

While the motive for Leath’s odd defense of Rastetter isn’t clear, it’s important to note that any implied equivalence between Leath and Harreld is unintended. Where Harreld is completely unqualified to be the president of any educational institution, Leath is not simply qualified, by all accounts he was an excellent hire by the Board of Regents in January of 2012. Admittedly, until a couple of weeks ago I’d never heard of Leath’s name in my life, and if you had asked me to name any current or former president of that fine institution I couldn’t have done so. In looking into Leath’s background, however, it’s not merely impressive, it’s absolutely shocking how qualified he is when compared to the carpetbagging dilettante that the Board of Regents is now foisting on the University of Iowa.

From the ISU website:

From 2007 to 2012, Dr. Leath was Vice President for Research for the University of North Carolina (UNC) General Administration, where he oversaw $1.4 billion in competitive research grants and contracts and promoted research and sponsored programs across the full spectrum of academic disciplines and interdisciplinary activities carried out by UNC’s 16 university campuses. He also oversaw UNC’s inter-institutional centers and was one of the leaders in such highly successful public-private partnerships as the North Carolina Research Campus and the David H. Murdock Research Institute, which he helped establish and led as chief executive officer. He also had active roles in the North Carolina State University Centennial Campus and the Research Triangle Park.

During his research career, Dr. Leath published nearly 100 scientific articles in plant disease resistance, plant pathology, plant breeding, and related fields.

Wow! And we got this guy?

How is it that only three years ago the Iowa Board of Regents managed to choose an eminently qualified academician with long administrative experience at an institution of higher learning to head Iowa State University, but now, in choosing the new president at the University of Iowa, they passed over three eminently qualified academicians with long administrative experience at institutions of higher learning in order to choose a guy who can’t tell the truth, who takes credit for other people’s work, and who can’t spell?

The answer is that the board which elected the fully qualified Leath is not the board that elected the utterly unqualified Harreld. In fact, between Leath’s hire in January of 2012 and Harreld’s hire in September of 2015, only two board members remain of the nine who hired Leath. Those members are Regents President Bruce Rastetter, and Regent Katie Mulholland, who famously uttered this defense of the improper special treatment given to J. Bruce Harreld during the hiring process:

“I don’t think that we knew any more about (Harreld) based on (those meetings) than we did about the other candidates based on their curriculum vitae, which were extensive,” Mulholland said.

To that toxic core of two, seven new regents have been added in the past two and a half years. Because each regent serves a six year term, those seven will remain in office for another three and a half years, minimum. (The terms of Rastetter and Mulholland expire in a year and a half, assuming they aren’t reappointed.)

It’s also interesting that at the same time when Governor Branstad was packing the regents with new appointees, the regents were also refusing to give University of Iowa President Sally Mason a new contract, while simultaneously going back on their own word about the length of contracts that would be offered to presidents at the state’s schools:

The question about Mason working at will was raised last week when the board awarded a five-year contract to Iowa State University President Steven Leath, who also received a 7.123 percent raise to $500,000. Mason received a 2.5 percent boost in salary to $525,828 but was not offered a contract. William Ruud, who just completed his first year as president of the University of Northern Iowa, is currently on a three-year contract and received a 2.5 percent raise, bringing his salary to $348,400.

The board awarded the salaries following performance evaluations of the three state university presidents. The raises go into effect July 1.

After granting Mason a 4 percent raise last summer but no new contract, regents leaders said the board did not intend to offer university presidents contract extensions beyond an initial three-year term. Leath has led ISU since January 2012 on a three-year contract.

Yep, that’s your Iowa Board of Regents. So desperate to have a lapdog at Iowa that they actually froze out the previous president, went back on their word, then committed a fraudulent hire.

Again, I know absolutely nothing about Leath, and I have no idea why he threw a feeble alibi to a political shark, but honestly, Leath has my sympathies. Whatever else he thought he was getting when he took the ISU job, he ended up with Rastetter chained up just across the street, and I’m guessing that’s not a lot of fun.

The agribusiness owned by Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter was awarded $480,000 in no-interest loans from an Iowa State University center a few months after he joined the school’s governing board, records show. The loans from the Iowa Energy Center helped Summit Farms LLC finance the $990,000 cost of installing wind turbines at its corporate office and two hog confinements.

The worst I can say about Leath is that he’s doing a good job advocating for his own school, and after sizing up Harreld at their celebrated dinner I’m guessing he’s licking his chops at the prospect of getting his hands on a big chunk of the U. of I. budget in the coming years. So good for him. Well played.

— Mark Barrett

If you read the previous post you probably found yourself thinking something like this….

Pshaw, Mark. Why would a US Attorney call up Iowa State University President Steven Leath, just to ask him if he really was the one who came up with the idea of having dinner with J. Bruce Harreld, on a day when Harreld was in Ames at Regents President Bruce Rastetter’s behest, meeting with four other regents at Rastetter’s business office, and benefiting from face time that was not made available to any of the other finalists for the position of president of the University of Iowa?

Well, that’s a fair question — if perhaps also a bit verbose — but we’ll get to the answer momentarily.

The Hen House
More broadly, you may be wondering why someone in the United States government would even care if a small group of corrupt bureaucrats hijacked the election of a university president. Don’t the feds have enough to deal with, what with every other thing going to hell in a handcart twice a week? Well, yes they do. But.

The thing about the federal government is that it doesn’t mind blowing money on its own terms, but it really doesn’t like it when somebody steps in and does so without permission. It’s kind of like how you feel about your own bank account. If you go on a drunken bender and drop $2,000 that you can’t account for when the weekend is over, well, there’s an important life lesson, or maybe six. On the other hand, if somebody steals twenty dollars from your wallet, chances are you’re going to make a federal case out of it, and rightly so.

While there are lots of colleges and universities across the country, most of them are not major research institutions. And while I don’t have a handy graphic that defines ‘major’ in that context, I think it’s safe to say that if you’re pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars each year in federal money alone, that you belong in that category. And the University of Iowa does that, every year. In 2015 the University of Iowa will bring in about $232,000,000, while in 2014 the total amount of federal money was just over $250,000,000. Add in private donations and state money, and each year over $500,000,000 flows into the University of Iowa.

On the federal front various departments are represented by those funds, from Health and Human Services to Education to the National Science Foundation to NASA to Defense. As you might expect, that money also comes with various strings and expectations, and even a few security clearances here and there. Among the expectations is the assumption that nobody will run off with, divert, monkey around with, broker, or leverage said funds for other purposes. So you can understand why the federal government might want to have confidence in whoever is accepting all those checks strewn with zeroes. In fact, they actually pay people to follow up on such things, to make sure there’s no hanky-panky going on.  [ Read more ]

Among the new facts disclosed last Thursday, surrounding the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be president of the University of Iowa, was the previously unknown role played by Iowa State University President Steven Leath.

The day before applications were due for the vacant University of Iowa presidency, J. Bruce Harreld met with four members of the Board of Regents and had dinner with Iowa State University President Steven Leath.

Given the importance of Friday’s unintentional admissions by members of the Board of Regents that Harreld’s hire was indeed improper, it’s understandable that Leath’s apparently minor role in the recruitment of Harreld has received little attention. In a follow-up piece about Leath on Friday, however, Press-Citizen and Des Moines Register higher-education reporter Jeff Charis-Carlson detailed a particularly noteworthy assertion by Leath that fundamentally changes the narrative surrounding Regents President Bruce Rastetter.

From the beginning of the Harreld saga until last Friday the focus of attention has been on the hiring process and result. Lurking in the background, also from the beginning, has been a deep suspicion by many that Regents President Bruce Rastetter orchestrated the hiring of the candidate he wanted all along. But until last Friday that issue remained secondary to questions about the hire itself, including whether Harreld was even qualified for the job.

As might be expected in that context, each new defense of the regents’ unanimous vote for Harreld addressed those same concerns, including responses from Governor Terry Branstad, from acting University of Iowa President Jean Robillard, from Regents President Rastetter himself, and from other members of the Board of Regents. All spoke in support of the election, in support of the regents’ right to make the decision they made, and in support of Harreld.

Now here are the opening graphs of Charis-Carlson’s PC/DSM article.

The president of Iowa State University said Friday it was his idea to host a dinner this summer for Bruce Harreld, who was then a prospective applicant for the University of Iowa presidency.

ISU President Steven Leath said that Bruce Rastetter, president of the Iowa Board of Regents, had asked Leath for permission to share his contact information with Harreld, to which Leath agreed. Rastetter was recruiting Harreld, a former IBM executive, along with a few other candidates, as a replacement for then retiring UI President Sally Mason.

After Harreld and Leath made contact, Leath invited him to dinner July 30 at the president’s residence. The dinner was preceded by several meetings in Ames that Rastetter had arranged between Harreld and four other members of the Iowa Board of Regents, two of whom were members of the UI Presidential Search and Screen Committee.

Take a look at the first sentence in the text above. That is not a statement in defense of Harreld as a candidate, nor a statement in defense of the regents’ right to hire whomever they choose, nor a statement in defense of the hiring process, and it is not a statement in defense of the reputations of the other eight members of the Board of Regents. It is, instead, the first statement I can find, by someone in a position to know, which is solely a defense against the percolating charge that Regents President Rastetter personally orchestrated the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld.

Until now — and admittedly I may have missed something — there has only been speculation about Rastetter’s behind-the-scenes role. Until last Friday, any defense of Rastetter’s actions by others, and by Rastetter himself, spoke solely to the hire. And yet suddenly, on Friday, we have Leath’s flat statement that it was his idea to invite Harreld to dinner — a statement that has virtually nothing to do with Harreld’s hire, and everything to do with whether Rastetter orchestrated the hiring process.

Which means that right there is an alibi. And from the sitting president of Iowa State University, no less.  [ Read more ]

At the end of last week two critical pieces of information were revealed regarding the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be the next president of the University of Iowa. First, on Thursday, it was disclosed that Harreld met privately, just prior to the deadline for declaring his candidacy, with four members of the nine-member Board of Regents that would unanimously elect him to office one month later. While that meeting was not attended by Regents President Bruce Rastetter, the meeting took place at Summit Agricultural Group, in Ames, Iowa, which is owned by Rastetter.

The day before applications were due for the vacant University of Iowa presidency, J. Bruce Harreld met with four members of the Board of Regents and had dinner with Iowa State University President Steven Leath.

These meetings occurred just weeks after Harreld — eventually chosen to become UI’s 21st president — first visited the UI campus July 8 to speak with UI Health Care leaders and meet with heads of the institution and the Board of Regents.

According to emails obtained by The Gazette on Thursday and a statement from Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter, Harreld participated in several meetings in Ames on July 30 “as part of the recruiting process for the position of president at the University of Iowa.”

One involved regent President Pro Tem Katie Mulholland and regent Milt Dakovich, and a second involved regents Mary Andringa and Larry McKibben. Harreld requested the meetings, and although Rastetter didn’t attend any of the gatherings, he did help coordinate them.

On Friday, in pushing back against the growing body of evidence that Harreld did indeed receive preferential treatment during the hiring process, several members of the Board of Regents not only failed to resolve the appearance of impropriety, by their own words they confessed to impropriety.

Regents Milt Dakovich and Katie Mulholland, who both served on the search committee along with Rasetter, also met Harreld on July 30 — the same day as a telephonic meeting of the search committee, and the day before committee members were to receive access to the application materials of the official candidates for the job.

Dakovich said the conversation with Harreld went on for more than an hour and included questions and answers from both sides.

“He definitely had some things that he was interested in, but it went both ways,” Dakovich said.

McKibben, Dakovich and Mulholland each said Friday that they maintained an open mind throughout the final stages of the search — not making up their minds until after closed-session interviews with the four finalists Sept. 3.

“I don’t think that we knew any more about (Harreld) based on (those meetings) than we did about the other candidates based on their curriculum vitae, which were extensive,” Mulholland said.

Prior to declaring his candidacy, not only did J. Bruce Harreld receive and accept a special invitation to speak on July 8th at the University of Iowa from Jean Robillard, who was the head of the presidential search committee and remains the acting president at Iowa — an offer that no other candidate received, which resulted in a presentation that was attended by Regents President Rastetter — but on July 30th Harreld also had face-to-face meetings with four other voting members of the nine-member board, which none of the other candidates, including the other three finalists for the position, were invited to attend. In now attempting to explain why none of that was improper, Regent Katie Mulholland actually proves impropriety by equating face-to-face meetings with documentation [bold mine].

“I don’t think that we knew any more about (Harreld) based on (those meetings) than we did about the other candidates based on their curriculum vitae, which were extensive,” Mulholland said.

This statement is so jaw-droppingly antithetical to integrity and fairness in any hiring process that I can’t figure out whether it represents genuine naiveté or conspiratorial panic. The question is not — as the regents appear to believe, based on their Friday pushback — whether the regents themselves view the hiring process as fair, but whether it was objectively fair. And by their own serial admissions over the past month it clearly was not. By their own admissions the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be president of the University of Iowa was, undeniably, improper at best.

Granted, impropriety can be a little hard to get your mind around when you’ve got four white male eggheads vying for a job, so let’s change things up a bit. We’ll keep the circumstances of the hire the same, and the job the same, but this time Harreld will be the lone white male egghead, while the other three finalists will be women or persons of color. Does that make the impropriety clear?

The whole point of making sure that all candidates for an open position get the same amount of face time is not simply to cover your ass when you finally get around to making a predetermined decision, it’s to make sure, if you’re not crooked, that the hiring process itself doesn’t produce skewed results. Meaning specifically the exact results you would expect in the case of the Harreld hire, where the candidate who got the most face time and the most opportunities to present himself ended up being chosen.

Even assuming this wasn’t a done deal, which we will probably never know unless the feds get involved, the mere fact that Harreld had so much more time to present himself to the regents, including imprinting on them at brain level in all kinds of sensory and intuitive ways, to say nothing of cognitively, by presenting ideas and responding personally and professionally, means that all of the other candidates were denied those same opportunities. And it’s at the level of opportunity that questions of fairness and propriety are determined in the hiring process.

[ Read more ]

The reputation of Jean Robillard, the acting president of the University of Iowa, continues to take hits as new disclosures mount regarding his role in the hiring of president-elect J. Bruce Harreld. Yet so far the central question of how Harreld even made it through the selection process remains unanswered.

It is now known that Harreld declared his official candidacy either on, or one day before, the deadline for doing so:

Rastetter said Thursday that four additional regents met Harreld on July 30 in Ames, the day before the application deadline. Rastetter defended the meetings, saying Harreld wanted to learn more about the position and what would be expected.

What has not been established, however, is when Harreld submitted his resume. Fortuitously, because acting president Robillard was also the head of the search committee, he is perfectly positioned to answer that and related questions.

For example, as the head of the search committee Robillard must have put protocols in place for verifying the resumes and c.v.’s of the candidates who made the initial cut. And that’s true even if responsibility for maintaining those protocols was delegated to Parker Executive Search, the search firm that was paid an unusually high fee of $200,000 by the Board of Regents to manage and ensure the integrity of the selection process. Yet despite all of those protections, it was learned via press reports just prior to the election that J. Bruce Harreld’s resume contained false information.

According to the CV provided by the Board of Regents, Harreld lists himself as managing principal for a firm called Executing Strategy LLC, out of Avon, Colo., advising public, private, and military organizations on “leadership, organic growth, and strategic renewal.”

But no business with that name is registered with the Secretary of State’s Office in Colorado, and representatives with an Avon-area chamber of commerce said they have no knowledge of the business. An Executing Strategy LLC was registered with the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2009 under the signatory James Bruce Harreld, but it was dissolved earlier this year.

Harreld, according to public records, on Feb. 6, 2013, filed three mandatory annual reports for the business for the years 2010, 2011, and 2012. But no reports have been filed since, and the secretary of the commonwealth on June 30 took action to dissolve the business, which listed its services provided as consulting, strategy, implementation, marketing, and turnaround advice.

Over the past few days Harreld’s resume has received renewed public scrutiny for additional misrepresentations, which were also overlooked by both the search firm hired by the Board of Regents and the search committee headed by Jean Robillard.

Whereas Harreld has already revealed his lack of such essential integrity by submitting a misleading professional resume, which not only identifies his current position as the managing director of a non-existant company, but also lists him as the sole author of 12 articles and book chapters, 7 of which were co-authored with others, as noted by many faculty, staff and students. So it’s no wonder that the university community is deeply puzzled and troubled by how he gained such a uniquely important position, presumably embodying the highest standards of the institution, despite such distortions of his professional record.

In judging Harreld’s fitness for office at an institution of higher learning such omissions are obviously a concern. So much so that the Faculty Assembly of the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences took the unprecedented step of censuring Harreld for misconduct over a month before he is scheduled to take office.

Harreld’s resume also included 12 items in the section on publication history. Harreld did not note, however, that that most of those publications were co-authored.

The motion from the faculty assembly notes that the failure to list co-authors is in violation of the UI Operations Manual.

If Harreld had already taken office, one obvious question is whether such disclosures would constitute grounds for removal. Because if that’s the case, they must also necessarily constitute grounds for precluding Harreld from taking office.  [ Read more ]

Having established that J. Bruce Harreld submitted a resume which contained false information about his consulting business*, and having exposed Governor Branstad’s claim that he was not involved in the Harreld hire as incoherent at best, we now revisit acting president Jean Robillard’s important contribution to Harreld’s election as the next president of the University of Iowa.

It has been reported that at the time Harreld was not a candidate for the position, and that Robillard simply invited him to speak to a small group of people at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, but that narrative is now falling apart.

“The chief of staff for Robillard sent Harreld a July 2 email with itineraries for his and his wife’s trip. The message referenced Robillard’s invitation to Harreld to speak to UIHC leadership on “sustaining success.” At the time, Robillard was head of the presidential search committee.”

The news that Harreld was on campus two months before appearing as a finalist for the presidency shocked the university community, which largely new nothing about the visit. The news was particularly jarring because Harreld himself made no mention of having been in the state, let alone having visited with his wife, when he subsequently spoke to the faculty and staff during an open forum. The fact that Harreld had previously met with Robillard and Regents President Bruce Rastetter, and two other members of the search committee who were roped in at the last minute, was actually news to other members of the search committee.

Yet to date there has been no follow-up regarding Jean Robillard’s personal facilitation of Harreld’s July 8th presentation and meeting, which makes the following tweet from Tuesday all the more interesting.

Interim President Robillard says he does not know what occurred behind the scenes during the selection of the new UI President.

— UIowa Student Gov (@uisg) September 23, 2015

When Robillard mentions “what occurred behind the scenes”, the clear implication is that he is talking about the Board of Regents and their deliberations — if indeed there were any — prior to their unanimous vote in favor of Harreld. However, as both head of the university’s presidential search committee and as the person who invited Harreld to speak at UIHC on July 8th, Robillard’s actions also remain behind the scenes, belying his own personal promise of a transparent hiring process.

Jean Robillard, Iowa’s interim president and chair of the search committee, pointed out that while the final stage of the search is moving quickly, the search itself has been taking place for months. The search firm was hired in February.

He highlighted the fact that faculty members have multiple avenues to submit feedback — through both the Faculty Senate and the search firm — and noted that at many other flagship public universities, faculty don’t have the opportunity to hear from multiple finalists publicly.

“The process has been transparent and open at every corner,” Robillard offered. “Many, many searches at universities, even public ones, are not that open. This is probably one of the most open searches that’s done in the country.”

In that context, as the acting president of the University of Iowa, and as the standard bearer for personal and academic integrity, I’m sure Jean Robillard would be more than willing to provide answers to the following questions in order to reassure the university community about his role in the timeline of events surrounding the Harreld hire:

• When did J. Bruce Harreld first come to Robillard’s attention?
• How did Harreld first come to Robillard’s attention?
• When did Robillard and Harreld first communicate?
• Who initiated the first contact — Robillard or Harreld? Someone else?
• Was it solely Robillard’s idea to invite Harreld to speak?
• If not, who suggested to Robillard that Harreld be invited to speak?
• Prior to extending the invitation to Harreld, did Robillard consult with anyone about doing so, and if so, who?
• Did Robillard notify anyone on the search committee, or anyone affiliated with the hiring process, including members of the regents who were not on the search committee, that Harreld was going to be invited to speak?
• When did Robillard extend an invitation to Harreld to speak?
• When did Harreld accept the invitation to speak?
• Did Robillard notify anyone on the search committee, or anyone affiliated with the hiring process, including members of the regents not on the search committee, that Harreld had been invited to speak?
• If so, in each case, when and to whom did Robillard make those notifications?
• Were any members of the Board of Regents other that President Bruce Rastetter in attendance at UIHC when Harreld spoke on July 8th, 2015?
• Apart from Harreld’s presentation at UIHC, did Robillard meet with Harreld and any members of the Board of Regents during that July visit?
• In the 365 days prior to July 8th, 2015, how many other speakers did Robillard personally invite to the university to speak in any capacity?
• Did Robillard invite any other prospective or declared candidates to speak at the university, or offer them the opportunity to speak prior to the election? If not, why not?

Update:

Jean Robillard, the chair of the search committee and top hospital official, extended the invitation, met Harreld at the airport and called a “special leadership meeting” of his staff to hear the lecture. Search committee members Gardial, Rastetter, and Faculty Senate President Christina Bohannan had a university-catered “VIP lunch” with Harreld, whose wife was also given a tour of the campus. No other candidates or potential candidates received similar invitations.

• Did Robillard turn down any requests from prospective or declared candidates to visit Iowa, to speak at Iowa, to meet with Robillard personally, or to arrange meetings with members of the Board of Regents? If so, why?
• What was the search committee’s procedure for determining when candidates were deemed officially declared?
• What was the procedure by which newly declared candidates were brought to the attention of the full search committee?
• When did Harreld declare his candidacy?
• To whom did Harreld make that declaration?
• When was the full search committee notified of Harreld’s intent to run?

As I’m sure acting president Robillard would agree, nothing is more important at an institution of higher learning than maintaining the highest standards of personal integrity and professional conduct. Answering these questions will help dispel the pall of suspicion hanging over Robillard regarding the behind-the-scenes role that he clearly did play in the miraculously successful, against-all-odds candidacy of J. Bruce Harreld for president of the University of Iowa.

* Pay particular attention to the moment in the video when J. Bruce Harreld rubs his eye. I believe that’s what poker players and body-language experts call a ‘tell’.

— Mark Barrett

You feel violated. You trusted in a process that proved corrupt and you trusted in people who proved corrupt. You know a wrong has been perpetrated but there’s no smoking gun — not even a broken pane of glass you can point to as tangible evidence of a crime. Instead, you’re left with a void, and you’re now trying to comprehend that void using your intellect, which has always sustained you. And that’s your first mistake.

When you’re victimized you may go through a period of dissociation or cognitive dissonance, where no matter how hard you try you can’t get your view of the world to match up with what happened. And that’s particularly true if you were betrayed in the process. If you’re a peace-loving sort and someone you know slaps you across the face, you may be stunned by that assault, not just physically but mentally. If you’re an honest person and someone you know takes money out of your wallet, then laughs in your face because it will be your word against theirs, you may be incredulous, but you may also find yourself numbly agreeing with their logic. If you’ve devoted your life to the search for truth and a small gang of thugs in blue blazers steals an election by corrupting key points in the electoral process, you may find yourself trying to rationalize that abuse simply because you can’t comprehend the audacity of the deceit.

If you are a good person all of those reactions are normal. Unfortunately, the bad people in the world will use your goodness against you to perpetrate crime after crime. Which brings us to the Board of Regents and their unanimous decision to hire J. Bruce Harreld as the next president of the University of Iowa.

You are now being told that the hiring process was open and transparent when you know it was not, that the perpetrators of that violation care about shared governance when they clearly do not, and that it’s time for everyone to pull together and help the newly elected, unqualified, carpetbagging dilettante who is about to be installed in office actually learn how to do the job he is now being paid $4,000,000 to do. Yet as a good person you may still be thinking there is some plausible justification for why a small group of fine, upstanding thugs behaved so reprehensibly.

What you are now being asked to do is to participate in the violation of trust that was perpetrated against you, and you are being asked to do that for two reasons. First, so you can no longer protest that abuse, and second so you will be complicit in the abuse yet to come. If you are on the faculty or staff, or are a student at the University of Iowa, what just happened is a violation of your trust and you should not forget that. The election of J. Bruce Harreld was not the result of a fair and open process of inclusion, but a bald abuse of power by Governor Terry Branstad, by the president of the Board of Regents, Bruce Rastetter, by the acting university president, Jean Robillard, and by the newly elected president himself, J. Bruce Harreld.

[ Read more ]

While speaking at an open forum as one of four finalists for the open presidency at the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld made no mention of his visit to the University of Iowa campus two months earlier. Only after his unanimous election by the Board of Regents was it revealed that he had visited the state with his wife, and that he had met with both the president of the Board of Regents, Bruce Rastetter, and the head of the search committee and acting president, Jean Robillard, as well as two more members of the search committee who were hastily added at the last minute.

It has been reported that at the time Harreld was not a candidate for the position, and that Robillard simply invited him to speak to a small group of people at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics*, but that narrative is now falling apart.

The chief of staff for Robillard sent Harreld a July 2 email with itineraries for his and his wife’s trip. The message referenced Robillard’s invitation to Harreld to speak to UIHC leadership on “sustaining success.” At the time, Robillard was head of the presidential search committee.

The email said that Harreld’s wife, Mary, would be escorted for “a tour/lunch while you are meeting with UI Health Care leadership.”

Mary Harreld’s itinerary was not provided, but included a tour of the new Hancher construction site.

“Mary and I truly appreciate your showing her the campus and especially the soon to be finished Hancher Performing Arts Center,” Harreld replied. “We look forward to meeting you.”

One reason it’s important for Rastetter and Robillard to stick to the narrative that Harreld was not a candidate at that point is that it could fairly be noted that the treatment afforded Harreld was not uniformly afforded to other candidates. The reason that narrative is now falling apart is that it strains credulity that Harreld’s wife was given a tour of the campus for any reason other than to show her the campus that her husband would be presiding over only two short months later.

Another reason it’s important to cling to any remaining shred of plausible deniability about Harreld’s status as a candidate is that it means Rastetter and Robillard did nothing wrong by failing to notify the full twenty-one-person search committee that Harreld was in town and being considered for the job:

During a meeting Thursday of the UI chapter of the American Association of University Professors, faculty members discussed the summer visit. Two members of the search committee said they learned of it in the newspaper.

“I didn’t know … and I think there are others who were completely unaware of this,” said one of them, Dorothy Johnson, a UI art history professor. “I’m learning things in the paper I had no knowledge of even though I was on the search committee.”

As is always the case when dealing with politically appointed bureaucrats and their collaborators the details are both mind-numbing and critical, but you can find an excellent summary of the ever-evolving narrative of Harreld’s visit here.

After Rastetter and Robillard both promised an open and transparent hiring process, and despite the fact that the regents were taken to court eight years ago for conducting a presidential search in violation of the law (which they lost), and after J. Bruce Harreld himself spoke at the university and talked about shared governance, transparency and building trust, it is readily apparent that neither Rastetter, Robillard or Harreld knows what transparency means, what shared governance means, or how to build trust with anyone except themselves. And of course with Mary Harreld.

* If you are not familiar with the UIHC, what you need to know is that it is a massive cutting-edge teaching hospital with resources and staff that rival any hospital complex in the world. On any given day there must be dozens of people giving talks on different subjects, none of whom would be contacted by the acting president’s chief of staff, none of whom would have a sit-down with the acting president (who was at that time also head of the presidential search committee), none of whom would meet with the president of the regents (whose body would soon vote on the candidate of their choice), and none of whom’s spouses would be given a tour of the campus even if they tagged along on such a junket, which they likely would not.

— Mark Barrett

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

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