DITCHWALK

One of the things I continually forget in life is that there really are people who cannot be embarrassed. I think everyone believes they feel some level of embarrassment, but objectively, when you look at what people do as opposed to what the say, it’s clear that some people do not register the kind of mortification you or I would experience if we did something wrong and were caught red-handed.

An obvious case in point, of course, would be the new president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld. Not only was Harreld’s resume insufficiently proofed, but he was caught lying about himself in two entirely different ways. One of those ethical breaches was so antithetical to higher education that the Iowa faculty censured him before he took office. Yet in the aftermath of that rebuke it never occurred to Harreld that his personal failings disqualified him from a job he had lied his way into.

A normal human being would never get over that. They would go on, but they would remember the sting of that public unmasking for years. J. Bruce Harreld is still scheduled to take office on November 2nd, and by his own press-release is determined to fight any slurs against his plastic values.

On Monday I was again reminded that some people do not have the capacity to experience normal human embarrassment when Iowa Governor Terry Branstad took time out of his busy day to dismiss recent revelations by regent Subhash Sahai. While it was known that five members of the Board of Regents, led by President Bruce Rastetter, conducted secret meetings with J. Bruce Harreld, what was not known is that the other four members knew nothing about those meetings until after the final vote. Like the wind-up governor he has apparently become, after Rastetter threw Sahai under the bus late last week, for the third time the governor came to Rastetter’s defense over what is clearly a fraudulent hire.

Branstad was asked about Sahai’s concerns this morning during the governor’s weekly news conference.

“I would point out the last time the Regents went through this, choosing a president of the University of Iowa, they had similar controversy,” Branstad said.

As the governor knows, there is no equivalence between what happened with the fraudulent Harreld hire and what happened in 2006, except that in both cases a politically connected and heavy-handed regents president decided that the board was his to do with as he pleased with. Yet even if there was some equivalence, you don’t simply overlook accusations of criminal or malfeasant behavior because those accusations sound like something that happened in the past. The police respond to each call in order to determine whether a crime was committed. The fire department responds to each call in order to determine whether there’s a fire. And the governor should respond to each report of malfeasance or criminality in his own government, in order to determine the facts of each case.

When a sitting member of the Board of Regents points out — not suspects, but actually reveals — that a majority of the Board of Regents kept him in the dark about secret meetings with the winning candidate, that’s not something that should be summarily dismissed with a flimsy political lie. Which is why — and again, I know this is naive — I was momentarily shocked by the governor’s brazen disregard for Subhash Sahai personally, but also his ongoing disregard for education, which is a sacred trust that all Iowans hold dear. From a few week ago:

So how can the governor square his claim that he played no part in the hiring process, even as he only spoke to one candidate, and that candidate was J. Bruce Harreld? Well obviously he can’t, but he doesn’t care about that. Politically, the governor has to insist that he played no part in the hiring process in order to establish plausible deniability, so that’s why he said what he said, even as that claim is in direct conflict with what he actually did. Unless there’s a federal investigation and the governor is put under oath, however, he knows there’s no price to pay for appearing incoherent in the eyes of the citizens that he technically serves.

Like I said, I forget there are people like that, and that quite often the very thing that allows them to take to the political stage is an inherent incapacity for empathy or self-awareness. If, as a politician, you have no problem defending pink slime against a non-existent conspiracy, you’re probably capable of doing or saying anything, particularly in defense of the people who bankroll your campaigns. Even if that means stomping on a sacred trust, or on a good and loyal Iowan that you yourself appointed to protect that trust.

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This past Wednesday and Thursday several important events took place in the ever-unfolding nightmare that is the election of J. Bruce Harreld to be the next president of the University of Iowa. Those events centered on and around the Iowa Board of Regents, which, in early September, reported a unanimous vote in Harreld’s favor, despite the fact that Harreld was manifestly unqualified for the position.

In previous posts we have looked at various dynamics involved in the search process, and we have documented the administrative fraud that occurred in the search committee itself. We have also pointed out, however, that the entire search process is not separate from the Iowa Board of Regents, but a function of the board, and as such any malfeasance is ultimately the board’s responsibility.

In this post we will look at the final vote by the nine-member Board of Regents, which took place after the conclusion of the search. In doing so it’s important to keep the following facts in mind. First, the board is not obligated to call a search. It can simply elect someone by whatever criteria it deems important. Second, if the board decides to initiate a search at taxpayer expense, for whatever reason, there is an implicit expectation that the search will be conducted fairly, so all candidates have an equal opportunity to present themselves throughout the search process. Third, in this search, when the committee concluded its business it sent four finalists to the board for a final vote. No other body, and no individuals other than the nine members on the Board of Regents at that time, had a say in who would be elected.

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In trying to comprehend why the Iowa Board of Regents chose a completely unqualified candidate to be the next president of the University of Iowa, as opposed to one of three eminently qualified finalists, we have turned over a lot of rocks and exposed a great deal of deceit. To date, the most plausible explanation for the regents’ otherwise inexplicable decision is that they elected the candidate that would give them the least possible resistance when implementing their plans, regardless of the damage that selection did to the university itself. While I think that’s still the most likely explanation, we are now compelled by the facts to consider a motive other than politics or rank ego.

For the record, this is not something I wanted to write about or even consider, but the only alternative was to remain silent out of discomfort, and that’s obviously not an option. Intolerance does exist in many guises, and people do have unspoken motives, which they do not utter because they know those motives are culturally indefensible. I am not interested in anyone’s religious affiliation, and I think everyone has a right to their own religious views. However, I also believe in the separation of church and state, and I believe that the University of Iowa is a state institution.

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If you’ve never heard of a man named Jerre Stead, join the club. Like most of the characters in the tawdry drama surrounding the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be the next president of the University of Iowa, I’d never heard of Stead until a few weeks ago. In fact, I read an article about him last month, and saw him listed on the search committee roster several times, but I still forgot almost everything I read.

Recently I revisited the article about Stead, who is yet another millionaire donor singing Harreld’s praises, and doing so clarified a couple of points alluded to in the previous post. Specifically, it was noted that although Iowa Board of Regents president and fellow search-committee-member Bruce Rastetter, and chair of the search committee and acting University of Iowa President Jean Robillard, both claim to have recruited Harreld first — even as those claims are at variance with Harreld’s own narrative about how he was nominated — neither Rastetter nor Robillard have had anything to say about how and when they first learned of Harreld. One minute Rastetter and Robillard have no knowledge of J. Bruce Harreld, the next minute they’re committing serial fraud by giving Harreld blatant preferential treatment in a sham search that they could have avoided by hiring Harreld outright.

And no, it makes no sense to me, either, but that’s where Jerre Stead comes in.

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Whether this is your first Ditchwalk post about the election of J. Bruce Harreld to be the next president of the University of Iowa, or you’ve been torturing yourself by reading along, I have good news. In this post we’re going to use everything we’ve learned to answer two lingering questions. The first question, which arose in the previous post, is why the acting president of the university and former search committee chair, Jean Robillard, lied about Harreld’s reason for visiting Iowa City on July 8th. The second question, which follows from all of the ‘Harreld hire’ posts on Ditchwalk, is whether the fraud that was committed during the search by Robillard and Regents President Bruce Rastetter rises to the level of a criminal offense.

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In the previous post about the election of the new University of Iowa president, we discussed three administrative crimes of omission which gave J. Bruce Harreld preferential treatment that no other candidate received. Included was a phone call Harreld received from Governor Terry Branstad, sometime in August; meetings Harreld held with four regents on July 30th, plus dinner that evening with ISU’s President Leath; and a “VIP lunch” and presentation Harreld was afforded on July 8th, which was attended by, among others, search committee member and Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter, search committee chair and acting Iowa President Jean Robillard, and two other members of the search committee.

At some point in the search process a determination was made that it was okay to offer those opportunities to Harreld. To-date, however, Robillard and Rastetter have failed to explain how those determinations were made. Because the weight of evidence suggests that they conspired to deprive other candidates of those opportunities, it is now incumbent on Rastetter, Robillard and even the governor to do what the Cedar Rapids Gazette suggested over a month ago.

It’s not uncommon for university instructors to demand their students thoroughly show their work. Not doing so can result in a lower grade, even if they arrive at the right final answer.

We think the same applies to the Iowa Board of Regents, which voted unanimously to hire Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa. Clearly, the board is convinced that its unconventional choice of a former IBM and Boston Chicken executive with no university administrative experience is the right answer. They may be correct, but we believe the regents have failed to show their work.

Even if we allow, as the Gazette does, that the decision to hire Harreld may have been arrived at fairly, it’s clear that the key decision points remain cloaked in secrecy. Between claims of confidentiality from Parker Executive Search, which the regents hired at twice the normal rate, the confidentiality imposed on the search committee, and the secrecy of the final interviews and vote by the regents, we have only the announcement of their nine-to-nothing vote to go on. What the regents have yet to do is explain how they got to that conclusion by showing their work.

Why is that a problem? Well, again overlooking the fact that wanton favoritism has already been proven, there are a lot of ways to get to a unanimous vote when you know the machinations of that vote will never see the light of day. Too, although five of the regents met face-to-face with Harreld at least once during the selection process — a voting majority, and far more than any other candidate — some regents did not have the opportunity to interview Harreld until the last minute:

Rastetter said the regents were well aware of the concerns raised by the UI faculty. The board received a cautionary Sept. 2 email from UI Faculty Senate President Christina Bohannan, the night before the regents’ closed-session interviews with Harreld and the other three finalists for UI president.

“A number of the regents hadn’t even interviewed the candidates when we heard one wasn’t acceptable,” Rastetter said.

While we’ve heard quite a bit from Rastetter, and from Regent Katie Mulholland, and several of the other regents who met with Harreld on July 30th, at least four of the regents are missing from the post-vote conversation. Even though the regents are political appointees, and Govern Branstad went against the intent of the law that created the regents by packing it with political cronies, we also can’t be sure that all of the regents were aware of the special treatment Harreld received.

Did they all know about the phone call from the governor? Did they all know about the meetings in Ames, or the dinner with Leath? Did all of the regents know about the July 8th “VIP lunch”? Because if they didn’t know about those things, and wanted to know about those things, I’m not sure the vote itself can be said to be fully informed. And that’s particularly true given that we don’t know how they finally arrived at their nine-to-nothing decision.

It is a given that the regents as a body are corrupt. It is not a given that all nine members of that board have forgotten what personal integrity means to Iowans. In that silent minority there may be at least one member who is aghast at what was perpetrated in their name, and at how their vote now validates the administrative crimes that were systematically used to elect J. Bruce Harreld.

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In the previous two posts we decided that fairness would be our only test for evaluating the search process that resulted in the hiring of J. Bruce Harreld as the next president of the University of Iowa. We also exposed a number of dodges that acting University of Iowa President Jean Robillard and Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter have been using to confuse and obscure the question of fairness. Finally, we looked at how a fair search process would be conducted by a fictional committee determined to meet that test, and in so doing learned that the two critical aspects of a fair search are decision making and communication.

We then compared that fictional committee to the search committee that Rastetter was on and Robillard chaired. In doing so we noted that while it has been clearly established that Rastetter, Robillard and even Governor Branstad gave Harreld preferential treatment, what has been overlooked is that Rastetter and Robillard also subverted the entire committee process. In this post we will consider how administration of the Harreld search would have been done if the search process had been fair to all candidates, and how the search was actually administered.

As we saw in the previous post, if you do something you’re not supposed to do, then lie about it, that’s a crime of commission and a lie of commission. If you don’t do something you’re supposed to do that’s a crime of omission, and if nobody asks you about that crime your silence is a lie of omission.

As you might imagine, it’s much easier to detect and prove crimes of commission precisely because something happened — a physical injury, a loss of funds, property damage. With a crime of omission you have to know that something should have happened to even suspect that a crime took place. Until you do, there’s no chance that you’ll stumble on evidence that leads you to ask the right questions.

In the context of the Harreld hire, the preferential treatment given to Harreld by Rastetter, Robillard and Branstad includes individual and collective administrative crimes of commission. Because those crimes resulted in acts, however — meetings and contacts which took place during the search — they have been exposed and reported by the press over the past few weeks. Prior to that point much of that information was obscured by lies of omission from the various parties, including the protracted lie of omission which encompassed J. Bruce Harreld’s entire presentation at the open forum shortly before the election. (And of course we can’t forget the serial administrative crimes of omission on Harreld’s resume.)

As damning as all that might be, however, those crimes are dwarfed by the administrative crimes of omission that were perpetrated against the search committee itself. What makes identifying those crimes particularly difficult is that nothing Rastetter, Robillard and Branstad failed to do rises to the level of illegality, meaning even though the search was fraudulent, their complicity appears to be nothing more than laziness, incompetence, or typical bureaucratic confusion.

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In the previous post we adopted fairness as the sole standard by which we would judge the election of J. Bruce Harreld to be the next president of the University of Iowa. We also noted different dodges that Iowa Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter, and acting University of Iowa President Jean Robillard, have been using to explain their preferential treatment of Harreld during the search process, and that their arguments always lead away from or obscure the question of fairness.

So. How do you steal an election? Well, if you’re Robillard, and you’re the chair of the search committee, and you’re Rastetter, and you’re also on the search committee, the first thing you have to do is corrupt the selection process. If you can’t get your candidate — freelance business consultant Harreld — through to the full Board of Regents, which Governor Terry Branstad has thoughtfully packed with political cronies for just such an occasion, then you can’t elect your stooge.

Though I know nothing about hiring anybody for anything, I’m reasonably sure that institutions like the Board of Regents and the University of Iowa hire people all the time, and as a result have mature guidelines and procedures for doing so. And in among all those mature policies I’m guessing there are a lot of do’s and don’t’s, and people on staff who are well-versed in those do’s and don’t’s, including some people called lawyers whose job it is to make sure the do’s happen and the don’t’s don’t. Because the last thing anyone wants in the middle of making a hire is for the appearance of impropriety, let alone actionable impropriety, to rear its ugly head.

Because I’m naive to such things, however, and cannot draw on real-life experience in this post, we’re going to do the next best thing, or the best thing if you prefer fiction to nonfiction. That’s right — we’re going to join an imaginary search committee fraught with the same aggressive recruiting and meticulous due diligence that tormented Robillard and Rastetter during their epic struggle to catch, land, and mount J. Bruce Harreld over the black-and-gold Iowa mantel.

So let’s pretend we’re members of a twenty-one person search committee in a parallel universe, which also happens to be looking for a new university president. I’ll play the part of Bruno Ratsnest, the head of the Board of Regency, which will elect the new president from four finalists chosen by the committee. You’ll be Jacque Bobblehead, the acting president of the university, and because of your loyalty to the regency you get the chair.

Although there are nineteen other members on the committee, because we represent and control both the regency and the university, and have access to crack staffers and legal teams at each institution, we decide to take the lead and do everything we can to conduct a fair search that meets not only every legal requirement, but every ethical test that might leave us vulnerable to the dreaded appearance of impropriety. We’ll not only do that from our point of view as aggressive recruiters, but from the perspective of meticulous candidates doing due diligence. Whatever happens, the one thing we will be sure of is that we are prepared for any eventuality.

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Until Thursday of last week I did not know what to think about acting University of Iowa President Jean Robillard. Was he a kindly old doctor manipulated by ruthless Regents President Bruce Rastetter, or a co-conspirator in the fraudulent selection and election of J. Bruce Harreld to be the next president of the University of Iowa? Unfortunately, based on Robillard’s comments on that day the answer seems to be co-conspirator, if not worse.

Predictably, Robillard, Rastetter, Governor Terry Branstad and Harreld himself are doing their best to move on, hoping that the facts of the fraud they perpetrated on the university and the people of Iowa will simply be forgotten. That’s the way corrupt bureaucrats roll, and unless a smoking gun turns up they often get away with their abuses. If there’s no pool of blood, no open wound, no sign of a struggle, then almost any crime can be called progress, while those who cry foul are dismissed as settling for the status quo, being afraid of change, or choosing to fail.

Oddly enough, however, as you’ve probably noticed in your own life, one of the things that bureaucrats are extremely good at is avoiding accountability. I’m not sure if that’s an innate capacity that leads some people to become bureaucrats, or if it’s a skill that’s learned on the job, but if you don’t have that ability you usually end up in another line of work, while the people who cost you your job gets promoted. If you end up in conflict with a bureaucrat you may think you have them dead to rights, but no matter what you do they dodge this way and that until you falter in the courage of your convictions, and then you’re finished. Combine a dodgy disposition with even a moderately complex bureaucracy and it may actually be impossible to figure out who did what, let alone pin anything on anyone.

Fortunately, although the people who hijacked the office of president at the University of Iowa are certainly very dodgy, they’re not lost in the bowels of a massive corporation like GM, Toyota or VW. No. Instead, they’re standing right out in the open on the autumnal grasslands of Iowa, where there’s nowhere to hide, except perhaps in the wintry blades of the governor’s mustache.  [ Read more ]

What I hope will be the first of many:

The American Association of University Professors is sending two representatives from its national headquarters in Washington D.C. to Iowa City to launch an inquiry into the search that landed J. Bruce Harreld as the next University of Iowa president.

The inquiry could lead to a full-blown investigation around whether the state Board of Regents breached the association’s values related to shared governance and the selection of administrators.

I guess J. Bruce Harreld was right. Institutions either go up or down.

We just didn’t know he was talking about the Iowa Board of Regents.

— Mark Barrett