DITCHWALK

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08/16/20 — Having your suburban homestead blasted by a derecho has a certain clarifying effect on the mind. No electrical power for 70 hours, no internet for 85 hours, yet I know I am one of the lucky ones. In Iowa City/Johnson County I had no damage to structures or trees, and only lost a little food after securing most of the frozen goods offsite. Meanwhile, Cedar-Rapids/Linn County just to the north was obliterated, and going on six days now tens of thousands are still without power and a thousand homes have been deemed unsafe for human habitation until repairs are made. (Which will now bring out the con artists by the score, fleecing people when they are in most in need, and when law enforcement is otherwise occupied.)

The most interesting mental aspect of the power outage was that even though I was witness to the storm, I had no information about the storm. It also became clear as days passed, and as I picked up a little news here and there, that most of the country was oblivious to what happened. A landed hurricane launched a sneak attack on the Midwest, yet both coasts and the Sun Belt cared not a whit. Yes, the pandemic accounted for some of that, but I also lay blame squarely on Iowa’s demon governor and the leadership in Linn County, which failed utterly to provide for its dazed citizenry and to communicate to the outside world the severity of the damage. (As I have said many times, if this had happened on the East Coast, and particularly around New York City, it would have received wall-to-wall coverage for days.)

Having said all that, for three days I didn’t think about the idiot president of the United States or the idiots at the Iowa Board of Regents. I did think about the illegitimate idiot in the president’s office at the University of Iowa, and about the idiot in the athletic director’s office at UI, because I heard that the Big Ten finally cancelled its football season. But even then the only substantive thought I had was that it’s a real problem that we keep electing and appointing idiots to important leadership positions.

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A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

07/20/20 — Click here and you will find an interesting exchange posted on the University of Iowa Latinx Council website. On 07/13/20, the UI Diversity Councils sent a joint open letter to illegitimate UI president J. Bruce Harreld, and other administrators at UI, detailing leadership concerns. Harreld’s response that same day was to entirely ignore the contents of the letter, and instead simply agree to meet with the Diversity Councils to “listen to your concerns in more detail”. Because one of the core competencies of any administrator is listening patiently without agreeing to do anything, the Diversity Councils declined to meet unless Harreld followed up “personally and in writing, to first address [their] primary concerns and recommendations”. Indeed, in their response to Harreld on 07/17/20, the Diversity Councils specifically noted that “when invited to listening posts by other administrators”, their “collective constituencies…find their concerns ignored, dismissed, or explained away”.

While I do not agree with all of the demands presented by the Diversity Councils, it is encouraging that they seem to have Harreld figured out. After five years of Harreld talking about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), while at the same time demoting and devaluing DEI at every juncture, perhaps Harreld has finally run out of shady tricks. Although he certainly didn’t invent the administrative stall, Harreld uses it constantly, as he did several years ago in promising a campuswide employment practices review following the loss of a gender discrimination suit that originated in the UI Athletic Department. After launching that review with great fanfare, however, the committee charged with delivering on that promise didn’t even get around to hiring an outside law firm for six months.  [ Read more ]

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

06/25/20 — So Bro Bruce and Rod Lehnertz talked at their cameras yesterday and today, largely saying a whole lotta nothin’, but we will get into that over the weekend. Until then….

* From the Gazette’s Lyz Lenz: The University of Iowa fires instructors and tells the rest to get back to the classroom.

* From Katie Akin at the Des Moines Register and Kylee Mullen at the Ames Tribune: Reopening and resurgence: Iowa restaurants, bars close because of employee coronavirus cases.

* From the Daily Iowan’s Chloe Peterson: Opinion | The University of Iowa must condense the coming semester.

* Following the announcement that Nadine Petty will be leaving UI in a matter of weeks — thus continuing the exodus of persons of color who were in leadership positions at the University of Iowa — the school has counter-announced yet another committee that they can point to as evidence that they care about diversity, when clearly they don’t.  [ Read more ]

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

05/20/20 — I put on a HAZMAT suit yesterday and calibrated my Geiger counter, then dutifully plowed through the most recent Daily Iowan interview with illegitimate UI president J. Bruce Harreld. Beyond the usual blather, ass-covering and self-aggrandizing rhetoric, I detected two significant radiation leaks from Harreld’s head.

First, here’s Harreld lying to the DI staff, which is something he does with regularity, but seldom so nakedly:

Last week, somebody tweeted incorrectly what I’d said that you know I’m hopeful that we’ll start football practice June 1 — I didn’t say we will… People wanted to interpret it as a ‘will’. I said ‘no we’re prepared, we’re set.’

Here is specifically what Harreld said, and if you are dubious about the transcription or curious about the greater context, you can hear Harreld himself here:

“But right now, June 1 is the date — we’re gonna get back to practice, and here we go.”

When I say that J. Bruce Harreld is lying trash, this is a mundane example. I can understand why he might be embarrassed about promising that Iowa football practice would begin on June 1st, when it very well may not, but the fact that his response to his own idiocy is to then tell an easily disprovable lie once again goes to the heart of why this man is not and never was suited for the job he holds. Which, unfortunately, now entitles him to deploy said idiocy in service of getting people killed by COVID-19 — which he will then lie about.  [ Read more ]

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04/25/20 — On Thursday of last week the Daily Iowan’s Rin Swann had an interesting story up about the search for yet another Associate Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the University of Iowa. There have been so many searches at UI since illegitimate president J. Bruce Harreld was hired that it’s hard to keep them all straight, but the AVP-DEI position is particularly notorious because of the TaJuan Wilson debacle earlier this year. (For more on all that, see here and here.)

Despite the fact that the new search is just now getting underway, Swann does an excellent job of framing the larger context and underscoring the stakes involved, starting with the headline: UI student urges next Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion leader to report to president. As regular readers know, not only did Harreld demote DEI from his cabinet and kick that position out of his office, but at the same time he invented an entirely new position for an ex-jock to handle startups on the UI campus — which Harreld then also made a dual report to his office. And yet from Swann’s report it sounds as if there may be a reassessment taking place about whether DEI is a cabinet-level position or not:

Donna Cramer, a representative from [search firm] Isaacson, Miller who hosted the student session, said the person who holds the position will report to the provost.

“… The person will most likely sit on the President’s Cabinet, so they will have a voice at the President’s Cabinet level,” Cramer said.

I don’t know what “most likely” means, but making that determination prior to advertising for the position will certainly have an impact on the quality of the applicants, as well as comity on the UI campus. Harreld has in fact been an entitled slug about DEI during his tenure, and in her reporting Swann rightly points out his administrative opportunism and hypocrisy:

The UI often turns to peer institutions when pitching its need for more state funding because some of those schools see better outcomes, such as higher graduation and retention rates — which Harreld has said is because those campuses, such as University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, receive more support per student.

Whereas on the issue of tuition, Harreld has advocated for its cost to be at or above the median of the peer group, he said in a September 2019 DI interview the UI felt comfortable straying from the peer group in this reporting structure because “context matters.”

Without performing an exhaustive historical analysis, I can state with high confidence that there has never been a more disreputable president at the University of Iowa, and Harreld’s cavalier belief that he can cherry-pick facts to suit whatever argument he is making at the moment underscores that certainty. No one who is honest talks like J. Bruce Harreld talks.  [ Read more ]

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

04/04/20 — While illegitimate University of Iowa president J. Bruce Harreld basks in the glory of his la-la-land fantasies about online learning, cracks are starting to appear in the corporate infrastructure that is suddenly handling loads it was never designed to meet. From Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post: School districts, including New York City’s, start banning Zoom because of online security issues.

As noted in yesterday’s story from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, UI does use Zoom and is aware of recent security problems. Now add corporate gaslighting and dirty tricks to weaknesses in any application or service, and we’re about to see an all-out war for market share in virtual/online learning — even though no one knows how long the spike in demand might last.

* Well that didn’t take long. Only a couple of days after the president of the Iowa Board of Regents (who is a former medical doctor) committed to having the state campuses open for business-as-usual in the fall, the governor of California said the following about the NFL season kicking off in August [full quote here]:

I’m not anticipating that happening in this state.

As noted below, it is going to be very hard for college football to kick off as scheduled if the NFL isn’t committed to the same timeline. In fact, even if the NFL tried to push ahead, public Division I programs would be under tremendous pressure to hold off until the pandemic was truly over. Again, I do understand that the regents and state schools want to keep people engaged on the chance that things break their way, but short of a sure-fire miracle vaccine, I don’t see any scenario in which that happens.  [ Read more ]

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

03/12/20 — I don’t know where J. Bruce Harreld and J. Brooks Jackson are, but even if they are lurking on the University of Iowa campus, they should both just stay out of Theresa Brennan’s way and give her whatever she needs to do her job. From the Daily Iowan’s Alexandra Skores: UI Hospitals and Clinics to open new clinic, conduct video doctor visits amid COVID-19 cases.

* The dissonance between academics and athletics is now deafening. From the Daily Iowan’s Brooklyn Draisey: Hawkeye Service Breaks cancels student trips.

So it’s okay for Iowa’s athletic department to send the men’s and women’s basketball teams off to various tournaments, and for the wrestling team to head up to Minnesota for the NCAA tournament, but domestic travel for academic purposes is being curtailed. Kind’a seems like revenue is the determining factor in which UI students are placed at risk. (Gonna be interesting watching Gary Barta — a great humanitarian and mentor of college athletes — explain himself if one or more students are hospitalized.)

* Sarah Hanson has been named the new UI VP for Student Life, replacing the interim Laura McLeran, who will now go back to black ops in the president’s office. Press release includes another disembodied quote from J. Bruce Harreld.

* Someone at the UI Office of Strategic Communication finally got around to writing up a very short press release about how the university completed the financial close on the UI P3 two days ago. Incredibly, however, despite using the words “financial close” in the headline, there is no mention of the fact that UI just pocketed $1.17B as a result of the deal. Instead, we are given yet another disembodied quote from illegitimate UI president J. Bruce Harreld, which is of course also a lie:

“We’re pleased to have found an innovative way to bridge a meaningful gap in available resources in order to help continue delivering on our mission of education and research excellence,” says UI President J. Bruce Harreld. “We’re looking forward to our partnership with ENGIE and Meridiam and appreciate the involvement of university shared governance members, academic leadership, and the campus community during this whole process.”

As detailed endlessly in these virtual pages, the “meaningful gap in available resources” that Harreld takes pains to mention is itself a fraud perpetrated by Harreld.

* Well this is a relief: Big Ten Cancels Remainder of Basketball Tournament.

Apparently, somewhere in the office of the Big Ten Commissioner — which, in better days, usually focuses on denying any knowledge of decades-long sexual abuses perpetrated against student athletes on its storied campuses (so far Penn St., Ohio St., Michigan St. and now Michigan) — there is at least one person smarter than UI AD Gary Barta and UI Head Men’s Moron Fran McCaffrey, who should both be fired for cause for pushing ahead with plans to attend the Big Ten tournament. If that is the level of intelligence and concern that UI administrators in athletics demonstrate in the middle of a global pandemic, then we know everything we need to know about those individuals and their warped, self-interested and potentially calamitous priorities. (As a direct result of their greed and idiocy, Barta will now be given another raise by J. Bruce Harreld, for his steady leadership in a time of crisis, and Barta will give McCaffrey a raise and contract extension that locks him in for another decade.)

* The committee for the nationwide UI AVP-DEI search has been announced. Following the TaJuan Wilson debacle, Harreld initially tried to put off a new DEI search indefinitely, but that obviously exposed his false claim that he was a big proponent of diversity, equity and inclusion at UI. (In reality Harreld demoted DEI from his cabinet, then kicked DEI out of the president’s office altogether.) Fortunately for Harreld, one of his fixers — Russ Ganim — was somehow miraculously named as a co-chair for the new DEI search committee, which will now take an extraordinarily long time to fine just the right person for that critical job, thus also giving Harreld the extensive administrative delay he originally wanted:

The search will begin in April, with a new associate vice president expected to be named during the Spring 2021 semester.

You can’t make this stuff up.

* Apparently the crony Iowa Board of Regents is suddenly cognizant of the fact that a bunch of bodies may start piling up, and are now eager to pass the buck to the crony toads they installed at the state universities, who were all hired primarily to rubber stamp directives from the crony Iowa Board of Regents. From the Daily Iowan’s Katie Ann McCarver: Iowa regents consider policy change to give president emergency-authorization authority. Next up: J. Bruce Harreld authorizes a $200M public-private partnership for body bags.

* Remember back in October, when the Iowa Center for Advancement brought four of the previous UI presidents together, and they also let Harreld tag along? And when those presidents were asked what their toughest challenge was on the job, Harreld talked about how badly he was treated after it became clear that he lied his way into the job he now holds, which was granted as a result of a rigged search process by the Iopwa Board of Regents? Well this is the man who will now lead the University of Iowa’s response to a global pandemic.

* Looking ahead to the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic — which may yet leave us in a state of cultural limbo and ongoing risk — we can already see the contours of the economic shocks that the University of Iowa will have to endure. Whatever revenue is lost and cash expended in the near-term, in the fall there may also be a sharp decrease in enrollment depending on the aftereffects, and how safe the UI campus seems to students and parents who are considering enrollment. Any downward pressure on revenue will in turn provide yet another opportunity for Harreld and the board to increase tuition, but precisely because they have perpetrated a four-year cash grab by relentlessly hiking tuition there is no more elasticity in the system. Meaning a sharp increase in tuition, even if legitimate, may also prove to be a barrier to enrollment.   [ Read more ]

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

11/04/19 — The J. Bruce Harreld Experiment Has Definitively Failed at UI.

11/03/19 — Paralleling an in-process post, this weekend the Gazette published an LTE from Shelton Stromquist about the privatizing of the University of Iowa, and a staff editorial titled “What’s going on at the University of Iowa?” What’s going on is that we’re four years into J. Bruce Harreld’s tenure as the illegitimate president of the school, and the damage from that corrupt act is ongoing.

10/23/19 — Four University of Iowa Presidents and a Prevaricating Narcissist.

10/13/19 — J. Bruce Harreld’s Unilateral Public Statements About TaJuan Wilson’s Resignation, in Context.

09/29/19 — J. Bruce Harreld Marches to the Beat of His Own Broken Drum. Updated 09/30/19.

09/25/19 — So it’s been about 48 since the first UI P3 ‘information session’ was apparently held, and about 24 hours since the second session yesterday, yet I can’t find a single report or tweet or stray mention that either of those meetings actually took place. I’m hopeful there will be press accounts of those sessions after the marching band fiasco dies down, but what I can say is that UI never announced those new, rescheduled ‘information sessions’ to the UI campus. If Harreld wanted to keep people from showing up and asking questions, he could not have done a better job. (In comments to the DI about the assaults perpetrated against the UI marching band, Harreld did manage to blithely mention his globe-trotting efforts on behalf of the P3, while humbly casting himself in the role of administrative superhero.)

09/23/19 — I have no idea yet if the first ‘information session’ on the UI P3 took place today. What did transpire on campus is that Harreld gave a sit-down interview to the Daily Iowan about the assaults that were perpetrated against members of the UI Marching Band, in which he lied about calling off the investigation. DI interview here, related Twitter thread here.

09/22/19 — I kept an eye on this page through last week, and as of today the only ‘information sessions’ that the UI community will ever receive about the UI power-plant P3 are still scheduled for Monday (tomorrow) and Tuesday. What is particularly concerning about the sequencing of those meetings is that administrators at UI have already stated that nothing will be definitively known until later, meaning the ‘information sessions’ are not so much about informing the campus of specifics, but about checking off an administrative obligation to pretend to have informed the campus.

From a report by the Daily Iowa’s Brooklyn Draisey on 07/11/19:

“Please remember, as stated from the start, the UI is exploring a P3 involving its utility system through a deliberate and measured process — and no final decision has been made,” Bassett said in the email. “The UI won’t know the value of the utility system P3 until the RFP process is completed and a concessionaire agreement is signed.”

From the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, three days ago, on 09/19/19:

Although administrators haven’t finalized any decision to move forward — and they’re still vetting potential partners — Harreld said an endowment made possible through the collaboration could yield $14 million annually.

Because the university still has not chosen a potential partner, and because the specifics of a deal won’t be known until after the deal is signed, I’m not sure what useful information will come out of these ‘information sessions’. What I am sure of is that as soon as those meetings have been concluded, administrators at Iowa will claim that the UI campus was fully informed about deal that had not yet been consummated.

09/21/19 — One of the benefits of hiring real leaders as opposed to bureaucratic tools, is that when there’s a problem real leaders tend to do the right thing by default, while bureaucratic tools have to be forced to do the right thing. If you told me that Iowa band members would get assaulted at Ames, yet between them J. Bruce Harreld and AD Gary Barta would turn that straight-forward problem into yet another public relations disaster for the University of Iowa, I would have…obviously believed you, because they’re bureaucratic tools. When you read the details, however, as provided in this comprehensive report by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller, it’s not remotely funny. And again, not only did the Iowa Board of Regents just extend Harreld’s contract, including a $200K increase in compensation, but Harreld immediately turned around and gave Barta a similarly sweet new deal. For this they should both be fired.

09/19/19 — As of this evening the ‘information sessions’ for the prospective public-private power-plant project (P6) are still scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. Toward the end of a report today by the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller — which largely concerns the next round of abusive tuition hikes that the Iowa Board of Regents will impose for the following academic year — we get our first visibility as to how Harreld will foment greed on the UI campus, in order to galvanize support for what will almost certainly be a money-losing venture:

To ensure “we maximize the use of these proceeds,” Harreld unveiled a proposed grant process.

Grants of up to five years would be available, and existing work groups, steering committees and the university’s budget review board would consider applications, Harreld said.

“Anyone on campus could apply for a grant so long as it specifically and directly impacts the strategic plan,” he said.

More to come, but so far it’s basically a game show in which UI borrows money, puts it in an endowment at interest, then spends the proceeds on fabulous prizes, as opposed to meeting any critical or even demonstrable need. And yes, this man is making $800K per year, and will soon be pulling down $1M.

09/16/19 — The Administrative Week That Was and Wasn’t at the University of Iowa.

09/08/19 — J. Bruce Harreld Goes Missing in Action at UI. Updated 09/10/19.

08/26/19 — J. Bruce Harreld, TaJuan Wilson, and the UI Employment Practices Review. Updated 08/28/19. Later update 08/28/19.

08/22/19 — I’ll have more to say about this when I get my head around it, but the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller just published an update on the TaJuan Wilson resignation:

For the next five months — or until he lands a job outside the University of Iowa — the campus’ short-lived head of diversity, equity, and inclusion will telecommute for his “special assignment” and be allowed to “job search during working hours,” even while continuing to earn his $224,000 salary.

So not only is there still no permanent AVP-DEI on the UI campus after two years, but Harreld is now paying someone full freight not to do that job. This is what you get when a small cabal of crony co-conspirators hires a carpetbagging dilettante to run an R1/AAU research university. (See also the prior post for more info.)

08/19/19 — J. Bruce Harreld’s Pretense to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at UI. Updated 08/19/19. Updated 08/20/19. Updated 08/21/19.

08/06/19 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Instinct to Lie.

07/25/19 — J. Bruce Harreld and the Power-Plant Lease That Is Not a Lease.

Take a look at this face:

That’s the face of J. Bruce Harreld, the current president of the University of Iowa. That’s also the face of crony corruption in higher education — not only in the state of Iowa, but across the United States.  [ Read more ]