The cry that issued from Boulder when Bruce D. Benson emerged as the lone finalist for the University of Colorado system’s presidency can be summed up like this: He’s not one of us!
No doubt about it. Mr. Benson’s résumé is all red flags to many on the famously liberal campus of the state’s flagship university. He’s an oil-and-gas tycoon and a Republican power broker who holds only a bachelor’s degree in geology from Colorado, having dropped out of graduate school to begin drilling for oil with a rig he carried around in his truck.
Even the $10-million he has given to the university rankled. He was too rich, some said, and would run the system like a business.
Three years ago, students and faculty members protested his candidacy, sometimes toting props like mock oil derricks. The Boulder campus’s Faculty Assembly voted 40-4 against him. The criticism went national, with Stanley Fish writing snarkily about Mr. Benson’s lack of academic credentials in a New York Times column headlined “Wanted: Someone Who Knows Nothing About the Job.”
But these days Mr. Benson and his critics have found common ground, thanks to his handling of state budget cuts the likes of which have caused more friction, rather than less, for college leaders in other states. His biggest spats have been with old allies at the Capitol and in business circles.
He has squared off loudly against a state-appointed planning committee for higher education, arguing that it overlooked the value of research universities to the state’s well-being. At a town-hall meeting in October, he said the panel displayed a “heck of a bias against the University of Colorado.”
That didn’t sit well with the committee’s two leaders, one of whom is himself a prominent Republican businessman, who said Benson’s comments were “false and intemperate.”
Blunt talk is hardly out of character for the self-made former roughneck, who is 72. Friends concede that “he may not be the most polished diamond,” an assessment Mr. Benson does not dispute. But while his plain-spoken approach worried professors and others when he was hired, a pull-no-punches advocate might be what the university needs during its budget crisis.
Mr. Benson’s efforts have yielded grudging respect, if not support, in Boulder, even from the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
“He hasn’t been as bad as we feared,” says Margaret D. LeCompte, the chapter’s president, who is a professor of education and sociology. “He’s a smart man, and he has learned some things.”
Bipartisan Spokesman
Colorado is an Exhibit A for the deepening privatization of public higher education. Like Virginia’s top-tier public universities, the University of Colorado has lost considerable state support while gaining some autonomy. It wasn’t as if it had a choice—the cuts were coming anyhow. Only 3.3 percent of the four-campus system’s operating budget, which has been trimmed by $50-million over two years, now comes from state coffers.
Given Mr. Benson’s roots in the energy business, many at the university assumed that he supported further privatization. The president, however, is glad to knock down that assumption.
For one thing, he says, Colorado taxpayers have spent large sums on university facilities, such as the Anschutz Medical Campus, in Denver, which has a total construction price tag of $4-billion. Given that history, they might want a say in what happens on the system’s campuses.
If not, he asks facetiously, is the state “going to charge us rent?”
As people in Colorado have learned, Mr. Benson is not easy to pigeonhole. But neither is a large public-university system, particularly one that represents both Boulder and conservative strongholds like Colorado Springs. He has made a point of traveling around rural Colorado, polishing the university’s image.
His road trips have been a departure in style from his predecessors’. Rather than travel with 20 or so people from the university, he and his wife drive themselves in his 2007 Audi. “You don’t go to rural Colorado with an entourage,” he says.
And while many professors and students fretted about Mr. Benson’s coziness with Republicans, fears of a polarizing university president have not materialized.
Uriel Nauenberg, a physics professor at Boulder, publicly expressed doubts about Mr. Benson when he was hired, mostly because he is not an academic. But Mr. Benson has done a good job, the professor says, particularly in fulfilling his promises of being a nonpartisan spokesman and leaving academic matters to campus administrators.
For example, when Mr. Benson directed the campuses to review their core curricula, with an eye toward reducing required courses, he gave the broad charge and let the chancellors and faculty hash out the details.
“He just speaks for the university,” Mr. Nauenberg says. “He has done what he said he would do.”
Many people have tried to bait Mr. Benson, figuring that he would bash higher education from a business perspective. This reporter, for example, asked Mr. Benson whether the job of a university president had surprised him in any way. He said he’d been asked that question about 20 times, by people looking for him to say something scandalous.
“I just don’t play their game,” he says.
Like many of his peers at other public universities, Mr. Benson has looked for cost savings and efficiencies. Employees complained to him about rampant bureaucracy in the system, he says, so he led an effort to reduce committees and policies, or, as he describes it, to eliminate “red tape and foolishness.” That’s rarely an unpopular move, but it’s easier said than done in higher education. Mr. Benson, however, slashed central administration, including executive salaries. And the system has increased collaboration among campuses in the past year.
Asked if the university could be more efficient, the president says, “What business, or what university, or what college, or what anything is as efficient as it can be?”
Losing Friends?
Mr. Benson’s critics remain plentiful in Boulder. He upset many professors by dismantling an internal faculty-and-staff newspaper as a budget-cutting measure. Ms. LeCompte says he doesn’t practice shared governance, and recommendations from the Faculty Assembly “fall into a black hole.”
Mr. Benson says he tries to be as collaborative as possible. And the elimination of the newspaper, which was uniquely independent for an internal publication and has been replaced by an electronic newsletter, came with annual savings of almost $600,000. University officials say it was one of many hard choices made in the wake of state budget cuts.
But there’s no question that much of the uproar over this nontraditional president has faded. And by being a strong advocate for the university, he has helped prevent deeper rifts between faculty members and administrators over its serious money woes. He has also gained good will with his personal frugality, paying out of his own pocket for travel and dinners with donors.
Mr. Benson prefers to give credit for the good will, at least in Boulder’s case, to Philip P. DiStefano, chancellor and former provost at that campus. “He was the one who took on all the heavy lifting” to right the university in the wake of its high-profile football and Ward Churchill scandals in recent years. “He just gets it done.”
Still, some of the criticism from old allies has stung, his friends say.
Steven K. Bosley, a Republican member of the university system’s elected Board of Regents, led the committee that hired Mr. Benson. He says the president has been apolitical and is widely respected in the halls of the state Capitol. But he has had to step on a few toes, fighting budget cuts and winning substantial changes in the report from the higher-education planning committee.
“He’s had some conflicts that have bothered him,” Mr. Bosley says. “It has been hard on him at times.”
For his part, Mr. Benson plans to continue sticking to his word as president. That means not backing down from his “bias” comment.
“I’ve had some pretty stiff conversations with some of the people that were not happy with those quotes. I maybe lost a friend or two out of this,” he says. “But I didn’t get hired to make a lot of friends. I got hired to run this place and to support it.”
