Consultant Controversy Drives Out President of Northern Illinois U.

Having drawn intense fire for his lavish payments for advice on improving Northern Illinois University, Douglas D. Baker has concluded that his own continued leadership of that institution would hold it back.

When the public university’s Board of Trustees met on Thursday in DeKalb, Ill., to discuss his continued employment as president, Mr. Baker pre-empted such talks by offering to step down at the end of this month, a year before his contract was set to expire.

Although President Baker continued to deny any suggestion by state investigators that he had intentionally violated university policy and state law in the course of hiring outside consultants, he acknowledged in a prepared statement that “the university community has continued to be distracted” by the allegations made against him.

“Given the challenges we face and the hard work ahead,” Mr. Baker said, “I simply couldn’t stand by and let this situation continue to fester.” He said he and the board’s chairman, John R. Butler, had agreed that it would be best to replace him, adding, “I truly do believe that at this point this course of action is best for the university.”

The university faculty’s response to his resignation was mixed.

Among Mr. Baker’s critics, Rosemary Fuerer, an associate professor of history and vice president of the United Faculty Alliance, a union that represents the university’s tenure-track faculty members, described him as part of “a long line” of presidents who seemed to believe that “in order to save the university, we must bloat the administration.”

Greg Long, president of the university’s Faculty Senate, said, however, that he was disappointed by the departure of Mr. Baker, who, he said, had derived no personal gain from rule violations and who appeared to be paying the price for unintentional, good-faith mistakes. “As an employee of the institution I am sorry to lose him as a president,” Mr. Long said.

Mr. Long argued that Mr. Baker was being made a “fall guy” for the university’s financial troubles in the face of a state-budget impasse that has persisted for two years, and probably never would have come under scrutiny if Northern Illinois had been on better footing. “The state is big and amorphous,” he said, “and the president of the university is a person you can target.”

Delayed Response

Mr. Baker’s decision to step down came just two weeks after the public release of a report by the state inspector general’s office accusing him of mismanaging the DeKalb institution.

The report said top administrators there had engaged in “a pattern of circumventing procurement requirements and violating employment policies and rules,” wrongly classifying five consultants as part-time instructors so they could avoid bidding for jobs that ended up paying them a total of more than $1 million from 2013 to 2015.

One of the consultants, Ronald L. Walters, earned more than $463,000 over 18 months, making him the university’s third-highest paid employee — behind only President Baker and the head football coach — in 2014. The university’s administrators used the job misclassifications to improperly reimburse the consultants for travel expenses, the report said.

The inspector general’s office had left it up to the Northern Illinois trustees on how to deal with Mr. Baker in light of the investigation’s findings. Chairman Butler, who was given confidential access to the report last August, said in a written statement coinciding with the report’s public release last month that the board already had taken suitable corrective actions, such as revising university policies to head off similar problems in the future.

He made no mention of plans to oust President Baker, whom he described as having responsibility for fixing the problems that the state identified.

In the wake of the report’s release, however, newspapers such as the Chicago Sun-Times and the DeKalb Daily Chronicle published editorials calling for Mr. Baker to go.

The Sun-Times editorial said: “Ignoring the rules of responsible money management is unconscionable at a time when public higher education is under fire in Illinois, struggling with stiff budget cuts and unpredictable state funding. Anything that smacks of misuse of scarce dollars gives ammunition to critics who say, wrongly, that public universities can easily tighten their belts without risking a reduction in quality.”

Mr. Baker became president of Northern Illinois in 2013, having previously been provost and executive vice president of the University of Idaho. Under the bylaws of Northern Illinois, he will be replaced on an interim basis by the institution’s provost, Lisa C. Freeman.

The board agreed on Thursday to pay Mr. Baker almost $600,000 as well as benefits in a severance deal that ensures he will not remain at the university as a faculty member in the business school.

Mr. Baker’s resignation appears unlikely to end the university’s troubles stemming from the contracting episode. It is being sued by a former controller who said he had lost his job for refusing to go along with administrators’ efforts to circumvent bidding rules.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.

Correction (6/16/2017, 12 p.m.): This article has been corrected to reflect that Mr. Baker’s contract as president was set to expire in June 2018, not June 2017, and that the board had planned to discuss ending it prematurely, not renewing it.