How Partisan Divisions Roiled Colorado’s Search for a New System President

As the Board of Regents prepared to name Mark Kennedy as the sole finalist to lead the University of Colorado system, its members seemed to have few worries.

“I can’t imagine anything will come up that we should be concerned with,” Sue Sharkey, then chairwoman of the board, wrote in an email to her colleagues in early April. Just days before, the board had unanimously chosen Kennedy as its only candidate, even toasting the decision with champagne, Sharkey said. In her email, Sharkey noted that his references had been solid and the system might not even need to send someone to North Dakota, where he was serving as president of the flagship, to vet him further.

The unity and optimism about Kennedy quickly dissolved along political lines. The regents – five Republicans and four Democrats chosen by voters in partisan elections – split over the public backlash against Kennedy’s voting record as a Republican congressman.

While Sharkey, a Republican, had suggested less need for scrutiny from the board, Democratic regents demanded more as the controversy unfolded. “Before I can vote for him, I will need not only to see how he does with open forums on campus,” Linda Shoemaker wrote, “I will also need to ask him questions in person.”

Those emails are among hundreds, obtained by The Chronicle through an open-records request, that show the regents grappling with Kennedy’s candidacy, the nature of the selection process, and the pressures of responding to the media and constituents – as partisan rancor undermined trust that their peers could act in good faith.

In an interview, Sharkey said that partisanship on the board ebbs and flows depending on the issues they are discussing. “A presidential search is the biggest decision we are going to make,” Sharkey said, “and there is naturally going to be some tension.”

Shoemaker, a Democrat, told The Chronicle that the board’s members care deeply about the university system. But the partisan divide among the regents is a symptom of the nation’s contentious political climate.

“We are not immune from the way the country has become so polarized,” Shoemaker said.

Complaints About the Search Process

The dispute at the University of Colorado system is just the latest example of a presidential search marred by political tensions and a process that’s often seen as opaque to the public. Some regents at Colorado, too, felt hamstrung by the secrecy of the process and what they felt was an excessive amount of control from the search firm.

In one exchange among Democratic members of the board, John Kroll, then the board’s vice chair, lamented that criticism over Kennedy’s nomination didn’t account for the monthslong process that preceded it. “A lot of the feedback we are getting doesn’t seem to understand the extent to which the public was engaged in the search process through the search committee.”

Lesley Smith, another Democratic regent, responded: “The issue is though that everything had to be kept under wraps, and we only have one finalist. It doesn’t look transparent. That’s just the reality though of searching for a president.”

Shoemaker shared her concerns that the information from the private search firm, Wheless Partners, may have been tailored to meet the expectations of the board’s Republican majority: “The Search Firm seems to have given us imperfect information as well.”

In an interview, Shoemaker explained that the information provided to board members by Wheless did not include his specific votes. Instead, she said, Kennedy brought up his vote on a bill to outlaw same-sex marriage in his interview with the board. “It wasn’t like we had his votes in front of us,” she said. “We knew the dates of his service as a Republican congressman, but nothing specific on his voting record.”

The search firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Republican members of the board, however, said regents had been aware of the issues before the controversy and had plenty of time to sift through Kennedy’s background on their own.

In a series of messages among Republicans, discussing a draft response to a Denver Post editorial, Chance Hill wrote that “no one on our board should be able to say ‘oh we didn’t know or we didn’t have enough information.’”

Sharkey wanted the letter to “emphasize the point that we were well aware of his position while in Congress on same-sex marriage. Nothing new came to light. We were all satisfied with his response.”

Political Mistrust

What is impossible to miss in the emails is the frequent expression of distrust between regents of different political parties.

Most of the communication is shared only among board members from the same party, which reinforced partisanship and further cemented two distinct narratives about the search process. Some Democrats on the board believed Republicans supported Kennedy solely for his political credentials.

“My personal view is that there were more [Republicans] on the search committee than [Democrats] and so we may have gotten a slanted pool of candidates to choose from,” Shoemaker wrote in an email to other Democratic regents.

Long after the final vote, Shoemaker still stands by that assertion. “The process was not the problem,” she said in an interview. “The problem was that the Republicans were only interested in moving forward with someone who had sterling political credentials.”

Some Republican members thought Democrats had caved to pressure from faculty and students, and dismissed criticism from faculty and students as kneejerk partisanship.

Sharkey, reacting to a critical email from a faculty member, wrote that “the arrogance and elitism of the Progressive faculty is represented in her personal attack on me.”

Hill wrote to Kroll: “I think we both know that none of you four Dems are going to vote Yes. I’d love to be proven wrong though!”

On each side, a few regents equivocated. Some Republican and Democratic regents said they did not make up their mind on Kennedy until very close to the final vote. Glen Gallegos, a Republican and current chairman of the board, told The Chronicle that he voted for Kennedy as a candidate but didn’t make his final decision until the night before. Emails confirm that his fellow Republicans also were uncertain about his support for Kennedy.

Kroll also reserved his judgment on Kennedy, initially. “For me he’s going to have to handle the campus visits well, address the LGBTQ items upfront and effectively, and we need to watch him for just saying things we want to hear,” he wrote to fellow Democrats.

But the partisan tensions escalated, reaching their apex when Hill aired his complaints in a lengthy Facebook post: “Some Democrat Regents have been frantically looking for any possible way to backpedal at the first sign of opposition from their liberal base, finding ways to seek cover so that they can justify changing their initial Yes votes to No votes. In some instances they have provided misinformation to the press.”

In his post, Hill also described some of Kennedy’s critics as “a small, well-orchestrated Far Leftist mob — who in my opinion represents a mentality as dangerous to this nation’s future as any foreign threat we face.”

Shoemaker, a Democrat, responded by voicing her frustration to Gallegos, a Republican, in an email: “I don’t know how he thinks that we will be able to work with him productively, after lashing out like this.”

“None of us have pointed a finger at Republicans or Far Rightists (mimicking his phraseology), and what we’ve said is quite mild compared to his diatribe,” she wrote.

Gallegos responded: “Thanks for your patience as we work through this process. We have a lot of work to do in becoming an effective board. I don’t think we can give up.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.