Hard Feelings in Iowa
How much experience in higher education do you need to be an effective college president? A little? A lot? And who gets to decide?
Those are among questions raised by the current controversy at the University of Iowa, whose new president, J. Bruce Harreld (right), has a background as a consultant, president of the Boston Market chain, and an IBM vice president (he has also taught at the Harvard Business School and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management). The state Board of Regents chose Mr. Harreld over three candidates with résumés heavy on university administration — and after being warned that naming him to the job would infuriate faculty members.
The president of the board — Bruce L. Rastetter, an agribusiness entrepreneur with a strong interest in politics — said Mr. Harreld was the best candidate for the job. And Iowa’s Republican governor, Terry Branstad, said Mr. Harreld would be “a great leader” for the university.
But the Faculty Senate disagreed. Its president, Christina Bohannan, told hundreds of professors attending a special meeting last week that the university had been “betrayed,” and the senate subsequently voted to approve a motion of no confidence in the regents. The university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors released a statement saying that only “a pre-conceived determination by the regents to appoint Mr. Harreld regardless of campus reactions to him can explain his hiring,” and that “the assurances of fairness and transparency in the hiring process given to us by the regents, the chair of the search committee, the search firm, and the Faculty Senate leadership were untrue.”
The graduate-student union took an even firmer stance, saying that Mr. Harreld’s selection “shows how far the Branstad-appointed board is willing to go to destroy public education at the University of Iowa,” and that the hiring process had been “hijacked” by the regents.
Meanwhile, Mr. Harreld toured the library, met the football team, and attended the Hawkeyes’ season opener. And the regents backed away from a plan to keep funding for the university flat, saying instead they will seek a $4.5-million increase for the institution in the next state budget. (Read more here.)
A North Carolina Deal?
A class-action lawsuit filed by an assistant professor of radiology at Duke University’s medical school accuses Duke and the University of North Carolina of secretly conspiring not to hire away each other’s medical employees. The suit says that the agreement is a way of keeping salaries down and that it arose after Duke tried to recruit “the entire UNC bone marrow transplant team,” forcing UNC “to generate a large retention package to keep the team intact.”
The plaintiff, Danielle M. Seaman, filed the action after being turned down for a job at UNC. While neither university will comment on the case, a former Duke senior vice president for public affairs, John F. Burness, said that while he was an administrator, “there was a general practice that we did not recruit aggressively at the other institution, and vice versa.” He said the approach “was based on thinking both institutions were better if each institution was strong.”
The lawsuit alleges, however, that the two universities are engaging in restraint of trade and commerce in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. How many other people might qualify as members of the affected class is not yet clear. (Read more here.)
A Promise From Obama
Andrew Harnik, Associated Press
Jill Biden, co-chair of College Promise campaign
Last week President Obama flew to Macomb Community College, near Detroit, to talk up his proposal to offer community-college students two years of free education if they maintain good grades. Mr. Obama has advanced the proposal before, but now it’s part of a broader campaign, called America’s College Promise, which will incorporate state and local efforts as well.
Accompanying Mr. Obama was Jill Biden (below), an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College who is also Vice President Biden’s wife. She will be co-chair of the College Promise campaign, which is to be directed by Martha J. Kanter, a former top Education Department official and a former community-college president.
“No kid should be priced out of a college education,” Mr. Obama said during the Michigan event, adding: “You don’t have to necessarily go to a four-year degree to get a good job, but you need to have some specialized skills.”
Aid for Syrian Students
The refugee crisis that is creating turmoil across Europe is no one’s idea of a good thing, but it has prompted a few positive developments, including the creation of new universities in Turkey for displaced Syrians.
One such institution, in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, is already enrolling students — Zakat University, established by a Muslim charitable organization called the Zakat Foundation of America. With 15 full-time and 20 part-time faculty members, it has 120 students signed up for courses beginning this fall. The courses will be taught in Arabic. Two other universities have been proposed. One is a joint project of Turkey and Qatar. The other, called the Middle East Peace University, would be established by a Turkish entrepreneur, Enver Yücel, and would consist of a network of campuses in cities close to Syria.
A Loss for Israel’s Backers
Meanwhile, the University of California’s Board of Regents has rejected a proposal under which some kinds of criticism of Israel would have been considered anti-Semitic harassment or bias.
The proposal, backed by Jewish organizations and some students, faculty members, and others, would have adopted the U.S. State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, which covers a variety of kinds of speech — including demonizing Israel, comparing its policies to those of Nazi Germany, or denying Israel’s right to exist. Backers said debates about Palestine had become so bitter that some Jewish students felt threatened, but critics of the proposal said the State Department’s standard was too vague to enforce on campuses.
The regents are instead expected to discuss a new “statement of principles against intolerance” that attempts to balance “the right to study, teach, conduct research, and work free from acts and expressions of intolerance” with “the free and open exchange of ideas.”
But Wait, There’s More
Butler University has removed a journalism professor, Loni McKown, as adviser to the student newspaper, The Butler Collegian, which has had a contentious relationship with the administration. The new adviser will be the college’s associate director of public relations, Marc Allan. … Trinity College, in Connecticut, is backing away from a former president’s decision requiring fraternities and sororities to become coed by the fall of 2016. The current president, Joanne Berger-Sweeney, said she did not think that mandating coed membership was “the best way to address gender discrimination or to promote inclusiveness.” … Hackers may have obtained personal information of 79,000 California State University system students — including their relationship status and sexual identity — by breaking into the servers of an organization the system had hired to provide training to prevent sexual assault.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
