Michael J. Hogan has burned a few bridges in Connecticut.
After less than three years as president of the University of Connecticut, Mr. Hogan is leaving for the University of Illinois. He was in Chicago and Urbana on Wednesday for what one university official called a “coming-out party” as the three-campus system’s new president. But back in Connecticut, people are fuming.
“Many, including myself, are deeply disappointed that he is leaving the university at such a critical time, particularly on the heels of the landmark financial investment we have just made to the UConn Health Center,” M. Jodi Rell, Connecticut’s governor, said in a written statement. “We had assumed President Hogan’s commitment to UConn was a long-term one; it should have been.”
Ms. Rell, a Republican, said Mr. Hogan did a “solid job” as president. A notable achievement was his successful push for $362-million from the state for an upgrade to the university’s financially troubled medical complex. But Ms. Rell was hardly alone in criticizing Mr. Hogan’s abrupt departure, with a newspaper columnist calling him a “job-shopping opportunist” and comparing his departure to the middle-of-the-night flight of the Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis.
Mr. Hogan acknowledged that his new job may have come as a surprise to many people.
“This was a very unexpected development in my life and was not an easy decision to make,” Mr. Hogan wrote yesterday on his blog, noting that his first day at Illinois would be July 1. In a separate statement, he said: “It’s with a degree of sadness that I’m leaving, but I can do so knowing that we’ve accomplished many of the goals that the Board of Trustees set out for me.”
The board’s chairman praised him for improving the university’s research profile and academic strength. But Mr. Hogan leaves as the university faces serious budget challenges. Flat state funding has led to wage and benefit cuts, and a budget gap of as much $20-million looms for 2012, university officials said.
Investment in a Three-Year Presidency
Mr. Hogan’s time in Storrs falls well short of the 8.5-year average tenure for a college president. Governing boards at flagship public universities generally want leaders to stick around for a decade, and UConn had made a substantial investment in its president, including $177,000 for a management consulting firm that was hired in 2007 to ease his transition.
UConn’s Board of Trustees tapped the New York-based firm, Katzenbach Partners, to give Mr. Hogan, 66, a comprehensive view of the university and its challenges. The board’s then-chairman told the Hartford Courant that the training would be particularly helpful for Mr. Hogan, because he was arriving as an outsider.
The former provost of the University of Iowa, a job he held for three years, Mr. Hogan began as UConn’s president in September 2007. Isaacson, Miller, an executive search firm with a higher-education focus, handled the search. The same firm plucked him from over 200 applicants for the Illinois presidency. Mr. Hogan’s base salary will be $620,000, according to news reports, and search firms generally charge one-third of a president’s first year of salary.
More Prestige, Bigger Budget Hole
Mr. Hogan’s new role comes with a bump in prestige. The larger University of Illinois has a campus -- at Urbana-Champaign -- that’s a member of both the Big Ten Conference and the Association of American Universities, a group of 63 prominent research universities. UConn, although hardly a research slouch, is not an AAU member.
The job in Illinois will not be easy. The state owes the university roughly $380-million in overdue payments, and future budget forecasts look bleak. Mr. Hogan also arrives in the wake of a high-profile admissions scandal, which led to resignations of the university’s president and the chancellor of the flagship Urbana-Champaign campus.
The new president does have the advantage of being a native Midwesterner (he grew up in Iowa and spent 17 years at Ohio State University). A Connecticut state senator told the Courant that his Midwestern roots created a cultural mismatch in Connecticut
“I don’t think he was comfortable with the idea that we in the higher-education committee could ask questions and challenge what was going on in the university,” said Sen. Mary Ann Handley, co-chairwoman of the legislature’s committee on higher education.
The fiscal bailout for the university’s health center was just approved by the legislature last week. And Mr. Hogan also helped oversee the resolution of another pressing financial matter at UConn: The contract extension of Jim Calhoun, the men’s basketball coach. Last Friday the university announced that Mr. Calhoun, who has led the Huskies to two national titles, had agreed to a contract worth a minimum of $13-million over five years.
