Finally—I understand that opaque lyric in the old Bob Dylan song: “There’s no success like failure. ... ”
We all know that E. Gordon Gee, the now-former president of the place I work, recently announced his timely retirement after making yet another set of bad and insulting jokes. Next came the news that for his transgressions, Gee will ride off into the sunset with a severance package worth nearly $6-million over five years. Actually, he will be riding off across campus to a plushly renovated set of offices where he will conduct research aided by a $300,000 research fund.
Perhaps more-honorable and nobler people, under such circumstances, would decline this extravagant deal, but really, how many of us would turn down that kind of offer? Hell, I’d be willing to embarrass the university in the national press for half that money.
No, don’t direct your outrage at ex-President Gee. The responsibility here lies squarely with Ohio State University’s Board of Trustees, and this whole sorry affair should serve as a cautionary tale about the way university trustees manage—or don’t—the institutions in their charge.
A quick review: As was reported at the time, when Gordon Gee returned for his second tour of duty at OSU—prompting some to quip that he had become the Grover Cleveland of higher ed—the job was offered to him by the trustees, who at times circumvented a presidential process they themselves had established.
Having done an end-run around the search process, the trustees then made Gee the first public-college president in the nation to be paid more than $1-million. That despite the fact that The Wall Street Journal and others had reported that his previous employer had been trying to rein in his spending. Their logic was simple: If we pay him more than anyone else, he must be better than anyone else. After all, isn’t that the ethos of corporate America, where most of the trustees come from?
That decision generated its own share of disbelief and outrage, but the board continued to insist that Gee was the best president. Ever! Even if by several metrics he resembled some of the free agents the New York Mets have signed over the years. Gee was not the “prodigious” fund raiser sometimes hailed by the trustees, for example. In fact, OSU barely cracked the top-10 in fund raising among public universities near the end of his tenure. Nor did the university make progress on its own strategic plan, as the trustees have recently acknowledged.
But throughout it all, the trustees stood by their man—through bad jokes, sports scandals, and a $64,000 bow-tie buying binge. Gee well might still be president had the story of his last round of comments about Notre Dame football players not broken in the national press. Recall that Gee made those comments in December 2012; the trustees “reprimanded” him for them in March; but only after they made ESPN headlines months later did the ax finally fall. In the business world, I think they call that “courageous leadership.”
And finally, it was the trustees who just offered Gee this 24-karat golden parachute. In making him the most highly compensated former president of a public university, they have doubled down on their decision to hire him in the first place and their decisions not to hold him more accountable for his performance along the way.
If Gee’s $5.8-million has you packing your bags for Columbus, thinking that OSU must surely be awash in cash, let me quickly disabuse you of that idea. While the trustees were bestowing this bounty on Gee, the unit where I work (the college of arts and sciences) is facing a $9-million budget deficit—departments have all been told to cut and cut some more. Staff may well lose their jobs, and new faculty are not being hired to replace those who are leaving. What the trustees have done here is really demonstrate how fundamentally disconnected they are from the real life of the university.
Fortunately, any unpleasantness that might cause is likely to fade pretty quickly. Football season gets under way soon, and in Ohio that usually means endless distraction and fresh scandals. The team is now coached by the former University of Florida football guru Urban Meyer, who was hired after Jim Tressel, author of a book of chirpy Christian bromides, was encouraged to resign after lying about and covering up a tchotchkes-for-tattoos brouhaha in 2011.
The New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez played for Coach Meyer. In the wake of the murder charges against the former Florida star, The New York Times did a big story on all the felonious fun in Gator Land when Coach Meyer was at the helm. Last week a star Buckeye running back was suspended because the Columbus police identified him as “person of interest” in an assault case. The Urban Meyer era has truly arrived.
Because of his success at Florida, Meyer was given a contract worth roughly $4-million a year to coach in Columbus. The trustees approved that contract too. In the world constructed by these trustees, there really is no success like failure.
But of course in the next part of that lyric, Dylan reminds us “that failure’s no success at all.”
Steven Conn is a professor and director of the public-history program at Ohio State University.
