: Irony, disconnect lead to no-confidence vote at MSSU w/ Bruce Speck shared governance memos

By Derek Spellman and Greg Grisolano

news@joplinglobe.com

Facing a no-confidence vote from faculty on Monday, Bruce Speck can cite steps he took to be anything but autocratic since assuming the presidency of Missouri Southern State University last year.

He curbed the president’s power and presence on the faculty senate. He announced an “open door” policy. He conducted summit meetings with faculty and staff. He sent e-mails and memos. He has deferred to a committee charged with devising a strategic plan — a vision — for the university, saying he does not want to foist his own vision onto Missouri Southern.

“I can’t think of any decision that I have made here that has been unilateral,” Speck said.

Yet signals are that on Monday, in a historic no-confidence vote, those efforts will be repudiated by faculty. It is not just about the decisions Speck made, faculty have said, but how he made them.

“Here’s the point: He undertook a number of unilateral decisions early on that kind of slapped faculty this way, and then that way,” said Stephen Schiavo, a professor of computer sciences. “Faculty, in my opinion, were ticked off before he even knew he’d given any offense.”

Interviews and a review of documents that include e-mails, reports, correspondence, financial audits and meeting minutes suggest a period of disconnect at Missouri Southern over the last 21⁄2 years. Of hirings, firings and resignations. Of budget cuts and cash reserves. Of a medical school and an international mission. Of changes without plans.

Ironically, Speck replaced an administration that had employed a method of “autocratic decision-making in which the faculty senate and associated committees were not fully recognized participants in the decision-making process,” according to a report from the Higher Learning Commission, a component of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools and an organization that oversees the accreditation of degree-granting colleges and universities in states like Missouri. He inherited deteriorating finances and a stunted culture of shared governance and comprehensive strategic planning.

When Speck arrived in the winter of 2008, he signaled a new era. He said he would take — and later said he did take — measures to be more accessible and transparent than his predecessor. He said he would institute a culture of planning and accountability. He would educate faculty and staff about the finances. He would help the university transcend its traditional methods, territory and outlook.

Yet in the end, Speck would be accused by the faculty not just of being autocratic, but even vindictive, overbearing and inept.

A man described as thinking in “visionary terms” by the president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Bioscienes would be accused by a number of Southern faculty as offering no vision. A leader who said he would — and did — disseminate more information than ever before would be accused of withholding information by a faculty ad hoc committee. An academic who begins his missives with “colleagues” also would then liken himself to a “chief executive” charged by a Board of Governors to run a “business.” A president who said he would advance shared governance would be charged with flouting its cardinal doctrines.

‘Great hope’

“With great hope, we looked to you coming here because we finally have honest-to-god university faculty,” Conrad Gubera, a social sciences professor with nearly 40 years of tenure with MSSU, told Speck on Friday, looking back on his arrival last year.

It was hoped that Speck, Gubera said, would help Missouri Southern realize its potential as a university.