: <img src="http://www.joplinglobeonline.com/images/zope/extra.gif" border=0> Irony, disconnect lead to no-confidence vote at MSSU <font color="#ff0000">w/ Bruce Speck shared governance memos </font>

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.

He acknowledged that Speck might have inherited some problems, but he then asserted that Speck’s management style could be deceptive.

“When you talk, it’s like smoke and mirrors,” Gubera said. “We all have wants and needs and passions that haven’t been met in a long time. You may have inherited this, but sometimes your style hasn’t met those needs.”

With a mandate from his employer, the Board of Governors, Speck would usher in a series of changes, notably to the international studies program, before long-term plans were in place — for shared governance and for the university itself.

“He’s not a good leader,” said Linda Hand, a professor of math and the assistant director of the honors program. “If he has a vision, he hasn’t expressed it to us. We don’t know where we’re going. We don’t know what to expect from day to day.”

A faculty that would accuse Speck of poor communication and withholding information itself was often reluctant to publicly share details, citing fears of reprisal and concerns over the university’s reputation.

But more recent comments and the paper trail do suggest a growing list of questions — about the budget, a university vision, faculty governance and more — posed by faculty over the last year despite what Speck described as greater efforts to solicit views and supply information than before.

Yet sometimes even the information that was released only raised more questions.

According to a July 21, 2009, e-mail obtained by the Globe, for example, Speck told faculty that the university continued to labor under a $1.2 million “deficit.”

That was a few weeks after the end of a fiscal year that would see the university’s cash reserves jump by $2.3 million.

It was more than a month after the Board of Governors approved a budget that would increase the cash reserves by at least an additional $645,000 by the end of the current fiscal year.

And yet the road to Monday’s no-confidence vote started before Speck’s arrival.

‘His way’

“(Julio Leon) had a 25-year tenure which exceeds the institutional memory of most faculty, staff and board members,” a team from the Higher Learning Commission wrote after its visit to Missouri Southern from March 31 to April 2, 2008. “As the new president (Speck) and the campus constituencies strive to develop a culture of shared governance and open communication,” the panel wrote, “it is likely that some members will struggle with change. It will be important for the board to support change without becoming intrusive.”

Speck was a couple of months into his tenure then. Leon had resigned the previous year. His departure marked the end of an era for Southern.

Leon had abruptly announced his resignation, effective almost immediately, in August 2007.

It was less than a couple months after Leon’s last full fiscal year at the helm of Southern.

In Leon’s final year, the university’s cash reserves — which would become central to the controversial budget cuts later made by Speck — plunged from more than $8.15 million to less than $5 million, according to audits. Its net assets, considered one indicator of a university’s fiscal well-being, would drop from $60 million to $56.1 million in 2007.

What happened?

On the operating side, the university had actually seen some increase in revenue thanks to increases in tuition and an enrollment increase, along with a small increase in state funding. Yet those revenues were outstripped by increases in operational expenses, chiefly in compensation and benefits, scholarships, travel, and repair and maintenance.

According to Jeff Gibson, the university budget director, the largest increases in payroll resulted from university faculty and staff receiving a 4 percent salary increase beginning July 1, 2006, and the cost of university-provided health care insurance increasing by 9 percent.

Phone messages left for Leon have not been returned. Multiple Globe efforts to reach him over the past few weeks also have been unsuccessful.

Dwight Douglas, a current member of Southern’s Board of Governors who was also the board chairman during the last few years of Leon’s tenure, has acknowledged that he had sought more information about the finances from Leon in the few years before Leon’s departure. He said Leon had been reluctant to share that information.

“He did it his way,” Douglas said of Leon’s administration.

But he says that Leon’s abrupt resignation was Leon’s decision.

“He made the decision to retire,” Douglas said. “I am not critical of Dr. Leon. His style was what it was.”

‘Autocratic’

That style, according to the Higher Learning Commission report, was autocratic and distinguished by a “highly centralized decision-making process.”

Under Leon’s administration, according to the report, shared governance “was not a part of the culture of the institution.”

Neither was comprehensive strategic planning.

The university had seen two straight years of decline in its net assets, but continued to devise a budget and conduct data analysis “in isolation,” according to the report. It had embraced higher enrollment but had not developed an enrollment management plan that examined, for example, what programs were already at capacity and those that were not.

“Without a strategic plan and a culture of data-driven decisions, the campus is unable to respond to the evolving environment in higher education,” the report stated.

And the report — which also praised many other aspects of Missouri Southern and affirmed its accreditation for another 10 years — had also noted the decreases in net assets, a trend it found more troublesome not only because the university lacked a comprehensive strategic plan but also because it lacked a means to devise that plan.

“(The) absence of a plan to establish funding priorities seriously jeopardizes the ability of the university to shape its future,” the report’s authors wrote.

Douglas said under Leon the only strategic plan that he had ever seen was one page long.

But Leon’s departure did afford an opportunity.

Douglas was asked if the Board of Governors wanted to assert a larger role in governing the university with the departure of Leon.

Douglas said the board was not about to micromanage, but it did want “more information” and “more oversight from a policy standpoint.”

When the university launched its search, it would seek an outsider who could import an “outside view” to the area, Douglas said.

Douglas cites Speck’s academic credentials, integrity and “first-class recommendations” from his former employer, Austin Peay State University, of Clarksville, Tenn., as key factors in the decision to hire Speck.

Even now, Douglas said he has no regrets about hiring Speck.

“I have even developed a higher respect for him,” Douglas said, citing the way Speck has coped with what Douglas considers faculty antagonism.

‘Unrealistic’

Roger Chelf, the faculty senate president at Southern, previously told the Globe that Speck initially was well liked when he arrived in February 2008. He had spoken of a different way of doing things.

Speck said he suggested that the president no longer have voting powers on the faculty senate and that administrators be excused from the latter portions of the senate meetings so faculty members could talk among themselves. He supported the creation of a task force to strengthen the university’s framework, policies and procedures for shared governance.

He identified the formation of a long-term strategic plan as a “top agenda item,” initially hoping that a draft could be in place by the fall of 2008.

Neither plan is complete. The shared governance plan is to be a component of the larger strategic plan. Speck has deferred to the committees developing those plans.

More importantly, faculty members said, the plans were incomplete before the administration initiated a number of policy changes and budget cuts signaling the university could be headed in a different direction.

For example, Joy Dworkin, an English professor who chairs the university’s faculty welfare committee, wrote to the Globe that faculty members harbor “serious concerns” about the “vision” for Southern, citing “mixed messages” from the administration about the university’s direction and whether it was straying from its mission of international education.

Speck, for his part, acknowledged there “may be some justice” when asked if part of the problem was that changes were implemented before the plan was in place. A plan would have established funding priorities.

But Speck countered that the university’s reserves had become perilously low in an increasingly volatile funding environment for higher education. Had he not acted, they would have eroded even further. He said he needed to keep the university solvent. He said he needed to preserve jobs.

In May 2008, the board passed the first budget with Speck as president. The panel immediately directed Speck to cut at least $500,000 from the budget. After the economy tanked, Speck’s administration would end up cutting a total of $1.3 million. It would be the first of two consecutive years without across-the-board raises.

Chelf has said Speck’s personality “changed” when the budget cuts started.

Money

Both Speck and his most ardent defender, Douglas, have previously said they can’t see how the fracture is not partly, if not largely, about money when the faculty had received raises before.

“I think the faculty has just been unrealistic about how serious” the state’s funding problems have been and will be for the next two years, Douglas said.

Chelf and other faculty members have said the issue has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with management style. Of the 23 complaints leveled against Speck in September, none cited money, they say.

But the complaints do include criticisms about financial information provided by Speck. Some faculty members say Speck would bristle when pressed for basic financial information that should have been available.

“One of the problems is the more they (faculty) asked questions and were denied a clear and simple response to the questions, the more they resented it,” Schiavo said.

“I believe that some cuts had to be made, but it is not clear to me how we got into the position we are, or how much cuts need to be made,” Hand, the math professor, said. “I know the board told him those cuts need to be made, but neither have they said we need to do this much cutting in the end and then we’ll be better. What’s the mark? Is it when we have this much amount in reserves, or this many students?”

Speck said he has offered a portrait of the university finances — first through open “summit” meetings with faculty and then through more communications. Both measures were new to the campus, he said.

Yet faculty said they still had questions. For example, how could Speck talk about a deficit in the same year cash reserves were to increase?

Speck said he instituted — and still maintains — an “open door” policy.

Yet in early months of this year, faculty members like Chelf said Speck was not open to meeting with faculty about decisions that included the firing of a longtime Southern employee and about the budget.

About six months ago, some faculty would weigh — but ultimately forgo — proposing a no-confidence vote against Speck, according to Chelf.

By September, faculty had changed their minds.

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