Faculty votes today

By Derek Spellman

and Greg Grisolano

news@joplinglobe.com

Facing criticism and questioning from faculty members, as well as a no-confidence vote, Missouri Southern State University President Bruce Speck last week said he remained somewhat bewildered as to the source of at least some of the frustration.

The faculty complaints formally leveled against Speck in September included assertions of breaches of shared governance and instances in which he allegedly overstepped his bounds in several personnel decisions.

Speck said there had been no culture of shared governance before he came to the campus in February 2008, and that the “cardinal sins” of which he is now accused were committed “fairly frequently” before his arrival, although he did not cite specifics.

Phone messages left for Speck’s predecessor, Julio Leon, have not been returned.

Some faculty members have said there is a big difference between Speck’s leadership and that of his predecessor, and not just because the former said he would be different from the latter.

“(Leon) had some skill at dealing with the politics of faculty,” said Stephen Schiavo, a professor of computer sciences. “He could keep the discontent down. You would never have seen him getting defensive and belligerent in his relationship with the faculty. Certainly not in the paper. So I think there was a level of confidence in his abilities that was different than a lot of people see now (in Speck), even though a lot of people resented his (Leon’s) single-handed way of doing things.”

Speck had said he would help advance plans for shared governance and supply information to the campus.

Yet more than a year into his administration, he sent the then-faculty senate president, Carla Walter, an e-mail in March 2009 stating:

“(I)f the Faculty Senate believes, incorrectly, that they will dictate to administration how the university is to operate, we have a serious problem on our hands, and I think it only proper to inform you, as the Senate President, that I have no intention of reporting to Faculty Senate or any committees established by the Senate. In addition, I will no longer allow those in administration to take requests for information from faculty members, whether representatives of the Senate or otherwise.”

Joy Dworkin, an English professor and chairwoman of the university’s faculty welfare committee, wrote to the Globe in an e-mail that today’s no-confidence vote is the byproduct of a “perfect storm” of factors that included “extreme budget pressures, new movement toward some form of shared governance, continued institutional growth in realizing its university status.”

‘Accountability’

In late September, Karen Pletz, president of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, said that Speck “thinks in very visionary terms.” Missouri Southern is a partner with the Kansas City university in a plan to establish an osteopathic medical school at Southern.

In interviews with the Globe, Speck has spoken about how the medical school could help raise Missouri Southern’s profile.

He talks about the need to attract students not just from seven or eight area counties, citing competition not just nationally but locally.

He warns of funding for higher education shrinking in 2012. He talks of a “culture change” that includes formal accountability: goals and objectives, and ways to measure how those have been achieved.

“Accountability is a big term in higher education,” Speck said.

Just a few months after his arrival, in the wake of a visit from a Higher Learning Commission panel, Speck identified the creation of a strategic plan as his “top agenda item,” according to the commission report. He initially hoped to have a draft plan by the fall of 2008.

A draft of that plan, which also will include a plan for shared governance, now is expected later this year. Speck, for his part, acknowledged that he was “overly ambitious” when he hoped for a plan to be in place by last fall. He said he deferred to a committee charged with devising that plan, and the panel told him his original target date was not feasible.

Deference

Speck cites such deference as one example of his attempts at not being “heavy-handed.”

“I could have said, ‘I don’t care what you say,’” he said.

Yet one of the principal complaints from faculty members is that great changes have been made without a sense of where the university is headed. Of the complaints leveled in September by the faculty’s ad hoc no-confidence committee, one stated that Speck, as president, needed to drive the strategic planning.

“The Faculty Welfare Committee has not discussed it, but I personally think the ‘vision thing’ is another serious faculty concern,” Dworkin wrote in an e-mail to the Globe. “We get mixed messages from the administration about the academic direction of Southern, about the commitment to academic quality versus the quality of other institutional features that, granted, do play a role in keeping us competitive. But faculty want to build on our academic strengths, and there is particular concern about straying from our mission of international education and about overemphasizing distance education.”

“You’ve got to know where you are going or else people won’t follow you,” Val Christensen, an art professor, told Speck on Friday.

Instead of strategic planning, the top priority for Speck would become the budget. Speck last week cited financial exigencies for that decision: Shrinking cash reserves could decrease no further in an increasingly volatile funding environment.

Speck said he anticipated difficulties when it came to cutting the budget, partly, he said, because the financial problems gathering at the university in previous years “were never clear before.”

So, in July 2008 he conducted “summit” meetings with faculty and staff members to detail Southern’s fiscal predicament and its origins. Smaller cuts had already started.

Just a couple of months later, the administration would find itself under questioning from students about a 40 percent cut to the budget of the Institute of International Studies, the nerve center for the university’s international mission.

Identity

Speck said the cuts were based on the size of the institute’s budget, which was one of the university’s largest.

He told the Globe last week that he doesn’t want to end the program. It just might have to be run differently, particularly against the backdrop of a statewide budget crunch, he said.

But if the university also was looking to attract students and boost enrollment, it was cutting the very program that distinguished Southern from other schools, said Roger Chelf, the faculty senate president.

“It’s really part of our core,” Chelf said. “It draws quite a few students here and quite a few faculty.”

The mission was the chief reason why Tim Pendergraft, an 18-year-old freshman from Carthage who is majoring in computer science, selected Southern.

“It’s the one thing they’ve got that makes them unique,” Pendergraft told the Globe. “I come from a low-income family, so I’m going to school on grants and scholarships anyway. I want to study abroad, but there would be no possibility for me to do that without some kind of help from the school.”

And part of what strained relations with faculty members, including those who are not directly connected with the institute, is that the cuts galvanized a number of students who sought to protect the program to get involved, Chelf said. Students showed up at a September 2008 forum to defend the mission and ask the administration to restore the cuts.

The students received “little sympathy” from either Speck or the Board of Governors, Chelf said.

John Tiede

In December 2008, Speck told the faculty senate that the new leadership was moving into a “mode of shared governance,” according to the minutes from that meeting.

He also said he does not report to the “faculty, the students, or the staff at MSSU” but to the Board of Governors, according to those minutes.

The following month, Speck announced budget cuts that included the elimination of the men’s soccer program and the Child Development Center. The administration would later reverse the decision on the Child Development Center.

He also “fired,” according to a faculty senate ad hoc committee report, John Tiede in early January as an adjunct professor from a section of a business law class. Tiede’s dismissal — and the fact that it was done without consulting the business faculty or the dean of the business school — was one of the 23 complaints presented in September as grounds for the no-confidence vote.

Tiede declined to comment when contacted by the Globe.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to discuss campus issues in the newspaper,” he said.

But his dismissal enraged a number of faculty members, according to Schiavo, the professor of computer sciences.

He said it was seen as a case of a university president — an administrator — reaching into a teacher’s classroom.

“Scheduling of classes, and who teaches what and what is the content of the class, is material that’s a responsibility of the faculty and nobody else,” Schiavo said. “The whole idea of somebody several layers removed saying you’re not going to teach that class anymore is the sort of thing that really enrages faculty.”

Speck said the decision to remove Tiede from that class was neither personal nor unilateral.

Tiede, a former vice president at Missouri Southern, had been working for the Missouri Southern Foundation since 2001. He is to retire from a post there later this year.

Speck said a number of people, including Tiede, already had full-time jobs outside teaching at the university. He argued that the arrangement was not the most efficient: Full-time faculty members have more flexibility to meet the needs of students.

He also said he consulted with his president’s council, composed of the university’s presidents and vice presidents, before reaching the decision.

Business faculty members bristled when they received the news, according to the ad hoc committee report, and they asked for a meeting with Speck.

Speck, via an e-mail, told the faculty that he was “not open to having a meeting related to the staffing of the business law classes,” according to an e-mail provided by the ad hoc committee.

Asked by the Globe about reconciling that response with his “open door” policy, Speck said he thought the issue had already been dealt with by the information already furnished to faculty. He said he did not think another meeting would be productive.

In retrospect, he told the Globe on Friday, a meeting might have been “smart” politically.

‘Misinterpreted’

A review of faculty senate meeting minutes and other correspondence in the following months shows mounting tension between the senate and Speck.

In February, the faculty had questions about the budget cuts announced by Speck the previous month. Speck told them he planned another “summit” meeting about the budget and finances for Feb. 16.

He would later cancel that meeting. Speck last week told the Globe that he could not recall the specifics of why, although he thought it might have been because the state’s financial situation was still unclear.

During the February faculty senate meeting, the group heard a presentation on a faculty senate budget oversight committee. The purpose of the committee, according to the meeting minutes, was to “look over the administration’s shoulder, following the money trail, overlook procedures, and review major changes. Trust but verify.”

By early March, after another faculty senate meeting, Speck sent the then-senate president an e-mail warning of a “growing and unhealthy attitude among certain faculty about their role in shared governance.”

The new “openness” and “transparency” he brought to Southern, he wrote, might have been “misinterpreted by some as an opportunity for the faculty to exert their influence in the day-to-day operation of the university.” He wrote of “an attitude that calls into question my integrity.” He cited fears of faculty groups acting like “a tribunal.”

He wrote that he had supplied financial information — about the university as a whole and the international mission — and yet questions persisted. He directed that requests for information be directed through him so he could weigh their merit.

He would start answering questions about the budget only in writing, according to Chelf, the faculty senate president.

Speck said part of the problem was that his administrators were receiving multiple requests from the faculty, many of them duplicate requests, at the same time they had other work to do.

But limiting access to information that should be readily available only fueled suspicion, Schiavo said.

Dworkin, the English professor and head of the faculty welfare committee, said Speck’s responses to the questions sent out mixed signals.

“We hear from the administration that inquiries about the budget are welcome, and then we hear that we cannot ask the relevant departments for that information, but instead all inquiries must be funneled through the president’s office,” she wrote in an e-mail to the Globe. “We request a meeting to discuss budgetary matters with the president, and first this request is granted, and then it is denied.”

By the end of last school year, some faculty members were considering a no-confidence vote against Speck, according to Chelf. They opted to wait until after the summer to see if the situation would improve.

“We agreed that the man had only been on campus a year,” Chelf said. “Last year would have been too early, so we said let’s wait and see if the chaos continued, and it continued.”

Speck acknowledged that he heard the rumblings toward the end of the last school year.

He has said what Board of Governors members have said: that there was never anything specific.

“I just didn’t have the tangibility,” he told the Globe on Friday.

He said he thought any disenchantment would dissipate over the summer. He thought people would have a “broader view” of the finances.

“I didn’t have any sense it would eventuate in this (no-confidence vote),” he said.

Over the summer months, the university saw the resignations of three vice presidents. One of the three, Jack Oakes, had been in the post for only 18 days and would later accuse Speck of being “vindictive.” Those resignations would be cited by the faculty as examples of failures in leadership.

The summer months also saw the end of the university’s first full fiscal year under Speck.

The cash reserves rose from about $4.52 million to more than $6.85 million between June 2008 and June 2009. For the current fiscal year, which started July 1, the Board of Governors approved a budget that would increase the cash reserves by at least $645,000 by the end of the current fiscal year.

On July 21, Speck sent out an e-mail stating that the university continued to labor under a $1.2 million “deficit.”

Asked to explain a year of a deficit and a year of an increase in cash, Speck — after a long pause — said that was the number provided by the university’s finance team.

“I rely on the finance people and their expertise to know what those numbers are,” he said.

Jeff Gibson, the university budget director, said that on a cash basis, the reserves are to increase.

The “deficit” Speck cited assumes the inclusion of depreciation — a non-cash expense — and the omission of capital expenses like equipment replacement and building maintenance. Depreciation was a byword during Speck’s “listening” sessions last week with faculty members.

Asked about that approach to the budget, Gibson said part of it is that, historically, even before Speck, the Board of Governors and the university president have wanted to present it that way: include depreciation and exclude capital expenses. Part of the rationale, historically, he said, is that the university wanted its budget to more closely resemble its audits.

“I take my direction from the president and the Board of Governors,” he said.

But Gibson said the university and the board did start talking about the budget more in a cash basis this year. Whether the board members abandon the old approach for a cash-based approach will be up to them.

“Ultimately, it’s their call,” he said.

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