Voice concerns about Harreld’s appointment

     I want to thank Daily Iowan columnist writer Hannah Soyer for her column “Harreld backlash shows no signs of stopping.” The governor and state Board of Regents have brusquely dismissed faculty objections to the hiring of Bruce Harreld as the anticipated response of whining, change-resistant professors reluctant to accept an innovative leader selected from “outside the box.”

     It’s therefore especially important that students and staff — who have bravely joined faculty in challenging this appointment — also voice their opinions on this matter. While the governor and regents find it acceptable to ignore and belittle faculty concerns, it is unlikely that they will offer insulting responses to students, staff, alumni, and the citizens of Iowa equally outraged by this situation.

     To date, their condescending responses to faculty have only been matched with silence toward these other groups, and thus their response ignores the solidarity among campus constituents; they have conveniently isolated one group from a largely unified, campus-wide reaction, knowing that they cannot afford to characterize students, staff, alumni, and Iowa taxpayers as ignorant children requiring paternal guidance.

     As Soyer’s column and other reports have emphasized, faculty objections are based on a wide range of troubling factors, including Harreld’s misleading and error-filled résumé, which wouldn’t get the foot of most graduating seniors in the door of businesses attentive to accuracy in employment applications. That this amateurish document was acceptable to the search film that helped conduct the search remains a mystery to many on campus. As Soyer makes clear, students are also keenly aware of the discrepancies between Harreld’s success on the job market and the way they are being carefully trained to present themselves to future employers.

     Because faculty will continue to be ignored in their protests over Harrald’s appointment, I urge students, staff, alumni, and donors to the UI — as well as the parents of students and citizens of the state — to follow Soyer’s lead and voice their concerns. You are much more likely to be heard, and less likely to be dismissed, than UI faculty.

— Corey K. Creekmur, Associate Professor of English, Cinematic Arts, and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies

Protect the mission of the UI

     The state Board of Reagents was created by the Iowa Legislature in 1909 to govern the five state public educational institutions including the three reagents’ universities through policymaking, coordination, and oversight, as provided by law. The governor appoints the nine-member board.

     In 2015, the regents embarked upon new and controversial policies/decisions that could adversely affect the UI. It approved a new performance-based funding model for the three reagents’ universities in spite of their significantly different missions and makeup. The model has already pitted the three state universities against each other, spilling over into Iowa community colleges. The proposal is as yet to receive legislative approval.

     For the first time in their history, the regents in a closed session hired businessman Bruce Harreld as the UI’s 21st president. Although Harreld has no experience in higher-education administration, he was offered a salary exceeding all former presidents and a tenured faculty position. The UI presidential Search Committee was disbanded after four finalists were announced without an opportunity for faculty, students, staff, and community to give a final summary on the candidates. The hiring of a nontraditional candidate, instead of one of the three fully qualified finalists, caused immediate uproar in the university community.

     The Faculty Senate, for the second time in nine years issued a vote of “No Confidence in the Board of reagents” followed by the UI Graduate and Professional Student Government. The Staff Council issued a statement of disappointment in the Reagents hiring process.

     Many believe the regents acted willfully and overextended their authority in a process that was politically motivated, influencing the search and selection process. The finalist pool lacked diversity demonstrating serious flaw in the search. The regents’ decision could ultimately affect the university’s ability to seek and secure future recruitment and retention of highly qualified faculty and staff.

     To move forward will depend on the good will of the entire campus and the ability of our new president to lead, to protect the mission of the university, and to enhance its excellence.

— Shams Ghoneim

The danger in obstructing education

   The actions of Terry Branstad’s Board of Regents in appointing a resident of the University of Iowa that Branstad can embrace as one of his own reveals that there is something about education that Republicans do not like. And that is that young people can think and question in the same manner as did a young Robert F. Kennedy: “Some men see things as they are and ask why; I dream things that never were and ask why not.”

     This younger generation and today’s teachers and researchers are capable of challenging what is and exploring those ever better ways, and thus they are higher education. As such, it is what has moved cultures forward in making the kind of progress that freed common mankind to do uncommon things that lifted humanity out of the Dark Ages — that a long and dismal period of stagnant times that benefit the lives of a ruling few at the expense of feudal servitude and suffering of the many.

     Naysaying Branstad is from the rank ranks of a Republican Party that holds fealty to the few and ever fewer hoarders of the nation’s and world’s wealth. If he and they could they would have others be party to the destruction of education as the nurturing heritage and older generation bequeathals to the next.

     This is the “idea thing” of progress that a conservative fears so much that he obstructs any and all efforts of we the people in making progress by putting one foot ahead of another on a path of have at minimum the courage to take two steps forward at risk of one step back and oft bound along in great leaps forward that have been our nation’s world-admired way of change from a start of Colonial Americans coming to a new world and setting us all to work in the land of the free and home of the brave and through each younger generation have kept the good promise an ever better American Dream.

—Sam Osborne