The Board of Regents vote taken Friday before Spring Break not to renew President Dunn’s contract comes as no surprise. Quoted in the local press, the Board Chairman’s disavowal of “factions, politics, hidden agendas” and the like, the fact he had to make such a public statement conceals a reality filled with undercurrents. When it comes to running the University, for years the board has had divisions that go deeper than “opinion.” Since the election of the current Democratic governor, its current minority faction, in the wings under the previous Republican governor, has reasserted itself and Dunn has become its target.
A case in point is his now completed “objective performance evaluation,” which took well over a year to conduct. If any performance issues were uncovered that justify his release, we in the community have yet to be informed. The real tip-off that his performance was not faulted there was the board’s appointment of a three-member contract review committee just a few weeks ago, which, to no surprise again, conjured up four new evaluation criteria.
The handwriting was on the wall for all to see at last.
Friday the 15th’s pre-emptive board strike is packed with ironies, pre-emptive because of the board’s stated commitment to ongoing and thorough constituent input. Would waiting till the May meeting have left too much time to register community support for Dunn? Another is the balance Dunn has managed over redistribution of declining resources throughout his tenure.
For the most part, the process was transparent and judged fair by students, staff and faculty repeatedly. Another is the apparent “clash of visions” between Dunn’s strategic imperatives whose main goal is to provide access to marginal and nontraditional students and this faction’s more “tradition-bound” view of the University’s direction that harks back to the middle of the last century. No public higher education leader of independent mind would subscribe to the latter in this day and age. Another irony, by no means the last, is the board chair’s own history in this community and how his downfall was engineered after his enlightened leadership had developed it into a real University from what had been little more than a teacher training institution. You would think he would have learned a lesson.
This University needs a stronger and more enlightened board, not one under the detrimental and obsolete influence of family connection and parochial prerogative. What we have here is a state University, not just a Murray-Calloway County one, whose mission is to serve the region, state, nation and the world.
Letter by Michael Basile, professor of education.