Cecil Staton (and ECU) discover Governance Chaos Theory
LINKS AND FURTHER EDITING FORTHCOMING. This is a first cut on this one.
Inside Higher Ed (and Rick Seltzer in particular) caught up with the Executive leadership mess now unfolding in Greenville. Cecil Staton has had one foot out the door for at least 9 months. (It was very interesting watching the Board of Governors, and Staton, struggle to respond when some of the BoG radicals tried to savage Staton and ECU several months ago). Now Staton is going -- and (like Tom Ross, and probably Margaret Spellings) he has a 'non-disparagement' clause for his severance contract.
(Hell, if they had given me one of those payouts, I probably never would have considered writing these things. Then again, that would have meant nightly and nasty visits from Cato's Ghost, so I probably would have been shamed into backing out of any payout deal. Sometimes cowardice protects you from being stupid, too.)
For nearly a half decade now, system-level faculty leadership have been warning that the chaos of governance created by the NC legislature and on the UNC boards (and that is both the system Board of Governors, and the individual campus Boards of Trustees) would drive away talented leadership, poison the process of hiring talented leadership candidates, diminish the morale and commitment of staff and faculty -- and corrupt everyone it touches.
The fact that the legislature cannot keep their partisan members (and yes, that is a double entendre) out of where they don’t belong, and board members for the UNC system and campuses cannot meet even the most simple and non-controversial principles of trusteeship (which are also governance standards required by accreditation agencies), is a sure sign that UNC governance is teetering on the verge of a broad legitimacy crisis.
None of the various board principals named in this article -- Smith, Long, Kieran Shanahan -- have been models of trusteeship. All of them have engaged in partisan meddling while serving in positions of public trust. (Steve Long’s attacks on Harry Smith are particularly, almost laughably, hypocritical. Long has been a zealous hyperpartisan operative for a very long time).
None of them seem to be able to live up to the basic principles of responsible trusteeship, viz: limit your speechifying about corporate matters to public meetings and deliberations of the corporate governing body -- or get off the board; keep your proclivity for partisan pandering in check, and let faculty, staff, and administrators do their jobs -- or get off the board; defend the institution from destructive meddling by elected politicians -- or get off the board.
It is also well worth remembering that Staton, Spellings, and several other recent executive appointments were enabled by partisan considerations -- and that partisan considerations were behind their departures. When you add up the facts of political appointees chased out by the partisans who hired them, the housecleaning of executive talent in the system office, the self-destruction of former UNC Chancellor Carol Folt, the impending authority battles over the state monument law (and its tin warrior, Silent Sam), what is likely to be other campus leadership departures, the coming conflagration that will be the "search" for Spellings successor, and most immediately, the fiasco that is likely to occur when half the Board of Governors turns over on July 1, it is very hard to resist calling forth the ghost of the legendary William Friday, who warned way back in the early 1970s that the politicized structure of governance in the UNC system would be the bane of public higher education in the state.
And now we are hearing from social and political elites around the state, who have decided that things might have gone too far. Never mind that they didn’t do anything about the potential for problems when they were in control, and never mind that they sat on their hands, or apologized for the excesses as matters of ‘politics,’ when faculty were raising the alarms. Suddenly they have found their voices, and don’t be fooled if they claim ‘better late than never.’ The fact of the matter is that it is now so late in the game that any corrections made now cannot prevent the losses already set in motion, and the remedies will be as costly as the damages done.
Long story short: the ‘controversies’ playing out over Cecil Staton are yet more testimony for the strategic genius of those who want to turn NC political higher education into an experiment in reactionary social engineering, and the misplaced confidence – and strategic cluelessness -- of the state's patrician classes and do it.
