UI Faculty Senate votes 'no confidence' in regents

The University of Iowa Faculty Senate, for the second time in nine years, issued a vote of “no confidence” Tuesday in the Iowa Board of Regents, the latest escalation in a contentious presidential appointment.

The senate resolution came five days after the regents unanimously voted to name former IBM executive J. Bruce Harreld as the 21st UI president. A previous vote of no confidence in 2006 also came after a presidential search.

Although Harreld has taught in the Harvard Business School and Northwestern University, he has no experience in university administration. The other three finalists for the position included two university provosts and a college president.

"The regents said they wanted faculty involved with this process,” UI Faculty Senate President Christina Bohannan told a standing-room-only crowd in the Senate chamber of the Old Capitol. “They said that they wanted to hear from us, that they respected our viewpoints. And at the end, they clearly did not.”

At least 46 members of the 80-member senate raised hands to vote for the largely symbolic measure, which said the regents had failed the university and the state's citizens by hiring Harreld. The motion said the regents had shown a "blatant disregard for the shared nature of university governance" and failed to live up to its own standards for ethics, communication, transparency and other values. The senate includes representatives from all academic units and is the principal channel of communication between faculty and the administration

It is unclear what, if any, effect the vote will have on relations between UI and the regents, which seem to be at the lowest point since the failed presidential search of 2006, in which the regents rejected all of the finalists put forward by a search committee. The resulting "no confidence" vote from the Faculty Senate — and a new gubernatorial administration — helped persuade the regents to begin the search anew, with a committee led by a UI dean. That search led to the hiring of Sally Mason, who retired this summer after eight years as president.

Tuesday's vote is unlikely to cause the regents to reconsider the five-year contract Harreld signed Thursday.

In a statement released after Tuesday's vote, Board President Bruce Rastetter noted the regents' decision came after listening "to all stakeholder feedback as well as having frank conversations with each of the candidates."

"The board unanimously thought Bruce Harreld’s experience in transitioning other large enterprises through change, and his vision for reinvesting in the core mission of teaching and research, would ultimately provide the leadership needed," Rastetter said in the statement. “We are disappointed that some of those stakeholders have decided to embrace the status quo of the past over opportunities for the future and focus their efforts on resistance to change instead of working together to make the University of Iowa even greater.”

Yet the regents could not have been surprised by Tuesday's vote.

Bohannan, who also served on the 21-member UI Search and Screen Committee, sent an email to the regents Sept. 2, the day before Harreld’s hiring, warning the board that “choosing Mr. Harreld would destroy the goodwill that the Faculty Senate and the Regents have worked so hard to establish.”

“There is no doubt that, if Mr. Harreld is chosen, some members of the Faculty Senate would demand a no-confidence vote in the Regents,” Bohannan wrote in the email, which was released Tuesday. “Whatever the outcome of that vote, it is hard to see how the Regents' relationship with faculty could thrive under such circumstances.”

Similarly critical reactions to Harreld’s hiring have been issued by the graduate employee union, COGS UE Local 896, and the UI chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

Bohannan, who had never publicly criticized the search process until Tuesday, set the tone for the discussion that followed when she used “betrayal” and “traumatic event” to describe the regents’ promise of involving the campus community as equal partners in the search.

"I think this university has been betrayed — faculty, staff, students, all betrayed," she said

A motion for a “no confidence” vote was introduced early in the meeting. Debate focused on whether the motion should include Harreld — who is not scheduled to begin the job until Nov. 2 — and whether such as statement would damage the reputation of the faculty and university with the Legislature and the rest of the state.

After nearly 90 minutes of discussion, the final version of the motion focused on only the regents, asserting that the board had failed to live up to its own standards for ethics, communication, honestly and transparency articulated in its strategic plan.

A handful of faculty members spoke in favor of delaying such a vote until a later meeting, but the final vote was greeted with cheers among the hundreds of faculty in the room.

"In retrospect, one of the most painful and divisive issues about this search is that it probably should have been a closed search," Bohannan said. "It would have been preferable to where we are right now. Because we would have gotten the exact same result. The problem with this so-called open search is that it dragged a lot of faculty down with it."

Jimmy Centers, a spokesman for Gov. Terry Branstad, said in a statement the governor supports the regents and Harreld.

"The governor believes that now is the time to move forward and position Iowa, our students and our regents institutions for the future," Centers said.

Reach Jeff Charis-Carlson at 319-887-5435 or jcharisc@press-citizen.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jeffcharis. The Associated Press contributed to this report.