Quote:
Use Amendment 33
Meredith Oakley
The time has long since passed for Amendment 33 of the Arkansas Constitution to be invoked.
Amendment 33 gives the governor the power to remove any member of a university governing board for cause, i.e., misfeasance, malfeasance, nonfeasance.
For well over a year we have been waiting for Gov. Mike Beebe to twist some tails on the University of Central Arkansas Board of Trustees, to impress upon members that they have a responsibility not only to the UCA community but to taxpayers. If he’s done anything, it’s been behind closed doors. But somehow I doubt that. Except for a few new faces, not much has changed at the Conway campus.
Last week we learned that a national accreditation team’s review of UCA operations found trustees seemingly uninformed and lacking in stewardship during the ill-fated presidency of former state Sen. Lu Hardin.
During Hardin’s expensive and self-aggrandizing reign, the team’s 51-page report noted, trustees “never asked the probing questions, never asked for detail behind the finances, never questioned the financial presentations they were given.” In short, they were a rubber stamp for whatever Hardin put before them.
The Hardin era is, of course, under investigation by the feds. According to the grapevine, the matter could be put before a federal grand jury within the next few days.
As troubling as the report was, it didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know or have every reason to suspect. It did, however, bring to mind something I wrote back in May of last year: “At some point, [Beebe is] going to have to clean house because, even if those running the show at UCA haven’t lost his confidence, they’ve lost public confidence, and the governor will lose some, too, if he doesn’t.”
I was speaking of the UCA Board of Trustees. Although some new members have been brought on board because their predecessors’ terms expired, the disengagement persists. When the evaluators from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools visited UCA back in March, only three of the seven trustees made time to meet with them. Little wonder that the evaluators concluded that “It’s not apparent that the Board of Trustees as a group understands the task before them.”
To his credit, the new president, Allen Meadors, impressed the team otherwise. His administration, the report stated, “understands the task before it and has begun to undertake the difficult work of mending a campus and rebuilding on strengths.” That includes bringing fiscal stability and, one hopes, accountability to the entire operation.
But Meadors shouldn’t have to do it alone. Trustees are charged with directing the funds and the policy of an institution, not waiting for the president’s marching orders. If this lot isn’t any more interested in paying attention and exercising its authority than the last lot was, Beebe simply must take charge of the situation. Before the Nov. 2 election would be nice.
Speaking of that report, I was chagrined to learn that the UCA board had met in apparent violation of the Arkansas Freedom of Information Act to discuss it. The report, a copy of which our reporter Debra Hale-Shelton had to invoke the FOIA to acquire, is by no means something that under the law may be discussed in executive session. Such sessions are to be confined to “employment, appointment, promotion, demotion, disciplining or resignation of any public officer or employee.”
Although board chairman Harold Chakales denied that the report was discussed behind closed doors, two other trustees and a UCA spokesman confirmed that it was.
Let it be noted that Chakales’ attendance record for board meetings hasn’t been exactly stellar. Indeed, after two of the aforementioned evaluators “met” with him by telephone earlier this year, they reported that the conversation “was troubling” in that Chakales “seemed uninformed about the university” and “exhibited little understanding of the seriousness of the institution’s financial situation as a public institution. . . .”
Amendment 33, governor. Use it.
From the ADG
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