Monday, December 29, 2014

How Elected Officials and their Political Supporters Compete Against PASSHE Students - Part 2

A Definition of Terms

According to The Free Dictionary, the idiom “to compete against someone” means “to contend against someone; to play against someone in a game or contest.”

The same dictionary provides that the idiom “to compete against something” means “to struggle against something; to seem to be in a contest with something.”

Recall that PASSHE’s governance system consists of a 20-member Board of Governors (BOG), plus a Council of Trustees (COT) at each of the individual 14 universities, with eleven members on each COT.  

Both of the above definitions have relevance in describing the ways in which Pennsylvania’s elected officials, and their political appointees to PASSHE’s BOG and COTs, compete against PASSHE students.

Two key ideas in the above definitions are “competition,” and “struggle.”  The Elected Officials and their Political Supporters are in competition against PASSHE students, and the students are struggling against the tyranny implicit in a majority (100%) governance share combined with a minority (25%) funding share.

Elected Officials and their Political Appointees Against the PASSHE Students

We have previously described an example of game theory with three players in which a “two-against-one” scenario involved Elected Officials and their Political Supporters working against the best interests of  PASSHE’s Majority Stakeholders—the students, parents and private donors, primarily PASSHE Alumni.

Recall that the State, with its minority (25%) funding share of PASSHE’s annual budget, continues to cling to a 100% governance share, meaning that the State continues to exert total control over the 14 PASSHE Universities. As a result, the Majority (75%) Stakeholders have no say whatsoever in how their share of PASSHE’s annual budget—the $1.125 billion which comes from their private checkbooks—gets spent.

Recall also that since 2002, the 100% political leadership of PASSHE has ignored the statutory (Act 188) purpose of the PASSHE universities, which is: “To provide high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students,” that is, at the lowest possible “bottom line.”

Instead, PASSHE’s Board of Governors has meekly followed the wishes of elected Governors—both Democratic and Republican—and focused instead on maintaining the lowest possible “sticker price,” i.e., “tuition,” a decision that may benefit Governors politically while causing great harm to PASSHE students:

It saddles students from less affluent families with crushing student loan debt, while

providing totally unnecessary State subsidies to students from more affluent families. 

Recall finally that since 2002 the PASSHE Board of Governors took actions resulting in the loss of half (14%) of the quality gains (29%) achieved by the Board of Governors in PASSHE’s previous 19 years.
We will now describe examples of how the two-against-one behavior of Elected Officials (EO) and their Political Supporters (PS) on PASSHE governing boards seriously disadvantages PASSHE students.
EO + PS against the Students

The essence of the relationship between EO and PS has previously been captured by means of the term “political patronage.”  Elected Officials (EO) do favors for their Political Supporters (PS) in return for favors done by their PS for the EO.  This is known as: “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”

This mutual back-scratching involves an exchange of favors, and typically involves exchanges of money.
Elected Officials have the power to appoint Political Supporters to government jobs—involving salary and benefits.  Elected Officials also have the power to appoint Political Supporters to governance boards that may not offer salary and benefits, but can still provide large financial rewards to Political Supporters.¹ 

Political Supporters, on the other hand, often provide financial campaign contributions to Elected Officials, or aspiring Elected Officials, as a way of getting the attention of the individuals with the power to either provide government jobs, or to appoint their “friends,” a.k.a., “political supporters,” to public boards.    
Financially Speaking, the 14 PASSHE Universities are Already 75% Private!

As the State share of PASSHE”s budget fell from 63% in 1983 to 25% in 2013, the Elected Officials and their Political Supporters who control the 14 PASSHE Universities never developed a plan to preserve the mission or financial viability of these universities, as State funding declined precipitously and the costs of education were rapidly shifted away from the State and onto the Majority Stakeholders.

The unrelenting loss of State funding for Pennsylvania’s “public” universities has been described as “Privatization.” And the absence of a plan by PASSHE’s 100% political leadership for dealing with that situation has been truthfully described as “Privatization Without a Plan,” in a book with that very title.²  
The fact that the PASSHE Board of Governors is not delivering a PASSHE education at anything like the “lowest possible cost to the students” means that PASSHE students desperately need scholarships to help reduce their “bottom line” cost of education—something promised to the students by Act 188 but, unfortunately, not delivered to PASSHE students by the current Board of Governors.

At private universities, student scholarships are often funded by philanthropists on the governing boards who are typically wealthy alumni that are grateful for their educations, and who want to “give back” to their Alma Maters. One example of this would be Les Wexner’s $100 million gift to Ohio State University.³  
Here’s Just One Way in which EO + PS Compete Against PASSHE Students
  • At private universities, individuals get on the governance boards by making donations to universities!
  • At PASSHE universities, individuals get on the governance boards by making donations to politicians!
Elected Officials need money from their Political Supporters to get elected, and they reward their PS with government jobs or appointments to pubic boards in exchange for those donations of money.   

The PASSHE universities are already 75% private, financially speaking, and need to be transitioning rapidly toward that status in terms of governance.  That is, the Majority Stakeholders should be selecting a majority of PASSHE’s governance board members, and the Minority Stakeholder should be selecting a minority of PASSHE’s governance board members.
To be continued.   
¹ https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/7425061/tribune-review-article-pa-university-board-members-grab-14m-in-contracts-july-1-2012-pdf-2.
² http://www.amazon.com/Privatization-Without-Plan-Leadership-Pennsylvania/dp/1491295244/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408368767&sr=8-1&keywords=angelo+armenti.
³ https://www.keepandshare.com/doc/7445735/wexner-s-100-million-gift-to-ohio-state-university-february-16-2011-pdf-317k.

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