Monday, February 9, 2015

If Elected Officials Cared about PASSHE Students, What Would be Different? - Part 4

Last week’s blog post ended with a documented assertion followed by a serious allegation:

A Documented Assertion

“All 20 members of the PASSHE Board of Governors, and all 154 members spread across the 14 PASSHE Councils of Trustees, have taken a public oath of office that requires them to obey the law.”

A Serious Allegation

“The PASSHE Board of Governors has since 2002 openly and shamelessly failed to live up to that oath.”
Malfeasance

Dictionary.com defines “malfeasance” as “the performance by a public official of an act that is legally unjustified, harmful, or contrary to law.”
 
Merriam-Webster’s definition of ‘malfeasance,’ on the other hand, is much harsher: “malfeasance is illegal or dishonest activity especially by a public official or a corporation.”
 
Both definitions however agree on the following notion:  “Public officials engage in ‘malfeasance’ when they do something illegal, unlawful, or contrary to law.”

Evidence of Malfeasance

The malfeasance of the PASSHE Board of Governors in this case is easy to document because the flawed actions by the members of the Board of Governors violate not just the spirit but the letter of the law.
 
The details of that violation of the letter of the law (Act 188) involve, among other things, PASSHE leaders publicly acting as if the law requires the Board of Governors to maintain “the lowest possible tuition,” i.e., sticker price, when in fact Act 188 explicitly requires them to maintain “the lowest possible cost to the students,” i.e., “the lowest possible bottom line!”
 
Anyone who knows anything about how American colleges and universities operate knows: 1) that for most students sticker price and bottom line are two totally different things; and 2) that all colleges and universities typically compete for students on the basis of bottom line = tuition minus grants & scholarships.
 
Most students and parents facing the prospect of paying for a college education care very little about the published “tuition,” i.e., sticker price, for the best of all possible reasons:  Most students and parents don’t pay the sticker price—they pay the bottom line, which is lower than, and often much lower than, the tuition/sticker price. 
 
When Act 188 states (as it does) that the purpose of the 14 PASSHE universities is “to provide high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students, it is stating that the Board of Governors should be focusing on providing that high quality education at the “lowest possible bottom line.”

The Disconnect

As shown in Privatization Without a Plan¹ as well as in previous blog posts,² there is a huge, shocking and almost inexplicable disconnect between what Act 188 mandates and what the members of the PASSHE Board of Governors have been delivering to PASSHE students and parents since 2002.

·       Act 188 mandates that the PASSHE Board of Governors deliver high quality education at the lowest possible cost to the students, i.e., at the lowest possible “bottom line.”

·       But the PASSHE Board of Governors has been, and is today, delivering dubious quality education at the lowest politically acceptable tuition, i.e., a “sticker price” that is totally divorced from economic reality.
 
This is not a failure of law, but rather a failure of the PASSHE Board of Governors to obey the law.

Divided Loyalty and the Structure of the PASSHE Board of Governors

Whenever elected or appointed officials fail to perform sworn duties, it inevitably raises a question of divided loyalty, otherwise known as conflict of interest, which Merriam-Webster defines as “A conflict between the private interests and the official responsibilities of a person in a position of trust.”
Quite aside from the particular individuals serving at any given time, it is obvious from its very structure that the PASSHE Board of Governors is predisposed to “divided loyalty,” a.k.a., conflict of interest. 

Five of the twenty members on the Board of Governors are elected State officials (the sitting Governor, plus a State Senator from each political caucus, plus a State Representative from each political caucus.  To be reappointed to the Board of Governors, the Senators and Representatives must be reelected by their respective caucuses, meaning that to retain their seats, they must satisfy not the PASSHE students and parents (who now pay 70% of the cost), but the members of their respective political caucuses. 
The Secretary of Education also sits on the Board of Governors after being appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the State Senate.  The remaining 14 members of the Board of Governors are appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the State Senate.

To be reappointed, those final 14 members of the Board of Governors must be reappointed by the Governor and confirmed by the State Senate, meaning that to retain their seats, they must satisfy not the PASSHE students and parents, but the Governor and the leadership of the State Senate.
Recall that: “It is important to note that a conflict of interest exists whether or not decisions are affected by a personal interest; a conflict of interest implies only the potential for bias, not a likelihood.” ³

PASSHE’s Current Tuition-Setting Process
Although the Board of Governors has the legal authority, from Section 20-2006-A(a)(11) of Act 188, “To fix the levels of tuition fees,” and despite the fact that the law does not require or even mention any role for the Governor in the tuition-setting process, the Board of Governors awaits the official word from the Governor’s office as to the maximum allowable tuition rate increase each year! 

Question: Why would the Board of Governors ignore the clear language of the law and allow the Governor to determine the maximum politically acceptable tuition rate increase for any given year?
Answer: Divided Loyalty, both on the part of the Governor, and on the part of the members of the Board of Governors, who desperately want to be reappointed by the Governor—and hence pay their loyalty to those with the power to reappoint them, i.e., not the students or parents who pay most of the cost of education, but the Governor and the leadership of the State Senate. 

To be continued.     
¹ 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.  Pages 25-31, and Chart 20 on page 66.
² See my Blog Post dated January 12, 2015.
³ http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/rcr/rcr_conflicts/foundation/#1_1.

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