The Commission of Presidents
Act 188 of 1982, the enabling legislation that
created and ostensibly controls the operation of the Pennsylvania State System
of Higher Education (PASSHE) and its fourteen universities, includes the
following verbatim language¹ in Section 20-2007-A -
Commission of Presidents:
“The Commission of Presidents of the System shall
consist of the presidents of the several institutions who shall annually select
one (1) of their members as chair-person. The commission shall recommend
policies for the institutions and shall act in an advisory capacity to the
chancellor and the governors. The commission shall meet quarterly and
additionally at the call of its chairperson or the chancellor. A majority of
the presidents shall constitute a quorum.” (Emphasis added.)
Recall that when used in laws, the word “shall” denotes what is mandatory.
PASSHE’s
14 universities include Bloomsburg,
California, Cheyney, Clarion, East Stroudsburg, Edinboro, Indiana, Kutztown,
Lock Haven, Mansfield, Millersville, Shippensburg, Slippery Rock and West
Chester.
As described in recent blog
posts, the Commission of Presidents failed to recommended any policies to the
PASSHE Chancellor and Board of Governors during the sixteen-year period between
1993 and 2008.
In effect, the Commission of
Presidents neglected to do its part, under Act 188, thereby denying to the
Chancellor and Board of Governors any opportunities to consider Commission
recommendations.
We also noted previously that
during that 16-year period of total inaction on the part of the Commission of Presidents,
neither the Chancellor, the PASSHE Chief Counsel, nor any member of the Board
of Governors ever inquired as to why the Commission of Presidents was not obeying
its part of the law.
As one of the fourteen PASSHE
presidents during that period, I can attest to the fact that the majority of presidents
had already become convinced that the Chancellor and Board of Governors had zero
interest in recommendations that the Commission of Presidents might wish to
send them for their consideration.
But so long as the Commission of
Presidents neglected to do its part by failing to develop and send formal
recommendations to the Chancellor and Board of Governors, any suspicions the
presidents may have had about the motives of the Chancellor and Board of Governors
remained unproven.
But that changed dramatically in
2010, when the Commission of Presidents sent its first formal motion, with
rationale, to Chancellor Cavanaugh—and he refused to even present it to the
Board of Governors!
By this time, the presidents were
very familiar with Chancellor Cavanaugh’s repeated comment to them that “This
Board of Governors is not interested in strategic planning” and, as a result, any
doubts about the motives of the Chancellor and Board of Governors were quickly elevated
from suspicion to fact.
Chancellor
Cavanaugh Refuses to Act on the Commission’s First Recommendation
As mentioned previously, when I
met with Chancellor Cavanaugh in March of 2010 to deliver the first formal
recommendation from the Commission of Presidents, he promptly refused to act on
it!
Recall that our motion read as
follows: “Resolved: That Chancellor Cavanaugh set up a meeting between
the Commission of Presidents and the Executive Committee of the Board of
Governors at which the question of PASSHE taking the lead in developing a plan
for privatization that is acceptable to all the relevant parties including the
universities, the System, the Governor and the Legislature.”
In refusing to even forward the Commission’s
recommendation to the Board of Governors, Chancellor Cavanaugh was acting to
thwart the specific mandate of Act 188 regarding the role of the Commission of
Presidents, which reads in relevant part as follows:
“The commission shall [not
may] recommend policies for the institutions and shall [not may] act in
an advisory capacity to the chancellor and the governors.” (Emphasis added.)
As Chair of the Commission of
Presidents meeting alone with the Chancellor as he declared his refusal to act
on the Commission’s first recommendation in more than sixteen years, I quickly
concluded that this Chancellor, and most likely this Board of Governors, would
not be overly concerned about ignoring the legal mandates of Act 188, the
enabling legislation which created the PASSHE system of 14 universities.
Recall that the fourteen
presidents had been frustrated for years by the fact that the Board of
Governors would never meet with us in “closed session” to hear our most deeply
held concerns, which had to do almost exclusively with declining PASSHE
educational quality—caused by the combination of: a) rapidly declining State
appropriation, resulting from powerful economic and demographic forces outside
of the BOG’s control; and b) PASSHE’s destructive “low-tuition-for-all policy,”
first implemented by the BOG in 2002 under Gov. Rendell (for eight years), and
continued under Gov. Corbett (for four
years), and continued by Gov. Wolf since his election in 2014—which was very
much under BOG control.
The Chair of the Commission of Presidents “Goes
Public”
When Chancellor Cavanaugh
rejected the Commission of Presidents’ first recommendation which I had just
handed him in our March 2010 meeting, I asked if he had any objection to me
publishing a public op-ed on the same subject the Commission of Presidents had wanted
to discuss with the BOG in private.
He not only encouraged my
proposal to publish an op-ed on the subject, he offered to review and suggest
improvements to my draft before I might send it to the media. I accepted his offer, presented a draft to
him a few days later, and included his one suggested additional phrase into my
final draft.
But during our conversation about
the proposed op-ed, I made the observation that the BOG’s “Low-Tuition-For-All”
policy was causing “gentrification” at the fourteen PASSHE universities. I explained that, based on ten years of rapidly
shifting PASSHE enrollment data, students from Pennsylvania’s less-affluent
families were rapidly being replaced by students from Pennsylvania’s more-affluent
families.
Chancellor Cavanaugh told me in
the strongest possible terms not to use the word “gentrification” in my op-ed. While I
didn’t realize at the time why a word that perfectly described the facts could
not be used, I agreed to avoid using that term in my op-ed in deference to him
as the person to whom I reported.
My Op-ed entitled Fix Our Finances: State Universities Need a
New Way of Doing Things² was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on May 10, 2010, and included the following
sentence, which stopped just short of using the “gentrification” word:
“Taken together, it is clear that
the [low-tuition-for-all] policy is failing at both ends of the financial-need
spectrum.”
This sentence was code for a
cruel, basic truth: Under the political thumb of Democrat and Republican
Governors—the PASSHE Board of Governors has been enforcing a policy of rapid
gentrification of the fourteen PASSHE universities, which were originally intended
for students from less-affluent families.
To be continued.
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