Atypically, I must commend the faculty, at least the 400 or so who showed up for the meeting on Wednesday. Not since the regents attempted to hire the utterly unqualified John Elac as president have I seen such anger and action from normally quiescent faculty. The group gathered in Popejoy Hall was very close to being a lynch mob, at least by academic standards.
At the same time, however, it was incredibly frustrating for someone who has been publicly complaining about the regents for 35 years to sit passive in the balcony with the other civilians, since I am a retired employee (in a burst of pettiness, my department denied me emeritus status). Oh lordy, how I wanted to step up to the microphone and make a few comments, employing the sort of inappropriate language my ever-so-polite former colleagues would never use. Instead, I had to confine myself to a few heckles.
All the votes passed with overwhelming majorities, despite the efforts of some weenies who wished to give President David Schmidly another chance or believed - incomprehensibly - that he was not at fault because he was only following the orders of the regents. Well, if Schmidly-Keitel did not support their policies, he might have said so publicly or, were he an honorable man, threatened to resign. He did neither.
What now? None of this has binding force on the regents and administration, who have indeed already demonstrated their willingness to violate what few rights the faculty actually has in the governance of the University. They certainly do not like adverse publicity concerning the University (as I well know), but this whole affair is easy for them to spin, inasmuch as the general public and the politicos are traditionally suspicious of the pointy-headed intellectuals who teach their children.
These three maroons - Schmidly, David Harris and Jamie Koch - are relatively powerful men, well-connected into the state power structure, and all the regents are political appointees, allied with and beholden to the governor. Even state Secretary of Higher Education Reed Dasenbrock is a former colleague of Harris and is partly paid by UNM, which one would think should undermine his credibility as an impartial administrator. Gov. Bill Richardson, of course, wasted no time in proclaiming his support for Gauleiter Koch, a hardly surprising development for the state's part-time chief executive. After all, he has already pulled a Schmidly in the state bureaucracy, creating dozens of highly paid exempt positions for friends, cronies and whatever. How could he possibly object to the same thing going on at UNM?
There certainly is no prospect of the regents canning Schmidly, as they did Louis Caldera. It is not that they have a problem with squandering huge amounts of money, but Caldera screwed himself, whereas Schmidly is being attacked by the faculty, and that simply cannot be tolerated. Incidentally, Schmidly's remarks at the meeting did not approach the level of honesty of Dick Cheney.
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Will they respond to the two faculty demands (charmingly referred to as suggestions)? It would be hard for them to turn down an impartial audit without looking like they had something to hide, which I expect they do. On the other hand, demoting/eliminating all those vice presidents, because the faculty wishes it, would be a tremendous blow to the authority and egos of the central administration. I suppose we will see.
These people are what Joe Stalin called wreckers, whom he dispatched to labor camps. Unfortunately, UNM does not possess a prison system, but perhaps we could force them to sit in the student section of The Pit, the closest the University comes to a gulag.
Meanwhile, the pressure must be continued. Schmidly (and I suspect Harris as well) gives talks to various groups in the community. For example, on April 8 he will talk to an Oasis class about how wonderful things are at UNM. The faculty needs to create a Truth Squad to follow these characters around. If they do not respond to the demands, how about a dignified occupation of Scholes Hall by faculty in full academic regalia, displaying their books, patents, grants and awards? It might, in fact, be possible to avoid the desperate measure of buying arms.
Finally, the underlying problem is the regents. It was suggested that the trouble began under the last three presidents, who pushed a corporate governance model. This is partly true, but it is precisely the corporate inclinations of the businessmen, politicians and attorneys who typically make up the Board of Regents who enabled all this. Schmidly pointed out that one cannot have good leadership if the University has a revolving-door presidency. Well, who the hell does he believe is responsible for that, the faculty?
Richard M. Berthold is a retired professor of classical history at UNM. He is the author of Rhodes in the Hellenistic Age.
