Wanted: President of the University of Colorado System. Duties: Repair image of scandal-plagued football program, mend fractious relationship with legislature and governor, and confront persistent concerns about alcohol abuse and racial diversity on campus. Budget-cutting dexterity a plus. Position comes with $350,000 annual salary, $40,000 housing allowance, and pending investigations into improper spending by the athletics department and research misconduct by a notoriously outspoken faculty member. Must boost morale of dispirited employees, recruit skittish students, and charm wayward donors.
To Hank Brown, the job sounded ideal.
The former Republican U.S. senator from Colorado — and onetime student-government president of the system’s flagship campus, in Boulder — agreed to take over as interim president following the abrupt resignation of Elizabeth Hoffman in March. He began work on August 1 and is expected to remain for just a year, although some members of the Board of Regents have hinted that they hope to hire him permanently.
“If what you like is solving problems, this is kind of a dream job,” says Mr. Brown. “It’s a wonderful challenge.”
Despite his temporary status, Mr. Brown has moved aggressively to set a new direction for the beleaguered university.
In his first day on the job, he banned the purchase of alcohol with public funds for university events and eliminated 10 administrative positions, saving more than $800,000. He has announced the formation of an outside panel to examine the effectiveness of programs to encourage racial and ethnic diversity on the Boulder campus, vowed greater transparency in policy making, and directed the University of Colorado Foundation, the institution’s fund-raising arm, to draft new spending rules after an investigation into transactions between the foundation and the football program. He has held 6 a.m. forums on each of the system’s campuses, drawing good crowds at all of them.
Mr. Brown’s most significant contribution in recent months may have been his taking several stints of unpaid vacation time to campaign for a ballot measure, Referendum C, which Colorado voters narrowly approved last week. It will roll back, for a five-year period, the state’s stringent spending limits, which have contributed to a 20-percent reduction in state support for higher education since 2000.
Mr. Brown’s strong start is earning him good reviews from his board. “We didn’t expect him to be a caretaker or a trustee,” says Paul Schauer, chairman of the Board of Regents. “We expected him to do the things that needed to be done.”
Financial Challenges
Mr. Brown inherits a university system that has been buffeted by one bad-news headline after another, including charges that the Boulder football program plied high-school recruits with sex and alcohol, and allegations of academic misconduct against Ward Churchill, a controversial ethnic-studies professor at Boulder. Ms. Hoffman stepped down amid criticism of her leadership by lawmakers and the news media. But Mr. Brown appears to have weathered his first political test, last week’s vote on the ballot measure.
Mr. Brown was a persuasive champion of the ballot measure, Colorado political observers say, because of his personal popularity and his record, in Congress, as an ardent fiscal conservative. Despite a profusion of on-campus obligations, he taped two television commercials in support of Referendum C and spoke about it to civic clubs and business groups.
“He was one of our most powerful advocates,” says Bruce D. Benson, a former Republican gubernatorial candidate who led pro-referendum efforts.
The stakes were especially great for higher education. A University of Colorado study had predicted that state appropriations could dwindle to almost nothing by the end of the decade if the current trend continued. That warning led to fears of higher tuition and cuts in student aid. Now, with the suspension of the spending cap, public colleges will share in the estimated $3.7-billion that the state would have otherwise had to refund to taxpayers.
Still, the financial situation confronting the university system is by no means rosy. Referendum C’s passage will do little to reverse two decades of declining state support for higher education, and voters last week rejected a companion measure to allow the state to issue $2.1-billion in bonds, a portion of which would be used to renovate and replace aging facilities at colleges and public schools. The university receives less than 10 percent of its budget from the state, and Mr. Brown may be called upon to make additional cuts or raise tuition, neither of them popular options.
“This just keeps their head above water,” said David A. Longanecker, executive director of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, which provides data and policy analysis for governors and legislators in 15 states.
Fiscal challenges are not the only test that Mr. Brown faces. He will need to work closely with the Democratic-controlled legislature and with the Republican governor, Bill Owens. Both sides attempted to intercede in university business when Ms. Hoffman was president.
Even before taking office, Mr. Brown began reaching out to public officials, and his efforts have already started paying off. State Sen. Tom J. Wiens, a Republican who tried to cut the university’s budget last spring after Mr. Churchill likened the World Trade Center victims of September 11, 2001, to Nazis, calls Mr. Brown a “consensus builder.”
The State Senate’s president pro tem, Peter C. Groff, originally was apprehensive about Mr. Brown’s commitment to diversity, in light of a spate of racially motivated incidents last spring involving University of Colorado students, including a mixed-race senior whose jaw was broken by an attacker shouting racial slurs.
Mr. Brown met with the senator and, in one of his first decisions on the job, named an outside panel to assess the university’s affirmative-action record and make recommendations for improvements.
“The president could have come in and said, ‘Give me time to take a look,’” says Mr. Groff, a Democrat. “But he didn’t. He acted. From that standpoint, I think he’s shown a commitment.”
‘Iron Fist, Velvet Glove’
Mr. Brown has established a reputation over the past three decades as someone who gets things done, and who does not shy away from hard choices while often managing to win over detractors.
When he became president of the University of Northern Colorado, in 1998, campus reaction was decidedly negative. Many faculty members felt that Mr. Brown had been foisted on them by the Board of Trustees, with no opportunity to consider other candidates, says John Loftis, an English professor and former president of the Faculty Senate.
Mr. Brown moved swiftly to mend fences. He cut administrative costs, channeled more money into faculty salaries and classroom instruction, raised admissions standards, and broke fund-raising records at the 11,800-student college. He did away with his reserved parking spot to declare that no one, not even the president, should receive special favors. (He will have to find his own parking space at Boulder as well, after eliminating his parking privilege there.)
Not all of Mr. Brown’s actions at Northern Colorado were warmly received, however. He was criticized for selling the college’s public-radio station and for shutting down its laboratory school, which trained elementary and secondary-school teachers.
“Hank would always listen to what you had to say, but on the other hand, he didn’t always seek advice on what he was considering, at least from the faculty,” says Mr. Loftis. “There were a couple of times when he called me and said he had made a decision, and that the press conference was in a couple of hours.”
Mr. Brown left Northern Colorado after four years to take over the Daniels Fund, where he made unpopular budgetary decisions, closing offices in three states and laying off a third of the nonprofit foundation’s staff. Two senior executives at the Denver-based fund, which makes grants to community-service organizations and awards scholarships to talented college students in need of financial assistance, resigned in protest.
“He’s like an iron fist in a velvet glove,” says Richard F. O’Donnell, executive director of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education, the state’s higher-education governing board. “He’s thoughtful, considerate, deliberate, collegial, but at the end of the day, he understands leaders have to make choices, and he’s not afraid of making tough choices.”
His accessible style, though, has made a difference even to his critics.
“Hank handled hostile groups quite well,” Mr. Loftis says. “He was witty, pleasant — he disarmed them. Hank is an extraordinary politician.”
Joan L. Clinefelter, another faculty leader at Northern Colorado, agrees: “You could talk to him. We might disagree on policy, but I did think he had the best interests of the university at heart.”
In person, Mr. Brown is pitch perfect — solicitous yet self-deprecating, calm and charismatic, folksy and friendly, capable of cerebrally dissecting issues while exuding passion about leading his alma mater. In Congress he cooperated across party lines. He held off on accepting the University of Colorado job until he was convinced that he had the support of the leadership of both parties in the state’s General Assembly.
Mr. Brown’s appointment has been welcomed by faculty members at the University of Colorado, although they say they will ultimately judge him on his sensitivity to the academic process and his ability to work with campus constituencies.
“The faculty reaction, in general, has been positive,” says Gerald A. Hauser, president of the Boulder Faculty Assembly. “But we’re still in the honeymoon phase.”
Rebuilding Public Confidence
The interim president acknowledges that he will need to do more than woo politicians and faculty members to succeed. He must win over Colorado residents who have been barraged with negative news about the state’s flagship university. During four months this past spring alone, local newspapers ran 191 front-page stories about the University of Colorado — most of them with bad news.
Mr. Brown says he senses fissures between higher education and the Colorado public that run deep. Despite a well-educated work force, the state’s college-going rate is below the national average, while state support for higher education in general, and the University of Colorado in particular, has eroded sharply over the past two decades.
“To have the level of hostility that exists toward higher education is kind of shocking,” Mr. Brown says. “You don’t go from 20 percent of the state budget to 10 percent without someone thinking there are better priorities.
“My No. 1 challenge is to restore confidence in higher education.”
Aims C. McGuinness Jr., a senior analyst at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit group that works to improve the way colleges are run, says that with voters agreeing to roll back the state’s spending limits, Mr. Brown has the opportunity to help create a new vision of higher education in Colorado.
“The passage of Referendum C shows how he drew together forces to support higher education,” says Mr. McGuinness. “He needs to build on that momentum.”
The Real Deal?
There is already evidence that Mr. Brown’s appointment is beginning to change some minds. While systemwide enrollment was down by about 2 percent this fall, the decline was far less steep, particularly among out-of-state students, than university officials had feared earlier in the year.
What’s more, before Mr. Brown was named interim president, the university’s fund-raising efforts were running almost $3.5-million behind the previous year. Between his appointment, in April, and the end of the fiscal year, in July, donations surged. They ended up totaling $83.7-million in the 2005 fiscal year, an increase of 4.5 percent over 2004.
He has also helped improve morale on the university’s campuses, say faculty and staff members.
“We’re just so beleaguered from being in the news,” says Joanne Belknap, a professor of sociology at Boulder, who had been critical of Ms. Hoffman’s handling of the football-recruitment scandal. “The general sentiment is, this is good. We can go back to doing what we do.”
Mr. Brown has an ambitious to-do list. He is expected to review grand-jury reports on the football scandal and determine whether anyone in the football program, including the head coach, Gary Barnett, should be disciplined or replaced. He has set up a working group comprising legislators, representatives of the governor’s office, and officials of the higher-education commission to help avert a repeat of this year’s donnybrook over a proposal by university officials to raise tuition for some in-state students by as much as 28 percent. He has called for whistle-blower protection for employees who report suspected fraud, and he is considering a proposal to move the president’s office from Boulder to Denver, closer to the legislature and the state’s major businesses.
All of this activity has led observers to wonder: Is Hank Brown a temporary troubleshooter or the real thing, the permanent president of the University of Colorado?
Several members of the Board of Regents, including the chairman of the committee conducting a national search for the university’s next president, have indicated that they wouldn’t mind seeing Mr. Brown keep the job.
Mr. Brown is typically politic on the subject. “I’m 65, so it’s not like I’m dependent on keeping the job so I can put food on the table,” he says. But, he adds, “I’m happy to help if they need me.”
HANK BROWN
Born:
February 12, 1940, in Denver
Education:
- B.A. in accounting, U. of Colorado at Boulder, 1961
- J.D., U. of Colorado School of Law, 1969
- L.L.M., George Washington U., 1986
- C.P.A., 1988
Career highlights:
- President, U. of Colorado System, since August 2005
- President, Daniels Fund, 2002-5
- President, U. of Northern Colorado, 1998-2002
- U.S. senator, 1991-97
- Congressman, 1981-91
- Colorado state senator, 1973-77
Personal:
After losing a full scholarship to play football — his play didn’t impress the coaches — Mr. Brown put himself through the U. of Colorado at Boulder on a partial wrestling scholarship and by working as a janitor and a busboy at a sorority. He and his wife, Nan, have three children and two grandchildren. Mr. Brown, who says he averages only four hours of sleep a night, managed to rack up a near-perfect voting record in Congress while finding time to earn a master-of-law degree and passing the examination in certified public accounting. In 1996 Osama bin Laden put a $1-million bounty on Mr. Brown’s head after he tried to negotiate the release of a Russian air crew held in Afghanistan. (The Russians eventually overpowered their Taliban guards and escaped.)
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 52, Issue 12, Page A23