Tribune editorial: Political meddling in higher education doesn’t help the cause of reform

Even in the best of times, being the president of an American public university is a difficult job. And these are not the best of times, especially in Utah.

The modern academy is not a silvan grove of learning and research. Running it means managing housing, buildings, parking, access, security, energy, health care and fund-raising, always fund-raising — things not known to trouble the great thinkers of history. It means balancing the interests and demands of faculty, researchers, alumni, politicians, donors and athletic boosters. And, oh, yes, students.

Our political leaders, on the national and state levels, should be doing a lot more to help our colleges and universities thrive. To be open to young people who, in the past, would not have been able to avail themselves of higher education. To bring forward the next generation, not only of competent employees, but also of literate, thinking, creative citizens.

Instead, too many university leaders are spending too much of their time being dragged before congressional committees or having to fight off attempts by state legislators to drag colleges into ridiculous culture war disputes.

In Utah, legislative leaders have distracted their constituents from the state’s inability to deal with real problems such as air quality, water and housing by, among other things, picking on the state’s universities. They have banned diversity efforts, cut budgets and otherwise meddled in matters they don’t understand.

A recent Salt Lake Tribune examination of the tenure of Utah’s university presidents shows that the average length of a top administrator’s stay is only about 3.5 years. That’s not enough time for the chief of any large institution to get the lay of the land, devise a plan for an institution’s future and turn those ideas into reality.

The longest tenured college president in the state, Deneece Huftalin of Salt Lake Community College, retired last June after 10 years in the post. She bluntly said that the political climate, particularly a “disdain for higher ed” demonstrated by members of the Legislature, was why the job went from challenging to impossible.

The kind of reform that is necessary in higher education won’t happen if university leaders are always looking over their shoulders or eager to pull the ripcord on their golden parachutes. Real reform takes time and a deep knowledge of each institution.

Micromanagement and harassment from the political classes will not lead to reform, just chaos.

The reasons for the high turnover at the top of Utah universities are many and often unique to those involved. Scandals at individual schools and bungled management decisions can happen anywhere, and are not the fault of our lawmakers.

But those vacancies could be filled with better candidates, and come up less often, if it were known throughout the American academic community that Utah was a place where the political class takes higher education seriously, supports it financially and engages in reasonable oversight rather than repeated attempts to undermine the goals of transmitting the humanities to future generations.

If half as many people who turn out to cheer for Ute football or Aggie basketball would tell their legislators to stop making life difficult for their school presidents, things might improve rapidly.

Editorials represent the opinions of The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board, which operates independently from the newsroom.