Kentucky Health Policy Institute

Do things always have to get worse before they get better?  When then can it ever end?

Yesterday was a busy news day for the University of Louisville.  While I was writing my own article in the afternoon, every journalist in town who has been following the drama within UofL’s administration these past many months was publishing new material!  I envy their information gathering network and their ability to publish something virtually every day.  Nonetheless, it appears that I was prescient with my own comments.  In truth, I would like to think I have been stirring the pot a little.  I will take the liberty of stepping through some of the points I made yesterday as a framework for catching up.

Headlines in today’s issues of the Courier-Journal by Andrew Wolfson, Insider Louisville by Joe Sonka, and WDRB Television by Chris Otts include the following:

• The settlement between the Justice Resource Center and a variety of other parties over the statutory racial makeup of the Board of Trustees was made public.  This appears to turn upside down the timetable of any discussion of a vote of no-confidence in President Ramsey for both the Faculty Senate and the Board of Trustees.  The process of appointing new minority trustees has been initiated.
• The agenda of next Wednesday’s Faculty Senate meeting makes it official that the Senate leadership intends for its discussion of the no confidence vote to be held in secret.  This has elicited criticism, including from me.
• Governor Bevin has unilaterally acted to decrease current state funding to universities by 4.5%.  This move was followed immediately by a declaration from the Attorney General that such a move was illegal and that his office would file a lawsuit to reverse it.
• Acting University Provost Professor Neville Pinto was named as the permanent University Provost following a limited internal search, also drawing faculty criticism.
• President Ramsey’s crisis management team continues to put out puff-pieces in an effort to offset continuous bad press.

The downside of all the above is that the University will be drawn out further in its institutional agony.  The upside is that additional time has become available for a systematic, transparent, and reliable survey of the faculty concerning their opinion of the leadership of President James Ramsey.  I will elaborate on this new information below. Continue reading “Yesterday’s Explosion of UofL News.  Not All Good.”

“April is the cruelest month.”

It is going to be a busy and certainly controversial month at the University of Louisville.  On April 6, the UofL Faculty Senate – the highest governing body of the University’s faculty – will have its last scheduled meeting before the meeting of the Board of Trustees later this month on April 20.  At the Trustee’s meeting, the Board will re-consider its postponed vote of no confidence in the presidency of James Ramsey.  An aborted effort last March 1st to proceed with such a vote was aggressively blocked on procedural grounds by longtime Ramsey supporters.  I am told that the President’s Office has retained an expensive outside crisis-management consultant.  (I wonder who is paying for this, don’t you?)

Those who have declared their intention to cast a vote of no confidence are being categorized as “dissidents.”  Demonizing one’s opponents is a strategy often resorted to when other arguments prove insufficient. We see examples in the papers every day. I am forced to ask, how can a majority or even a near-majority of the Board be called dissidents?  Would it then follow that if President Ramsey does receive a vote of no confidence, that his supporters would be the dissidents?  I have listened to the language used by both sides.  In contrast to the professional, restrained, and respectful language used by those Trustees unhappy with the current direction of the University, Ramsey’s supporters are becoming even more shrill resorting to personal character attacks. These smack of desperation.  I am not alone in this perception.

By accounts, the vote will be a close one.  Not every one of the 20 trustees has expressed how they plan to vote.  None of the three trustees representing faculty, staff, or students has done so.  It even remains possible that Governor Bevin will name two new trustees who would then be asked to vote on the President’s performance even before they had their required orientation, and certainly before they had any opportunity to observe events as a Trustee. I cannot find evidence that the Postsecondary Nominating Committee has begun their statutory process, but obvious Ramsey supporters are already standing in line to be noticed. Stacking the Board with Ramsey supporters would be a bald political move that would only perpetuate the current weakness of the University’s position. Using the excuse that the Board is illegally constituted to support Ramsey in his understandable efforts to hang on is hypocritical in the extreme. Continue reading “What Does the Faculty Think About UofL President James Ramsey?  Does It Matter?”