Possible new U of I board would look to future
CHAMPAIGN – If Gov. Pat Quinn follows the advice of a commission examining the admissions scandal at the University of Illinois and asks school trustees to step down, day-to-day operations at the school’s three campuses wouldn’t be much affected, university officials and outside experts agree.
But what would happen in the months that follow could say a lot about where the university heads in the years to come.
The Illinois Admissions Review Commission voted last week to recommend that all nine voting trustees resign following revelations that the university maintained a list of politically connected applicants and admitted some over better-qualified candidates. Two trustees, board chairman Niranjan Shah and Lawrence Eppley, have quit. Quinn hasn’t commented on what he will do.
The panel plans to release its report with its recommendations to the governor in Chicago at its final meeting Thursday afternoon.
A Quinn spokeswoman declined comment Tuesday on the governor’s plans.
While the board oversees the campuses in Champaign-Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, it doesn’t have a major role in their operational nuts and bolts. Trustees vote on measures that university staff members have researched and choose university leaders such as the president and campus chancellors.
One trustee, attorney David Dorris, has argued that sweeping the board clean would leave a longer-term vacuum at the top of the university system, and at best throw new board members into months or more of scrambling to learn how to oversee the system’s $4 billion-plus annual budget and roughly 70,000 students.
“Having nine new trustees at one time would be a disaster for that university that would harm it for a long, long time,” Dorris, a graduate of the university’s law school and a trustee since 2005, said in an interview last week. “For at least six months but probably a year, you would have people that would probably not be able to make sound decisions for that university.”
That’s true to some degree, said Richard Novak, senior vice president of the Center for Public Trusteeship at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges in Washington.
“There’s going to be some lag time until they get up to speed,” Novak said. “Institutional memory’s gonna be lost.”
But if Quinn chooses to sweep most or all of the board away, Novak said he probably won’t have trouble finding qualified people with either higher education experience, public governance experience or both.
He added that Quinn shouldn’t have trouble finding trustees who are likely to do the right thing, given the memory of the current scandal and the scrutiny they would likely face.
Novak knows of only one situation in which an entire university board was removed, at Adelphi University in New York in the mid-1990s.
The private school, through a quirk in New York law, is subject to state governance. After complaints from faculty and others that the board paid the school president a lavish salary and allowed trustees to do business with the university, the State Board of Regents fired all 18 trustees.
“They were successful, and still are to this day,” Novak said.
Abner Mikva, the admissions panelchairman, has said he believes trustees should step down, but suggested that Quinn might bring back some of those less tainted by the scandal.
The next scheduled trustees meeting is Sept. 10. Trustees are likely to talk about next year’s budget, among other matters, university spokesman Tom Hardy said.
Novak said the September meeting will be watched closely for signs that trustees – whoever they are – are setting the right tone ethically and otherwise for the university.
“The University of Illinois is a statewide public asset,” he said. “One of the first responsibilities of any governing board is sort of protecting that – the reputation, the financial soundness, the ethics.”
