Toward the end of the NDSU academic year a couple of interesting e-mails appeared on faculty list-serv.  First, Bruce Franz, then director of facilities management, sent a message about the effects of the 12th Avenue project and other construction on  NDSU’S operation.  He described the schedule of meetings he would be attending during the nest week about these things,  The next day. faculty list-serv announced that Franz had resigned with a minimal severance package.  Obviously there’s more here than meets the eye, so I decided to do a little digging to see what I could discover.

From talking to low level administrators and faculty leaders, here’s what I came up with,  We should be aware that at the moment this is hearsay, but informed hearsay that fits the facts and the situation.

The Minard hall project that lead to the Minard Hall collapse was one of those projects that was expensive enough that it would require board approval.  Hence, apparently under pressure from Chapman, Franz divided the project into four separate ones and let bids on all four.  Unfortunately, to perform all four separately was unsafe, a fact known to Franz.  But, like the former vice president for business and finance, caved in to pressure.
and accepted the bids.   And sure enough, Minard Hall collapsed, an event now connected to Chapman(former NDSU President and Forum’s Man of the Year).

I recall Franz saying at the time of thee collapse that it was fortunate there was no-one in the building at the time of the collapse.  I guess.  Try to imagine the legal implications if there had been.

When this comes out, and I imagine that it will and I think there’s more, the state board of higher education will come up with more ides that will be reported in the media as means to prevent/control NDSU’s actions in some areas.  But if one understands NDSU to mean the faculty and students as well as academically qualified administrators, NDSU hasn’t done anything wrong.  Only state board appointees, and, in the case of Chapman, selected with the guidance of a search committee appointed by the state board and containing few NDSU faculty or students.

Many think this search committee. chaired by the current Fargo mayor, suggest Chapman since he would bring Division I athletics to NDSU, a move never very popular with the faculty.  If so, I hope some think it was worth it.

Last Monday the State Board of Higher Education unanimously elected Dean Bresciani, “a vice president at Texas A & M” according to the media,
to be NDSU’s new president, The new president, seemingly a charismatic individual, promised to hit the ground running to win the people’s trust of NDSU back.

Wow.  Looks like misinformed media hype to me.  First, why shouldn’t people trust NDSU. NDSU, however one defines it, hasn’t done anything wrong: only two individuals, one, the Fargo Forum’s man of the year. With questionable motives and past, and another a political appointee as vice president for business an finance.  The faculty, staff and students of NDSU had nothing to say about these appointments and should not be held accountable for their transgressions.  Rather the state board should shoulder the responsibility,, but they have not.

Now about this appointment.  I certainly wish Dr. Bresciani well, but thinks he has an almost insurmountable task and there’s nothing in his credentials that indicate he will be able to.

I would like to ask anyone reading this if they have ever heard of Les Pavek.  How about George Wallman.  My guess is that most will not while most that have will not be sure of who they are.  I’ll tell you.  They are the past two vice presidents for student affairs at NDSU.  They decide when to close the university due to snow, oversee academic conduct and misconduct and the like.,  They were not responsible for funding, administering budgets, except for small office management ones, nor did they supervise any faculty.

Dean Bresciani was Vice President for Student Affairs at Texas A & M.  Good luck, Dean.

Recently, Steve Swiontek , chair of the presidential search committee at NDSU, even  though not being formally associated with the University, announced the finalists for the position and expressed “excitement” at the qualifications of the list of candidates.  I strongly disagree with that sentiment, and wonder if the State Board of Higher Education is going to have to actually  destroy the University before the people(as in “for the land and it’s people,”  see below) realize  what they have done.

I do not think that a single finalist so far named by the search committee is worthy of serious consideration for the post.  No, I’m not going to advocate Interim President Hanson, who saved the University from virtual extinction by getting the University under way again after the Vice President for Business and Finance allowed the university to stagnate  because he didn’t have the courage to do his job.   Hanson is a good man, a hard worker, but i think he rather clearly is not qualified for the job.  But neither are any of the other candidates, in my view.

In his recent Bison Pride address, Interim President  noted that NDSU is the state’s land grant school, referring to the Land Grant, or Morrill, Act of 1852 which gave each state a grant of land to use for generating funds for a university for, according to Hanson, excellence in research and facilitating the work of the agricultural world.  NDSU is one of these, as well as one each in most, if not all states.  The exceptions are the former Confederate states that have two(formerly “separate but equal, don’t you know).

Dr., Hanson, while having spent some of his career at NDSU has spent most of his administrative life  at a small liberal arts colleges, most recently at Waldorf  College of Decorah Iowa, a 440 student 4 year libral arts college.  Such institutions tout excellence in teaching, I’m sure justifiably so.  However, NDSU’s faculty, as desparately underfunded as they are, are involved in nationally or internationally recognized research, for the most part, and their better undergraduates take graduate courses and are involve with the faculty in their research, opportunites not available at, for example, Waldorf.

NDSU is in serious financial difficulty.  Hanson has pretty much made that clear.  The next president is ging to have to deal with that reality. I submit that to do so, he’s going to have to understand what he’s chasing funding for, ande what it’s needed for.  I thinkk he also needs to underestand the intricacies of administering such a university. Hanson may not be qualified to do this, but look at some of the other candidates:

D. C. Coston, vice president for agriculture and university extension at NDSU.  I’m unsure of how much administration is involved in this position, but would point out that the Academic Vice President for Academic  Affairs and Provost, Dean of the Graduate School, several college deans, were all promoted from within NDSU.  Another internal promotion will indicate to potential funding agencies the desperate situation at NDSU.

Thomas Keon, dean of business administration at the University of Central Florida.  From dean at a regional, at least in name, university to president of a land grant school?  I don’t think so.

Dean Bresciani, former Vice President for Student Affairs at Texas A & M.  Texas A & M is a land grant school, but Vice President for Student Affairs is not a position actually involved in the administration of the university: no faculty report to him and he has no budget to administer to speak of.

Gene Hockfield Malandra, Malandra Consulting and former vice chancellor for strategic management, the University of Texas system.  None of this suggests actual academic experience to me,

Stanley Battle, consultant for the Connecticut State University and former president of North Carolina State Agricultural and Technical University. North Carolina A & T is the historically African American land school in North Carolina.  It is impossible to describe how underfunded
and therefore poor in other ways institutions like this are.  This is not a comment about the faculty, students, administration or supporters of such institutions: only about their funding.  Once again, appointment to NDSU president would be a huge leap.

Priscilla Nelson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology.  From professor to president in one leap?  You’ve got to be kidding me.

These are just some of the candidates, and some may not be candidates anymore.   I have nothing for or against any of fhem personally. But they indicate how bad the situation is, and I am extremely disappointed that Swiontek is “excited” about this list.  My feeling is that if this is the best we can do, we should close the search and try again next year with a new search committee.

There  are a couple of other things about this search that concern me.  One is that the profile of the NDSU president disseminated by this search committee there was a section on university athletics, claiming that athletics is an “integral part”  of NDSU.  Ii can’t seem to track down where in university policy this is established.  Most, if not all, NDSU faculty I’ve talked to don’t feel that this is true.  I wonder if it’s not a product of the search committee itself. Since most have no formal connection with NDSU, they have no business making NDSU policy.

Finally, remember when the Forum’s Man of the Year was considering another position?  We didn’t find out about it until he had already been offered the position.  According to those I’v spoken to experienced eith searches, qualified applicants sometimes don’t apply to NDSU since the Forum has a history of investigating the candidates on their own camp, and most don’t want it known they are looking elsewhere.  So, if we do have another search, the Forum should stay out of it.

Fargo ND. – Although Congress is still working on health care reform legislation and it is far from final, rural North Dakota may be at the center of what some believe is the crowning achievement of the Obama Administration’s first year in office. Virginia Wolking, rural organizer with the Center for Rural Affairs, says the lack of health care services in rural areas has led to more serious and chronic medical conditions for many small town residents. She say one problem is that there are too few places for new doctors to learn the ropes.

“It is one of the big issues that, even if somebody wanted to practice in a rural area for their residency, there just are not enough slots for them. And research shows that when someone comes to a rural area to do their residency, they end up staying there, so that’s a really positive thing. ”

Wolking says she is sometimes discouraged by the politics around health care reform, but she thinks the benefits to people outweigh the benefits to corporations, if the outcome is that most people will be insured.

“More rural people are uninsured than people in urban areas, and people who are uninsured receive fewer preventive services. That’s part of why having 95 percent of people covered by insurance is so important, so that people can get the preventive care that they need.”

Critics continue to point out the costs involved, but Wolking says that while the House and Senate bills are being combined there’s a chance to work out the best possible compromise.

Definition of “Creeping Meatballism” The idea of thinking individually has become a big joke. Old Thomas J. Watson of I.B.M. came up with the idea for a sign which just said: “Think”. And today, it’s a gag! This is the result of “Creeping Meatballism”.

On the first of December, Dr. Richard Hanson became the interim president of NDSU. I recall thinking at the time that he might becoming president of an institution on the verge of collapse.  I had no idea that it might happen literally.  I’m referring, of course, the collapse of the north side of that grand old structure Minard Hall.

For those unfamiliar with the NDSU campus, Minard Hall is the four floor yellow brick building with maroon trim across Albrecht Blvd from the NDSU Library, sandwiched between Askanase Hall(the Little County Theatre), the heating plant and Festival Hall.  It was built in three stages, the first being in 1901. It houses the College of Arts, Humanities and social Sciences, as well s the Mathematics and Psychology Departments of the College of Science and Mathematics.

For those not involved in higher education at a research university, this is a catastrophe of indescribable proportion.  To me, it is symbolic of the neglect  a state with a billion dollar surplus and its population treats its higher education system.  I don’t expect to make any friends by saying this, but for me, this is the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I no longer care whether the youth of North Dakota get quality education or not.  Much as I love my students, the state just doesn’t deserve the effort.

So let’s return to Minard Hall, clearly one of the most important buildings on campus.  Currently it is closed to everyone.  There is hope to get the offices and classrooms not affected by the collapse ready for the start of spring semester.  There will supposedly be a window of opportunity for faculty with offices in the safe part of the building to return to their offices to retrieve important materials, such as books and papers, before the building is closed again.  I find that many don’t understand that NDSU is a research university, meaning that just because classes are not in session does not mean the faculty don’t need to use their offices.  I think the NDSU administration, in particular provost/academic vice president Craig Schnell, and, for that matter, some of the students, of publicizing the fact that many of the lost books and papers are irreplaceable.  I can only imagine how much research has been lost.

Bruce Frantz, who is in charge of the physical buildings on campus, would have us believe that this was an unforeseeable accident, and there were no mistakes made by his office or the contractor.  Snort.  This is an engineering school with a strong construction engineering program and excellent construction engineering faculty.  They just didn’t pay attention, in my view.  Franz is probably right to say the collapse happened at one of the few times no one would get hurt.  I’m glad, of course, that no-one did, but if someone had, I would have enjoyed the embarrassing national publicity that might have followed.

Franz would also have us believe that the damage can be fixed(for half a million.  The loss to the affected faculty, of course, can’t.  Even if it could, it turns out that NDSU carries no liability insurance).  I question whether Minard Hall should be repaired.  The building has been an expensive disaster for decades.  My office is in Minard Hall, but not in the affected area.  But my library and research papers and very probably my health has suffered much over the years.

Sometime in my first few years at NDSU the roof above(by a floor or two) sprang a leak and much of my library, carefully and costfully assembled while I was a graduate student and new faculty member, was drenched, rendering many of the books unusable, as the pages are all stuck together. This has happened so many times since that during a rain storm there is apparently a stand-by crew available  that can go rushing into faculty offices and cover everything with plastic if the roof leaks.  I read something about this once, but since I’ve observed it happening a few times, there’s no need to cite it.

Air quality has also been an issue in Minard Hall, due to its proximity to the heating plant.  In fact, the state health department once declared my office as uninhabitable.  My department and college administration was unable to find another office for me, but fortunately I was able to generate two invitations from departments in other buildings to reside there.  Yes, that is a dig at the problem solving abilities of the NDSU administration.

So, what we have here is an historic building that houses many important departments and in which many classes are taught that is virtually collapsing.  We didn’t have enough space for our 14,000 students before this happened.  And all of this at the end of an eleven year term of a president, Forum’s man of the year, that could raise millions for athletics, but couldn’t keep a major building safe in a state with a billion dollar surplus.

There’s many more problems Chapman left us with, but that could be the topic of another essay.

UPDATE: Here’s What CBS Is Saying About Oprah

EXCLUSIVE: One of the biggest questions in the TV biz has been when, and even if, Oprah Winfrey would give up her daytime syndicated talk show to focus on OWN, her long delayed Oprah Winfrey Network in 70 million homes that was supposed to launch in place of the Discovery Health Channel as a joint venture between Winfrey and Discovery Communications. The industry has been betting that the daytime diva would extend The Oprah Winfrey Show for at least another year or two because of the huge cash license fees which stations have long paid her. But people around Oprah are telling me that won’t happen. They say that Discovery Communications chief David Zaslav has demanded that Oprah “move it or lose it” — move her talk show to OWN, or risk losing the Oprah Winfrey Network altogether. I’ve learned that in coming days Winfrey and Discovery will issue a press release announcing OWN’s on-air launch for the start of 2011. And, in several weeks, Oprah will tell the public that she’s ending her syndicated Chicago-based daytime talk show when her current deal runs out and moving it to OWN headquarters in Los Angeles probably as soon as mid-2011.

How long has it been now since Joseph Chapman has made the front page of the Forum or been the topic of a Television News Feature about his alleged accomplishments?  I’m not sure, but he sure seems to have dropped off the radar all of a sudden.  Wonder why  that is.  I can only speculate, but I think we don’t know very much of the story.  His sudden and unexpected resignation(regardless of what he says after the fact) and the speed with which the State Board of Higher Education accepted his resignation certainly makes one wonder.  It has been amusing, however, to watch the news media display their ignorance of the Chapman presidency and how a research university functions.

I recall the huge issue of the forum with the front page headlines of “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” together with several other articles with color photos of Chapman and his missus.  I have often wondered what NDSU president’s wives have to do with the situation: it is not their credentials that are examined, they are not the ones to give an address, as is customary, to the entire university community, so why do the presidents always refer to their spouses when announcing news about their actions on belhalf of the University?  In this case, Chapman’s wife was paid approximately the salary of a beginning assistant professor, supposedly to represent the University.  How could she do that, when she is not a University administrator, faculty member or staff member?  Of course she was not paid with apporpriated funds, and to focus on such minor apparent abuses is, I think, to miss the point.

There was supposed to be a huge rally in support of Chapman during the middle part of the class day featuring the Gold Star Band, speakers and throng of students.  Channel 11 hyped the event for approximately a week. promising full coverage.  I watched their coverage, and tried to figure out where the event was held.  There were remarks by Chapman and his wife, some members of the Gold Star Band performing on a stage, interviews with a couple of students(what does two interviews out of 14,000 students tell us about anything?) and some shots of some students sitting in an auditorium.  I noted there were a lot of empty seats.  Channel 11 did remark that the event was smaller and more subdued that the previous Chapman rally.
Later, I found out that the event was held in the Memorial Union’s Century theater and was attended by about 150 students.  If true,e I find even 150 a bit high, since that’s about all Century theater holds.  At that time of day, I could get 150 students to watch people flipping coins in the union.

I’m not sure what happened during the first rally to cause such a large and enthusiastic turnout, but I suspect it had something to do with athletics and a large dose of propaganda from the president’s office.  The turnout this time is not surprising: students really have almost zero contact with the president or his office, academic policy is not made by the president, so in general most don’t know or care who the president is.  Anything they learn about him will come from the media, which apparently gets its information directly from the president’s office.

So, now we come to the interim president, selected rather quickly by Chancellor Goetz.  Before the appointment of Dick Hanson as imterim president, the Forum again amused me with their picks.  One was Allan Fischer, who was interim president once before, and the mdia has indicated was “The student’s Choice.”  This last is pure balderdash: just because a fes students held a vigil outside the president’s office while Fischer occupied it does not make him the student’s choice.  As a metter of fact, the vigilantes were, as it turned out, all members of the Campus Crusade for Christ, an organization of which Fischer was the Faculty Advisor.  In fact, Fisher was previously Dean of the college of Science and Mathematics.  He neglected to have the faculty perform their mandatory evaluation of him, so Vice President Schnell stepped in and had the faculty evaluate Fischer.  Most people on the evaluation committee were shocked as to how unpopular he was with his own faculty.  Now, it is important that Dean does not mean “Boss.”   His unpopularity among his faculty did not come from poor administrative decisions, but rather from poor administrative style.  In fact, under current University policy, his style of administration would now be illegal.  But I won’t go into detail.

Despite an attempt by an end run by some local luminaries, Fischer was not appointed without submitting to the usual search process.  I asked one of the search committee members about his candidacy, and was told he was not a serious candidate.  During televised interviews he was often not able to respond in a complete sentence.    I was tempted to attend his address to the University community just so I could ask enough questions so that he would embarrass himself, but was told by the same member of the search committee that would be unnecessary, since he would do a perfectly good job of doing that himself.  Apparently, that’s what happened.  So, not a good choice for interim ;president now, I don’t think.

That brings us to another Forum choice, Provost/Academic Vice President Schnell.  Craig Shcnell is the closest thing to leader the University has.  He is far, far too valuable to the University and its academic programs, both teaching and research, to spend his time on funding and the like, in my opinion.  Also, he has a direct and honest style which I find refreshing and is unusual in a university administrator, which makes him all the more effective as provost and Vice President, but I don’t think it would help much in the Legislature or in fund raising.  Of course, that’s just my opinion.  I could be wrong, on all counts, but I  dont’ thiink the Forum consider any of these issues in deciding who they think should be NDSU’s president, either permanent or interim.

That brings us to Chancellor Goetz’s pice, Dick Hanson, whom the Forum apparently supports.  I knew Dick rather well when he was Sharon Wallace’s Associate Vice President for academic affairs, and admired him as the only man in the uppr administration with any brains(remember, Sharon Wallace, the Academic Vice President and Jim Ozbun, the president at the time were essentially run out of town on a rail).  I suspect that the Forum supports Hanson because he is an ex Bison football player, and so will continue to support higher profile athletics.  If so, I think they are mistaken: I think Dick’s football days are in his past.

But let’s look at the rest of the story.  Hanson, as reported in the Forum, was indeed a faculty member at NDSU for a few years, but I believe his PhD is in Home Economics are a similar field.  NDSU is the state university of agriculture and applied science.  Even though he had some success in the past. I don’t think Dck’s credentials qualifies him to seek funding for such a university.

When Dick left NDSU, it was to become academic vice president at Augustana College.  He apparently has had several other positions since then, most recently as president oi Waldorf College in Iowa, a 440 student liberal arts college.  The similarity between such an institution and NDSU is non-existent.  One main difference is that Waldorf wouldn’t be doing any researchm, while NDSU gets approximately 1/3 of its budget from overhead money for its research programs.  Dick is an advocate of high teaching standards for the faculty, and who can disagree with that, but he , at least used, to have some what are to me funny ideas.  For example, he doesn’t agree with those of us that think active researchers use that activity to make them better teachers.  Well, just think about it.  Would you rather learn a subject from someone active in the field or someone that just studies it?  He thinks, or used to, that high student evaluations were synonymous with good teaching.  sometimes, maybe, but when I was a department chair I used to be suspect of abnormally high student evaluations, and investigation proved me right on many occasions.  Besides, we are have a large College of Engineering: in taking their beginning science and mathematics courses, it is far more important that the students learn the material that if the like how its taught.  But all of this may be moot, the president doesn’t have much control over these things, and Dick may have changed some.  I always found him intelligent and open to new ideas.

But I cannot emphasize enough the difference between a school like Waldorf and NDSU.  Of course I’m biased, but to my way of thinking and experience, education at state land-grant schools is a real bargain.  Small liberal arts colleges pride themselves in academic excellence, but they are very limited in what they can offer.  In some departments at NDSU, the best students in their graduate courses are their own undergraduates.  I currently know of one student that in 3 1/2 years will have completed a double major in the sciences and earned a master’s degree in addition.  The type of institutions Hanson has been associated with would have noting to offer such students.

So, I hope whoever makes the decision of the composition of the search committee and ultimately the president will take into account the actual make up and structure of the University, and I hope everyone ignores the Forum.

by:Fear the Lutefisk

This past Sunday, the Minnesota vikings lost their first game of the season. Given that their previous opponents were of questionable quality, this may be cause for some alarm among the Viking faithful. My view, however, is somewhat different.

In the first place, the Vikings were playing the world champions on their own field. A win under these circumstances would be exceptional for any team. Secondly, the lost in a sand lot free for all that could have gone either way. The fourth quarter was one of the most exciting quarters of football I’ve seen in more decades of football watching than I care to admit.

Read More Here

Minnesota Viking SuperBlog