Notes on a Scandal, Part I
May 7, 2007
To no one’s surprise (not even the commenters who feigned shock when I said the search was rigged), Mike Garrison’s coronation last month went off with barely a hitch. I say “barely” because there was that three-hour secret session before the Board voted publicly. I don’t think that was part of the plan. The emergency HEPC meeting (scheduled so the Commission could rubber-stamp the Garrison selection before anyone could raise a fuss with them) was set for 11:00, and the Board ended up not voting until around 12:30. I imagine we’ll never find out what took so long.
Who came up with the euphemism “executive session” as a polite term for “secret meeting”?
The so-called “vote” played out exactly like the rest of the search: The real decision was made in complete secrecy. But because Steve Goodwin came out in public to tell us what he’d decided, we were supposed to marvel at how open and transparent the process was. Well glory.
If you watched the live webcast of the Board meeting, you saw how perfect the imagery was. The session started off in a big meeting room with cameras and lots of spectator seats and a pretty board table at the front. But when it came time to actually make the decision, the Board got up and went into the back room. Literally. Behind the board table was a door, and behind the door was the back room. And it was in that back room where the Board went to spend three hours preparing for a five-minute public session and a 16-1 vote. So when we people who aren’t afraid to call a spade a fucking shovel say this thing was all back-room politics, we’re right in more ways than one.
Say it with me:
Picking a president in secret is no way to run a taxpayer-funded university.
Picking a president in secret is no way to run a taxpayer-funded university.
Picking a president in secret is no way to run a taxpayer-funded university.
Especially a university that, according to Garrison, is going to be a lot more taxpayer-funded in the near future.
