What Happened at UMKC?

by Jack Cashill

Kansas City business leaders are still shaking their heads.

They are asking themselves how a UMKC Chancellor that they had respected and even honored could have been so unceremoniously deposed by her own faculty in an all-but-unprecedented coup.

They are asking themselves too—at least they should be—how they could have so badly misjudged the state of affairs. Indeed, the influential Downtown Rotary had named Martha Gilliland “Business Executive of the Year” only months ago. And just a day before she resigned under fire, several prominent civic leaders helped Gilliland kick off a $200 million capital campaign.

Yes, as the daily paper said, Gilliland’s exit had something to do with her trendy plans to “transform” the university, but if strange ideas cost academics their jobs, the university would have been de-peopled long ago.

No, what happened is that Gilliland set her New Age sails into a perfect storm of miscommunication, misjudgment, and spectacular mistiming, a storm that left her and her corporate allies as confused at the end as they were confident in the beginning, and none of them even saw it coming.

Miscommunication

As a lot, professors tend to be ornery, insecure, and, when tenured, way too used to having their own way. You don’t want to manage them if you don’t have to. I learned this in grad school when I used to play poker in an otherwise all-professor game. I needed the money and I could beat this game 100 percent of the time. (OK, so they were English professors.) Poker players will draw the appropriate inference. I can’t even beat my nieces 100 percent of the time.

Once, on a telling hand of high-low seven card stud, a powerful and very political prof turned up his cards and said to me, “I’ve got you beat, 6-4-3-2-Ace. Best possible low.”  

He started raking in his half of the pot. I stopped him. “You’ve got a problem here,” I told him.

“They’re all hearts.” I waited for him to connect the dots. He didn’t. So I reminded him that it was he who announced that 6-4-3-2-Ace was the best possible low. “As you implied, 5-4-3-2-A is not the best low because it’s a straight. You’re hand is higher still because it’s a flush.”

From playing with these guys over time, I had already learned several lessons useful for future university administration. One, forget about their Marxist mumbo-jumbo and remember never to get between a professor and his money. Two, don’t expect logic to prevail in an argument. Three, if you do not have authority over a professor, don’t try to exert it. (And even a chancellor doesn’t have power over a tenured professor.) Facing likely defeat on the poker confrontation, I fell back on the one bit of power that the powerless have in a university setting, “shared governance.”  

“Perhaps we should vote on it,” I suggested. Profs like to vote. There are no people this smart in the free world who have so little real power. As a result, they are eager to exercise what power they have. After about a half hour of lively debate, the other tenured profs sided with me, and we prevailed 4-3.  

For all of Gilliland’s virtues, she never must have played poker with other professors.  If she had, she would have known enough to let them think they were making the rules.  She would also have known not to stack the deck while they were looking.

Misjudgment

For the record, 2000 witnessed the single greatest one-year crash of a major American market with the collapse of NASDAQ. In March 2001, the recession began. In September 2001, America and its economy took another major hit. In the aftermath, state tax revenues shriveled, faculty salaries froze, and yet, amazingly, Gilliland got a pay raise larger than the salary of most of her faculty. In one startling swoop, MU President Elson Floyd hiked Gilliland’s salary to $250,000 a year from $183,000, an increase of $67,000. She now made twice what the governor of the state was making and got a better house to boot. Plus, had she stuck around for just a few more months, she was looking at a six-figure bonus on top of that.

The faculty noticed. Even without the bonus, Gilliland’s salary was 267 percent higher than George Russell’s had been for the same job 20 years prior. In that same period, however, the consumer price index had only gone up about 80 percent and faculty salaries remained about the same.

To complicate matters, Gilliland hired a retinue of consultants and administrative courtiers, several of whom were making more than any humanities professor, and some of whom were getting jumbo raises too.

Did Gilliland not know that faculty members like administrators about as much as they do plagiarists or state legislators, especially those who are younger, dumber, better looking, and better paid? And now these fulsome little factota were trying to tell the faculty how to “transform” the university. Not in this lifetime!

Mistiming

Something else happened of consequence in the year 2000, the year Gilliland was hired. George Bush was elected president. When the UMKC professors woke up that November morning and saw the sea of red in which they were immersed, they felt more alienated than ever. When Bush “stole” the election a month later-how else could he have won, no one they knew voted for him-the profs fell into one great collective, surly funk.  

I don’t exaggerate. As a faculty spouse, I got to see the funk up close and hear it roar. As the election of 2004 approached, that funk turned to fury. When the profs woke up that tragic November morning in 2004 and saw how the sea of red had turned tsunami, they snapped.

Their unfulfilled fury found its outlet in the impeachment of the one impeachable presence in their lives. More than one pro-Kerry, anti-Martha partisan has volunteered that had John Kerry won, Martha Gilliland would still be chancellor.

But he didn’t, and she isn’t. It’s not that she was a Republican. Au contraire, her plans for the university were perfectly progressive. No, sort of like an academic Reginald Denny, she had wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time and took a brick in the head for her troubles.

Business leaders might have seen what a dangerous neighborhood she was driving through and warned her off. But they didn’t know either. Other than the occasional interaction with the Bloch school or the Law school, they have little truck with the professoriate. No, their understanding of the university came largely through Gilliland, and Gilliland had become one of them.

Or so she thought, until her colleagues reminded her otherwise.    

 

Jack Cashill is Ingram’s Executive Editor and has affiliated with the magazine for 26 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram’s Magazine.