President Fogel

Two unrelated matters today, both of them, fitting for work done on Groundhog Day, reprising and wrapping up reports of the few days previous.

First, a “very sorry” University of Vermont President Daniel Mark Fogel confirmed that, as first reported here yesterday,  Ben Stein would not be the commencement speaker this spring.

The sorrow was inspired not by Stein’s withdrawal but by Fogel’s original invitation to the actor/commentator, extended when Fogel was “insufficiently attentive” to the controversy it would create among scientists and other academics  around the world.

Stein is an advocate of “intelligent design,” a denial of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Almost all scientists regard evolution as the foundation of biology and “intelligent design” as fraudulent. Stein co-wrote and starred in a move called Expelled which argues that belief in evolution was one cause of the Holocaust.

Fogel said he had been vaguely aware of Stein’s interest in intelligent design, but thought of him primarily as a commentator on economics, his subject when he spoke at UVM last spring.

“Of course I didn’t go see Expelled , Fogel said. “Why would I?  I am myself a believer in science.”

After last week’s announcement that Stein would be UVM’s commencement speaker and receive an honorary degree, Fogel said he “started to get a lot of emails… I would say hundreds,” protesting the selection, One was from well-known scientist Richard Dawkins, a professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford, who called the choice  of Stein “lamentable.”

Fogel said he did not “retract the invitation” to Stein, but that after the two men discussed the situation, Stein said, “look, I’m not going to come.”

Fogel said UVM “will identify another Commencement speaker in the weeks ahead,” using “a more consultative process .”

The Commencement is scheduled for May 17.

Now we turn to Rep. Patricia O’Donnell, Republican of Vernon, who has not been mentioned before on this web site but who was mentioned – derisively – by this reporter on television the other day, commenting on her proposal to demand lower salaries for the top executives of some non-profit groups.

The specific derision proclaimed on Vermont Public Television’s Vermont This Week was that the proposal was not “grownup.”

Last week, O’Donnell announced legislation that would require five percent salary cuts in the pay of  any official who earns $60,000 a year or more working at a non-profit agency that gets half its total funding from the state.

What did not seem “grownup” was that O’Donnell:

–Didn’t know how much money might be saved;

–Didn’t know (and apparently was not asked) how many non-profits get most of their money from the state;

–In some cases listed non-profits that don’t get any money from the state at all.

In a telephone interview yesterday, O’Donnell explained why she did what she did the way she did it.

“I’m not doing this to get at anybody or to be nasty,” she said.” I’m been working on Medicaid and these programs for elderly people for years. I’ve pushed for V-Pharm and for higher medical benefits.”

Her hope, she said, is that the money saved by paying less to the non-profits could be diverted to V-Pharm, which helps low and middle-income people get prescription drugs.

As to not knowing how much could be saved, she said that as one legislator with no staff she didn’t “have the resources at my finger tips” to get the information.

“Nothing’s going to happen unless the bill is introduced. Now this bill will go to the committee and the committee will take it up,” she said, apparently referring to the Committee on Human Services, on which she serves.

Perhaps, she said, the bill would have to be expanded to apply to non-profits that get only 20 percent of their funding from the state. Perhaps, she said, the state could save as much as half of the $3  million V-Pharm costs by sending less to the non-profits.

Perhaps. But she could present to evidence to support that hope.

Revealing that she had decided to return five percent of her Legislative salary, O’Donnell said, “I’m just asking everyone to share the burden.”

However admirable her own sacrifice, she actually seems to be asking a few people – at the most a few hundred people – to bear the burden. The same is true for the policy she said she modeled her idea on – the five percent pay cut for most state workers earning $60,000 a year or more that Gov. Jim Douglas’s imposed late last year.

O’Donnell said it is saving $589,000 a year. But it is doing so by effectively levying a huge tax increase – perhaps $2,400 on a 60,000 a year earner (roughly the take home pay lost for a $3,000 gross pay cut) – while not asking a penny of anyone earning $60,000 or more who does not work for the state.

On that television program another reporter, who had been to the press conference where O’Donnell announced her proposal ,held up the list of non-profits she had handed out and noted that all of them seemed to be organizations that had expressed some opposition to Douglas’s budget-cutting plans.

O’Donnell said it was “ludicrous” to suggest she had any political motive “because I said all non-profits. I’m going to get at everybody,” specifying that she might add to her list of big-paying non-profits the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC).

VSAC does pay big salaries. But it appears to get no state appropriation, so cutting those salaries would save no  money for use in other programs.

And while O’Donnell may want to “get at everybody,” notably absent from her list of non-profits with high-salaried officials were any of the regional economic development corporations, which tend to have close ties to the Douglas Administration.

But unlike the governor and his aides, O’Donnell did not rule out supporting some kind of income tax increase on wealthier taxpayers.

“If it was an increase  on higher income people, I would probably support something like that,” she said. “The burden now is on the poorest people of the state. I’m just trying to make it so that it’s shared on the higher level.”

Ben Stein

Ben Stein will not deliver the commencement address at the University of Vermont this year after all.

Cancel one major league media frenzy, no doubt with attendant protest marches, petitioning, name-calling, and battling blogs.

The hullabaloo had already begun. It almost instantly become global. It seems to have prevailed.

The University did not announce the sudden reversal on Sunday of the announcement made only three days earlier that Stein-actor, writer, one-time presidential speech-writer, and conservative commentator-would be awarded an honorary degree and speak at the University’s 205tth Commencement on May 17.

But according to a widely read scientific web site, UVM President Daniel Mark Fogel wrote Sunday that, “Mr. Stein will be unable to receive the honorary degree here or to serve as Commencement speaker .”

Fogel wrote that in a letter to Richard Dawkins (pictured above),  the well-known evolutionary biologist who was the most prominent of several scientists protesting the choice of Stein, an outspoken advocate of “Intelligent Design,” who has argued that belief in evolution was partly responsible for the Holocaust.

Perhaps Stein had an earlier commitment for May 17 that he had failed to communicate to UVM officials before Thursday’s announcement that he would be the commencement speaker.

The usual drill in these matters, though, is that the inviters and the invitees work out scheduling problems before the press releases are issued, raising the possibility, if not the likelihood, that Fogel saw the fury inspired by the Stein announcement and decided to execute an abrupt, face-saving retreat.

University officials had neither comment nor information Sunday.

The intensity of the scientific community’s reaction is plain from Dawkins’ email to Fogel sent Sunday. Dawkins called the invitation to Stein “lamentable,” described him as a “notoriously mendacious propagandist for creationism,” and warned that UVM’s “reputation is in danger of being besmirched” by a commencement ceremony featuring Stein.

A few hours later, Fogel replied that as a great admirer of Dawkins he was “honored” to see a personal email from him in his inbox ” but very sorry indeed” about its content.

Though the University had “recently learned” that Stein would be unable to come, Fogel said, he assured Dawkins that Stein’s ” remarks would address the global economic crisis and that he would speak from his widely acknowledged area of expertise on the economy.”

That wasn’t quite an assurance that Stein wouldn’t say a word about evolution or about science in general. But it seemed to be heading in that direction.

Either way, Dawkins replied, thanking Fogel for his “extremely gracious letter,” and adding that he could not “disguise my gladness that Ben Stein will not be going to Vermont.”

The account and the quotes above were taken from Dawkins’s web site – RichardDawkins.net – and the Internet is a notoriously un-policed realm on which charlatans can and do put up fraudulent messages. In this case, though, the authenticity of the letters was confirmed (via an old-fashioned telephone interview) by Paul Z Myers, a biology professor at the University of Minnesota at Morris, and the proprietor of a scientific web site called Pharyngula. (“a term coined by William Ballard to describe a particular stage in the development of the vertebrate embryo,” according to the site).

Myers said he is in frequent contact with Dawkins, and vouched for the accuracy of RichardDawkins.net web site, and its account of the Dawkins-Fogel messages.

Pharyngula was one of several scientific web sites that immediately began to attack UVM for asking Stein to make the commencement address. The overwhelming disapproval of the scientific community can hardly seem to be an inviting prospect to an administration that has been striving, with some success, to enhance the scholarly image of the university.

And Dawkins is a powerful force in the scientific community. Since the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976 he has been among the world’s most highly regarded biologists. He’s also a fierce polemicist and a militant atheist, lately more famous for his 2006 book, The God Delusion.

As admired as Dawkins is among scientists (including many who are not atheists), Stein is scorned as a showman whose views are hostile not merely to science but to rational inquiry in general. Many, including Dawkins and Myers, were especially angry about the movie Expelled, which Stein co-wrote and starred in, a film which claims that those who deny evolution are victims of religious persecution by the scientific community.

Both Dawkins, in his letter to Fogel, and Myers in an interview claimed that Stein got them to appear in the film under false pretenses.

” I am one of several evolutionary biologists who, in good faith, agreed to be interviewed by Stein and his team, on the basis of what turned out to be flagrant lies as to the true purpose of the film,” Dawkins wrote.” In my case, Stein and his team then went on deliberately to distort my words.”

Myers said he was told the film was “to be a serious movie about  the conflict between science and religion , something I would happily participate in.  What it turned out to be instead is move that accuses science of killing, and of responsibility for the Holocaust.”

The university’s own faculty was upset about Thursday’s announcement, but didn’t really get time to organize a response.

“I’m unhappy but I don’t want to say anything now,” said one science professor, asking not to be identified. “This is something the Faculty Senate should consider.”

Another professor said there should be no effort to censor Stein, who spoke at UVM without incident last April. But inviting Stein to deliver the commencement address effectively meant that the University was “honoring” him, the professor said, which he called quite different from permitting him to air his views.

Many economists would dispute Fogel about Stein’s “acknowledged…expertise on the economy,” Stein writes on economic and business matters for many journals, including the New York Times. He majored in economics at Cornell but has no advanced degrees in the field. He is a lawyer. But he is no doubt best known for his acting role as the boring, pompous, teacher in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Stein’s economic views are mostly conservative, but in the past few years he has written several columns critical of rising income inequality and the low tax rates paid by upper income earners.

(NOTE: Due to a computer error [Well, OK, the computer operator's error] last Friday’s post did not get posted until Saturday evening. It is now in its chronological spot on the site, just below, for anyone who is interested.)

Go the State of Vermont’s official web site-Vermont.gov-and you can find links to 109 state agencies, alphabetically from the Access Board to the Commission on Women.

What you won’t find is the University of Vermont; it isn’t part of any state agency.

That’s not how it works in most states, including Vermont’s neighbors. New Hampshire’s public colleges and universities are a part of the University System of New Hampshire. In Massachusetts, the public universities are a division of the Department of Higher Education, and the State University of New York is governed by a 17-member Board of Trustees, 15 of them appointed by the governor with the approval of the state senate.

Similar systems prevail in most states, said Richard Novak of the Washington-based Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Whether called trustees, regents, directors, or something else, he said, the people who govern public universities are “representatives of both the state and of a public entity, so the burden really falls on them to be defenders of the public interest.”

Not in Vermont, where nine members of the 25-person Board of Trustees, which “has full legal responsibility and authority for the University” are not chosen by any public body or official. These are the “self-perpetuating” members. Every other year these nine trustees-they alone, with no participation from the other 16-elect three people to six-year terms. Institutionally, at least, these trustees owe allegiance to nobody except the nine who chose them.

This doesn’t mean the public is shut out of governing the university. The governor is always an ex officio member, and the governor chooses three other members.  Using the same process of choosing three members every other year, nine members are elected for six-year terms by the Legislature. Not surprisingly, the lawmakers invariably choose one of their own, though it is not clear that they are required to do so.

The president of the university is also an ex officio member, and there are two student trustees, each serving a two-year term.

Novak said that “only a handful” of other state university systems are run by boards with self-perpetuating members, and the only two he could think of were Pennsylvania and Delaware . But in Pennsylvania, only a third of the board members are self-perpetuating, and the power of Delaware’s board is buffered by a 13-member Higher Education Commission  made up of the heads of the state colleges and universities and five members chosen by the governor.

Of all the systems of public higher education in the country, then, Vermont’s appears to be the least public, not only because the state provides little more than 10 percent of UVM’s total  revenue, but because the people who govern it are less beholden to the public than their counterparts in the other 49 states.

It is also probably the only state university in which most students are from out of state.

“UVM is less a state institution than the others,” said State Rep. Harry Chen of Rutland County, one of the nine lawmaker trustees.

If nothing else, this is a historical irony. The university’s iconic building, right at the corner of Main Street and University Place, is Morrill Hall, named for Justin Smith Morrill,  the Vermont U.S. Representative (1855-1867) and Senator (1867-1898) who sponsored the law that lead to the creation of state universities, primarily so that the children of farmers and workers could go to college. But his own state’s public university comes farther from meeting that goal than any other.

Beyond the irony, the university’s public-private hybrid status raises the question of accountability, one of the arguments of faculty members battling the administration’s plans for cutting the budget by some $28 million.

“What kind of accounting assumptions have been going on for the last five years,” asked English Professor Nancy Welch, a leader of United Academics, the teachers union which opposes the way President Daniel Fogel wants to cut the budget. “We’ve had real revenue accumulation. The General Fund is up some 50 percent but (Fogel) says we have a budget deficit.”

Many of the other faculty members don’t doubt that the deficit is real, and that cuts are needed. But many of them wonder whether they have all the information needed to judge how much should be cut, and where.

Behind that immediate question is a larger one: Who looks over UVM’s books?

The university itself, of course, as do all universities, and then its findings are examined by one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, in UVM’s case KPMG, from its local office in Colchester, according to university spokesman Jeff  Wakefield.

But it is no secret these days that audits by a “Big Four” firm, while necessary, may not be sufficient. The big accounting firms sometimes don’t question all those “accounting assumptions,” instead accepting the client’s contention that expenses are necessary. Besides, KPMG, no matter how skilled and thorough, does not represent or report to the people of Vermont.

Those nine legislative trustees do, and Chen said he and most of the others “are engaged in the board.”

But another legislator, outgoing Senate Education Committee Chairman Donald Collins of Swanton, said that the legislative trustees “are at a real disadvantage” on the board. “They don’t have the background,” said  Collins, who was once on the board of the State College system, and is a retired educator. “They don’t even know what questions to ask.”

The Legislature itself doesn’t keep close tabs on UVM either, Collins said.

“We’ve had Fogel and the others in to explain their programs,” he said. But Vermont legislative committees have tiny staffs. The lawmakers themselves are citizen-legislators who have day jobs. If a legislative committee wanted to, it probably could not conduct an in-depth examination of the university’s finances. At any rate, it hasn’t. Neither has the Auditor of Accounts.

None of this means that Fogel and his top administrators can do as they please. But they can do much of what they please, and during Fogel’s five years, they have pleased to expand-buying old buildings and putting up new ones, starting new programs (such as the Honors College), adding students, faculty, and administrators.

As a result, UVM is a better university. It’s also  more expensive , and it spends some $250 million a year. Most of that money does not come from Vermont taxpayers. But all of it is spent in the state’s name, without the state paying much attention to what is going on.

That may be changing because the faculty union and the faculty senate want to take a look at the books. From what they’ve said, it’s not clear that many of them know how to read those books; accounting has its own language, easy to misinterpret

But big bucks is big bucks. UVM has been spending some.

And wasting some? Tune in tomorrow.—Jon Margolis

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