Does the governor remember he appointed college board?

By CHRIS POWELL

Governor Lamont beat up the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system pretty good the other day, but not good enough.

The college system’s president, Terrence Cheng, had called a press conference, ordered other system executives to join him, and then denounced the governor’s proposed budget for the system, contending that it is so stingy as to require hundreds of layoffs and big tuition increases. 

Through his budget director, Jeffrey Beckham, the governor replied by leveling against the college system the same charge he has leveled against the University of Connecticut — that the system had misconstrued its emergency financing during the virus epidemic as permanent and should start economizing in light of the system’s steadily declining enrollment, 36% down in the community colleges and 21% down in the universities.

Beckham should have added something about the extravagant executive salaries in the college system. After all, while Cheng was pleading poverty, he still was collecting an annual salary of more than $350,000 and not volunteering to take a pay cut to make attending college more affordable for the students he was bleating about. The three college system executives whose mismanagement recently cost it $750,000 in damages in a sex discrimination case are themselves still getting paid between $228,000 and $256,000 annually — and the system is still refusing to explain the case, in which it fired the chief executive officer of Manchester Community College only to reinstate her quickly with that lovely damage award when she sued.

The college system claims that it doesn’t need to explain a personnel matter that has been settled — as if the cost of settling it might not still be resented by taxpayers, along with the extravagant salaries of the executives responsible for the disaster.

And if economizing amid declining enrollment in the college system will require layoffs, so what? Private-sector companies are always restructuring amid financial and performance setbacks. Except for the political influence of their unions, why should the state’s higher-education employees be exempt? Why should the higher-education payroll be inviolable, starting with the salary of Cheng himself?

The governor’s budget director omitted something else important. For as good as it was for the governor to clamor for economy in government, and especially in the smug and pompous empire of higher education, and for him to criticize its administrators so sharply, the governor himself is largely responsible for the problem. For he appoints nine of the 15 members of the college system’s Board of Regents. If the board is appointing and coddling ineffective managers, it is only because the governor appointed most members of the board.

If the governor really wants to make an impression about his desire for greater efficiency in higher education, he could start replacing board members. They are not members of a politically influential union — at least not yet.

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BEARS MOCK LEGISLATORS: Connecticut’s bears seem to know that under the pressure of animal-rights fanatics, the General Assembly lacks the political courage to protect the state against the roly-poly invaders.

Soon after a legislative committee refused to report out a bill to establish a bear-hunting season, more bears went on a rampage.

In April a bear twice broke into a farmhouse in Salisbury in search of food, the second time after state environmental police set a trap for it, which the bear ignored. The officers euthanized it.

A few days later a bear attacked a woman walking her dog in Avon. That’ll teach her.

The incident in Salisbury again disproved the claim of the bear apologists that the animals cause trouble only because people discard so much food outdoors and fill bird feeders. But the bear in Salisbury would not have invited himself inside if there was so much food outside. The real problem now is that there are more bears in the state — a population estimated at 1,200 — than can survive on food available outside.

The essential question here remains: How many bears does each town want? The bears won’t be asking.

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Chris Powell (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com) is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut.

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