Lamont’s first school year assignment: find right leader for CSCU
Gov. Ned Lamont has a critical new assignment of his own as the school year gets off to an uncertain start: Lamont must pay attention to the search for a president of the vast Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system.
Lamont’s first task will be to announce — and mean it — that this time the system is not rigged. CSCU is in urgent need of new leadership as the sclerotic organization confronts stark changes in the world around it.
The retirement of CSCU’s leader, Mark Ojakian, provides Lamont with an opportunity to shed his timid approach to public higher education. Two years ago, Lamont was asked what grade he’d give then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy for his leadership during eight years in office. “At the end of the day, I give him an F for not solving our fiscal crisis, and an F for not making the fundamental changes that needed to be made.”
Malloy did not earn that failing grade alone. He had assistance from the people around him. If Lamont meant what he said, and there’s no reason to think he would not tell the truth, he needs to keep the Malloy people, who still control CSCU, out of the search for a new president and the choice for an interim one.
Ojakian was serving as
Malloy’s chief of staff when he was parachuted into the CSCU as the interim president while a national search for a permanent leader of the system of 17 colleges and universities took place. There was no real search. The fix was in. The system of debts, favors and lucrative rewards that marked the Malloy years worked as intended. Ojakian was selected by the compliant Board of Regents for the permanent job of president of the 85,000 student system.
The board’s contempt for its own public pledge to conduct a serious search for a new leader ought to disqualify anyone on the board who participated in or condoned the farce. The board reveled in its betrayal of the public trust it holds. In 2018, as the Malloy administration was coming to an end, CSCU appointed a new chief financial officer, Benjamin Barnes, who had presided over Malloy’s catastrophic economic policies as the state’s budget director.
Barnes and Ojakian, who was a deputy budget director at the start of Malloy’s first term, own a large share of the F Lamont gave Malloy. If Lamont is serious about reforming and improving public higher education, Barnes ought to be leaving with Ojakian. It should not be the burden of 85,000 students to endure Barnes at the top of the system to provide him a pension benefits boost.
At each step of the way, the Board of Regents has been an accomplice in discarding merit as a qualification. Lamont announced that he may not care about that when he appointed Board of Regents Chair Matt Fleury to serve a second term at the head of the board.
Lamont must not allow this opportunity to become another exercise in awarding raw partisan political indulgences at the expense of students and the public. He should take command of the search. Lamont is the product of elite private schools, including Phillips Exeter, Harvard and Yale, but seems to possess some interest in public education. This is the moment to show it.
The new head of CSCU will need to confront the gathering storm of Connecticut’s demographic crisis. There are not enough students to fill the classrooms in 17 schools. The system requires a leader with a skilled and avid interest in learning and innovation. Lamont ought to speak to people outside the system who have offered opportunities for change.
A liberal arts education still brings lifelong rewards to students. But more and more of the diminishing pool of state school applicants are looking for courses in specific skills. The state’s public employee agreements are impediments to curriculum adjustments and hostile to transformation. Lamont needs to find a leader who can outlast the resistance to change.
An entrepreneurial leader will have some failures. That’s an element of innovation. Lamont needs to appoint a board that welcomes change, understands its risks and rewards, and will discard the cynical reverence for political ties that have injured students striving for a fulfilling life in Connecticut. If Lamont is their champion, now is his moment to act.