Posted on Fri, Dec. 03, 2004

UMKC needs new leaders

By Alfred F. Esser

Special to The Star

Both the chapter of the American Association of University Professors and an overwhelming faculty majority informed University of Missouri President Elson Floyd recently that his only choice to resolve the current turmoil was to replace the administration at the University of Missouri-Kansas City since the administration had lost the faculty's trust.

Nothing could be done to patch this up. The main reasons included Chancellor Martha Gilliland's intolerance and punishment of dissenting faculty opinions and her squandering of public financial resources.

The Star reported that Gilliland was short $8 million to start the building process for a new Health Sciences Building. To make up the difference she decided to transfer funds from academic programs into a plant fund in what was called a "team effort."

In reality, the team had only two players, chancellor and provost, who made the top-down decision that the academic units need not keep a 5 percent reserve mandated by the curators for unforeseen events but should "lend" it to them instead. With one stroke the academic units lost $5.67 million.

Yet Gilliland invited the faculty to celebrate because UMKC had privately raised $132 million since her arrival on campus. In spite of this, UMKC apparently cannot keep the building project going.

Whom is she trying to fool? The citizens who gave so generously to support "Kansas City's University" but weren't told the truth? The faculty at UMKC, who face another year without adequate support for their teaching and scholarly activities? Or the civic development councils who put all their efforts into creating "Life Science" endeavors and now find out that all those "proclamations" were just that? Do they know that many life scientists left because of Gilliland's repressive policies, taking along $4 million in federal funding?

The Star reported in 2001 that Gilliland's "desire for universitywide transformation didn't arise from her early impressions of UMKC's strengths and weaknesses." The victim, UMKC, paid about $3 million for this desire, mostly for lavish PR campaigns and for consultants, such as David Westbrook and Steve M. Cohen, who defended Gilliland's agenda. They each were paid more than $140,000 - Westbrook to inform the public about UMKC and Cohen to be "executive director of diversity in action" and to "deal with violators and people who 'don't get it,' " as he wrote in the student newspaper.

The AAUP-UMKC chapter trusts Floyd to appoint an interim leadership team that is sensitive to shared faculty governance issues and is cognizant of local structures. He should also ask for an immediate audit of UMKC's budgets to clear the air of mistrust and to provide a clean start for the next administration.

Alfred F. Esser is vice president and treasurer of the American Association of University Professors chapter at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He lives in Weatherby Lake.