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Hank Brown's new job: Ship & canal-master

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Contributed by: Francis Miller on 4/6/2006

My contrary nature suggests the dynamics of Hank Brown becoming president of the University of Colorado are more complex than first meets my jaundiced eye. I have spent thirty years consulting to corporate and non-profit boards and the recruiting of a new ceo is always more fun than a barrel of monkies.

Let's connect the dots. First, CU gets embroiled in two years of controversy: sex scandals, football recruiting, campus riots. In the end, the heads roll: Betsy Hoffman transfers down to the Auraria campus and Birney finds a spider-hole at the Health Sciences Center. Both of them can collect a few hundred thousand in salaries and max out their retirement plans, all the while contributing nothing to the future of the institution. Barnett gets a multi-million dollar settlement and goes down the road kicking rocks and a Nobel-prize winning scientist beats feet for Canada.

If CU were an organization attempting to survive in the open market subject to the disciplining forces of competition they would be well on their way to bankruptcy. As it is, they are just failing in the unique seperate reality of entrenched bureaucracies. It is a Lake Wobegon world where everybody is above average. The Regent's decision to turn to Hank Brown as interim chief was probably the only smart thing they have done. Hank Brown spent most of his life as an attorney and politiician, but he has enough gravitas to get the job done.

The recent recruiting effort by the Regents is not out of character. Most interim executives get the permanent job if they want it. I suspect some excellent candidates did not bother to apply because they knew the odds were not in their favor with Brown in the running. High profile CEOs put themselves at risk by throwing their hats in the ring for such jobs, because their current employer becomes highly animated at the thought of losing them. There is also a lot of brain damage trying to get your job done and applying for a new position at the same time.

We will never know whether an optimum choice was made at CU because our rationality is bounded by our knowledge of all the alternatives. I would guess the outcome is satisfactory and the Board of Regents can go back to doing whatever Regents did to get the institution into this predicament in the first place. We the public should be comforted about the Hank Brown outcome, but we should still be hell bent on replacing the confederacy of dunces that has governed the university system and engages in polite civility at the expense of getting it right.

Back in the 1980s, when Arnold Weber was president of CU I did a consulting project looking at faculty compensation within the Health Sciences Center. The exposure to big league academia led me to believe that dealing with all of the stakeholders is more difficult than being governor of the State. Maybe that's why former governor Dick Lamm went to DU as a professor and not chancellor. He was smart enough to know it is a thankless, emaciating job.

I wish Hank Brown success but place little hope that he will be able to transform the institution. Brown's role at CU is analogous to how they get ships through the Panama Canal. The Canal must be kept open and they can't take the risk that some drunken Exxon-Valdez captain will ram the locks. So they have special "Ships-Masters" who take over the ship and steer it through the Canal. It is returned to the captain when it is safe and clear. Brown's job should be to get CU through the Canal. The only question is whether he will have control enough over his ego to turn it over to a new captain at some future date or whether they will have to pry the reins from his rigor mortis fingers.

CU was ranked number 44 nationally by US News & World Report this week and its point score was 57 out of 100, an F by any account. Neither CU or the Health Sciences Center ever seem to be ranked highly by independent agencies, but if you ask them they insist they are world class. Psychologists have a word for this: DENIAL.

CU, along with most universities has a mindset that no matter how high the tuition, how many research grant dollars, or the level of state funding it is never enough and money is always the solution. They see disruptive technologies such as Internet based education and alternative schools such as the University of Phoenix as fringe and more irritating than threatening. They are woolly mammoths grazing contentedly before the Ice Age.

If the Colorado economy is to stake its 21st Century future on higher education as a cornerstone, our entire University system must become better, not by 20%, but by 2,000%. It is going to have to go through creative deconstruction and irreversible transformation.

I would suggest that the most instructive thing Hank Brown could do would be to charter five tour buses and take his possee on a field trip to the Butterfly Museum. Why? A caterpillar's main mission in life is to eat and grow bigger. When it enters the cocoon stage it literally must deconstruct down to the molecular level and irreversibly transform before it can emerge as a butterfly. CU is still in the caterpillar stage of life, eating, growing and defecating.

I have always maintained that every great organization is the lengthened shadow of a single man. Whether that man is Hank Brown or not is yet to be seen. The Alamo became the lengthened shadow of Davy Crockett so history can be brutal in its outcomes.

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Francis Miller

Parker , CO

Francis Miller has posted 699 stories and 9 comments since joining on 11/17/2005. Francis Miller's average story rating is 4.19.

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