UNI Presidential Candidate Avijit Ghosh Offers Broad Vision at Public Forum

The importance of shared governance was again a theme Wednesday as University of Northern Iowa faculty, staff and community members gathered to hear from Avijit Ghosh, the second of three candidates vying to be UNI's next president.

"It is the notion that every individual’s ideas must be listened to, not just heard. Through that process we can create something better for the institution," he said. "If there’s an idea 'A' and an idea 'B' and there's not agreement between the two, it's probably because there’s an idea 'C' that we haven’t reached yet."

Shared governance - which also came up at Monday's - is a term which strikes a chord on campus, as UNI faces the possibility of censure by the American Association of University Professors.

“I'm a deep believer in shared governance," Ghosh said. "Presidents are individuals who come and go. It’s the shared governance process through which the values of an institution get carried from one generation to another."

Ghosh currently serves as a professor at the College of Business at Urbana-Champaign and as Senior Advisor to the President of the University of Illinois, a position he has held since 2001. Before that he was a professor at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

In a speech long on broad ideals if short on specifics, he laid out his background and experience before taking questions from the audience, which with a winter storm continuing outside was much smaller than Monday's gathering.

"This is a time for big ideas, not for cutting ourselves short," he said. "We’re going to solve our problems with big ideas."

He said UNI must work with the community, statehouse leaders, alumni and the business community to build and execute a vision for the future.

Many of the audience member questions alluded to the controversy surrounding last year's closure of dozens of academic programs at UNI.

If such an issue came up in the future, Ghosh said collaborative decision making would be key. He made an analogy to the U.S. government closing military bases. No one could agree which to close, he said, so commissions were created to first agree upon criteria. Once objective criteria were established, the decision on which cuts to make could be agreed on.

In some ways, that is what happened last year at UNI, when criteria such as the number of graduates a program had per year were used to decide which programs to cut.

However, Ghosh said the criteria would need to be arrived at collaboratively, again going back to the shared governance issue.

"If you agree on the process and criteria, hopefully the outcomes will be accepted," he said.

UNI professor Joe Gorton asked Ghosh to address a lawsuit filed against the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, Ghosh and three other university employees in December 2006 by Robert Van Der Hooning, a former assistant dean at the university.

The complaint related to a scholarship program for veterans. Van Der Hooning, who ran the program, lost his job and said it was because he refused to rescind admissions for some veterans after administrators became worried about costs.

"I take great pride in the scholarship program that was offered," Ghosh said. "At one point we found that for this one particular program the processes that were being followed were not consistent with university policy, including that a lot more students had been admitted than was the target or even physical capacity."

The lawsuit was dismissed, and Ghosh said he stood by his decisions, adding the university honored every scholarship that was offered.

"We made two decisions, in consultation with my team and my superiors. One is that we’ll honor every scholarship, every admission decision," he said. "The second is that we needed to have much clearer leadership of this program and needed to make changes in leadership. Under the same circumstances I would make the same decisions."

UNI community members were emailed a link to a feedback form to fill out after today's visit. Community members and any UNI employees without university email access who wish to give feedback should email CSBR@uni.edu.

Current UNI president Ben Allen has announced he will retire by July. After all three candidates visit campus, the Presidential Search Committee will forward its recommendation to the Board of Regents, which will have the final vote.

The third and final candidate, Michael Wartell, will visit Cedar Falls Monday and Tuesday, Feb. 4 and 5. His public forum will be Feb. 4 from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the Old Central Ballroom, Maucker Union. The first candidate, William Ruud, held a public forum Jan. 28.

Read more: