Ndsu president chapman resigns.

[JimmyJack]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

NDSU isn't the only campus with a president house problem. This happened a few years back at Eastern Michigan Univ.

Fallon firing just latest chapter in EMU turmoil

By Steve Pepple

July 16, 2007, 7:38AM

Holy crap. I understand that a university president needs a place to host events, but... holy crap.

[filbert]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

I've stayed in major-chain hotels that were smaller than that . . .

[Nidaros]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

The Fargo Forum reported that the State Board of Education voted to authorize a full audit of the President House project at NDSU. So the details will explain what went wrong on this project. Auditors and accountants often have the job of counting dead bodies and I can believe it is appropriate here. I did not want to post the links from Fargo Forum but there apparently is some finger pointing between Chapman and the Foundation Vice President of Developement already.

The Eastern Michigan University incident kind of drawfs the NDSU in depth of scandal. Quite a house at EMU. To think the guy who was mostly responsible for the overuns left town with a half of million bucks settlement money in his pocket. Good lawyers are people we should all know.

[Hammersmith]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

The Grand Forks Herald just might have the best reporter in the Dakotas. He's a young Seattle transplant named Tu-Uyen Tran, and he's covered the GF city government beat for several years as well as the non-athletic UND beat for about two years after the Herald was forced to downsize a bit. His articles are good, but his blog might be even better. In it, he adds his opinions and personal conclusions that don't belong in a print article. Since he's insightful and doesn't carry the baggage of having grown up in the area, his opinions are refreshingly rational.

Anyway, I bring all that up because Tran weighed in on the issue on his blog after Chapman resigned. Tran took the info released, talked to some people, and came to conclusions that were based on reasoning rather than the emotional responses that came from most of the other local media. There were many mistakes made, but most were honest or, at least, honestly meant, if a little foolish. Ego, arrogance or corruption played little, if any, role despite what other talking heads tried to portray.

Follow the link at the bottom for more detailed info, but here's the short version. Both universities independently believed that stuff like landscaping, parking lots, and site prep did not fall under the $900,000 cap set by the SBoHE. You can read the rationale in detail over there, but I can understand where they were coming from. NDSU got into worse trouble because they believed they were going to get more in donated materials and services than they actually did. The established policy was that donations of that kind did not count against the cap and did not need to be reported. Since NDSU did receive well over $300k of these kinds of donations, it wasn't totally out of line for them to expect more. Still, they were way too optimistic and got burned for it.

Read more here if you are interested in this kind of thing.
http://www.areavoices.com/gfhcitybeat/

[Nidaros]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

Thanks Hammersmith. This makes a great deal of sense and probably puts in true perspective what is at the bottom of this scandulous issue. Not much!! Obviously lots of differences in interpretation of policy. Maybe at the get go some one needed to get a definition of that what was included in the $900,000 authorization and then went back for a higher number since it was not everything that they needed to include.

[zooropa]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

Not much!!

Meh. I don't know if I'd be that generous.... I think Chapman ends up being the fallguy, but the oversight structure certainly seems like it should be beefed up.

[SDSF]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

I am into Joel Heitkamp, who by the way has been part of refereeing crews at CAS and has from time to time mentioned that Coughlin has in his opinion the best atomsphere to watch a football game. Its a great place so says Joel, because its outdooors. Also he has commented that SDSU has a great marching band. Normally on political issues I am in agreement with Joel, but on this one I think he has been hard on President Chapman.

Chapman forced UND through the State Board of Higher Education to back off on allowing UND to offer some of their courses in Fargo a few years back and this is what made him an enemy among UND people. If I recall correctly UND medical school was trying to work with the hospitals in Fargo and I believe UND was wanting offer to some pharmacy courses, too, but it was worked out to NDSU favor. Chapman was the winner and a hero that day in my opinion.

I agree with Chapman on this issue. I do not think that South Dakota or North Dakota have the resources to waste on having duplicate programs. Unfortunately, Chapman was a bit two faced on this topic. When the State Board of Higher Education director tried to enforce the concept of a system with some of NDSU's program expansion. Chapman went with competition is good. It was at this time that Chapman worked the politcal system to remove his boss - Mr. Potts - AKA Joel Heitkamp's - hunting buddy.

Also he did not come to the aid of UND in preserving the logo, and I suspect that did not help his job security either.

I have no idea why this would be Chapmans issue. This makes no sense - enlighten me on this one.

None the less Chapman had done a great deal for NDSU.

Personally, I too feel its a raw deal involving politics, but it I felt it was of news interest to readers on this board.

If you are willing to play political games as mentioned above. It may come back to haunt you. I do agree that overall Mr. Chapman was a very good leader.

[SDSF]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

This is what makes me mad, NDSU has been ripped apart for this and a certain school up North has basically been given a pass.....

Heitkamp and the UND grads in the state legislature don't even acknowledge what happened over at their beloved alma mater.

You may agree or not agree with me on this one... but in my opinion - Hietkamp and the two state legislatures are being used as pawns by the NDSU Foundation. It is obvious to me that some falling out took place between Chapman and NDSU Foundation and the Foundation went forward with leaking information to the media and legislature to get rid of Chapman. I come to this conclusion based on the almost daily leaks of detailed financial information that only the foundation would have knowledge of and only a state directed audit would provide this type of detail. The information was too steady ...

- Presidents house over budget
- Presidents house schedule too aggressive driven by Chapman's
- Presidents house plan changed to include additional great room that would knowingly be over budget.
- Presidents wife get paid by Foundation
- President Chapman get additional funding from Foundation
- President Chapman has additional credit card annually spending 20k to 40k
- President Chapman take trip to Washington DC for 25K

Chapman knew that he was going to lose this battle with the Foundation. So, he retires and says that he was going to retire in the spring of the 2010. The Foundation has the alumni masses blaming the media and UND. The Foundation gets what they wanted with the removal of Chapman for whatever reason and they have done some damage control on the budget issues.

or

Hietkamp has more power than any of us know and we should all be very scared.

[SDSF]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

I suspect that a thorough explanation will be forthcoming and when all the details are known its likely to be more about NDSU-UND forces clashing in places other than the athletic field. The two institutions do have their differences and affect the Board of Higher Education, the legislature and even the Governor, who also is a UND grad but has been rather silent about the whole matter and perhaps no one has asked him.

Please see my previous post, I think that this was internal NDSU issue and two or three UND grads were simply used as a good cover story. I am not sure that we will ever get the real story. But, I find it hard to believe that Chapman and power that he had in the community of Fargo and the good will he had at NDSU and across the state would simply retire because a house was over budget. We are talking about a million dollars that is peanuts compared to what he had control over as the president at NDSU. It is a simple slap on the wrist and move on unless he lost his power base at NDSU ie the Foundation.

[SDSF]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

I haven't paid a great deal of attention to the politics of higher education in North Dakota. Perhaps I have some bias for our fellow travelers in transition, NDSU, but it appears quite clear that people aligned with UND really go out of their way to hurt NDSU. Even in some of the darkest days of the SDSU and USD rivalry, the nastiness didn't come close to what goes on north of our border. Things are going on now that can be harmful to the educational institutions themselves and that's not good for the state's taxpayers.

Dig a little deeper and you will see that it clearly goes both ways.

[FargoBison]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

You may agree or not agree with me on this one... but in my opinion - Hietkamp and the two state legislatures are being used as pawns by the NDSU Foundation. It is obvious to me that some falling out took place between Chapman and NDSU Foundation and the Foundation went forward with leaking information to the media and legislature to get rid of Chapman. I come to this conclusion based on the almost daily leaks of detailed financial information that only the foundation would have knowledge of and only a state directed audit would provide this type of detail. The information was too steady ...

- Presidents house over budget
- Presidents house schedule too aggressive driven by Chapman's
- Presidents house plan changed to include additional great room that would knowingly be over budget.
- Presidents wife get paid by Foundation
- President Chapman get additional funding from Foundation
- President Chapman has additional credit card annually spending 20k to 40k
- President Chapman take trip to Washington DC for 25K

Chapman knew that he was going to lose this battle with the Foundation. So, he retires and says that he was going to retire in the spring of the 2010. The Foundation has the alumni masses blaming the media and UND. The Foundation gets what they wanted with the removal of Chapman for whatever reason and they have done some damage control on the budget issues.

or

Hietkamp has more power than any of us know and we should all be very scared.

Why would the foundation hurt NDSU to get rid of Chapman? They are the fundraising arm of NDSU and they came out of this looking like a bunch of idiots who don't know how to manage their money. What you are saying they did would only hurt their ability to raise money.

This all came after they limited some of the money they gave Chapman and put into place measures that would better control what was spent.

It would have been far easier to just tell Chapman to retire in peace at the end of the year if they had a problem with the guy. My guess is the press got a piece of info somehow(maybe a disgruntled foundation member) and the Foundation had to cave or look like they were hiding something.

That lead to a media feeding frenzy that Heitkamp had been stoking for months. It was all kind of perfect storm.

I do believe Chapman was going to retire, his state of the university address seemed to hint of him looking back instead of looking forward.

[Hammersmith]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

Just want to clear a couple things up... (another post that got out of hand as I was writing it)

1. Regarding the UND presence in Fargo a few years back:

UND has always had a presence in Fargo because they place a lot of their med students in Fargo hospitals and clinics for their rotations. UND leases some office space in Fargo and uses it as a contact point for those students and a few others. For years, it consisted of some offices and a meeting room or two. A few years back, UND completely remodeled the office to add a computer cluster and additional classroom space. Once the work was finished, UND began an advertising campaign aimed at existing NDSU students. UND denied this, but they placed a billboard three blocks from NDSU's campus on the main route that off campus students use to get there. Also, UND bought ad space in the NDSU student newspaper touting their online engineering programs(an NDSU strength).

The thing that pissed off the NDSU administration more than anything was that UND had given NDSU no warning that this ad campaign was coming. In North Dakota, there's an unwritten rule that universities give warning when they plan to push ads in another university's city. When the story broke, campus presidents from across the state backed NDSU's position that UND was out of line. UND got a slap on the wrist, was ordered to drop the Fargo marketing, and was told to return the Fargo office to it's original function as a contact point for med students and other existing programs(ex: UND has a good masters program for working teachers that many Fargo teachers make use of). The office is still there today and will be for the foreseeable future. NDSU doesn't have a problem with the office, it was the targeting of NDSU students that was the issue.


2. The pharmacy issue:

Around the same time(give or take a year), UND wanted to start up a tele-medicine program. NDSU had been building a tele-pharmacy program for the preceding several years. Rather than build a separate network and incur the related costs, UND wanted to piggyback on the NDSU network. Since NDSU's network was funded through federal grants, and UND was planning on doing the same, UND contacted our congressmen and asked them to combine the programs and put UND in charge. One little problem: During all of this, UND had never contacted NDSU and told them of their plans. The first NDSU's pharmacy program heard of this was when a congressional aide contacted them and told them that separate funding requests wouldn't be needed since it would all go through UND. As you might imagine, there were some unhappy people at NDSU. UND got their hand slapped for that one, too.


3. Opposition to new programs:

There was opposition to several new graduate programs, but the opposition never came from NDSU(to my knowledge). As NDSU tried to improve and expand its graduate school, UND complained the entire way and tried to block many of the new degrees. At a guess, I'd have to say they were successful about 25% of the time. Still, NDSU's grad school has increased by about 250% in the last decade. You should have heard the howling when NDSU added an MBA program and fought to get its business school accredited(business is a UND strength). UND argued duplication of programs, but, really, how many schools with enrollments north of 10k don't offer business degrees?



Moving onto current events, there's the NDSU Development Foundation issue and the conspiracy theories that are going with it. An often overlooked fact is that the entire foundation only meets twice a year and the most recent full meeting was held over homecoming(2.5 weeks ago). The word is that the meeting went poorly with a lot of arguing, accusations, and hard questions. The pump was primed for this because the latest news of the over-budget home had just come out. It was right after this meeting that the Forum started getting info about Chapman's discretionary funds. The simplest explanation is that one or two of the at-large foundation members didn't like what they heard at the meeting and leaked the info to the press. My suspicion is that the info was leaked to embarrass the foundation's leadership, but Chapman got caught in the crossfire.

Right now, I believe that there are a lot of people across ND that are regretting their actions(and more than a few that are celebrating). The governor and most of the SBoHE and legislature all liked Chapman(or at least they liked what he accomplished for NDSU & the state). It was the SBoHE that started the ball rolling with the house overspending, and I bet there are more than a couple that had wished that they had done it more quietly. It was the Fargo Forum that dug hard and kept the story on the front page with inflammatory headlines. Well, ForumComm lost the TV rights to Bison games a few years back and will now probably lose the radio contract as well. I also doubt the Forum will get as much cooperation from NDSU as it did in the past. Finally, I bet the individuals who leaked the foundation info to the Forum are questioning their decision. I don't subscribe to SDSF's theory that it was a calculated plan to get rid of Chapman. I believe it was an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.



One last thing...

The $22k trip to DC was brought up. For those unfamiliar to the particulars of this situation, here's what happened. Chapman (and UND's Kelley) were invited to Obama's inauguration. NDSU has the use of a private plane that the NDSU Development Foundation purchased several years ago(the DF owns the plane and NDSU pays the DF for its use). Chapman planned to bring his wife and grown children with him to DC. Since they would all be flying on the NDSU plane, there was really no additional cost. Well, at the last minute, the plane required servicing and the needed part didn't get there on time. With less than a week before the inauguration, Chapman needed tickets. As you can imagine, any airline tickets were nearly impossible to come by and expensive as heck to boot. Eventually, the decision was made to charter an aircraft. That charter made up $17k of the $22k cost of the trip. It was probably a bad decision, but I can see how it happened.

On the flip side, Kelley at UND(who had just taken over about five months prior) decided to play it safe and charge as little as possible to UND. He flew coach and his wife's ticket was paid for by a separate UND booster group. Altogether, his trip cost UND only $2k. That was the comparison that put the final nail in Chapman's coffin, IMO. When the Fargo Forum and the Grand Forks Herald put each of their photos on the front page with $22,000 under Chapman's photo and $2,000 under Kelley's, that was all she wrote. The circumstances didn't matter; the only thing that did was the perception of Chapman as an arrogant, wasteful loose-cannon.

[JimmyJack]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

I do not think that South Dakota or North Dakota have the resources to waste on having duplicate programs.

It depends on a lot of factors. Where are the existing resources? Where are the students? How many students are interested in a given program? What campus(es) have the best fit with a given program? Are there local industries that want to support a program? To say we just can't have duplicates is one of those easy things to say that might not work out in real life.

If we're going to have six distinct campuses in our system (a questionable assumption, I would say) we have to give them some autonomy to create programs that make them viable options for students. A hard-and-fast "no duplicates" rule (and I'm not even sure that's what you mean here) limits local campus options and means that as times change, they cannot remain viable.

We're not stupid people. Nobody wants to create another medical school. But should we shut down one nationally accredited journalism program (for example) because there is another nationally accredited journalism program in the state? What if both programs are stable, viable, and successful?

[SDSF]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

Why would the foundation hurt NDSU to get rid of Chapman? They are the fundraising arm of NDSU and they came out of this looking like a bunch of idiots who don't know how to manage their money. What you are saying they did would only hurt their ability to raise money.

This all came after they limited some of the money they gave Chapman and put into place measures that would better control what was spent.

It would have been far easier to just tell Chapman to retire in peace at the end of the year if they had a problem with the guy. My guess is the press got a piece of info somehow(maybe a disgruntled foundation member) and the Foundation had to cave or look like they were hiding something.

That lead to a media feeding frenzy that Heitkamp had been stoking for months. It was all kind of perfect storm.

I do believe Chapman was going to retire, his state of the university address seemed to hint of him looking back instead of looking forward.

I have no idea why Chapman and the Foundation got into it or anything about his pending retirement.. but as I read this thread for the first time yesterday. I was very frustrated by the anti UND tone and that UND was somehow the primary source of the problem. My overall point is that UND had nothing to do with this and it is a internal NDSU issue. I wish NDSU the best and leave UND out of it.

[Nidaros]

Re: Ndsu president chapman resigns.

I have no idea why this would be Chapmans issue. This makes no sense - enlighten me on this one.

What I was implying was this might have been a missed opportunity for Chapman. Chapman through actions and reaction probably does have some enemies who by the way represent UND. By coming to UND aid and supporting UND on retaining the logo, he might have gotten UND forces on the Board of Higher education to support him on other issues. I dont think NDSU would have been happy with Chapman if he had came down on the side to support retaining the logo. Sometimes your adversaries can become your best friends against other adversaries. This was not the case so perhaps you are correct in saying it makes no sense.
In retrospect, I regret making this statement as part of my post. I do like the exchange from you and the other Nodaks. Its enlightenment in terms of reading about higher education in North Dakota.