What’s the Deal With Rothman?

Here’s a little intrigue to warm up a gloomy spring.

University System President Jay Rothman has been invited to fall on his sword or, alternatively, to hand over his sword, surrender his university-provided housing and darken the doorstep of the Board of Regents no more.

The Regents have asked Rothman to resign immediately or announce his retirement effective at the end of the year. If he refuses they threaten to fire him as early as this weekend. It’s reasonable for the public to ask why.

It’s also reasonable for Rothman to get an explanation because it’s not like the reasons are obvious. But apparently no explanation has been forthcoming and so Rothman has gone public, refusing to leave voluntarily.

There are a lot of things that are odd about this. For one thing Rothman was the choice of this set of Regents. It’s not like he’s a holdover from a board dominated by appointees from a previous governor. For another thing he’s done nothing obviously, egregiously wrong.

In fact, his record is pretty good. Let’s review.

When Speaker Robin Vos withheld over $30 million in pay increases for UW staff, Rothman got that released.

After years of Republican recalcitrance on building a much needed new engineering building on the Madison campus — something strongly supported by the state’s business leaders — Rothman finally got them to give the go-ahead.

And in this last budget Rothman got Vos to fork over $256 more for the System, the biggest budget increase in a long while.

Now, of course, Rothman was dealing with a hostile Republican legislature, so none of that came without a cost. But those costs were reasonable, some were necessary and some were actually not a cost at all, but a positive thing. Let’s look at those.

To get the pay increases and the engineering building, Vos’ demand was that Rothman reform the System’s DEI programs. But that was a good thing. DEI had long been discredited. It was causing more resentment than anything else. And the deal Rothman and Vos worked out retained most DEI positions, but renamed them and refocussed their work. In fact, the need for reform was underscored later when it was revealed, thanks to an audit demanded by Vos, that the Madison campus’ DEI programs had been wildly mismanaged.

To get this latest budget increase, Rothman had to agree to some minimum teaching standards for faculty. Now, that’s been an irritant to professors and I understand why. A prof is not like a tech school instructor. Their jobs aren’t just about — or in a lot of cases even primarily about — teaching. Most professors love to do research and only teach because they have to. Making some of them teach more was not going to go down well. But again, it certainly didn’t strike me as a big price to pay for $256 million.

Rothman also had to close some two year campuses — eight so far — that had low and declining enrollments. That was a painful but necessary correction. Many of those campuses were sited half a century ago for political reasons and didn’t make sense from a business perspective. Rothman had to cut costs and this was low-hanging fruit. But, of course, each campus had its own local supporters and none of them were going to be happy.

It’s possible that this is personal. Rothman is not an academic and had no experience managing academic institutions. He’s a lawyer and had been the managing partner at the state’s biggest law firm. He may have a command and control style that irritated the Regents and didn’t mesh well with the more collaborative style of academia. But again, the Regents should have had some understanding of what they were getting when they hired him.

Another intriguing question is where the governor is on all this. Does he support the coup? Did Rothman do something to cross Tony Evers?

What’s clear is that this will not end well. When a CEO gets crosswise with his board, he’s going to be gone soon enough. But this isn’t a private corporation, but a public institution. At some point the public deserves an explanation for why a man who seems from the outside like a capable administrator is being shown the door.

That’s it for this week. Have a good weekend.