UI President Michael J. Hogan offered an apology to members of the Senate Executive Committee on Jan. 23 for a recent incident that led his chief of staff, Lisa Troyer, to give up her position.
Hogan, delivering the comments following his annual state-of-the-university address to the SEC, said he accepted “full responsibility” for the episode and “for any other such incident that occurs.
“I sincerely regret the incident, the personal hardship it has caused to our senators and others, and the embarrassment it has brought to the university,” he said, reading from a prepared statement.
Troyer has been accused of posing as a senator through anonymous emails in an effort to affect a University Senate Conference report critical of the administration’s enrollment management plan. She has denied crafting or sending the emails.
Senate leaders said the incident illustrated their disappointment with Hogan’s leadership, which they say has been contemptuous of academic input and has threatened the long-held university practices of consultation and shared governance.
Kim Graber, USC representative and a professor of kinesiology and community health, said the disappointment stemmed not from an individual incident, but from “a culture that was permitted from your office.”
In addition to the email incident, Graber said administration officials had vilified academic leaders and had gained access to unreleased committee documents – practices she said were “not a presidential thing to do.”
Nick Burbules, chairman of the senate’s General University Policy Committee and a professor of education policy, organization and leadership, pointedly asked Hogan if he had any direct involvement in the Troyer email affair.
“I’m still confused about exactly what it means,” Burbules said of the apologetic tone in Hogan’s statement. “Are there any lapses of your own behavior … that you are sorry for?”
Hogan denied involvement and pointed to three investigations – one internal and two using outside investigators – that he said exonerated him. He said he didn’t recall reading the unreleased committee reports and that the information within them was not acted upon. He said the investigations were commissioned almost immediately.
Burbules also pressed Hogan to more clearly define the chancellor’s role on the Urbana campus – claiming the president has eroded some of the chancellor’s power in an attempt to centralize university authority.
Hogan said each chancellor and campus has its own leadership and can exercise a certain degree of autonomy, but statutes say the president’s position is all-encompassing in its responsibility.
“I like to consider myself a part of it all,” he said.
Hogan said he feels some of the disagreements between administrators and faculty members are due to misunderstandings that could more easily and immediately be addressed by direct discussion. For instance, instead of delivering an annual state-of-the-university address to the SEC, Hogan posited, both sides would be better served if he simply attended more of their meetings.
“The arrangement we have now, it’s not enough,” he said. “We need more talk and more direct communication. We have to work together. It’s not going to be easy and we are not always going to agree. We do have to be unified to confront the problems.”
SEC members voted to include two resolutions on the email matter in the Jan. 30 full senate meeting. Senators are expected to decide then whether or not to endorse them.
One is a statement made by USC Chair Donald Chambers, a UIC professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics. Chambers delivered the statement to the UI Board of Trustees at the Jan. 19 meeting at UIC. He called the situation “one of the worst scandals ever to confront this university.”
The other is an SEC-prepared “Statement on Ethical Leadership” that calls the email incident a “symptom” of a “broad pattern of surveillance and intrusion” by administration representatives.
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