While the Board of Regents’ end-of-year indulgence in allowing President Joan Gabel to double-dip by moonlighting on Securian Financial’s Board of Directors, which she has now resigned from, has rightfully drawn considerable criticism, it’s only the latest in a series of actions by the University leadership reflecting the old adage that “money talks” and, when it does, the institution doesn’t balk.
In combining tone deafness with bad optics, the regents, by a 9-3 pre-Holiday vote, gave Gabel the gift of supplementing her $1 million-plus compensation package at the University of Minnesota with a $130,000 position on the board of a financial giant that the University contracts with.
In addition to the obvious conflicts of interest, which even the regents recognized, the dubious arrangement creates a bad precedent for other public servants, public sector employees and their employers.
Greed creed
But Gabel’s gambit is only the latest manifestation of the creed of greed that characterizes some other very public undertakings of late at the state’s flagship institution of higher education.
The University’s venerable School of Journalism, which celebrated its 100th year last fall, was re-christened the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication six years ago. The new name honors the media mogul Stanley Hubbard and his St. Paul-based Hubbard Broadcasting family, which has been extremely generous in financially aiding the school for many years.
Then, a year ago, Cambria, the Le Sueur company that produces kitchen countertops and other furnishings, entered into a lucrative 10-year arrangement with the University that includes prominent placement of its logo on the Williams Arena basketball court. The company is family-owned, like the Hubbard enterprises, headed by Marty Davis, and both businesses are generous with contributions to a variety of charitable and worthwhile causes.
They share another similarity as well. Both of the moguls, Hubbard and Davis, have taken aberrational and highly questionable stands on important social and public policy issues antithetical to the values the University supposedly embraces.
Hubbard has been notoriously averse to rights of employees and labor unions. He has supported and financed numerous political candidates who have bashed public education expenditures, and most recently, has been on the fringes of climate change denial.
Davis has been a denier, too, of a different stripe. He was one of the hard-core 2020 Presidential Election deniers, like fellow Minnesota MyPillow man Mike Lindell, and advanced some radical proposals of dubious legality supporting the BIG LIE proof rated by then-President Donald Trump and his acolytes.
Both of them, and others of means, certainly are entitled to express their views and use their hard-earned money to advance the causes, at least lawful ones, they support. But the University need not genuflect by condoning them on the one hand, while accepting their financial largesse with the other.
University structures used to be named for those warranting recognition within the academic community, not business moguls. But that practice also has its shortcomings, as reflected in the revelations concerning racist, anti-Semitic and other anti-social views some of them espoused years ago.
Soul selling
Nor is it unusual these days to designate educational facilities after large donors, like the Carlson School of Business, which was named after the patriarch of the highly successful hospitality enterprises founded and headquartered in the Twin Cities.
But the Hubbard naming of the J School, an institution that has bred numerous prominent and influential journalists and those in related fields, and placing the Cambria logo on the Williams Arena hardcourt, raise disturbing concerns the University is selling out its soul solely for financial reasons.
The next time lucre is waved in front of the regents, they ought to balk, rather than waive their rights to place appropriate nomenclature and other designation on these public facilities.
Marshall H. Tanick is a Twin Cities Constitutional law and employment attorney and University of Minnesota alumnus.
