Kaleb Poor
Staff Writer
I didn’t know what the Board of Trustees was until I was most of the way through my junior year. By the time I was a senior, I was worried about them.
For many of us here at the University of Wyoming – the great bastion of higher learning in our rural state – it can be difficult to understand how this school truly operates. How many of us understand what a dean is, or what they do, or to whom they report? What is the Board of Trustees to us, and why should we care?
It is true that this university is a gigantic, complex institution which takes time and effort to understand, and that is exactly why it is so necessary that we all take a moment – this moment, before the coming semester robs us of our time and energy – to try to understand how this university operates and what the fundamental problems are with that operation.
The Board of Trustees are a group of one dozen people from around the state of Wyoming who are appointed by the governor to run UW. They have near-ultimate authority over almost everything the university does; their own web page declares that they possess “all of the powers necessary or convenient to accomplish the objects and perform the duties prescribed by law.”
Translation: as long as the Trustees don’t break the law, they can do whatever they want with the University of Wyoming.
The Trustees are one of the most powerful voting bodies in the state of Wyoming. Their votes determine the course of this university, and therefore their votes determine the future of Wyoming. They decide how we spend our money, they have authority over the administrators who work in Old Main and they determine the long-term course, strategy and intent of the university.
Did you know that UW’s overall budget in 2019 was $497.8 million? Take a moment and let that sink in. This university – which raises student fees every single year, grossly underpays its student employees and many of its gainfully employed educators and gouges students’ bank accounts with meal plans and book prices which most can only afford because they take out student loans – had a Trustee-approved budget last year of almost half a billion dollars.
Look around. Does this look or feel like half a billion dollars well spent?
This university was just sued by a small coalition of some of the most respected news organizations in the state. Why? Because the Trustees secretly investigated our last president, dismissed her just days after the investigation concluded and have ever since refused to tell anyone why they did any of it.
Is it possible that the Trustees had a good reason for firing the first female president in UW’s history? Absolutely.
Should we assume that they did? Absolutely not.
It was once said by a man named John Dalberg-Acton that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” though I suspect that the meaning of his words is as old as human civilization itself. There are many derivations of this concept: power begets power, if you give a mouse a cookie, give an inch and he’ll take a mile, etc.
These concepts are as old as humankind, and their central thesis is this: those with power will inevitably attempt to use it to acquire more. It is simply human nature. In how many great literary works have stories of corruption endured through our history? In how many passages of holy scripture are we cautioned against it? In the great story of human history, our struggle is not against any nation of outsiders or agents of chaos. The great adversary of human civilization is corruption.
It was corruption that ignited the American Revolution against imperial British rule, and it was through the founding of our democracy that we formed a government designed to check against corruption. In the United States of America, for the first time in human history, those with power were held accountable to those without.
That system of democracy, of egalitarianism and liberalism (look them up), became the template for prosperous government across the globe. For more than two centuries, the United States of America has been a beacon of freedom and liberty to the world for one reason above all others: our system of government is designed to check against corruption.
To whom are the Trustees accountable? What checks do we have against them? In what ways do we see our collective values reflected in their behavior? How can we even truly know what their values or priorities are if they cannot be bothered to explain why they fire – or hire – anyone.
Did you know that our university is currently hiring a new president? Ask around and not a single person you meet will be able to tell you who any of the candidates are. That’s because it’s being kept a secret by the Trustees. And, legally, they can do that… because of a law one of them wrote in the state legislature before he became a Trustee (see Brown, Kermit).
Am I accusing the Trustees of being corrupt? No, but how could any of us know if they were? How could any of us know whether or not they are acting in our best interests if they refuse to be transparent in every instance where transparency matters? How can any of us trust our Trustees without relying on blind faith?
It is time for some answers from the Trustees of the University of Wyoming. It is time for the people who make up this school to have a say in how it is run, where it goes, and why it goes there. It is time for the future of Wyoming to be placed in the hands of those who will one day become the People of Wyoming.
