On May 2, The University of Colorado (CU) Board of Regents elected Mark Kennedy to become the next president of the University of Colorado system which is made up of four campuses and 67,000 students. They, however, voted on party lines and against the recommendation of every student government organization, most of the faculty, parents, alumni, members of his previous university and more.
Mark Kennedy is most known before coming to Denver as being a representative in Congress for Minnesota between 2001 and 2007. He supported the Iraq War, supported a lifetime ban against members of Congress becoming lobbyists and generally held the reputation as a reformer. After being a representative, Kennedy served Bush and Obama as an advisor and also taught at Johns Hopkins and George Washington University. In 2016, Kennedy became president of the University of North Dakota.
During his tenure, Kennedy was not well-liked by faculty. He cut budgets for many liberal arts programs and did not try to refill vacant positions. Foreign language programs were cut from six to two, while a new artificial intelligence lab received $10 million. Faculty argued that Kennedy’s plan for the university created a situation where the different programs competed against each other for funding.
While president, Kennedy also approached the University of Central Florida to become their president, and there were rumors that he had also approached the University of Minnesota. One of the biggest controversies Kennedy had involved promoting his personal assistant to become his chief of staff. Kennedy’s new chief of staff was entitled to a $114 thousand a year salary, including an allowance of $25 thousand to $30 thousand. The justification for this allocation was that the chief of staff would be living in Texas and commuting, and therefore the allowance would pay for travel, housing and transportation. After some uproar, Kennedy responded to the grievances by saying to the Daily Camera that the uproar was caused by racism and sexism since his appointee was an African American woman: “I fear that part of the reason that that article got as much attention as it did is some people couldn’t understand how a young African-American woman from the South could be as qualified and worthy” to do the job as others, he said. “I’m quite confident it is about more than remote working.”
A central reason that students and faculty at CU are upset revolve back to his terms as U.S. representative. Twice he proposed amendments to ban same-sex marriage, and then he sponsored or co-sponsored various bills that allowed the federal government to not aid states who “discriminated” against adoption centers that stopped same-sex parents from adopting, put extreme restrictions on abortions and on the actions of doctors who performed them, allowed the search of minors at schools, forced students and schools to recite the pledge and restricted stem cell research.
What makes the whole thing worse is that the regents did not listen to the CU community. The Anschutz campus, known for its medical research, was worried about Kennedy’s bill to restrict stem-cell research. According to the CU Faculty Council, 70% of faculty were worried or opposed to Kennedy’s nomination. As mentioned before, every student government organization voted for a resolution to oppose the nomination.
Regent Heidi Ganahl responded to this by sending this message to a student: “I’d like to ask that you take a step back and meet Mark Kennedy when he’s here, ask him tough questions and ask how he feels about these issues 20 years later.” Regent Chance Hill also responded to the CU students and faculty by saying, “They cannot tolerate the notion of a Republican occasionally challenging their liberal college fiefdoms where people suffer real negative consequences if they dare challenge the Leftist orthodoxy that dominates campus culture.”
The previous three CU presidents were Republicans.
The nomination of Mark Kennedy shows the major effect of party politics. The students and faculty of the CU system are receiving a president they did not want. Although they attended town halls to get their voices heard, the regents did not listen. Mark Kennedy does not have that many qualifications to become a president of a university as grand in size as CU. In many other situations, if anyone was as disliked by people as much as Mark Kennedy is disliked by the CU community, they would never be hired.
