Colorado State University

When it comes to college football and politics, Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz knows better than most that revenge is indeed a dish best served cold; he just wishes his consumption of those dishes ate up a little less airtime on CNN’s “Freshman Year.”

Parachute has been hit hard by the current slowdown in natural gas drilling. Mayor Roy McClung has watched school enrollments fall and rental vacancies rise over the last year in this mountain town. He now plans to join many of his constituents in heading to greener pastures. The town Mayor is pulling stakes.

A Larimer County judge this afternoon ordered the Colorado State University Board of Governors to make public further recordings of a closed-door session last month during which it secretly interviewed candidates for the university’s new chancellorship and decided to select its vice chairman Joe Blake as sole finalist for the position.

Judge Stephen Schapanski’s ruling comes in a case brought by The Colorado Independent, the Fort Collins’ Coloradoan and the Pueblo Chieftain, which argued the university violated state open meetings laws in its search for a chancellor.

The Colorado State University board of governors is moving to install its own former vice chairman, Joe Blake, as system chancellor this month after making little effort to directly address concerns about the lack of transparency that marred the chancellor search process this spring.

U.S. Sen. John Ensign, the Nevada Republican who shocked — shocked! — the political world Tuesday night when he announced in Las Vegas he had recently “violated the vows” of his marriage by having an affair with a campaign staffer married to a former Senate aide, has a couple ties to Colorado.

In recent years, colleges and universities have encountered increasing pressure to operate like businesses. As the logic goes, businesses must survive in a cutthroat climate of unfettered competition and, thus, their organizations need to be leaner, more efficient and more responsive to the needs of their customers than not-for-profit organizations, such as colleges and universities.

Colorado State University lawyers are attempting to regain control of recordings of a CSU board meeting held in secret last month where members decided to select their own vice chairman, Joe Blake, as sole finalist for the new university chancellorship.

CSU is being sued by The Colorado Independent, the Fort Collins Coloradoan and Pubelo Chieftain for violating state open-meeting laws. Larimer County judge Stephen Schapanski earlier ordered CSU to turn over the meeting recordings so that he could review them in chambers to determine, in part, how the court should proceed.

The Denver Post celebrity sighting column caught soon-to-be Colorado State University Chancellor Joe Blake already beginning some of the work he has been hired to do for the school.

According to the Post, 73-year-old Blake stepped out Tuesday night in Denver for cocktails and dinner with local movers and shakers — exactly the kind of people the board at CSU is depending on Blake to summon out of the depths of his Rolodex and tap to help solve the ongoing funding crisis at the land-grant university.

In papers submitted to a Larimer court last night, Colorado State University attorneys argue that CSU board members did not break state transparency laws when they voted in private to make board Vice Chair Joe Blake CSU chancellor because Blake had recused himself as Vice Chair roughly a week before the vote.

It’s a bad time to be raising university administration costs. It’s a good time to be streamlining administration and expanding recruitment efforts and student-funding options.

On Friday, Colorado officials formally asked the federal government for $760 million in stimulus money to save education programs and jobs threatened by this year’s record budget shortfalls.