Tag: Higher Education

Influential and controversial national conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks started the Tea Party movement last year and is endorsing conservative candidates across the country this...

Democratic candidate for governor Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper told the Colorado Independent today that colleges, like divisions in corporations, do best when there is...

DENVER-- The Higher Education Flexibility Act passed the Senate last week and is scheduled to make it to the House Monday. It's a bold bill that would rearrange the relationship between public universities and the government. It would mean greater autonomy for university administrations which, for example, would be free to levy tuition hikes under 9 percent per year. Current higher education funding in low-tax recession-wracked Colorado has become unsustainable. The new bill seeks to buffer universities against a likely $300 million funding cut next year.

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.

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.

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.

Has something changed at Colorado State University in the wake of the secretive chancellor search that yielded one candidate and accusations of cronyism? The chancellor search that has so far generated campus protest petitions, a scotched state transparency law, an open-meetings lawsuit and an ethics-watchdog coalition backlash? Maybe. The university today announced three applicant finalists for CSU Chief of Police. Note that: three finalists; not one. And that's not all. The university has made the names of the applicants public so you can look into their background and qualifications. Also, the applicants are going to be asked to come to campus to meet with the CSU "campus and larger community" before any of the three of them are named Chief.