Tag: Joe Blake

 
Over the past few years, the Colorado State University Board of Governors has become increasingly secretive. During the spring of 2009, the BOG's stealth...

Yesterday in Pueblo, new CSU Chancellor Joe Blake stressed again his mission to reengineer state-wide higher-education funding. He said his job over the next...

Top-dog prominent Colorado business leader and state Republican Party giant Bruce Benson voted for the Taxpayer Bill of Rights in 1992, joining in the...

Unbowed by a ruling two weeks ago in which a Larimer County judge found that Colorado State University violated Open Meetings laws, the CSU board and its lawyers fought an order demanding the release of audio tapes of the executive session where the board selected its own vice chairman, Joe Blake, as sole finalist for the new chancellor position. Judge Stephen Schapanski today granted CSU a stay of his order. The battle over the release of the tapes is part of a larger ongoing suit brought last month by The Colorado Independent, The Fort Collins Coloradoan and The Pueblo Chieftan alleging the university violated state transparency laws.

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.

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.