Tim Steller's column: UA took risks in successive crises, with weak accountability

The campus crisis crept up quietly for months, then burst suddenly into public view.

A senior administrator was held responsible and pushed out of her job. But, it turned out, she retained her salary in a newly made position.

And the UA president? Well, he denied knowledge of the problem till the last minute and was not held responsible for it. In fact, the Board of Regents defended him.

Sounds like a recent story, right? It's got to be the story of the UA's financial troubles that came into view in November and have dominated headlines since. 

Nope. I'm talking about the on-campus killing of Prof. Thomas Meixner, the chair of the UA's Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, on Oct. 5, 2022. 

The two crises — Meixner's killing and the university's financial crisis — are different in kind, but it's surprising and telling how the stories share some important features.

The way the chair of the faculty senate, Prof. Leila Hudson, describes it, there is a main theme that connects the two.

“In my opinion, the common element is a failure to perceive accurately, assess, and appropriately mitigate risk,” said Hudson. “The source of this failure to understand, appreciate and mitigate risk, I think, comes from having a culture of privilege, immunity, and failed systems of accountability.”

In the case of the eventual killing of Meixner, the ongoing threats were well-known and documented for most of a year. Members of the hydrology and atmospheric sciences warned from December 2021 forward that a graduate student, Murad Dervish, posed a risk to their lives.

One faculty member even bought a bulletproof vest to wear to class, though he ultimately decided against doing so.

When Meixner was shot, the campus was shocked, but members of the department were not. Meixner’s last words were, “I knew you were going to do this.”

Signs of coming trouble

The warnings were not quite so clear in the case of the financial crisis, but they were also months old when the story broke in early November and shocked the campus. Or years old, depending on how you measure it.

One key factor in the $240 million deficit is the integration of Ashford University into the University of Arizona Global Campus, which happened July 1. But the purchase occurred three years earlier and was loudly warned against by experts at the UA’s Eller College of Management.

In a June 2020 memo, they called the prospect of buying Ashford a “catastrophic mistake for the University of Arizona” and projected that, under existing trends, Ashford would lose between $35 million to $94 million per year over the next five years.

It’s unclear as yet how the UA Global Campus will perform this first year, but simply incorporating it is one of the factors contributing approximately 10 days to the drop in cash on hand that signaled the crisis, UA administrators have said.

The memo also warned the purchase would expose the university to liability for Ashford’s misdeeds, and now the U.S. Department of Education is seeking $72 million from the UA for loans to Ashford students that the department discharged.

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More recently, members of the strategic planning and budget advisory committee have seen repeated signs of trouble. Johann Rafelski, a physics professor, told me he’s been seeing these signs since joining the committee in 2022.

Among them was when the UA, unlike other universities, decided not to pay back the $80 million saved through furloughs and cuts during the pandemic, Rafelski said. Another sign was when he brought up the increasing bloat in administration and the salaries the administrators pay each other.

Then-chief financial officer Lisa Rulney “clearly showed by her reaction that the administrative bloat was putting a financial strain on the university,” he said.

So when Rulney said at a Nov. 2 meeting of the Board of Regents that “our position is precarious and already turned downward,” it was a surprise to the public, but not to those clued in to UA finances.

Patterns are similar

In the aftermath of the attack on Meixner, UA President Robert Robbins ordered an outside review.

When it came time to hold people accountable, two heads rolled — sort of. Police Chief Paula Balafas resigned for real, and provost Liesl Folks, who oversaw several of the responsible departments, stepped aside.

Folks, who holds a professorship in computer and electrical engineering, didn’t leave like Balafas though. She was put into a new position apparently made for her: Vice president of semiconductor strategy.

It appeared at a December meeting of the Arizona Board of Regents that Rulney had suffered Balafas’ fate. Robbins announced he had accepted her resignation and thanked her for her service.

But as it turned out, Rulney has remained, retaining her $500,000 per year salary as “senior advisor to business operations.” Although the university described the job as temporary, it looks for now like she has enjoyed a fate more like that of Folks.

Conveniently to the administration, a high-ranking official who takes blames but keeps her high salary is a lot less likely to blow the whistle on other people. So, for now, Robbins and other high administrators remain protected — below them from administrators who might have stories to tell but also have new titles and good salaries to protect.

And he appears protected from above by a board of regents who seems as loyal now as they were after Meixner’s killing. In January 2023, current Regents Chair Fred DuVal wrote an op-ed supporting Robbins, and he did the same soon after the financial crisis came into view.

Independent audit needed

When Robbins announced that an outside firm would investigate what went wrong in the run-up to Meixner’s killing, I was skeptical. But as it turned out the report by the PAX Group seemed independent and productive. It led to important changes in the security structure and practices at the UA.

An independent report was a good idea last year in the aftermath of the previous crisis.

And it is again. In December, the Faculty Senate approved a resolution calling for an independent audit of UA finances that explains how we got in this position.

Probably not coincidentally, this idea originally came from Meixner’s Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, which passed a resolution calling for an independent audit in November. The UA’s de facto acceptance of risk had hit them hard in 2022.

An independent audit could reveal why the UA accepted so much financial risk in the years leading up to 2023 and who was responsible. That would be a positive parallel to the security crisis that burst into view in 2022.