In a clumsy, method-to-madness way, the State Board of Education spiced up what could have been a dull discussion about mission statements.
Just remove the word “flagship” from the University of Idaho’s mission statement, and it’s like football season all over again.
Vandal haters went online to talk smack and share a few virtual fist bumps. Vandal faithful, stunned and blindsided, looked around for a referee to boo.
A role played happily by the State Board, which started rewording the universities’ mission statements Wednesday, one day before pointing a torpedo at the U of I’s flagship. The board’s idea was to remove wording that gives one university pre-eminence over the others — to level the proverbial playing field.
So the State Board loves all its children equally. That’s nice. I’m sure that’s a sentiment shared by a Legislature and a governor that has shown its love for higher education by whacking 26.4 percent off the universities’ general fund budget over three years. All of the state’s institutions of higher learning, flagship or otherwise, have been taking on water.
Which makes the flagship fight a particularly pointless distraction. The State Board’s stated goal — encouraging universities to cooperate — is perfectly reasonable, but lean budgets are already forcing the universities to work together and avoid duplication. Not coincidentally, Gov. Butch Otter’s 2012 high-tech initiative builds on one collaborative university research effort that is already up and running.
But even if their intentions were good, State Board members should have been politically savvy enough to see they were starting a fight. The abrupt redlining of “flagship” reinforces all the old rivalries that divide Idaho’s institutions, outside the athletic arena. It forced, for example, the normally even-keeled U of I President Duane Nellis to go to the school’s Facebook page and play to the crowd in the grandstands. “This edit does not change who we are or how we will operate going forward. We are THE University of Idaho.”
And this was mild compared with the reaction from Rep. Tom Trail, R-Moscow, who saw fit to send the hometown Moscow-Pullman Daily News an email quoting a local educator who blamed the coup on a “BSU mafia.”
The popular read from Thursday is that it shows that Boise State University is gaining political clout, squarely at the U of I’s expense. Never mind that the two schools serve different niches in the higher education market and provide a very different campus experience to their students. The big problem is that the State Board chose to rekindle an old turf fight, when it does neither institution a bit of good.
A WILD PRIMARY. MAYBE.
A few days ago, while meeting with the Statesman editorial board, Ada County Commissioner Sharon Ullman mused about the prospects of running against fellow Commissioner Vern Bisterfeldt.
“I actually like that idea,” she said. “One of us needs to go.”
And one will — under a plan commissioners approved a couple of hours after the editorial board meeting. The new county commission district boundaries, which are aligned with Ada County’s redrawn legislative districts, put Ullman and Bisterfeldt in the same district, which means they’d have to run against each other.
That’s a fascinating prospect, considering the backstory. In the spring of 2010, Ullman convinced the Ada County GOP Central Committee to endorse incumbent Fred Tilman, because Bisterfeldt had backed Democrats in other elections. After his election, Bisterfeldt hired a private investigator to check into Ullman — although Bisterfeldt never really said what he was looking for.
That’s just the recent history.
It may all be moot, though. So far, Bisterfeldt hasn’t said whether he plans to run.
LEFAVOUR’S THEATRICS
It was a long-shot ploy — and long on political theatrics — but Boise Democratic Sen. Nicole LeFavour attempted to rescue the “Add the Words” gay rights language by attaching it to another bill, one pertaining to prison contraband.
The move went nowhere. The state Constitution requires that bills stick to a single topic. Lt. Gov. Brad Little, the Senate’s presiding officer, ruled against LeFavour, and I think he got it right.
The “Add the Words” proposal — an appropriate effort to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — deserved better than the perfunctory thumbs-down it received from the Senate State Affairs Committee last week. But LeFavour’s efforts amounted to Senate floor theatrics.
THERE’S DOG LEGISLATION ...
... and then there’s Dog Legislation.
The blue heeler, like all dogs, will inevitably have its day. But that day was not Monday, as the House State Affairs Committee rejected a bill to name the blue heeler the state dog.
One explanation, from The Associated Press: “(Some) lawmakers on the panel were simply reluctant to favor one group of dog enthusiasts over another.”
Wow, it really is an election year.
Kevin Richert: 377-6437
