Lesson of North Idaho College: Far right good at campaigning, lost when governing | Opinion
If North Idaho College fails to lose its accreditation, it won’t be for lack of trying.
“The events about to transpire at Monday’s meeting of the North Idaho College Board of Trustees could be a death knell for the college’s accreditation and possibly the college itself,” Coeur d’Alene Press staff writer Maureen Dolan warned in an analysis ahead of this week’s meeting.
Good prediction, it seems.
As Kaye Thornbrugh of the Coeur d’Alene Press reported, on Monday night, the board’s far-right majority voted to nullify the contract of President Nick Sawyne, who was hired by the board, then placed on administrative leave and then replaced — and then the board was ordered to reinstate him. The action was likely illegal and will probably be reversed at some point.
That has been the pattern since far-right figures launched a successful effort to take over the North Idaho College board.
As Daniel Walters of the Inlander reported in December, the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee worked hard to gain a majority on the NIC board. And David Reilly, a hardcore anti-Semite and one of the organizers of the notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, pitched in with election messaging.
The takeover may have been a sinister plot, but the plotting seems to have ended with the election. Now the winners look like the dogs that caught the car.
Maybe they wanted to purge all teaching they are ideologically opposed to. Maybe they wanted to turn the college into some right-wing, theocratic indoctrination center.
Regardless of what the goal was, all they seem to know how to do is trip over their shoelaces.
Ever seen that clip from “The Simpsons” of Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake, having the handle fly up and hit him in the face, groaning, and then taking another step, only to find he’s stepped on yet another rake, ad infinitum? Well, that’s a pretty good synopsis of the NIC board with the far right in charge.
It seems hard for the board to hold even one meeting without breaking the law, Monday being no exception.
The majority has hired former attorney general candidate Art Macomber, who is the laughingstock of the state bar — and at an exorbitant level of pay.
As Thornbrugh reported, the board took the action to nullify Swayne’s contract based on a top-secret report produced by Macomber. The report claims that there were unspecified Open Meetings Law violations at the time Swayne was hired — in June 2022, far too long in the past for the action to be undone.
Board members who aren’t part of the far-right majority objected, rightly, that nullifying Swayne’s contract was probably illegal, with Macomber’s legal advice being less than trustworthy. That’s a good bet.
And even if nullifying the contract isn’t strictly illegal, it’s sure to be seen as a dodge of the intent of a court order mandating the board to reinstate the status quo while Swayne’s termination was litigated. But the path the far-right majority would take was set out long before the meeting, and they did not waver.
Expect that the board will soon get yet another “correction” from a judge.
And all this likely lawbreaking is happening only days before a visit by officials from the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, as Dolan noted. The commission is considering revoking NIC’s accreditation, thereby turning it from a community college for students into a collection of useless buildings.
The main reason they’re thinking of doing it is that the board has a track record of lawlessness and incompetence — not because of the students or the staff, who continue to conduct themselves honorably in the face of this travesty. And now the board’s far-right majority has shown itself lawless and incompetent yet again.
When the far right controls the levers, this is what it looks like.