Tag: waste

Last week, Kansas legislative leaders met in a Statehouse committee room with a broad agenda item—to approve a higher ed budget consultant.

Neither the name nor proposed pay for this consultant was listed. The person Republican leaders were planning to hire didn’t become clear until House Speaker Dan Hawkins began talking at the meeting.

“We have an opportunity,” Hawkins told fellow members of the Legislative Coordinating Council, according to a video the Legislature posted. “One of the presidents of a university has retired. He has intimate insight into the higher ed budget arena. And, certainly, as everybody knows, we have to be very careful and prudent with the dollars in our budget.”

“We really need to cut $200 million from our budget,” Hawkins said, adding that the consultant would help “find efficiencies—find any waste that we can find.”

Within eight minutes—including brief objections from Democratic leaders in the room, one of whom said he was relying on “context clues” to guess whom the hiree would be—the lawmakers voted 5 to 2 to give Hawkins the power to hire this consultant. And, as The Kansas Reflector confirmed after the meeting, Hawkins is indeed planning to hire Ken Hush, who retired as president of Emporia State University last month, at a rate of $10,000 per month. Hush’s leadership of his own institution was controversial, including budget problems, tenured faculty layoffs and enrollment declines.

Tom Day, Kansas’s director of legislative administrative services, told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “We are currently in communication with Mr. Hush putting a contract together,” and there are no documents showing what his “scope of work” will be. But Day said the payment will be “$50,000, over a 5-month period.” Hawkins gets to sign off on the final contract.

Republicans’ hiring of Hush, who the Reflector noted is Hawkins’s former fraternity brother, to give advice on cutting other universities’ budgets has elicited criticism from those who say he wasn’t good at running one institution and suggest he’s benefiting from his political connection.

“Ken Hush’s hiring was a sole-source backroom deal to give an old frat brother—who has a proven track record of being unable to run a university—a job,” Dinah Sykes, leader of the Senate Democrats, said in a statement.

Under Hush’s leadership, Emporia State garnered national controversy after it laid off tenured faculty, saw a 12.5 percent enrollment plunge the next academic year and then defended its general counsel for writing a bill to eliminate tenure protections across public institutions statewide. The top administrator of the Kansas Board of Regents accused the university of breaking the board’s policy requiring preapproval of legislative proposals.

(Emporia State spokesperson Gwen Larson said last year that its top lawyer’s “submission of this bill” was “a surprise to the university,” but defended his right to submit it to lawmakers. Hush had appeared to ask legislators to support such legislation a week before it appeared. The bill failed.)

A lawsuit filed against Emporia State officials during Hush’s presidency also continues, despite his departure.

In 2022, Emporia State abruptly told 33 employees—30 of whom were faculty members, 23 of them tenured professors—they were losing their jobs. The Board of Regents approved these layoffs under a policy that cited “extreme financial pressures” and declared, “Any state university employee, including a tenured faculty member, may be suspended, dismissed, or terminated.” Eleven tenured professors sued, saying they weren’t given due process.

In addition, the American Association of University Professors placed Emporia State’s administration on its censure list and condemned it for “unilaterally terminating the appointments of 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty members.” Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia Conference of the AAUP, was one of the three investigative committee members who wrote that report.

“If the Kansas Republican lawmakers want to cut spending and gut higher education, they found their man in Ken Hush,” Boedy said. “He did exactly that at Emporia State by firing many a professor and upending the school in many ways.”

Boedy added, “The ways in which Mr. Hush went about decimating Emporia State—if that’s to be replicated across the entire state, I would not want to be a student or professor in Kansas anymore.”

But Larson, the university spokesperson, said this week that Emporia State “began to show material results of its turnaround” last fall. Among other things, she said, it eliminated a $19 million deficit, reduced deferred maintenance by 20 percent, saw enrollment rise 6 percent and went from a negative to a stable Moody’s rating.

The Reflector reported that the Legislature gave the university $18 million in total “bailouts” in 2023 and 2024 as enrollment declined. Upon his retirement, Hush announced he was donating about $1.4 million, equivalent to the last four years of his salary, to the university.

It’s unclear what kind of advice Emporia State’s former president will give lawmakers and what Republican lawmakers are looking to cut from universities. But their comments may give a clue.

‘Questionable Spending’

During last week’s meeting, Senate president Ty Masterson expressed a general need to cut costs, partly because of the Legislature’s tax cuts.

“All the stimulus money that happened through COVID … it’s now all dried up, it’s all gone,” Masterson said. “So we have to manage our budget back down to something that is normal. We’re also in a climate where some of the tax cuts that we were able to get through are being implemented, so I think it would be wise to bring on a consultant in that area.”

But Blake Carpenter, the House speaker pro tem, said he’s targeting what he referred to as “questionable spending.” The Republican said he and his staff found around $100 million worth of this spending over the legislative interim period.

Carpenter’s definition of questionable spending includes subjects conservatives have railed against. He listed just three examples: “$75,000 in travel reimbursements to a vanilla bean manufacturing tour guide in Africa,” “$96,000 to a nutritionist guru specializing in vegan cookbooks” and “$111,000 to a social justice headhunting firm specializing in placing executives into leadership positions in nonprofits.”

“If we’re able to find about $100 million just on our own over the interim, with my staff and I looking through these line items, then I think it makes a lot of sense for us to hire an executive who has run one of these universities,” he said. “They know how they operate … I think the $100 million at this point is scratching the surface and we need to continue to dig.”

(Carpenter, Masterson and Hawkins didn’t respond to requests for comment this week. Inside Higher Ed was unable to reach Hush.)

Sykes, the Senate Democratic leader, objected during the meeting to hiring a consultant. “All the talk we have about finding efficiency in government … I think we keep growing government … and to pay $10,000 a month,” she said.

“The first that I saw of this was when it was on the agenda item last night,” Sykes said.

She continued her denunciation in a statement following the meeting. “Republicans’ hiring of Ken Hush is a part of a larger problem with the Legislative Coordinating Council of issuing no-bid contracts,” she said, adding that Republicans on that council “have been dealing out sole-source contracts left and right, acting like kids in a candy store.” She said Hush’s Emporia State presidency “was fraught with failures.”

“If Hush can’t even create a proper plan for the ‘realignment’ of a single university, how could he ever properly identify areas of all of the state’s universities’ budgets to be cut?” Sykes asked.

Mallory Bishop, past president of the Emporia State Faculty Senate, said Hush’s actions at the university shouldn’t be replicated across the state now because it’s too early to tell whether they turned the institution around.

“He just ended his tenure a month ago,” said Bishop, a clinical instructor and program director at Emporia State.

“Was it triage or was it just severing limbs?” she said. “I don’t know.”