Members of the Arizona Board of Regents lambasted the University of Arizona’s faculty senate during the board of regents meeting Thursday — just days after the UA Faculty Senate chair alluded to a possible conflict of interest within the board during a meeting Monday.
Regent Chair Fred DuVal announced that he was pursuing legal action against Faculty Senate Chair Leila Hudson, after she raised concerns over his former position as a managing director of investment firm Amicus Investors, which invests “in universities, partnering with them to help realize their master plans,” according to the website.
“This crossed a line and I refuse to be a punching bag or to let intentional defamation go unanswered,” DuVal said at the meeting.
The Amicus website states its team has worked with Arizona State University and the University of Arizona. DuVal addressed Hudson’s claims, denying any conflict of interest and clarifying the timeline of his involvement.
“Before I joined this board, I had a client called Amicus that was in the business of public-private financing partnerships for universities. Frankly, it failed to land business, it generated no income, and went out of business on August 20, 2017. I returned to this Board a year after that,” DuVal said at the meeting.
His LinkedIn profile shows him working at Amicus from April 2016 to August 2017, in between his terms on the board of regents.
DuVal denounced Hudson, an associate professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, and criticized her research capabilities, saying her comments had further tainted his view of the UA’s faculty governing body.
“Unfortunately, Dr. Hudson has inflicted a terrible blow to shared governance which, frankly, works so well at the other two universities,” he said at the meeting.
“How do you develop trust with people who intentionally lie about and publicly defame their partner? It’s shameful.”
The board of regents sent out an emailed statement by DuVal about the conflict with Hudson on Thursday afternoon during the meeting but the webpage it linked to is now empty.
Tensions grew further when Regent Lyndel Manson blasted members of the faculty senate, calling them embarrassingly dysfunctional and encouraging UA President Robert Robbins to establish new faculty leadership at the university.
“At some point, enough needs to be enough. And that time is now,” Manson stated at the meeting. “We’re frankly unsure of how representative this body is of the greater faculty at UA. With few exceptions, productive and positive-minded faculty have declined to serve in the senate because of its negative and aggressive nature and its lack of focus on what’s truly best for the university.”
The audience, which included members of the Student Campus Workers Union, there to protest proposed legislation, booed Manson’s comments. The faculty senate is primarily composed of elected members with 56 of the 75 slots being elected positions.
Mark Stegeman, who teaches in the Eller business school at the UA and is a former TUSD school board member, spoke during the call to the audience, saying many faculty at the UA are tremendously committed and do shared governance work for no compensation.
“Not only should you not judge the senate by the loudest few, you should not judge the faculty by the senate and you should not judge people by their worst moments,” he said.
Hudson won reelection for faculty chair in mid-February with 750 votes — almost two-thirds of the 1,201 cast for the position, according to a press release from the UA’s Committee on Elections. In total, 1,258 voters, or 33% of eligible faculty participated in the election.
Arnold shares updates on UA finances and insight into how the board missed signs of financial distress
In his opening comments, DuVal described the situation at UA as a “financial turnaround” and “a bit of a rough patch.” He asserted they would stand by their “turnaround principles,” which includes promises of no tuition changes or furloughs, but added that sacrifices were inevitable.
“The reality of the math that we face is quite simple: you can cut costs or you can raise tuition. That’s it,” DuVal said. “We are going to cut first from the top, as the campus is urging us to do.”
John Arnold, UA’s interim chief financial officer and the board’s executive director, shared insight on possible reasons why the board of regents missed the UA’s downward financial spiral.
He explained that some of the pandemic funding lowered operating costs in 2021, artificially inflating that year’s days cash on hand number, so when that metric took a steep dive in 2022 he assumed it was “noise in the system” due to COVID and UA administrators’ substantial investments in strategic initiatives.
“In retrospect, we probably should have understood a little bit better what was going on with Fiscal Year 22,” Arnold said.
Arnold followed with an update on the UA’s finances during Fiscal Year 2023, including the University of Arizona Global Campus, a controversial acquisition that many say contributed to the university’s financial distress.
According to Arnold the online school reported in November 2023 it was operating at an $18 million loss but has since cut that loss to $2 million a year. Regent Manson, who has a background in business and serves as the board’s treasurer, praised the development.
“When you acquire an organization, there is always a year of dust in the air. And so the fact that they’ve actually been able to wrangle an $18 million loss is a significant improvement,” she said.
Arnold said he has been on a quest to figure out how the board missed warning signs of the UA’s plummeting financial trajectory and determined he should have looked further into anomalies within certain metrics. But he also questioned the effectiveness of the metrics the board uses as an oversight method as many did not show the dire state of the UA’s finances.
“We need to identify some metrics so that the board clearly understands what’s going on inside of that metric,” he said.
New UA athletic director and a contract extension for UA’s highest paid employee, basketball coach Tommy Lloyd
The board approved Desireé Reed-Francois, Robbins’ nomination for UA’s new athletic director.
“We are confident that you will help us get our athletic department not only back to financial sustainability, but also change the whole culture of our athletic department,” Robbins said.
This comes amid a university-wide hiring freeze.
Reed-Francois will start with “an annual base salary of $1 million elevating to $1.2 million in Year 5, with an additional $250,000 annual contribution from the University of Arizona Foundation,” according to the school’s athletics website.
She’s also eligible for additional incentives and bonuses based on success and retention if she stays longer than four years.
The board also approved a contract extension for basketball coach Tommy Lloyd, who earns $3.7 million annually and is the school’s highest paid employee. Robbins said the renewal will extend his time with the UA by another five years but the money isn’t coming out of the university budget.
“All of those funds were raised from private donations,” he said.
Regents avoid a stance on House Bill 2735 — a proposal to weaken shared governance at Arizona public universities
Faculty and students from UA and ASU spoke against controversial bills making their way through the Arizona legislature during the public comment section, including House Bill 2735. The proposed bill swaps the faculty, administration and regents’ current shared participation in governance for a vague “consult” role by faculty.
Specifically, revisions strike language from Arizona laws that empower faculty members of each university through their “elected faculty representatives” to “participate in” the governance of their respective universities.
Evan Berry, faculty head and associate professor of religious studies at ASU, said the bill is “a serious threat to academic freedom and will have a chilling effect on free speech.” He spoke during the call to the audience, adding that removing faculty governance will weaken academic freedom.
The bill passed the House Appropriations Committee Feb. 14 with the committee’s 10 Republican members voting in favor of the measure and five Democrats voting against. The two other Democrats voted present.
Thomas Adkins, the board of regents vice president of government affairs and community relations, outlined the bill’s provisions during the meeting. While he openly spoke about the board’s stance on other bills, he gave little indication of their stance on HB2735, only commenting that the two present votes were “notable.”
The board had no questions or comments about HB2735 or any of the legislation Adkins spoke about.
The board maintained a neutral stance on the bill during the House Appropriations Committee hearing.
FAFSA delays caused by federal “revamp” of the application
DuVal announced an extension on Arizona Promise Grant applications due to problems with the new FAFSA application. The new deadline is May 1.
The program “is a guaranteed scholarship program for eligible Arizona residents that ensures all tuition and fees are covered at Arizona’s public universities,” according to the website. Students must receive a federal Pell Grant following their FAFSA submission in order to be eligible for the promise grant.
“While the new version of the FAFSA form was supposed to simplify the process, the delay and computer glitches have resulted in a steep drop in the number of submissions nationally,” DuVal said at the meeting.
Only 15.7% of Arizona students have submitted their FAFSA applications, making it 49th in the nation, according to a meeting presentation by Julie Sainz, the board’s director of FAFSA and College Access Initiatives. Additionally, 2024 FAFSA submissions are nearly 45% lower than last year.
Anika Olson, vice president for enrollment management at Northern Arizona University, said the effects of FAFSA delays will disproportionately affect low-income, diverse and first-generation students.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print.
