Two cases of stunning arrogance

When those with power refuse to acknowledge and respond to the outcry of the people they serve, a grim mockery of open and inclusive government becomes the object of grass roots fury that won’t subside.

When those with power choose to discriminate against the rights of a minority, using the moral authority of a religion supposedly grounded in loving thy neighbor as thyself, the powerful make a mockery of their own deepest inner standards.

New Mexico last week saw two instances of obstinate and arrogant power. One attacked participatory democracy by ignoring it, the other orchestrated a crushing act of intolerance unworthy of any leadership community.

When the University of New Mexico’s faculty, supported by the school’s staff and many graduate students, brought an overwhelming vote of no confidence against the school’s president, the president of the board of regents, and the executive vice president for finance, UNM’s administrative leadership and the governor brushed aside the vote as if it had no teeth, no clout, and no consequence in the long run.

When a number of powerful Christian hierarchies from numerous sects and denominations in New Mexico turned themselves into political action committees, bombarding state senators with ferocious lobbying, and even some treats of hell fire and damnation, a majority of senators caved in on a bill supporting the legal rights of unmarried domestic partners, both heterosexual and homosexual, to have many of the rights of married couples.

The religious groups put their power to the service of stark prejudice, emotionally harming thousands of New Mexicans fighting for equality.

These church leaders weren’t protecting the rights of New Mexicans, but rather depriving a large and worthy community of the rights which all of us deserve. It’s dogmatic rigidity at its worst. Not all Christian denominations opposed the domestic partnership bill. Progressives in Christian churches backed it, but the furious absolutists won the day.

So much for Christian charity, and the live-and-let-live wisdom that’s implied in the First Amendment of the Constitution. What happened last week to a community of loving couples is simply unconscionable. This is why religion should be totally separated from governmental action, as the nation’s founders thought right and proper. And religious groups in being overtly political in their actions should lose their tax-free status.

How terrible it is to be the object of systemic prejudice by the very institutions that are meant to root out such immoral dead ends from our culture.

The UNM faculty and staff’s encounter with arrogant authority was stunning. Not only did those who were given a thumbs down, respond, in effect, with a supercilious shrug, their boss, the governor, indicated the vote didn’t matter to him either, affirming that his administration would still support the confirmation of a publically condemned regent and move on with the current president.

This was the first vote of no confidence ever given to a sitting president and head of the board of regents in the history of the school. And it was just blown off as a silly gesture from a bunch of eggheads.

But New Mexico’s economy depends on its scientists, technocrats, artists, writers, scholars and universities in ways that are historically well known to anyone who pays attention. What does it say to the scientific and intellectual community across the country that the governor of New Mexico basically thinks the scholars at his flagship university are just full of baloney?

I am sure, however, that such a response has galvanized the faculty to action with an intensity and commitment that hasn’t been seen in years. The issues of using the model of top heavy corporate governance, fiscal high-handedness, lack of transparency, and rigid hierarchy just won’t go away any more.

A university is not its administrators. Not its coaching staff, not its weight rooms and press boxes, and buildings. And corporate governance of a university, with swollen salaries for people who do nothing directly to further the academic enterprise, looks as totally foolish as it is, now that America’s economy is falling apart from rotten corporate leadership.

A university is its faculty and its students. The people who make teaching and learning possible are the university’s hard working and underpaid staff, not the suits in Scholes Hall.

Teaching, learning, researching, and creating –- those are reasons a university exists. Everything else is a distant second, especially sports.

UNM, like other colleges and universities around the country, has deep problems — financially and with the community it serves. It’s a truly wretched scandal that the part-time faculty who teach so many classes have not had a meaningful raise in salaries in 25 years! Some still teach an entire semester for $1,800 to $3,500. And now they are now suffering from departmental cutbacks while vice presidents are given bonuses that would keep a part time teacher’s whole family going for a year.

Anyone who reads my columns knows that I’ve supported the governor over the years and think he’s done a lot of good for our state, including taking care of New Mexico’s impoverished as best he could, building the Rail Runner Express and preserving the Bisti Badlands when he was in Congress.

But he has made a terrible mess of the University of New Mexico, appointing regents who apparently know nothing about the operation of a university and have no sympathy for any part of its primary mission, and depositing in the president’s office two people who’ve earned the enmity the of the university community.

It’s time for him to make things right, to meet with faculty representatives, support their role in the governance of the university, weed out the ineffective and the arrogantly incompetent, and help lead the university on the path of sound governance that puts the academic mission of the school above all others in funding, focus and commitment.