by P.D. Lesko

Now is the Winter of Our Discontent.

To hear AAPS insiders tell it, the atmosphere at the Balas Administration building is like the Court of King Richard III, the atmosphere unhealthy, the established nobles at odds with the upwardly mobile members of the AAEA teacher’s union. What the tax-paying peasants have been reading in the media’s coverage of this year’s AAPS budget-a-palooza mirrors the life of the hunchbacked king. For those not up on their Shakespeare, the Machiavellian and increasingly paranoid Richard III eventually loses what little initial popularity he had, and then the rebellions begin.

Enter stage left AAEA President Linda Carter, who in late-February all but challenged the Superintendent to a duel when she called the Sup.’s $300,000 pay package “asinine” on AnnArbor.com.

Right about now, Dr. Patricia Green is being haunted by the ghosts of her declarations (“I came to Ann Arbor to eliminate the achievement gap.”—December 2011). Thoroughly irked peasant taxpayers, fed up with paying $300,000 per year for a Superintendent who hasn’t delivered on her promises, post cranky comments to AnnArbor.com in response to articles about Green: “Despair and die!” after which they wish victory upon anyone willing to run for the Board of Education in 2014.

Today, Superintendent Dr. Patricia Green announced she is taking a pay cut. She also announced that it would take 12 months to put controls and practices in place that would allow for full line-item control over the District’s $180 million dollar budget. This claim met with derision from local bank president Stephen Lange Ranzini who responded to Green’s assertions thusly: “Translation: the current budget documents are for show and sit on the shelf collecting dust after approval by the AAPS BoE and are quite useless. It will take us a year to create detailed budgets that we can actually use to track expenditures at the level of detail required to actually know what we are spendig the money on, how much each school actually costs to run and to catch waste.”

Zounds!

Dr. Green’s announcement that she was cutting her own pay and getting a grip on the District’s finances comes on the eve of her upcoming evaluation by the BOE, and on the heels of the very public rebuke by Linda Carter. Carter went on to tell AnnArbor.com, “She  (Green) needs to come back down here with the rest of us.” Obviously, Carter’s not-so-subtle hints hit home. On March 7th Dr. Green was quoted in the media as saying she “didn’t need to be asked,” to take a pay cut. Green, who continues to shoot herself in her stylishly shod feet, told the local education reporter in an interview: “I already shared with the board that I intended to take a cut in my pay. And that precedes anybody saying anything publically about it. … If I’m asking concessions from individuals in this organization, how could I not take the same thing myself? I don’t need anybody to ask me to do that. Because as a superintendent I recognize, that as a leader of the school district, you don’t ask people to take compensation cuts and not do it yourself.”

When asked by a reporter how big a cut she was prepared to take, Dr. Green took a dainty .22 caliber pistol from her purse, pointed it at the toe of her patent leather sling-back and said in her usual off-putting style, “I don’t think that detail is something we’re prepared to talk about yet.”

Since January, Dr. Green has been taking a brutal PR beating thanks to public accusations of working only four days per week (refuted by AAPS staffer Liz Margolis, as well as BOE member Christine Stead), being arrogant, aloof, not worth her weight in gold, and downright dismissive of concerns from within her own organization by her own administrators. Watching Dr. Green being peeled like an onion by those commenting on articles posted to AnnArbor.com is like watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. It’s riveting and revolting all at once.

The bottom line is that, like Ann Arbor city government, the AAPS administrators are spending big on travel, eating out and luxury hotels while cutting funding for music camps, sports and transportation. This is business as usual and it has continued, unchecked, under the not-so-watchful Ann Arbor Board of Education members (Deb Mexicotte, Irene Patalan, Christine Stead and Glenn Nelson) who behave as though pushing for specifics is beneath their dignity. Trustees Susan Baskett and Simone Lightfoot have been chastised by the current Superintendent, as well as fellow BOE members for trying to deconstruct the librettos penned for them by AAPS administrators concerning a variety of financial, educational and operational challenges facing the District.

The frustration on the part of AAPS parents has reached a boiling point, and we will see trustees whose terms end in 2014 challenged for their seats by well-funded and well-organized candidates (more on this in a later post).

What follows is a letter I recently sent to the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Trustees.

To the BOE,

by P.D. Lesko

The University of Michigan’s Lecturer’s union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), entered talks for the group’s fourth contract with on November 30, 2012. LEO, as the union is known, represents some 1,500 full-time and part-time non-tenured faculty who teach on all of the college’s campuses. Headed by behavioral sciences adjunct faculty member Bonnie Halloran since the union was formed in 2004, it is one of very few college faculty unions headed by a part-time faculty member. To be sure, there has been tension between the full-time lecturers, many of whom teach on the Ann Arbor campus, and the part-time lecturers, who are spread out among the various campuses, including Ann Arbor, Flint and Dearborn. The decision of union leaders to bargain a first contract in 2004 that called for larger pay increases and increased job security for the lowest paid of the union’s members was ground-breaking, and resulted in grumbling among U of M’s full-time lecturers.

According to a 2009 profile of Halloran: “In May 2006, AFT-Michigan awarded LEO the President’s Award for its activism and organizing work. AFT-Michigan President David Hecker dubbed LEO “a union mature beyond its years,” thanks to the group’s lightning-fast organizing effort, and effort that stretched across three campuses and gathered together 1200 temporary faculty. (To put Halloran’s work into perspective, the AFT-MFT local at nearby Eastern Michigan University (EMU) in Ypsilanti, Michigan, took a decade to organize, and was able to include only 110 full-time non-tenure track lecturers.”

It took Halloran and her bargaining committee six months to hammer out the union’s first contract. According to a piece about those negotiations that resulted in a 6-year agreement, “Some of the gains include the ability for lecturers who work under 80 percent of the semester to be omitted from the Conflict of Commitment Agreement, full health coverage throughout the summer months, and a three percent salary raise for the Dearborn and Flint campus faculty.”

In locals that represent full-time and part-time faculty, there can be serious conflicts of interest. For example, in Washington State, non-tenured faculty represented by a local that is jointly affiliated with the AFT and the National Education Association, recently petitioned the presidents of both organizations to take over their local on the grounds that the full-time faculty who control the union have neglected to represent the part-time faculty equally. This came on the heels of an April 2012 request by another Washington State adjunct faculty member who petitioned Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the NEA, to assume control of a different local union in that state—one where part-time faculty concerns were being ignored by union leaders.

The president of the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington State, Sandra Schroeder, a powerful figure in the national AFT office, as well, was recently discovered to have sent emails that showed her colluding to spread misinformation about her own adjunct faculty union members. The adjuncts in question had formed an independent faculty association to rival the AFT-NEA affiliate at their college (which only 10 percent of the part-timers had elected to join), and had organized an April 2012 teach-in to draw attention to the pay equity issues of non-tenured faculty—some of the very same pay equity issues faced by LEO and its 1,500 Michigan members.

On January 25, 2013, in what LEO officials described to members as “worst day ever” in negotiation, the administration team last proposed an “explicit general waiver” of benefits for the new LEO-UM collective bargaining agreement. According to the LEO website, “The waiver would remove any guarantee from the employee benefits detailed in the contract. Benefit plans — including those for health care, dental, retirement, life insurance, and disabilities — could be unilaterally changed by the University administration at any time with only 60 days notice to employees.”

On January 31, 2013, to draw attention to its own pay equity issues, University of Michigan lecturers participated in a Flash Mob in Mason Hall. Singing and dancing to the Aretha Franklin song, “Respect,” the union members asked for a contract and pay equity. Despite almost a decade of union representation, unionized parking lot attendants earn more per hour than some of the college’s part-time faculty, who are expected to hold graduate degrees, and unionized painters who work on the Ann Arbor campus earn higher salaries than the unionized lecturers.

You can view the lecturers’ Flash Mob performance below.

The day after the Flash Mob, university officials released this statement on their Human Resources website:

The University of Michigan and the Lecturers Employee Organization (LEO) opened negotiations on their fourth collective bargaining agreement on Nov. 30, 2012. The current agreement expires April 20, 2013.

The university recognizes the valuable contribution lecturers make to the university community and to the world-class education available to U-M students. A collaborative approach to bargaining has resulted in contracts that have demonstrated the value of lecturers to the university.

As the fourth contract is negotiated, U.S. universities face significant funding challenges. With tuition revenue now comprising the majority of the general fund at U-M, disciplined spending is increasingly important to the university’s goal of keeping tuition affordable. The university must be responsive to that challenge and intends to reach a negotiated agreement that serves the interests of the union, the faculty it represents and the academic enterprise of the university.
Negotiations Update

Latest Update: February 1, 2013

The University of Michigan and the Lecturers Employee Organization (LEO) opened negotiations on their collective bargaining agreement on Nov. 30, 2012. To date, the teams have had six regular bargaining sessions, scheduled for each Friday, and three small group sessions.

Currently, the open articles are salary, benefits plans, term of agreement, layoff, performance evaluation, and union security. The university has reached tentative agreements with the Union on:

Faculty support
Union rights
Professional development
Benefits eligibility

by P.D. Lesko

Republicans, Tea Partiers and malcontents have blamed Obamacare for the rise in health insurance premiums. Republicans in Washington complain that Obamacare will result in soaring costs for health care providers. Progressive Washington DC think tank Think Progress offered a different explanation for the rising cost of health insurance premiums. In August 2012, Think Progress published a piece titled, “Rising Health Costs, Not Obamacare, Are Increasing Insurance Rates…” In that piece we read: “It’s true that health insurance rates are rising, but data from Connecticut suggests it has nothing to do with Obamacare. Filings from Connecticut’s two largest health insurers, which both applied for double-digit rate increases this year, show that the insurance companies are not driving up their prices because Obamacare is leading them to do so. Rather, the rate increases are due to increasingly expensive health costs that are unaffected by the implementation of the health care law….Providers are raising their prices.”

Obamacare is designed to make health insurance more affordable by reforming payment models and reducing payments to hospitals—companies that have raised prices exponentially, costs that health insurance companies have passed right along to business owners, their employees and other consumers in the form of higher premiums.

The University of Michigan Health System rakes in around $2 billion dollars per year, and has operated at a profit since 1997. It’s an enviable track record, but one that has contributed to the dramatic rise in the cost of health care premiums in Michigan. According to research by the Washington, DC nonprofit  Families USA, “Over the past 10 years, Michigan’s working families have seen their health care costs go up significantly faster than their earnings. As a result, health insurance premiums now place a greater burden on family budgets than ever before. Premiums for job-based health insurance have risen rapidly over the past 10 years: Health insurance premiums for Michigan’s working families have risen by 76.5 percent—12.9 times faster than median earnings in Michigan.” According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 2000 and 2011, the cost of employer-provided health benefits in the state jumped a whopping 75 percent, on average to between $6,900 and $12,000 per family covered per year. Meanwhile, the cost of health insurance for individuals doubled from an average of $2,400 per year to $4,800.

In June 2011, Doug Strong, who oversees the University Hospital, C.S. Mott Children’s and Women’s Hospital, 30 health centers and 120 outpatient clinics told University of Michigan Regents that the construction of the new C.S. Mott Hospital and Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital would “squeeze” the UMHS budget. Strong told U of Regents he expected a $23.5 million budget shortfall in 2012. In June 2012, when Regents again approved the UMHS budget, they were told by UMHS administrators that increased patient demand would help move the UMHS back into the black by 2013. Over the next four months, however, the UMHS experienced “expenses…greatly exceeding our revenue.”

Six months after Doug Strong assured Regents that strong patient demand would help move UMHS “back into the black,” in December 2012, UMHS staffers were told that without cuts to the lowest paid workers (temp workers and part-timers), among others, administrators projected a $200 million annual gap in its budget by the end of 2020, or an almost 10-fold increase in the organization’s project 2013 deficit.

In 2009, the UMHS instituted a wage freeze. It was, in part, in response to a profit margin that dropped from 3.9 percent in 2007 to just 1 percent in 2009. Below, is a table of the UMHS annual revenues and operating (profit) margins:

In December 2012, Pescovitz sent out this email to all UMHS staff:

A message from Dr. Pescovitz, Doug Strong and Dean Woolliscroft

There is much political conversation about the country being at a fiscal cliff – a precipice of tax increases and spending cuts that will occur Jan. 1 unless the federal government gets its financial house in order.

We also find ourselves at a significant crossroad for our Health System, where larger-than-expected deficits now require us to focus intently on ensuring we have a positive margin for this year so that we have a solid foundation to weather expected financial pressures in the years ahead.

Our expenses after the first four months of our current fiscal year, which began July 1, are greatly exceeding our revenue, which leaves us with a much larger than expected financial challenge. Both the Hospitals and Health Centers and the Medical School need to considerably reduce operating expenses for the remainder of this fiscal year to offset this deficit.

One month ago, we asked leaders of each unit of the HHC and each academic and administrative area of the Medical School to consider how best to reduce expenses. The approaches were different for those two parts of our Health System, given how different the business and operations are for each.

HHC leaders were asked to develop detailed expense management plans to adjust to new revenue realities. Those plans included attrition management; reductions in appointment effort, overtime, temporary staff and contract labor; and savings from improvements in supply chain efforts.

In the Medical School, each of the departments underwent a “stress test” by looking at expenses should there be an additional 10 percent reduction in revenue to each unit. Each of the department leadership teams considered hard choices about what programs and projects could be reduced or cut to remain solvent, including support for unfunded research and targeting clinical areas where revenue could be enhanced. The Faculty Group Practice asked each of the Ambulatory Care medical directors to bring their margin back to at least the level of FY12; their detailed plans exceeded this goal.

All of our leaders have responded with plans that will significantly reduce our negative margin. But more work remains. We have not closed the gap between our expenses and our revenue for this fiscal year, and our challenges moving forward are growing.

By the end of the decade, the Health System may be facing a $200 million annual gap in our clinical margin. In the Medical School, the challenge to secure research funding will continue. The fiscal pressures on our federal and state governments are very real, and the actions taken by government will hit our Health System – and all hospitals and medical schools – hard.

Across-the-board cuts to reduce the federal budget deficit (also known as budget sequestration), could be the path our legislators take. If this happens, we will see a decrease in National Institutes of Health and medical education funding, potentially significant reductions in payments for hospital outpatient services and decreases in physician reimbursement.

These external forces make it more important than ever that we take meaningful and sustainable actions now to improve our operations and financial performance to prepare us for the financial pressures that will continue. The work we do now to create a positive margin for this fiscal year is the first phase of our cost-reduction efforts and will position us well, but we know that we must continue to look for more ways to improve processes, throughput and efficiency across our Health System, as we are doing through reductions in length of stay, improving capacity and access, expense management and revenue growth. In research, we are consolidating service contracts to reduce expenses, streamlining repairs to laboratory equipment and are using lean thinking to reduce the post-award management of externally-sponsored research.

Our strategic plan continues to be our roadmap: a combination of investing in growth in key areas and recognizing what we must stop doing to help improve our operating performance. Our rich history, excellence across each part of our mission and abundant assets afford us an opportunity that few other academic medical centers have to weather this period of financial uncertainty. But it will require diligence, hard work and undeterred focus to ensure we never stop seeking ways to improve.

We are committed to moving our Health System forward – strategically, strongly and effectively. We appreciate all you are doing to ensure The Michigan Difference continues to be more than words, but the palpable result of our commitment each day to make a lasting impression on all who come here for care, research and education.

Ora H. Pescovitz, M.D.
Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, U-M CEO, U-M Health System

Douglas L. Strong
CEO, University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers

James O. Woolliscroft, M.D.
Dean, Medical School
Lyle C. Roll Professor of Medicine

While the 2012 salary information of these administrators might be interesting, it wouldn’t tell the real story. Below, is a graph that charts the increases in salary given to the four top administrators. The graph shows that in the case of the Dean of the Medical School James O. Woolliscroft, M.D., between 2003 and 2011 his annual salary was tripled from $166,704 to $524,509. Doug Strong, CEO U of M Hospitals, saw his salary rise from $294,295 in 2003 to $612,000 by 2011. In contrast, the UMHS Senior Administrative Assistant’s salary (the purple graph line in the chart below) rose from $42,188 in 2003 to $53,921 in 2011, an increase of about 3 percent per year:

While the reduction in salary of any one or even all of the UMHS administrators who signed the email would not close the projected budget gap, focusing cuts, as Pescovitz writes, on “…attrition management; reductions in appointment effort, overtime, temporary staff and contract labor” is a strategy that targets the lowest paid employees—the most economically vulnerable, if you will. This strategy, combined with the immense increases in the compensation of top-level administrators over the past half a dozen years, and it’s a move that smacks of Wall Street-like business practices. The UMHS top-level administrators plan to squeeze revenues and savings out of lower- and middle-class workers to balance their budget. In light of their own pay and salary increases (even in the face of falling profit margins) Pescovitz, Woolliscroft and Strong’s strategy to return the UMHS to profitability smacks of white-shoed hubris and crass entitlement.  While we can congratulate the administrators for “freezing” their salaries in 2009, it’s also important to note that in 2010 Strong and Woolliscroft received 10-15 percent raises (helping them “catch up” on income lost during the sham pay freeze, one imagines). Meanwhile, the UMHS Senior Administrative Assistant, whose $51,324 salary was frozen, as well, received a 2 percent pay increase in 2010, or about $1,000, before taxes.

by Rob Smith

In an August 28, 2012 video interview, Michigan’s Republican governor told WaPo interviewer Nia-Malika Henderson that he and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney “have a lot of similarities.” Snyder urged Romney to “get a positive message out there.” Several times during the interview, Snyder talked about “job creation” and “a future for our kids.” He pitched Michigan as “the comeback state.” Michigan, he suggests, is a “great role model” for Washington, D.C., “which is a mess.”

Interestingly, Snyder told the WaPo “government doesn’t create jobs. We create an environment for jobs to flourish.” Someone needs to remind Snyder that the State of Michigan is spending tens of millions of dollars each year on 12 regional “job creation incubators,” such as Ann Arbor SPARK, which was most recently fingered for having spent $7.7 million in Michigan tax dollars in order to create only 79 jobs.

I wrote in a June 2012 post for A2Politico:

Over the past several years, Ann Arbor SPARK has siphoned millions of dollars away from the public schools through a TIF scam approved by Ann Arbor’s Mayor and City Council. First a financing authority was created (the local LDFA), then the LDFA is funded through tax-increment financing (TIF) similar to the way the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority is supported. A TIF district allows authorities like the LDFA and the DDA to skim the property taxes levied in the TIF district. The local LDFA then contracts with Ann Arbor SPARK for “business development services.”

Looks great on paper. Sounds good at a cocktail party. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. In practice, the LDFA and Ann Arbor SPARK have done little but rob taxpayers, public schools and the District library of millions of dollars. SPARK’s job creation numbers are suspect because the company has never allowed an outside audit, but rather fills out its own report and hands that over to the LDFA.

Keeping those facts in mind, in August 2011 Daily Beast ranked Michigan #1 on a Hit List of the Best States for Job Growth. The online news mag. pointed out, “With job creation shaping up to be one of the core issues of the 2012 presidential race, Newsweek/Daily Beast finds the boom states for business.” So how did DB evaluate states? “To find the 20 best states in America for job growth we considered three factors. First, a new poll and index from Gallup, which asked more than 100,000 employed people whether their companies are expanding or contracting, and provides an index score from the difference between the two; second, the change in seasonally adjusted unemployment rates, from the annual average for 2010 to the annual average to date, with data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; finally, each state’s 2010 average annual income, also with BLS data. Using z-scores (a measure of each state’s performance relative to the mean), each factor was equally weighted. The first two data sets examine opinions on job creation and raw unemployment numbers, while the third takes into account how well, in general, jobs in each state tend to pay. The result is a ranking of the states where, despite the recession, job growth is actually happening.”

Using these criteria, Michigan came out on top.

In May 2011, the right-leaning Mackinaw Center presented a somewhat different view of the same job creation data. Writer James Hohman linked the job creation numbers with the job loss numbers for an interesting interpretation. He writes:

Most news stories focus on the net job gains or losses because these are good indicators of whether an economy is improving or falling. There is a substantial lag to the release of gross job figures, however, making them less important to the day’s news. The monthly net job reports tend to show a state that is fairly stagnant — rarely adding or losing more than 2 percent of jobs in any year.

But the gross job creation and loss figures show the incredible amount of turnover in Michigan. In a given year, the state can add and lose 1 million jobs in gross, leaving no net gain. This means around one out of every four jobs is created and lost in the state every single year.

The latest release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that there were 216,561 private-sector jobs created in the third quarter of 2010, a gain of 6.8 percent of total jobs, or an increase of one job for every 15 existing jobs. The state also lost 191,483 private-sector jobs, a loss of 6.0 percent of total jobs, or a loss of one job for every 17 existing jobs.

Hohman points out that most of the jobs being created in Michigan are not the result of incubators, such as SPARK, but “from expansions and contractions of existing businesses….The state’s economic development programs are targeted at select industries and specific companies. The key areas of job growth and loss, however, are deep and broad and across industries. Incentive programs that look to assist with hundreds and sometimes thousands of jobs simply cannot keep pace with an economy that turns over hundreds of thousands of jobs every quarter.”

Hohman’s analysis explains why while there is job creation in Michigan and unemployment is down from 14.2 percent to 9.4 percent, childhood poverty is still a huge problem. In January 2012, about 6 months after Daily Beast tagged Michigan the best state for job growth, the HuffPost reported that:

An annual report examining the living conditions for children across Michigan finds high poverty rates satewide, and even bleaker news for kids living in the city of Detroit. The most recent Kids Count in Michigan Data Book shows a 13 percent jump in the number of kids living in poverty in the city between 2005 and 2009. It also finds that more than 80 percent of children in Detroit Public Schools now qualify for free student lunches. Jane Zehnder-Merrell, the study’s project director at the Michigan League for Human Services, told HuffPost children in both Detroit and around the state are suffering the impacts of the long recession. ”The general situation [in Detroit] pretty much mirrors what’s happening in Michigan in terms of trends, [but] the level of economic distress in the city is much more acute than the state as a whole,” Zehnder-Merrell said.”

As of January 2012, 23.5 percent of all Michigan children lived below the official U.S. poverty threshold. The 2012 report from the Annie E. Casey foundation indicated that extreme childhood poverty in Michigan has doubled since 2005, and that Michigan’s childhood poverty rates are among the highest in the nation. In Washtenaw County, where Governor Snyder lives, the percentage of kids who qualified for a free or reduced price school lunch rose from from 10,225 in 2005 to 13,886 in 2010. Unemployed adults rose from 8,795 to 14,782 during the same period, and unemployment rose from 4.2 percent to 8.1 percent.

Basically, Snyder suggested that Mitt Romney focus on jobs and kids, kids and jobs. After all, it’s what Snyder focused on in 2010 when running for governor and won. Political pundits rarely agree on everything, but in discussing the 2012 presidential election there is consensus: if Mitt Romney takes Michigan, he will take the White House. There is one other point of agreement between political observers writing about the 2012 election and that is this: Michigan’s governor will be of little use to Romney as he tries to flip the state. Snyder, a GOP outsider, can offer little in the way of an established political base or machine. In fact, Snyder has his own worries. While he has seen improvement in his poll numbers over the last few months—voters are now almost evenly divided on him with 42 percent approving and 44 percent disapproving—he could find himself with a Democratic legislature to work with next year. Democrats lead the generic legislative ballot in the state by a 45/37 margin, numbers that could translate into them regaining control of the State House.

by P.D. Lesko

Dr. Susan Martin, Provost and Senior Chancellor at the University of Tennessee, is probably wishing right about now her parents had chosen a different name. The other Dr. Susan Martin, the President of EMU, is presently embroiled in a scandal that, EMU insiders posit, may yet force her resignation. College trustees loathe negative publicity. The EMU president’s scandal was revealed on the heels of former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s Report which condemns former Penn State president Graham Spanier for attempting to cover up the Sandusky/Paterno scandal.

However, like Penn State’s protection of its football coaches and its football program, EMU President Susan Martin’s scandal—and the attempt to hush it up—should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to local politics.

This is how EMU was described by the news media in 2008, when Dr. Susan Martin (pictured right) was hired as the 22nd president: “Eastern Michigan University — an institution plagued in recent years by a series of presidential missteps, communication blunders and even tragedy – is scrambling to get back on its feet…But in recent years, the university has faced accusations that it’s too secretive and prone to scandal.”

A year after Dr. Martin took office, she hired disgraced former Ann Arbor City Council member Leigh Greden as her institution’s Director of Government Relations. According to 2007-2008 Freedom of Information Act requests filed by citizens and an Ann Arbor News piece published shortly before the paper closed in July 2009, Greden scripted debates via email, telling Council members what to say and when. He rigged votes. He shot off emails mocking the people on Council for whom he had little respect, including Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje. Greden summed up Hieftje’s penchant for self-aggrandizing in a December 17, 2007 mid-Council meeting email titled: “The script is back….But short.” Greden writes an invented dialogue that includes this bit of actual insight and foreshadowing:

John Hieftje: “I call this meeting to order. I just returned from an important conference of Mayors in Oscoda. I was the only attendee. I gave a speech to myself praising Ann Arbor’s LED and rail programs. If the Mayor of Grand Rapids had been there, he would have praised me.”

The “script” leaves one wondering exactly what kinds of dialogues Leigh Greden must be inventing for Sue Martin.

Ward 4 Council member Margie Teall and Ward 2 Council member Tony Derezinski were also caught up in the City Council email scandal which triggered a lawsuit—eventually, settled out of court. While on Council, Greden worked part-time for Miller Canfield, a law firm that has its collective fingers in many of Ann Arbor’s real estate development pots and (though its political PAC) political campaigns, including Greden, Hieftje and many of Hieftje’s cronies on Council. It was speculated that when Greden lost his Council seat, he lost his usefulness at Miller Canfield and so he moved on to EMU, an institution plagued by scandal and where, obviously, his own poor judgement and scandal could be overlooked by a president whose own 2005 DUI had been overlooked by the Trustees who hired her. Both Greden and Martin were rewarded with positions of responsibility and six-figure salaries.

One year after Martin hired Greden (pictured left), she and Greden were “elected” to serve on the Board of Ann Arbor SPARK as members of the group’s executive committee, joining Paul Dimond, a real estate attorney employed by Miller Canfield.

Small town minds. Incestuous small town politics. Midwestern sensibilities. AnnArbor.com, a news blog that was new then, but whose reporting awards are now the subject of public protests and the butt of jokes.

Just months after Greden was booted by voters, in 2010, AnnArbor.com endorsed Margie Teall for office making no mention of her part in the unprecedented email scandal that triggered a lawsuit the city was forced to settle on behalf of taxpayers.

Former AnnArbor.com education reporter David Jesse jumped ship to the Detroit Free Press, along with several of his colleagues. A few days ago, Jesse broke the story about EMU President Dr. Susan Martin’s one-the-job, public, drunken altercation with a graduate of EMU. The piece, particularly in light of former FBI director Louis Freeh’s scathing report that blames Penn State’s Board of Trustees for their “inaction” and “lack of oversight” of former president Graham Spanier, is not only timely, it’s very important news.

In May 2012 EMU’s Board of Trustees sent a two-page formal letter of reprimand to Martin in which the group urges her to seek help for her drinking, and makes clear that should she have any further alcohol-related incidents, she will be dismissed. Jesse writes that “Martin disclosed the letter to the campus community this afternoon, four hours after the university fulfilled a Freedom of Information Act request by the Detroit Free Press for Martin’s personnel file. EMU was due to respond last week to the Free Press’ request but asked for a delay because of the holiday week.”

What Jesse did not reveal in his July 10, 2012 news scoop is just who at EMU tipped him to file a Freedom of Information Act request for Martin’s personnel folder. An EMU staffer who works in administration, and who asked not to be named, said, “I could give you a long list of suspects. Sue Martin isn’t exactly beloved by all.” Clearly, someone at EMU knew about the incident, the letter of reprimand, and obviously felt like the incident should not be hushed up.

The other interesting aspect to this story is that AnnArbor.com education reporter Kellie Woodhouse either was not tipped, or if she was acted slowly, or chose to ignore the tip. Only after Jesse’s story broke, did AnnArbor.com quickly post a piece linking to the letter of reprimand and David Jesse’s reporting. On July 12, 2012, Woodhouse posted a piece about a series of emails between Dr. Martin and the individual involved in the April 2012 altercation.

The comments in response to the July 10th and July 12th AnnArbor.com stories about Martin’s behavior are almost uniform in their outrage that the incident was made public. The first comment under the AnnArbor.com July 12, 2012 piece begins:

It appears that the only people who acted inappropriately here were the members of the Board of Reagents. Really a reprimand for an argument where the President is defending her self, reputation as well the University prior Board’s decisions and its reputation? That justifies a reprimand and public humiliation? That justifies all the personal assumptions being made about her drinking? Where are all the other prior incidents in her file that are alluded to in the reprimand? Her file says she is doing an excellent job…..

Another comment rips Woodhouse and the rest of the media who have, of course, picked up the story.

The EMU regents or whoever made this thing public are fools. Poor EMU covered up a rape and murder in a dorm room of one of its students by the hands of a stranger and typical thug who invest the campus area and now they make the current President the butt of jokes in all of academia in Michigan. They should of fired her if they wanted to go public with this. Murder and Rape are not to be kept secret but publicizing someone’s drinking is shameful in the context EMU did it. Just look at how the media swarms all over this. That includes you Kellie Woodhouse.

One regular AnnArbor.com commenter suggests the whole episode is even boring and not even worth reporting: “I almost fell asleep reading those emails, they were so dull. Could annarbor.com put this non-scandal to rest and start reporting actual news?”

Yet another comment compliments Martin.

A bit of a case of much ado about nothing, eh? I will never understand society’s perpensity to be be angry/hateful towards others, and it appears that this may be the case here. As a student at EMU, I have appreciated Dr. Martin’s work. I understand that a student’s perspective is often different than a staff member, the community of a board member, but if you will, I hope she stays.

Meanwhile, at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Martin’s Republican political connections, and participation on the Board of “job creation” boondoggle Ann Arbor SPARK mean nothing. Between 1981-1984, Martin was the deputy state treasurer for Bureau of Local Government Services, serving for Republican William Milliken. Former Ann Arbor City Administrator Roger Fraser just “retired” from the city and walked into the same position for Republican Governor Rick Snyder.

While that kind of political mojo is obviously buying Martin all kinds of sympathy locally, it means little on the national stage. Unlike the first comment in response to the Woodhouse piece at AnnArbor.com which supports Martin, the first comment in response to the short write-up in The Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) sets the tone for the dozens that follow:

She is not the only such president around and should be getting the boot given her previous driving infraction and other alcohol-related incidents during her term as president of EMU (mentioned in the board’s letter, which can be found as a link from the Detroit Free Press article). One can be sympathetic to the difficulties of alcohol abusers, but they do not belong in responsible positions in which the lives of others and the fates of great institutions rely upon them. One wonders at the board’s judgment in retaining her.

Comment number two on CHE website points out the obvious connections between the national efforts to deal with alcohol abuse by students on college campuses nationwide (including EMU), and Martin’s scandal: “Not to mention being in a position which is supposed to set an example for the thousands of young adults for won she is in some way an authority figure.”

Subsequent comments slam the EMU Trustees:

If it is a repeated incident, it pretty much does.  This was not at a Christmas party, and she has a history. Besides that, get real. This is a college president who has publicly been told her drinking is a problem. How much more evidence do you need? You can also bet that there have been other incidents that have not been reported. These people are protected, and for a Board to go to these measures, it has to be serious. Unfortunately this Board never followed through, and for that they are hurting the University. They obviously are not professional.

Was that really the best EMU could do, hire a President with a DWI? It just amazes me. Then we have to be PC about her drinking problem when she is in charge of the lives of young people, as well as serving as a role model? I’m as liberal as most academics, but this is unacceptable.

Similarly, at InsideHigherEd.com, a short post about the incident earned similar comments, including this one:

Good grief. Who’s doing the presidential hiring at EMU? First John Fallon and his shenanigans and now this? I mean, yes, there’s a simple “human failings” factor to getting drunk and acting a fool, but it seems like there’s sort of a track record of poor decisions regarding leadership. If the criteria for determining what makes an ostensibly desirable chief executive are the same at EMU as they are at my institution, then I can understand how you end up with people like this, though.

In her letter to students, faculty and staff about the incident and the Trustees’ letter of reprimand, Martin writes: “As your President starting my fifth year, I made a vow to never cover up or hide anything.” Martin was asked if anything regarding the incident had been released to the public prior to the Free Press FOIA. She said, “No, but it is a personal matter and I needed time to digest that and consult with my team and decide how to move forward and how to share this information.”

Susan Martin subsequently agreed to donate her 2012 raise of about $9,000 to EMU’s alcohol educational fund, and plans to seek counseling. Should the furor over her hiring and reprimand not quickly die down, she may also be seeking a new job.