For many years the University of Connecticut has been considered the fourth branch of state government, since it tends to get whatever it wants from the governor and General Assembly no matter its failings.
All the university has to do is trot a winning basketball team through the state Capitol every year, whereupon problems and questions are buried under an avalanche of fawning and gush.
For a while this month there was talk that the university’s domination of state government might increase because President Radenka Maric’s contract is up for renewal, the university’s Board of Trustees is said to be unhappy with her, and some people were trying to recruit House Speaker Matt Ritter to succeed her. Ritter indulged the speculation for a while but this week said he’d stick with a fourth term as speaker in January.
But something still is up at UConn, since the University of Wisconsin has announced that Maric has applied to become chancellor of its Madison branch. It’s not clear whether she wants to leave UConn or is just protecting herself against the possible dissatisfaction of the trustees. But the other day she seemed to take a crack at Ritter. “This university has been always run by academics,” she said, “and I believe it is going to remain that way.”
The rap against Ritter was that he has no experience in management of higher education and that his appointment would be raw political patronage, since his father, Thomas Ritter, a former House speaker himself, long has been a UConn trustee.
But if experience in higher education management was so important, UConn’s Board of Trustees wouldn’t be letting Maric get away. Besides, these days experience in higher education management isn’t much of a virtue in Connecticut, what with the recent financial and sexual misconduct scandals in top management at the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system and UConn’s own arrogant decision to change the name of its basketball stadium, the Harry A. Gampel Pavilion, to the M&T Bank Arena.
Gampel was the UConn graduate, real estate developer, and philanthropist whose $1 million donation in 1989 for the basketball stadium’s construction earned him naming rights. UConn has just resold those rights to M&T Bank for 20 years for $32.5 million. The facility now will be called the M&T Bank Center at Gampel Pavilion.
Nothing distinguishes the “center” from the “pavilion” — they are the same place. But the bank has bought top billing, subverting Gampel, and Gampel’s family resents the swindle. Now that UConn is obliged to pay big salaries to its varsity athletes, maybe it also will start selling naming rights to the stadium’s concession stands and restrooms.
In a letter to the Hartford Courant, Gampel’s family writes that when UConn awarded naming rights to their forebear, “no one expected that commitment to be breached. That is why students, alumni, athletes, and his children and grandchildren are angry.” The family asks: “How will the future of naming rights be affected? Should a promise to a donor, accepted in good faith, be sold to any corporate bidder?”
Those are fair questions. The answer is that UConn is for sale.
Matt Ritter has no higher education management experience but as House speaker for nearly six years he has cordially managed and maintained the respect of 151 elected officials with egos and pretensions almost as large as those of academics. That might be skill enough.
Or maybe not. Odell Shepard, an English professor at Trinity College in Hartford and a Connecticut historian who served a term as the state’s lieutenant governor 80 years ago, said afterward that he had intimately experienced politics at the state Capitol and politics in higher education and had found the latter far more cutthroat.
Even so, those who promoted Ritter for UConn’s presidency might have thought he could tie the university even closer to state government and get it still more of what it wants, if that’s possible. UConn could do worse — as the CSCU system has done.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.