Laurie Stenberg Nichols got a nice homecoming present yesterday. After getting the surprise boot from the president’s chair at University of Wyoming (which wasn’t paying her enough anyway), Dr. Nichols gets to land on her feet in Spearfish, where she will interimly run Black Hills State until the Regents find a permanent replacement for BHSU President Tom Jackson, who is headed for Humboldt State in California:
A native of Colman, S.D., Nichols received her undergraduate degree in home economics education from South Dakota State University. She holds a master’s of education degree in vocational and adult education from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in family and consumer sciences education/family studies from The Ohio State University.
“We are so pleased to have Dr. Nichols serve as the interim president of Black Hills State University,” said Paul B. Beran, the regents’ executive director and CEO. “Her higher education experience and previous service in South Dakota’s public university system leaves little doubt that she will be an excellent guide for the university until a permanent leader is appointed. We welcome her back home to South Dakota.”
…“I am delighted to be returning to South Dakota to join the leadership team, faculty, staff, and students at Black Hills State University for the next year,” said Nichols. “I also look forward to returning to the Black Hills, the same region where I started my career as a high school teacher in Hill City some four decades ago. I anticipate a positive and productive year as BHSU searches for its next permanent president” [South Dakota Board of Regents, press release, 2019.06.03].
Nichols had said she planned to remain at UW in a faculty position. But given a choice between continuing to work as a demotée for capricious and sneaky trustees who spent $9,100 on a private jet flight to ruin her March vacation in Arizona and being a top exec for old bosses who clearly like her, Nichols made the happier choice, even if it’s just a one-year gig.
Besides, Laurie’s husband Tim just jumped ship from UW, where he was teaching honors courses, to dean the University of Montana Honors College in Missoula, and the Spearfish–Missoula drive is 88 miles shorter than the Laramie–Missoula drive.
And Spearfish—Spearfish! Who doesn’t love Spearfish? I’d take just about any gig that would give me another year in Spearfish.
Welcome back, Interim President Nichols. Hike Lookout Mountain, bike Spearfish Canyon, and make every Spearfish weekend an adventure.
We need an innovative conservative to head-up BHSU .. badly. But the revolving door from one ultra left liberal institution smacks of the lobbyist model in D.C. – we’ll probably get more of the same entrenchment and sordid domestic agenda aimed at the reduction of the family and erosion of human biological imperatives.
Oxymoron: “innovative conservative”? Is that like a flat-earther with a globe? An anti-vaxer with a shot record? A catholic priest teaching child development? An American firster who hires illegal immigrants? A three-time married guy who cheated on each wife and paid to cover it up?
The right-wing hand picked regents did an exemplary job appointing the present and past presidents of BHSU. Both elevated BHSU locally and regionally. It appears that Mr. Dale has no idea of what he wrote.
Political ideology is not a primary criterion that should be used in selecting the leader of an institution of higher education. But as the second John notes, South Dakota’s university presidents are all chosen by a club appointed by conservative governors, so it seems unlikely that first John’s critique has any relevance to Black Hills State University or any other public university in South Dakota. I suspect first John’s comment is only a generic critique of higher education that will distract us from discussing the specifics of curriculum and administrative practices at BHSU and the merits of Nichols’s leadership… but I will invite first John to explain to us specific aspects of teaching and management at Black Hills State—not generic critiques of liberals in higher ed, but specific things witnessed at BHSU—that were made worse by specific decisions of specific professors and administrators that can be fixed by an “innovative conservative.”
I’d also like to see specifics on Dr. Nichols’s political ideology and how it manifested itself in previous academic positions.
Second John is right: by definition, conservatives do not innovate—”make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.” They exnovate, taking measures to ensure that past practices are preserved and insulated from change.
That people regard institutions of higher education as political indoctrination centers for imposing ideologies on students is evidence, as is the election of Trump, of the cultural and intellectual deterioration of the U.S. In listing the qualifications for regents, most states list general characteristics and, like South Dakota, restrict the number of members who can belong to one political party. For many years, even though regents are political appointees, governors tried to nominate people who had substantial experience and knowledge in higher education–people whose professions require staying abreast of developments in their disciplines, ex-presidents, deans, professors, etc. That custom has devolved into a situation in which most appointees are political operatives. Of South Dakota’s nine regents, all but one are primarily from business. Dr. Wink has been a professor. This orientation is further reflected in the appointments of college presidents. Outside of a few prestigious universities on the coasts, hardly any are headed by people who are eminent scholars.
Most college presidents are chosen for their potential to raise funds. In the past, a college president was regarded as the lead scholar on a campus, leaving the business administration to a finance officer who was responsible to the lead scholar.
The universities for which some parents were caught paying bribes to get their children admitted are prestigious because the of the quality of scholarship they have attained under leadership that makes it their main purpose.
The Wyoming cabal that fired Dr. Nichols in the way it handled the matter provides an indication of why prospective students and professors should be wary of the institution.
yeah, who wants to live in the Wyoming Rockies anyway?
This shows just the tip of the iceberg in SD Regent’s secrecy, power and individual wealth and opportunities, just like with Wyo Trustees. we sneak around in the Missouri breaks, less visible to the free press/capitalism press than on the high shoulder of the snowy/sierra madre ranges. then there are fossil fuel interests lurking more so in Wyo too. look at the mess government and pipelines have created closer to home. Uranium too.
SD is a parochial state, easy to manipulate by lawyers for greedy corporate interests.
All the lawyers that enabled EB5/MCEC ect. REGENTS, REGENTS, REGENTS!