Senator White recently introduced SB 5182, which would eliminate the Higher Education Coordinating Board.  The bill passed out of the Senate Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee and will get a hearing in the Senate Ways and Means Committee on Thursday.

If the initial hearing was a harbinger of things to come, the Ways and Means Committee will hear from a parade of past and present HEC Board members and staff who will talk about the solid policy and oversight work that the HEC Board gives to the state.  But the more interesting part of the testimony will be the pious subtext about the value of a courageous “citizen” board that protects students, the legislature, and the governor from the lying, greedy miscreants who work at universities. 

Setting aside for a moment our umbrage at the implication that those of us at universities aren’t citizens, we think that the good senators on Ways and Means would do well to pay attention to that subtext.  Senator White’s bill responds to the complete disconnect that has developed between the HEC Board and the universities.  For the most part, the HEC 

Board lives in a theoretical world of a master plan that bears no relationship to the actual situation on the ground at our universities.  And, right or wrong, the people at universities feel that the HEC Board regularly fails to even minimally stick up for us, sometimes even to the point of joining the chorus that keeps insisting that we can continue to do more for less. 

So we hope that the senators ask some basic questions about the genuine value that the HEC Board adds to one of the best university systems in the country.