By GARRETT SAGER
Hays Post
The first in a series of stories examining the change of leadership at Fort Hays State University.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, an abrupt change in the leadership of Fort Hays State University occurred, as Dr. Mirta M. Martin announced her resignation from the office of president via an email to faculty, staff and students.
The news sent shockwaves through the community and FHSU families both near and far, as many were surprised by the announcement of Martin’s resignation, in which she cited “personal reasons.”
But, with discontent swirling on the campus in recent months, some saw the move as a foregone conclusion.
“I knew it was inevitable. But still, when it actually happened, it was unexpected,” said Carl Miller, FHSU Faculty Senate president and associate professor in the philosophy department.
Miller said he was almost certain that Martin’s presidency would not survive the events of recent months, but nobody anticipated a change would come this soon. Miller headed up a months-long internal investigation into the presidency, publicly speaking about that probe during a Kansas Board of Regents meeting on the FHSU campus earlier this month.
“I thought it was possible she would leave over the semester break, but the most likely scenario (was) her leaving at the end of the academic year,” Miller said.
A member of the Kansas Board of Regents reportedly was scheduled to be on the FHSU campus Monday for a meeting with Martin, but after her resignation, that meeting was canceled. A press release issued by the KBOR the day of the resignation offered no reason for Martin’s departure, but thanked Martin for her commitment to Fort Hays State.
According to Breeze Richardson, director of communications for the Regents, “the board does not anticipate making additional comments regarding this matter.”
Martin will serve as a consultant to the university. However, with Martin vacating her FHSU residence and relocating to her family in the Virginia area, it remains unclear the extent of those consulting duties.
Richardson said Martin will continue in the consulting role through June 30.
There is debate on the FHSU campus whether Martin’s departure was forced by the Regents, an idea Miller disputes.
“(The) Board of Regents tends to keep these things pretty quiet,” Miller said. “The Board of Regents is very conservative and does not force people out unless there is good reason. My best guess is she saw the writing on the wall and realized this was not a battle she was going to win.”
Among those who believe the KBOR laid down an unjust ruling in an untimely fashion was Yuri Yerastov, FHSU Faculty Senate secretary and assistant professor of linguistics.
“The resignation came the day before Thanksgiving, which is an indication that the resignation was forced,” Yerastov said. “I believe she was forced out. She seemed to be someone who would fight to the end for the right causes, but I believe that the Kansas Board of Regents and Carl Miller, the Faculty Senate president, forced her to resign.”
Yerastov said he has spoken with Martin since her resignation and said she is “heartbroken” over the situation. Yerastov blamed Miller for giving the KBOR misguided information that did not tell the whole story.
“Many of the criticisms were generalizations without any evidence supporting facts,” Yerastov said.
Yerastov points to one particular situation in which Miller presented to the Faculty Senate a letter from an unidentified alumnus from the Kansas City area that detailed 14 allegations against Martin.
Yerastov claims the document itself has never been seen by anyone other than Miller. He said faculty members have been asked to simply believe what Miller has said was true.
“Carl Miller would say, ‘If you knew what I knew about this document, then you would realize this is the right thing to do right now,'” Yerastov said. “That is not right logic to me.”
Yerastov strongly believes this was Miller’s way of ousting Martin at an improper time.
While Miller does not have the power to dismiss a president, but Miller did offer the KBOR the following during the Faculty Senate meeting in November:
“So my goal in doing these things is not to force Dr. Martin to resign. My goal in doing all of this is to give you all the evidence so that you force her to do so,” he said at the meeting earlier this month.
“My goal was to gather the evidence and present it in a way to be compelling to the university community, the Board of Regents, and to the administration,” Miller told Hays Post this week.
Yerastov also disputed one of the more public complaints against Martin — a letter signed by 100 faculty and staff members.
Miller delivered that letter, which outlined claims made by a number of faculty and staff members, to the Regents. The letter included allegations of “speaking repeatedly with heightened emotion, only supported by anecdote; a(n) impulsive attitude towards faculty members; threats to job security of faculty and staff if they failed to support her plans for the university; emotionally driven decisions on personnel and programs; cronyism in hiring practices; loss of autonomy and creativity; lying and backtracking of previously made comments; and lying about the financial situation at Fort Hays State University.“
Yerastov was quick to question those claims, saying he never personally witnessed such behavior from Martin. Instead, he pointed to the potential of sexism and racism playing a role in an anti-Martin crusade.
“(Being emotional and impulsive) are interesting accusations,” Yerastov said. “It’s a very common stereotype to think of women as emotional, and it is further a very common stereotype to think of Hispanics as being impulsive. What I see here is the voicing of deeply entrenched stereotypes. People did not like having a Hispanic woman from the beginning. I believe many of those accusations stem from a deep-seated racism and sexism. … She was never given a chance.”
Miller denied racism or sexism were factors in the investigation into Martin, the university’s first female president as well as the first Hispanic president in the Regents system.
“Those that say we held some ill will toward her because she was a woman or Hispanic are simply misinformed and wrong and I cannot believe those accusations would exist and hold no validity,” Miller said. “A lot of information was gathered, enough to be alarmed. It wasn’t that anyone was opposed to her because she was Hispanic or a woman. This was simply to discover the truth.”
In fact, Miller said he was excited about the hire of Martin, because it brought in a breath of fresh air.
“All the people that I have worked with were excited about her arrival, wished her well and had high hopes for the future,” he said.
But Yerastov said he has personally witnessed sexist comments directed at Martin while she was present in the room at both Faculty Senate meetings and American Association of University Professors (AAUP) union meetings.
Yerastov paraphrased a quote from an AAUP bargaining unit member that he said came out of a two-plus-hour meeting with Faculty Senate members, Martin and AAUP bargaining unit members.
“The first reason we cannot trust Dr. Martin is that her husband does not live with her,” Yerastov claimed the bargaining member said.
“We live in the 21st century,” Yerastov said. “It is beyond sexist to make statements like that and is not even legal.”
Miller denies hearing sexist comments made about Martin.
Yerastov pointed to an institutional racism on campus, noting said he has heard anecdotes of a Hispanic provost in the 1990s being mocked for his English-speaking skills and harassed.
“This is the same playbook that is very similar to what we have observed with Dr. Martin,” Yerastov said.
Looking into President Martin
Prior to opening his investigation into Martin, Miller said he had nothing but pleasant interactions with Martin.
“When I began this process two months ago, I was under the assumption that everything she said was true, that she was a good manager, and that she was treating people with respect because my encounters with her, she was very polite with me and I assumed she was that way across the board with everybody,” Miller said.
Most of the faculty, he said, had a similar perspective because they were unaware of what happens behind closed doors and at meetings. But once they began collecting the stories and corroborating those stories from multiple people, Miller said real issues started to appear.
“From the beginning, we encouraged people to write to the Kansas Board of Regents,” he said.
Yerastov still believes the truth has not been told and that it was a small group of faculty members who shared their grievances and won — a contention Miller disputed.
“It wasn’t just a few people that were disgruntled. There was more than enough evidence given to us and corroborated by others to back up the claims to which we knew there was an issue,” Miller said.
Miller said many factors come into play when trying to grasp the complete story of Martin’s departure and the players involved.
There are public things on which Miller is free to comment, he said, such as how the financial statements that show administration spending has increased by $1 million a year. That increase, he alleges, is largely due to Martin hiring former colleagues, creating positions for them and using her position to get her “friends” around her.
However, a lot of the documentation is based upon a person’s willingness to come forward, which is a challenge, Miller said.
“One of the biggest challenges is that the stuff we know to be true we cannot share publicly because it may identify someone who is nontenured or people in positions from which they may be removed,” Miller said, adding that while the information is not public, it is in the hands of the Regents. “We’re not making any of these claims up. The Kansas Board of Regents are in possession of everything, so if there was pressure from them, it was because of all the information they have in their possession.”
Evidence had been gathered over the last three months, and even started before Miller opened up his own investigation, he said.
“Prior to my own investigation being opened up, an FHSU alumnus wrote a letter to the Board of Regents, detailing 14 separate instances of mismanagement and abuse of power,” he said.
While Miller said he was able to find sufficient evidence of lack of leadership and unprofessional acts by Martin in the two months, he said it was actually the act of an alumnus that sparked the Regents’ own look into the situation at FHSU.
He said the document included a list of people who could verify the allegations. Miller declined to provide a copy of the letter, citing the wishes of its author.
Miller said the KBOR hired a lawyer and began contacting the people listed in the document and, according to Miller, they were able to verify through those sources a number of items on the list from the alumnus.
“So, really, the Board of Regents have been looking into this long before we even began looking into it,” he said.
According to Miller, he did not begin looking into Martin until faculty members asked him to look into a proposal regarding caps and overloads.
A course cap is the limit of students that can be in a single class. The FHSU administration had floated a loose proposal that would, if implemented, raise the cap sizes, which would lead to a larger student-to-faculty ratio.
Overload courses are classes taught by professors outside of their contract with universities, which serves as additional income for faculty members.
Martin requested that overloads be limited, and instead, give those classes to adjunct professors making less money than faculty.
Martin’s administration listed three reasons why limits on overload classes were needed, Miller said: to save money, save jobs and to be a good steward of state resources.
At the request of his peers, Miller began looking into the caps and overload proposal and claims he found misinformation given out by the administration, claims that were untrue and arguments that did not hold up under scrutiny.
While the proposal was meant as a way to save money, Miller said no research or calculations had actually been done by the administration. After the calculations were completed by the Faculty Senate, Miller said the university would only save about $1,000 per overload class.
Miller interpreted the “save jobs” portion of the justification as a veiled threat that cutbacks would be made if the change wasn’t, noting Mike Barnett, FHSU Vice President of Administration and Finance, has said the change it is not necessary to save jobs.
Yerastov claims this is more misguided information by Miller and that it was more a presentation of a possible idea rather than trying to implement the caps and overloads policy right away.
However, in a recent meeting, several faculty members claimed Martin did indeed speak of this policy change happening as soon as January. According to Miller, it was described more as an edict that the policy would be implemented in January.
Miller also alleged there had been several reported instances of Martin backtracking on comments, which caused him to begin to ask new questions.
“If this is true, in this case, then is it possibly true in other things that we believe? So then we began digging deeper,” Miller said.
He began soliciting information from several department chairs throughout the university, faculty members would slide papers under his office door of lists of information, a whole department gave him a list of 19 different things to look into, a faculty member wrote an 11-page summary detailing grievances — and then Miller started compiling his own list, which was four pages with 45 different items.
“We had emails, signed documents, signed statements and financial ledgers, so, in the end, we concluded that there was no doubt that this stuff was happening, that it was real, and that the university would be better off if that type of leadership was not here,” Miller said.
The survey
In October, Dr. Gary Brinker, who acted as principal investigator for the Faculty Senate, developed a survey to be sent out to the faculty that covered university policies as well as class caps and overloads. Brinker serves as director of the Docking Institute, but was serving in his capacity as Senator when he developed the survey. (Story clarified, 12/1/16)
While questions arose about how the information gathered in that survey was presented to faculty and the Regents, details are unlikely to be made public.
The survey has since been determined by an internal Institutional Review Board to have had a conflict of interest. The IRB has placed a gag order on the survey, which means the data contained therein likely will never become public and those involved are prohibited from discussing it.
Divided campus
Martin’s departure has left deep divisions in its wake.
“It is true the campus is divided, and somehow we need to overcome that,” said Yerastov.
Miller said the university will be fine, and that FHSU will be able to recover from the turmoil that has enveloped the campus in recent months.
“We’ll strengthen our relationships and mend the friendships that were broken,” Miller said.
What is next?
Barnett will act as the university’s acting president until the KBOR can name an interim president. Barnett, who grew up in Atwood and earned his bachelor’s degree from FHSU in 1979, joined the university in 2004.
“Most of us are excited that Mr. Barnett is the acting president, and we think he’ll be a steady hand at the wheel in this time of transition,” Miller said.
KBOR will next meet Dec. 14 in Topeka, with an interim president possibly being named. In recent transitions in Kansas, the person chosen as the interim will serve for a year while the KBOR conducts a national search to fill the position.
Martin, whose cellphone and email were shut down almost immediately after the announcement, was unable to be reached for comment.