The headline for this post just about says it all. I cannot absolutely confirm that this is true, but I’ve heard it enough, from people I consider reliable and well informed, so I believe it overwhelmingly likely to be true; I’ve not seen documents that prove this (but I’m told they exist). Further, it is reported that VP Stroh hired this assistant without the required approval for hiring someone, thus violating University rules. And the rate of pay would make this assistant one of the highest paid university employees — not bad work if you can get it, eh? All this, plus VP Stroh’s widely acknowledged dismal job performance over the last year, apparently explain the motivation and timing of the decision to put her on paid admin. leave. Normally I don’t repeat rumors that I can’t myself verify to be true, but the widespread concern around campus for why VP Stroh was removed from her duties requires an explanation.
The vague statements put out by Welch Hall merely fan the rumor mill, and hint of a coverup. And there are some pretty vicious rumors circulating that I believe to be baseless; the sooner the facts of the matter are made known, the sooner the University’s interests, as well as those of the affected parties, will be protected. So I think it best serves the University to have reports of this unauthorized hiring made available on emutalk. Let the facts be known to a candid campus at the earliest opportunity. Who will be the first to FOIA the relevant documents? How many have already been destroyed?Normally a paid administrative leave is preliminary to further disciplinary actions (such as firing) or a holding pattern for the duration of an investigation of alleged misconduct by the employee. What’s strange is that EMU has an at will policy that permits an immediate termination of an administrator for any reason whatsover: But this policy was not used against VP Stroh, and hence she’s still on full salary; of course, Welch hall officials are always nervous about using the at will policy for “important” administrators (as opposed to mere underlings). If the aim of the employer was to merely reassign Stroh, then there’d be no need to publicly announce that she was being removed from her job. Likewise if it was a regular case of an administrator preparing to leave EMU for another job (the “long exit” option currently being permited to the failed VP of Advancement), then there’d be no need for a public statement. The seeming abruptness of the imposition of paid leave, and the public announcement of it, indicate serious problmes with Stroh. VP Stroh’s mismanagement of the EMU budget involves many millions of dollars in errors. EMU raised tutiion more last year that we needed to, and cut academics needlessly, in no small part because of those errors, and she was preparing to put Eastern thru the same wringer again for 08-09. That alone would be enough to at will an administrator, but apparently there was much more afoot as well. Yet still the VP gets a “well paid vacation” instead of termination.
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Two comments, more or less editorial:
* I inserted a “read more” post to make this long post a little more readable in relation to others. One of these days, I’m also gonna have to show Mark how to insert some paragraphs….
* Keep in mind that your rumor mileage will vary, and I feel a little unsure as to whether or not this is really an appropriate forum for this kind of thing. On the one hand, Stroh was a pretty high-paid and high-ranking employee at EMU. Her job status was important enough to merit an announcement from the Provost’s office and a mention on WEMU as news. On the other hand, it’s not like she hushed up a murder.
But who is this golden assistant and what was his/her duties? To do Stroh’s job for her? And, is the assistant still on board?
Unfortunately, rumors like this only bring up more and more questions.
It is my understanding that this person was hired as a consultant to fill in as Budget Director until Vicky Bagrehzadeh could be replaced.
Well, if it was a consultant, that doesn’t sound as bad as an employee hired behind the scenes (which is the impression given above). Consultants are hired all the time w/o benefits, etc. by companies to serve special purposes and if their skill set is high, then they could indeed make more $ on a part-time basis. I don’t know about EMU, but they certainly wouldn’t go through the usual hiring approval process as a regular employee (at least the companies I consult for don’t handle it that way).
Mark – Did you just extrapolate the consultant’s rate to arrive at the $144,000 amount or was it the figure you were given? It wouldn’t be an accurate comparison to do so, just like you wouldn’t want to compute a unique software consultant’s fee relative to an in-house IT employee.
I guess I’m not convinced that the above issue is so scandalous the more I think about it. Of course there are budget limitations, but people in the senior administrative positions should be able to hire consultants on a different track than regular employees. Unless this person was promised a full-time job at some point…
BrianAlum, good questions. The figure is what I was told; i did not extrapolate it. Further, EMU policy does not allow officials to hire consultants without approval to do so. I was told that this person was hired as an aide to Stroh, part time, at the rate of pay I cited. So far, no one has disputed those claims. (The budget director is of course, in EMU’s organizational structure, an aide to the VP of Bus & F iannce, but i don’t know what duties this aide had.) I am told, and I do believe, that this unauthorized hiring was part of why Stroh was put on what one of her fellow former top administrators called, in another context, “a paid vacation”, but I cannot prove it.
WEMU is about to announce that an Ann Arbor firm has been hired to act as VP of Finance. His name is John Lumm, worked at Ford Motor Company in finance for 28 years.
Here’s the information Alum is talking about:
http://blog.mlive.com/annarbornews/2008/03/emu_hires_interim_cfo_after_ad.html
Thanks, Mike & Alum, for this info.
In the last few days I’ve been approached by a variety of people who would like me to “clarify” what I said in this original post a few days ago. These are from EMU people who I trust, but who fear, for diverse reasons, speaking out themselves.
My original post resulted from being urged to make this post by people in B&F who were most unhappy about how their Division was run by Stroh and by her predecessor, Steve Holda (whose career before coming to EMU was in the auto industry). They felt that this “aide” to Stroh was just someone hired to do her job, which she was clearly incapable of doing, at a high rate of pay. There were also hard feelings about how communications were handled within the Division. Understandably.
However, I have also heard that this aide/consultant was indeed hired with the appropriate approval, and that this hiring was not at all related to the firing of VP Stroh. (Stroh’s paid administrative leave is ending next week.)
Normally I don’t post ANY of the many things that I am asked to post here. I listen, and I check things out, and pursue those items that most interest me, and that I have direct knowledge of. But my friends in B&F are dismayed by how badly they’ve been treated, and by upper management’s long term indifference to what they need to do their jobs. Ethical and competent supervision is chief among those needs, and that’s been absent for many years. They saw the hiring of this high priced new aide as an affront and as an example of out of touch decisions.
Clear? Maybe not. One thing I am not clear on is whether the hiring of John Lumm as an interim CFO is the same hiring, or a different one, than what had so many people upset. And I don’t find any public statements by university officials that address this — and in the absence of information, rumors spread, and distrust grows. One of the rumors that is afoot now is that lots of lower level persons in B&F are about to be fired — as a way of making the little guys pay for the sins of the VPs.
I think this post has served to clarify some of the facts. A clear statement in a timely way would have done more, but then again, Welch hall has not yet figured out whether it really wants to operate transparently or not.
I thank everyone who’s spoken to me about this matter, especially those who brought it up to me at the Distinguished Faculty Awards ceremony yesterday.
And may Mr Lumm have every success at EMU.
There once was a man from Ann Arbor,
Who was hired to create a new ardor,
When asked what he’d done,
He said: “that sum equals Stroh’s bum,”
Which everyone now knows is fodder.