Illinois House Votes For an Elected BOT
Good News!
HB 3289 passed on a vote of 113 to 1, and now heads to the Senate for consideration.
Of course Illinois Republicans pushed the switch to a Governor-appointed Board of Trustees, back when Illinois was in the midst of a long line of Republican Governors. Now they’re singing a different tune.
The News-Gazette thinks that this is because of Chief Illiniwek. I’m sure that’s true in part, yet I can’t imagine that an elected BOT would really make a difference on this issue—no BOT will want to exclude Illinois from NCAA events and enter another 10 year phase of lawsuits and protests over this.
Most importantly, this (if passed by the Senate and signed by the Gov) will discourage the rampant cronyism that’s infected the Board ever since this change converted BOT positions into patronage perks for the Governors friends and donors. Good news all around.
One worry however: the News Gazette points out that under the proposed system there will be eight candidates, each of whom will come from separate districts in Illinois. This seems a little worrisome, insofar as such districts might tend to minimize the importance of voters in areas of concentrated population (i.e. Chicago), and give undue influence to white rural conservatives (as electoral politics do on a federal level, of course). This may not be a problem now with a democratic Governor and state legislature, but it will certainly become one if/when Repubs take over state Government. The old system of state-wide election of representatives was advantageous for Democrats, since voters tend (with good reason) to vote Democratic on issues of education, particularly when the candidates running are not well known to them (candidates for the UI BOT were rarely well known to voters).
It will also be interesting to see whether the UI Alumni Association will try to reassert a role in nominating candidates to run for these positions.
Despite a few concerns, this seems like good news for the University of Illinois, and the Democratic process, insofar as a system of regional elections will give voters the opportunity to know more about the candidates for whom they’re voting. Some Republicans may assume that this will push the BOT to discriminate against same-sex couples and reinstate its racist mascot and so forth; however I suspect that such retrograde reversals are unlikely to come to pass. We’ll see, I suppose.
May 1st, 2007 at 9:40 pm
I wouldn’t count on popular election to eliminate cronyism. The Board of Regents at the University of Michigan is popularly elected, but the universe of possible nominees is effectively limited to party fundraisers.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Good point. One reason I was wondering in this post about whether the UI Alumni Association would try and reassert its old role in selecting BOT candidates. Before things got all out of control in the 90’s, there was an odd tradition in Illinois, according to which the Republican and Democratic parties of Illinois would both nominate candidates for the BOT that were suggested by the UI Alumni association. There was no legal system for this, and the whole thing started to break down when one party or the other started ignoring this rule in the 90’s; however for many decades this unofficial system (despite its basically undemocratic nature) produced some BOT members who were not totally terrible. When they switched to a governor-appointed system in the 90’s, there was for a time a desire (expressed by President Ikenberry) to have the governor chose from candidates nominated by a “blue-ribbon panel.”
So, I’m curious to see whether any such mechanism will be introduced to prevent the cronyism of the last decade from re-emerging under the new system. I must confess however that I think that even if no such mechanisms are proposed, that things will be less bad on the BOT than they are today.