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May 28- June 3, 2009
editorial@boulderweekly.com
 (Editor's note: The version of the article that follows contains several corrections.)
Stop the presses
Citing budget issues, CU eliminates its faculty newspaper. But is there more at stake than money?
by Erica Grossman
Thea Evans places her hands on top of a desk plated with glass and reflects.
“I am really going to miss this light table,” she says.
The old hand-crafted table, once used to lay out the Silver & Gold Record (SGR), the University of Colorado’s faculty and staff newspaper, has remained a staple of the office even though computers long ago rendered it useless.
Evans, the advertising manager at the SGR, has used the table as part of the office workspace since joining the paper seven years ago. Now, she is not sure whether it will wind up in the garbage or a museum.
Down the hall, offices and desks are vacant. Phones remain silent. No one is typing or printing documents or debating excitedly the topic of a story. This silence is the sound of a newspaper dying.
Like many other newspapers across the region and nation, the impending death of the Silver & Gold Record is being attributed to an inadequate business model in a down economy. Those who fund the paper claim that a budget crisis has left them no choice but to shut down the paper completely.
But unlike other newspapers facing similar crises, the SGR is funded by the same organization it is charged with covering — the University of Colorado (CU). As the main source of inter-campus communication and information concerning all things CU-related, the 39-year-old Silver & Gold Record has been considered not only a university resource, but a watchdog, keeping an eye on the administration of Colorado’s flagship university. It’s these roles that the SGR plays — along with the sudden announcement that it would close — that lead many within the CU system to question the circumstances behind SGR’s demise. CU administrators adamantly assert that the decision to eliminate the SGR was based on finances alone, but others believe that the university is using budget cutbacks as an excuse to do something they’ve long wanted to do — squelch a major forum for dissent at the university.
• • •
At the quiet headquarters of the SGR, editor Jefferson Dodge sits at a table in the office. Normally, he would be the on the other side of this interview, asking questions. But those questions may be the reason his office will soon be empty.
“We were all surprised by it,” he says of the decision to eliminate the SGR in its entirety. “I think we underestimated the administration.”
Only a few weeks prior to the May 1 announcement of the SGR’s closing, the future of the SGR was on an entirely different path.
On April 10, Dodge and the SGR were informed that they were going to face a budget cutback to the tune of 25 percent. The SGR, funded mostly by the Office of the President, with additional funding coming from advertising revenues, received the announcement, and its staff quickly went to work on the budget. Throughout the following week, they came up with the best approach to eliminating 25 percent of the paper’s expenses. They would cut back on the number of issues they published. Full-time staff members would face an 18-percent salary cut. Some sections of the paper would be eliminated entirely. They presented this new budget to CU’s administration.
But within 20 days, a 25-percent budget cut would transform into the elimination of the newspaper in its entirety.
• • •
“We’re editorially independent and don’t have prior review of our articles,” says Dodge. “As you can imagine, there have been stories that the administration didn’t appreciate us running.”
At a university where scandals routinely make national headlines, the SGR has served as a forum of dissent among faculty and staff — and not always to the satisfaction of the administration that funds it. In April, for example, SGR ran an article about Paul Rodriguez, a UC-Denver employee who fought an effort to demote him and won. It was the first article about the issue that gave equal weight to Rodriguez’s side of the story. When Shelly Hubing, Rodriguez’s wife, also employed through the system with the University of Colorado Cancer Center, suspected that her university e-mails were being intercepted, breaching the Cancer Center’s confidentiality, SGR covered that, as well. Twice the university told Hubing that her e-mail was not being intercepted. However, a third-party investigation found that Hubing’s e-mail had, indeed, been scrutinized. The matter is once again being put to the CU authorities.
It is stories like these that have given the university’s faculty and staff — about 24,000 people across the four-campus system — confidence in the SGR. It’s also stories like these that have led to tension between the paper and CU’s brass.
But it was a smaller, seemingly less controversial article about the SGR’s own budget cuts that some say resulted in the administration’s decision to ax the paper.
After presenting their reduced budget to the president’s office, Dodge told administrators that the SGR was going to write a piece about the impending financial cuts. Though these decisions were made in mid-April, the CU administration did not want to publicly announce any cuts until May 1.
As editorial board member’s notes reveal, Leonard Dinegar, CU’s vice president for administration, asserted that the budget cuts were not public information, but rather part of an internal management discussion. Dodge, however, felt the cuts were significant and constituted a story.
“I never committed to be off the record,” he says of the dispute. “I’m a reporter. I know when I’m going off the record or not.”
Dodge decided to poll the staff and editorial board of the SGR as to whether they, too, felt the story should run.
“There was a significant majority of support saying, ‘Run the story about our own cut,’” he says.
As a compromise, the staff opted to not report on the other cuts they knew about in other areas.
So on April 23, 2009, Silver & Gold Record ran an article with the headline, “S&GR expects to cut budget by 21 percent.” The article detailed the methods by which the SGR proposed to keep the paper going within the context of the university’s budget crisis.
On April 24, Dodge learned that the administration was not pleased with the SGR’s decision.
“I saw the president the next day and got some indication that he was not very happy with us running the story,” Dodge says.
One week later, the paper’s entire staff was called into a meeting on the CU-Denver campus, where Dinegar passed out a letter, dated April 28, recommending that the SGR be cut entirely from the university’s budget. The publication was to cease operation, and everyone at the paper would be laid off.
Dodge recalls the scene as “intense, emotional.”
In the letter, Dinegar states that the decision to eliminate the SGR was made with “great difficulty” based on a range of factors, including the demise of the newspaper industry.
“Simply put, the president’s office can no longer afford to be in the newspaper business,” Dinegar writes. “As we have seen in Colorado and elsewhere, the typical newspaper model is struggling.”
Dinegar also states in this letter that the university will “move quickly to develop a new, electronic publication that will meet the internal communication needs of system and campuses, including reporting on actions taken by the Board of Regents, president and faculty and staff governance groups.”
Dinegar makes it clear that such a newsletter will not be a replacement for the SGR, but rather will augment campus interaction by providing direct e-mail and online communication.
• • •
Ken McConnellogue, associate vice president for university relations, says that the decision to cut SGR came about as a part of budget discussions, and discussion about reorganizing system administration. He points to the $29 million in budget cutbacks that the university is facing.
“We cut every area [in the Office of the President],” McConnellogue says. “We cut $6.2 million just out of the system administration.
We’ve got another $21 million in budget cuts to make next year.”
But he denies the recent disagreement between the paper’s staff and the president’s office had anything to do with the decision.
When asked if anyone in the Office of the President ever told or suggested to the SGR to not run the story concerning budget cutbacks, McConnellogue says, “I don’t think anyone in the president’s office has ever told Silver & Gold not to run a story.”
He follows by saying that Dodge had the “difficult position of being an editor, but also being a manager of a budget area of the university.” And that budget area, says McConnellogue, was a moving target.
Nancy Ciccone, the SGR’s editorial board chair, insists otherwise.
“Between April 17 and May 1, we were told not to [run the story],” Ciccone says. “It was not suggested.”
Though Boulder Weekly was unable to reach Dinegar for comment, Ciccone says that though he may have been the one the tell the SGR that they could not run their April 23 story, he has denied that the closure of the SGR is an act of retaliation.
“I’m not saying that the budget-cut story was the only reason why they cut us completely,” says Dodge, “but it certainly looks suspicious.”
On May 14, the CU Faculty Council passed a measure asking the Board of Regents to consider at least holding off on the decision to eliminate the SGR until further budgeting options could be explored. In a 5-4 vote, the regents rejected the recommendation, and the message was clear: CU has no room for the SGR, even if funding could be found elsewhere to keep it operational.
• • •
The way some see it, however, the road to the SGR’s elimination began long before the April 23 story ran.
In 2007, when Susan Barney Jones decided to step down from her long-term post as editor of the SGR, then-CU President Hank Brown took the opportunity to get involved in the paper. Hand-picked for his conservative political views about higher education, Brown, a former U.S. senator, was viewed by some as the ideal person to shift CU policy toward a more conservative path.
Considered for the post of CU president as far back as 1999 in the wake of CU President John Buechner’s resignation, Brown’s arrival at CU came in the midst of two scandals that had put CU in the national spotlight: the CU football recruiting scandal and the fracas over Ward Churchill.
Brown discovered that the SGR did not have a specific policy in place that explicitly stated who named the paper’s editor. Without such a policy, the CU administrators imposed themselves on the editorial operations of the SGR for the first time, claiming that it was their office, not the SGR itself, that had the authority to choose the paper’s next editor.
Dodge had been working as the SGR’s assistant editor for almost 10 years at that time. Through an internal search, he was chosen by Brown to fill the post. But a few of the rules had changed.
Brown issued a policy statement concerning the paper, retooling the membership of the editorial board in ways that Dodge believes were “designed to weaken the independence of the paper.”
Historically, the board chair had been a Department of Journalism faculty member, but Brown put himself in charge of appointing the board’s chair. This meant that the editorial board chair — the person who supervised the editor — was now appointed by the president, as well.
“You can imagine that would be a different model that wouldn’t be quite as independent from the administration as it had been,” Dodge says.
While Dodge doesn’t go so far as to say that these changes were in direct conflict with the mission of the SGR, he does assert that they made it a little bit more difficult to stay true to that mission.
• • •
On May 1, Margaret LeCompte, a professor in the CU School of Education, sat down at her computer to check the weather report.
When she logged onto the Denver Post’s website, however, she was greeted with the following headline: “CU pulls plug on faculty newspaper.”
The announcement about the demise of the SGR came as a shock to LeCompte, an avid reader of the SGR. According to LeCompte, the Office of the President had not yet notified the faculty when the article appeared on the Denver Post's website. LeCompte says this reflects the current administration’s pattern of what she and others believe is a failure to adequately consult faculty and staff when it comes to decision-making.
An e-mail from the president’s office concerning the SGR arrived in her inbox half an hour later.
For LeCompte, and several other faculty organizing to keep the SGR alive, the Office of the President is not telling the whole story when it comes to the decision to cut the SGR.
“There is a long history of attempts to get rid of the Silver and Gold,” she says, “and that history has been countered by vehement faculty protest, and they had to back off at least to some extent.”
She and others speculate that CU administrators are using the university’s budget crisis as a pretext to eliminate the SGR without coming under the same scrutiny they faced in the past during more economically sound times.
The SGR costs the Office of the President $580,000 per year to operate on its current schedule.
In a memo dated May 6, Benson writes that the elimination of the SGR came about as his office began to recognize, starting last fall,
what were and were not necessary expenditures.
“A worsening budget situation led us to prioritize essential services and set budget reduction targets that changed as our funding
situation changed,” Benson writes. “Silver & Gold Record’s budget is part of a system administration.”
But LeCompte and others find this notion absurd. They point to instances where the president has supported using budget resources on far less beneficial endeavors. While some cite the lack of cutbacks to the athletic departments, which provide no academic services to the campus, others are concerned with the campus’ recent “rebranding effort.”
In November 2008 — the same time that Benson declared he began convening with other administrative officials to find ways of making CU more efficient and effective — CU paid up to $785,000 to Landor Associates, a contracted consulting firm, to have the image of the University of Colorado system revamped. The project, funded through the President’s Initiative Fund, is meant to produce a new logo for the university that will be less Boulder-centric. At the time, McConnellogue told the Daily Camera, “CU President Bruce Benson has identified it as a top priority.”
“Any protest they [the Office of the President] make about budget cutting is kind of foolish, especially when you consider that the administration has spent well over the amount of the Silver & Gold budget for a marketing firm,” says LeCompte.
And more importantly, she says, it’s that kind of information that the SGR is the first to report on.
“Without the Silver & Gold, we never learn about things like that,” she says.
Lori Krug, chair of the University of Colorado Staff Council and a member of the SGR editorial board, does see the budget as the primary motivating factor behind the decision to shut down the paper.
“I really think it was primarily a budget decision,” Krug says. “I know that there were a lot of other tough cuts that they made for system administrations, which is also out of the president’s office.”
But alternate scenarios to eliminating the paper were never laid out on the table, she says
“It would have been handy if they’d said, ‘You know, if the cuts go deeper than we think, you might want to look at what happens if we need to cut 50 percent or 75 percent of your budgets, or if we simply cannot afford to fund you anymore,’” she says. “If they would have said that a couple of months out, it wouldn’t have been such a huge shock, and no one would have read into it that it was a retaliatory action.”
For minimal coverage — with at least a half-time reporter on each of the university’s four campuses and a scaled back product — Dodge believes that the SGR could operate at a cost of $350,000 per year, $230,000 less than the amount formerly allotted.
The problem is that further cuts or alternate sources of funding were never presented as options. And in some cases, attempts to improve the paper and provide less expensive distribution were supressed.
Last spring, for example, the SGR surveyed its readers and learned that they preferred to have headlines and links to articles e-mailed to them directly, a move that could eventually transfer readership from the expensive print-based model to a less-costly online format.
“In response [to the reader’s survey], we started going down that road, but we ran into some resistance from the administration sending out our headlines by e-mail each week with a link to our website,” recalls Dodge. “The reason given was that the chiefs of staff on the campuses didn’t want to clog people’s inboxes with yet another e-mail.”
McConnellogue says “chiefs of staff were sensitive about the amount of e-mail they had sent out since the paper was already printed.”
Ironically, the new online newsletter proposed by Benson and currently run by McConnellogue is almost identical in format to what SGR had proposed. It arrives as an e-mail with headlines and links to the university’s website.
The first copy of this successor, currently known as "Faculty and Staff Newsletter," rolled out on May 12.
Benson has emphasized the necessity for an online newsletter in several communications, sometimes citing the same reader survey that SGR used to attempt an online version of their publication. In Dinegar's April 28 letter concerning his suggested closing of the SGR, he writes, “Pursuing an on-line publication that provides critical, system-wide news will help us to continue to provide necessary information to our university community, while helping us meet our budget goals.”
McConnellogue says that the publication will not always be e-mailed out to staff and faculty.
“Eventually people will know every Wednesday or whenever that you go to the website, and there will be a new issue,” he says.
In the time since the announcement of the SGR’s closure, staff and faculty members have confabulated about alternate ways to fund the paper — subscriptions, retaining financial support from chancellors, transferring the paper to the University Foundation — none of which were proposed or apparently considered by the administration.
Since Benson’s May 1 announcement of the SGR’s demise, LeCompte and other faculty members have been working to save what they feel is their primary voice within the university system.
“We are trying to reestablish the existence of the Silver & Gold on a financial basis that is independent of the CU system administrations,” LeCompte says. “It has been the concerted effort of a few administrations to get rid of the Silver & Gold, and the only way it is going to be really protected is to be no longer in their clutches.”
In addition, LeCompte says, faculty are attempting to raise enough money to tide over the SGR staff because, as she says, “the Silver & Gold is not an institution; it is the staff itself.”
In the meantime, the SGR offices off 30th Street remain sleepy, and many of those staff members are facing the reality of looking for a new job in the newspaper industry in a down economy.
• • •
Whether CU faculty can resurrect the SGR — which publishes its final commemorative issue on June 18 — will depend on finding broad support and funding.
If the paper closes, CU faculty and staff say it represents the loss of their only true forum, and serves as a glaring example of administrators making decisions without consulting them.
“Regardless of the motivation,” says Krug, “everyone is fairly outraged that the president’s office is interpreting for themselves when they think staff governance should be involved in decisions or not, and I know that is probably a bigger concern to all of us than the loss of the Silver & Gold. We don’t want to lose the Silver & Gold — it is a valued resource — but we are appalled that they would take an extreme action like this without trying to consult some of the government of the advisory groups that are set up to be just that
resource.”
Many, including LeCompte, consider it to be a violation of the laws of regents, one that emphasizes co-governance and consultation when it comes to matter of import.
“The regents’ laws themselves, which are binding on the president and which he is ignoring left and right, require that the faculty governance bodies be consulted on any budget and planning matters that have to do with academics and communication,” says LeCompte, “and he clearly didn’t do that.”
McConnellogue sees no violation.
“I think it’s clearly outlined in the regents’ policy that shared governance comes into play when there’s matters of academic concern and academic budgeting,” says McConnellogue. “And this is not an academic matter.”
But such a distinction is blurry for many.
“What they are defining as academic and what others are defining as academic are two different things,” Ciccone says. “One is that they are absolutely right — it’s a fiscal consideration and it has nothing to do with teaching or grading. But, in fact, those of us who are faculty who are chairs also have administrative appointments and we need the Silver & Gold for our daily operations… It’s the dissemination of information.
“The issue that is most disturbing is the issue of co-governance. The Benson administration is saying this was a management decision and has nothing to do with co-governance, and I distrust that distinction.”
The lack of consideration is looked at by many as a representation of the transformation of the University of Colorado from a center for higher learning to an institution run more like a business — with funding going more toward rebranding images than to inter-campus communication — and with top-down decision-making at the core of its commitments.
“It’s all command and control,” says LeCompte. “He [Benson] is trying to run the university the way he runs his oil company.”
And that decision, she adds, is a slap in the face to faculty and staff.
Respond:letters@boulderweekly.com
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