UA President's Bonus Rescinded And Fuller Cowell, The Regent Who Voted No

This is old news, but I want to complete the story I started on this topic and also get people to start paying attention to who is on the Board of Regents.

At their September 8, 2014 meeting, the Board of Regents voted, at the President's request, to rescind the $320,000 retention bonus.  I'm hoping this is the end of this particular series of posts, but I would note that the president's request did say that the bonus was inappropriate at this time.  Leaving open, perhaps, a more appropriate time.  But I want to give the president the benefit of the doubt.  As I've indicated in previous posts on this topic, he's already earning - with pensions from the Air Force and the Alaska Railroad - and his UA salary, in the ballpark of half a million a year.  Anyone could find something to do with $320,000, but at his income level, surely he can live well without it.

One of the regents voted against rescinding the bonus.  KFQD reported:

"[Cowell] says the university wants to attract high-quality leaders and the vote sets a bad precedent. Gamble says he appreciates the support of the board."

It seems that the rest of the regents thought giving the bonus sends an even worse message to students, faculty, and staff of the university system, not to mention potential donors, the legislature, and the general public.  And I'm not sure what bad precedent it sets.  That the Board listens to the president?  That it is sensitive to public opinion?  That it can correct a mistake?  Or that if you want to be president of the Alaska system, your salary won't be unlimited?

I emailed Regent Cowell right after the vote to ask some questions, but I never got a response.  He's also the only regent who doesn't list his phone number on the University pages for the regents.

So I took to the internet to try to figure out who he might be.  I'll warn you, I've been doing this long enough to know that figuring out someone's values and motives from scraps of bio information is a risky business.  At best it can let you speculate and raise questions to ask.

So let's look at Cowell's online shadow.

First, from the University of Alaska's bio of the regent.

Fuller A. Cowell of Anchorage was appointed in 2007 by Governor Palin. Regent Cowell was raised on a homestead in Fairbanks, attended Lathrop High School and studied biology at UAF. He completed his bachelors of business administration with an emphasis in marketing at National University, Sacramento, California graduating Summa Cum Laude. Cowell completed the Advanced Executive Program at the Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois. In 1995, he was awarded the UAF Alumni Achievement Award for Community Achievement. The award was established to recognize outstanding UAF alumni.

If you just read this you might think Cowell was born in Alaska, but a McClatchy article from 1993  says he didn't come until he was seven. 

He has an extensive background in Alaska, moving to the state with his family when he was seven years old. 

That's no big deal.  I didn't get to Alaska until I was in my 30s. It's not so much how long you've been here, but a) whether your story matches what really happened, and b) whether your time here was spent getting to know the state, particularly the people.    

Probably much more relevant to his position as a regent is his educational background.  From the official bio we can infer that he studied at, but did not graduate from UAF.  Then, apparently he switched from biology to business.  National University is today a big online university. How good it is, I can't tell.  Students often go to online universities because it's easier to get in, class times are more flexible, and they want a degree.  While you can get a good education online (and a bad one in person), my guess is that most people going to online programs want the degree more than they want an education.  That's a generalization and there are lots of exceptions.  Does it apply to Cowell?  First, I don't know when he went and whether it was even online at the time.  But it's not a traditional university.  I'm guessing he went there because after dropping out (?) of UAF, he just wanted to get his diploma.  But I don't know.  We just gather clues and make hypotheses and try to test them.  His next educational experience seems to point in the same direction. 

"Cowell completed the Advanced Executive Program at the Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois."

First, I'd mention that Northwestern is in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.  But maybe they have a Chicago branch, or maybe he thought people wouldn't know where Evanston was, or maybe he's not a stickler for details.  It's probably not important, but just another clue that may or may not prove useful.

The Kellog School has one of the best business programs in the country.  An advanced executive program sounds pretty substantial.  But the Advanced Management Program - Intensive today is just under three weeks long and costs $36,000! (In comparison, a Harvard Business School Program For Leadership Development costs $45,000, but goes from December to June with two (12 day) on-campus and two off-campus modules.)

Again, this is a program for someone who wants to get things done quickly, who can't or doesn't want to spend the time for a longer, more traditional program.  I'm sure it was a stimulating experience, but there's only so much you can learn and retain in such a short program. 

Is this the best person that Sarah Palin could find to be on the board?  Of course, each appointee should be considered in the context of the other members.  If they all have more traditional educations, then he might add a useful perspective. 
 

Back to the official bio. 

Cowell serves as co-chair of the Providence Foundation Steering Committee, is on the board of St. Elias (long term acute care) Hospital and on the C.W. Snedden Chair of Journalism Selection Committee at UAF. He has served on the Journalism Advisory Board at UAA, the boards of Commonwealth North, Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, and the Anchorage Performing Arts Center and co-chaired the United Way of Anchorage campaign.

The Juneau Empire adds this:

He also co-chaired the Providence Foundation Steering Committee and was a founding member of the Alaska Cancer Research and Education Center.

The cancer research makes more sense if you look at Evangeline Atwood's Bent Pins to Chains:  Alaska and Its Newspapers:

"He returned to Alaska in 1993 as publisher of the Daily News but had to retire in 1999 to concentrate on a successful fight against leukemia."

Back to the official bio:

Cowell’s newspaper career took him from a newspaper carrier at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner to director of operations of the McClatchy Company and ultimately publisher of Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News. He spent ten years commercial fishing in Area E, which includes Prince William Sound and the Copper River Delta.

Cowell is married to the former Christmas Tripp of Fairbanks. Their daughter Alexis lives and works in Anchorage where she was born.

Much of his career has  been spent working for the McClatchy newspaper chain. Including time with some of its California papers.   He seems to have been in the management rather than the journalism side.  The McClatchy newspaper chain published information about Cowell when he took over as the publisher of the Anchorage Daily News, in 1993.


He's also, it seems, the owner of Cowell's Heliport Service in Big Lake.  The only date I could find on the site was a 7/2004 activation date; there's a July 2014 reference at 123 Jets. Or maybe he has a son with the same name.


OK, as I said, this is just a bunch of facts about his education and his work experience.  It doesn't tell us who he is, what he knows, what he values, and whether he's a good choice for the Board of Regents.

The University plays a critical role for Alaska.  If it does its job well, more Alaskans will get a good education and make important contributions to a sustainable Alaska, an Alaska that uses its resources wisely and has both  physical and social infrastructures that support a good life for this and future generations.

With a FY15 budget of over $1 billion, it's also an institution whose leaders should be closely followed and kept accountable.  But I dare say few Alaskans could name even one or two regents, let alone have any idea of what they do or how well.  (I did post abbreviated bios of the regents in an earlier post.)

I hope to explore this topic further in future posts. 

Alaska Election Gets Yet Stranger As Oil Consultant Brad Keithley Pledges $200K To Change Election

Brad Keithley is apparently taking advantage of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and will, according to APRN, spend $200,000 of his own money in order to pursue his concern that the state is spending too much money.

From his blog at Alaskans For Sustainable Budgets:

Today I am taking the next step in the effort by announcing the legislative races in which I intend to participate.  They are House Districts 15, 19, 21 and 25.  I also am going closely to watch Senate Districts K and N, and, after studying the dynamics at play, House District 9 over the next two to three weeks with the possibility of participating in them as well.  A brief description of the reasoning follows:  [You can read the rest here] [And you can check on the Alaska election districts here.]

He identifies spenders and savers.  He's targeted two incumbent Republicans and will support their Democratic opponents;  one Democratic incumbent and will support her Libertarian opponent; and another Republican over a Democrat in a seat with no incumbent.

His basic criterion is whether the candidate will vote for a sustainable budget.

There are a couple more races he's considering campaigning in.

 Is this a good thing?  If you are a challenger struggling to raise money to unseat an incumbent, this probably looks good.  Keithley isn't going to give money directly to candidates, because there are limits to how much you can give as an individual.  Instead he will essentially have a PAC that will independently support candidates. 

To what extent will this affect what the chosen candidates say and do?  The blog acknowledges that some of his choices are just based on questionnaires returned to him by candidates and that they might not follow through.  But he's not worried,

 "If Moore fails to live up to his words I will work to defeat him also in two years"

 For $200,000 you can be an Alaskan Koch it seems. Keithley isn't taking on the governor's race, but given Bill Walker's rhetoric on the budget deficits at the announcement of the Walker/Mallot ticket, it would seem Keithley would be supporting him, especially since the incumbent Sean Parnell was one of the architects of the current deficit budget that Keithley opposes. 

One of the incumbents he opposed came out fighting,  accusing Keithley of being a bully who takes advantage of women.  

This is not politics as usual.  It will be interesting.  November 4 is only seven weeks away. 

Can We Simplify Politics? Simpolfy Thinks They Can

A family member runs a business incubator - called Fledge - for socially-conscious startups.  They have a new group that started a week or so ago.  The website tells it succinctly:

Fledge helps impactful entrepreneurs take their ideas and prototype-stage companies into reality, via an intense, 10-week program of guidance, education, and mentorship, plus a large and growing network of support from past fledglings and hundreds of mentors.

Fledge receives applications from around the world, inviting just 6-7 to participate.  Each team is paid for the privilege, in exchange for an investment in a unique revenue-based model, where you ultimately keep the ownership of your startup.

Our goal is to help foster a wave of companies that make not just a measurable impact in the world, but a noticeable improvement in the lives of everyone on the planet.

So I was looking at the list of new Fledglings and one jumped out for me - mainly because it's a topic I know a little about.  It's called Simpolfy and the aim is set up a website:

"that simplifies politics so you can hold your representatives accountable to you!"

Their particular goal is a) to simplify complicated legislation and b) communicate to users about bills of interest to them.   You can get more details directly from Simpolfy's Indiegogo page where I got the video below.




This is a great concept.  There's simply way too much data out in the world for people to keep track of what's going on.  But simplifying legislation is also difficult.  I tried to do that when I blogged the legislature.  If you hang out at the committee meetings and read the bills carefully, you can get a good idea of what's in the bills.  But really good bill writers know how to word things, using references to other legislation, or specifying parameters so that even clever folks can't figure out that the intent is to favor a particular company or to make it impossible to, say, get an abortion.

This also raises questions for me about what they do with the information they collect from users.  It would seem of great interest to politicians and their handlers.  But these things can be worked out and I'm sure that's what they are busy doing now.  The bigger goal - turning data into useful information - is a worthy one, something that other websites - such as those that parse political ads to determine if they are truthful - have been successfully doing. 

At the end of the ten week period the Fledglings present their companies at Demo Day.  If you're in Seattle October 23 you can go see the presentations, but get your tickets early.  I was able to attend one of these and it was an exciting evening of possibilities.

Alaska Is Number 1 - Spending Per Capita

Here's a cute video advertising Common Ground's Oct 4th forum on Alaska's Fiscal Future.   It sets out quickly and with wit, the way Alaska's spending its oil wealth and the forum that will discuss it at Loussac's Marston Library on Saturday October 4. 




A Crude Awaking for Alaska from Ian Laing on Vimeo.

Leaving LAX - Light Games

These are all straight from the camera, no photoshop and in chronological order from taxiing to take off.  I like the latter ones best. 

The red comes from the decorative light tubes where the airport road connects with Sepulveda.

I have no idea why the blue lights in the foreground look stable while the background lights reflect the slow shutter speed and the planes movement.  

These shots remind me that what we see is that tiny part of the world that our eyes are wired to capture and our brain is wired to interpret.  With different eyes, we'd see different things and know different things.  For example, what if we didn't see skin pigment, just whether people were benevolent or threatening. 

Chinese Week At UAA - Food, Movies, And Other Treats

The Confucius Institute at UAA is sponsoring a Chinese culture week.  There's food, movies, and other activities. 

This is a heads up for next week.  It looks like everything is free.  I'll have to check if they have free parking passes for events too. 

I'll try to find out more about the movies - there are three short films - the poster they sent me is a little hard to read.  

Click to enlarge and focus

The Confucius Institute is the Chinese version of things like the American Libraries abroad or the German Goethe Institute, used to spread Chinese culture around the world.  The Confucius Institutes are connected with universities.  There have been some reports that they are part of the Chinese espionage system.  Whether that's true or not, these events are available and past events that I've attended were pretty good to excellent. 


I'm at LAX waiting for my plane out of the heat and back to decent weather. 

Who Skips Fisheries Debate? [UPDATED]

[UPDATED 1:45pm:  Apparently, not Dan Sullivan any longer.  According to Lanie Welch's column in today's ADN:

"The lure of reaching a statewide audience was too much to pass up for U.S. Senate hopeful Dan Sullivan, who will be at the Oct. 1 fisheries debate at Kodiak after all.    Sullivan was able to reshuffle a packed travel schedule to fit in the fisheries event, said Ben Sparks, campaign manager. Sullivan initially was going to be in Bethel on a multi-day swing through Southwest Alaska during the time of the Kodiak event. “Dan recognizes the importance of Alaska’s fisheries, and our campaign has rescheduled our southwest swing to ensure that Dan could make the debate. He looks forward to a healthy exchange of ideas with Mark Begich on the future of Alaska’s fisheries, and is excited to attend the debate in Kodiak,” his campaign said in a prepared statement."

The original post below should be read with the above in mind.]

This letter to the editor was in the ADN Sunday. [I couldn't get the link to the ADN, but it was also in the Kenai Peninsual Clarion]:

"Who skips fisheries debate?    I had to ask myself this week does Dan Sullivan actually want to get elected in November? I’m not sure he does, since he chose to skip the fisheries debate in Kodiak. Or he is a complete fool and had no idea the giant mistake he made by turning down this debate.    Either way, Sullivan just proved what Sen. Begich and Democrats have been saying all along he doesn’t know or care about Alaska.    Bill Starnes"

Why couldn't he make it?  According to debate organizers, via Lanie Welch, ADN's fishing reporter:

"Sullivan campaign manager Ben Sparks told debate organizers that Sullivan does not have a prior commitment keeping him from the fisheries debate, but that “he is just too busy with all the traveling he is doing.” The two-hour debate is broadcast live to over 330 Alaska communities."

I think at least three more credible possibilities beyond the two Starnes gives:

1. He knows that Begich, after six years in the Senate and as Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard knows his fisheries much better than Sullivan and that Sullivan would look bad in comparison.
2. He knows his policies as Attorney General and Natural Resources Commissioner - helping get rid of local input in development, on Pebble Mine, and other issues wouldn't sit well with the fishers anyway.
3. He's simply biding by the old saying, attributed, incorrectly it seems, to Abraham Lincoln, 

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."

Maybe a combination of all three.  He knew this was a fight he couldn't possibly win. 


[Note on dubiously attributed quotes:  The link goes to a website called Quote Investigator:  Exploring the Origins of Quotes.  It looks like a much better sources than all the spurious 'quote' sites that just copy things incorrectly from other places.   The discussion on this quote makes it highly unlikely that it came from Lincoln and also looks at similar sentiments from the bible.]

Counterintuitive - Swimming Pools And Drought

"As California's drought worsens, swimming pools have become a target for those who think the classic backyard oasis wastes water. Some water districts have prohibited new pools from being filled and have limited how much water existing pools can use."  From the  LA Times 

I'm in LA right now.  California is in a severe drought.

"With California facing one of the most severe droughts on record, Governor Brown declared a drought State of Emergency in January and directed state officials to take all necessary actions to prepare for water shortages."

 California's first seven months of 2014 have been the hottest on record.  And to make the point, at 10 am today it was already 88˚F downtown with 25% humidity. Now, at 11 am, it's 93˚.   Fire danger is high. 

TWater levels are low.   The state of California has been taking steps to get water consumers to reduce their water usage. 

Swimming pools would seem to be a slap in the face to everyone trying to save water. 

But the the LA Times article headline actually is:

"Water agencies are learning pools aren't a big factor during drought"

The article tells us (in part):

"Analyses by various water districts, along with scientific studies, conclude that pools and their surrounding hardscapes use about the same amount of water as a lawn of the same size. Over time, pools might even use less water. With pool covers, experts say water evaporation can be cut by almost half, making pools significantly less wasteful than grass and about as efficient as drought-tolerant landscaping."

"Facing complaints over a recent ban on filling pools, the Santa Margarita Water District conducted its own water-use analysis. It found that pools require thousands of gallons of water to fill initially, but they use about 8,000 gallons less water than a traditional landscape after that. By the third year, the analysis found, the savings add up, and a pool's cumulative water use falls below that of a lawn."

 I always like it when things we think are so obvious turn out not to be true.  But also, let's be careful with this as well.   The article doesn't tell us the specific 'scientific studies' but it does mention the pool lobby was involved.

"At least two California water distributors have rolled back pool-filling limitations after being contacted by the pool lobby and crunching the numbers." 

Whose numbers did they crunch?  The pool lobby's?   Compared to green lawns, pools might use less water (after three years), but there are relatively few green lawns left as water restrictions are in effect.  And drought-tolerant landscaping probably is more environmentally friendly and heat reducing than the cement that surrounds most backyard pools.  And their calculations seem to assume that people conscientiously use their pool covers when the pools are not in use.  I suspect that isn't the case. 

While looking for the scientific studies online, I found a more thorough San Gabriel Valley Tribune  article on this back in July with an aerial view of pools.

ISPACA (International Swimming Pool and Automatic Cover Association) has a list of studies that shows pool covers save energy and water, but most seem to be focused on the energy savings.  A US Department of Energy study they list does also say there are water savings, but doesn't compare the savings to lawns.  

$17.50

Well, they were going to fill this parking lot at Rose and Venice Beach today no matter what they charged.  And for all day, I guess that's not too bad.  But it's the highest I remember seeing. It was supposed to be pushing 100˚F downtown and the beaches were supposed to pretty warm as well. 

I got my bike ride in before ten and you could feel the beach was drawing people towards it.  But the breeze from riding the bike felt nice and it seems to have turned out not quite so bad as expected.  Weather.com says it's only 84˚ in downtown LA now (about 4pm) and 79˚ in Santa Monica.

But it got pretty warm in my mom's house.  Being pretty close to the beach means that you almost never need air conditioning.  I closed most of the windows as the day warmed up, but I've opened them now and there's a "cool" ocean breeze coming in. 

"Money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic . . ."

I'd been reading David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years so I had a newly focused understanding when I read this sentence from the LA Times story on the pending Detroit bankruptcy settlement:

"The creditor was frustrated that a deal had been reached to transfer the works in Detroit Institute of Arts to a public trust and use foundation money to nearly make city pensioners whole, while other creditors were expected to receive pennies on the dollar."

The unusual part of this story is that the pensioners would be paid before the money creditors and their insurance companies. 

Why is this unusual?  Because usually the bankers get paid first - as we know from the housing crash when the bankers, who pushed lenders [borrowers] into loans the bankers knew the lenders [borrowers] couldn't pay, got paid, while homeowners lost their houses.

Graeber argues that our unquestioned moral certainty that "people must pay their debts" makes it easier for bankers and other lenders to enforce collection of debts, even if the conditions were impossible for the borrower from the beginning. 

He discusses how to distinguish between moral obligations and debts.  This is, he says, the basic question of the book.

"What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal?  What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?  What changes when the one turns into the other?  And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?  On one level the difference between an obligation and a debt is simple and obvious.  A debt is the obligation to pay a certain sum of money.  As a result, a debt, unlike any other form of obligation, can be precisely quantified.  This allows debts to become simple, cold, and impersonal - which, in turn, allows them to be transferable.  If one owes a favor, or one's life, to another human being - it is owed to that person specifically.  But if one owes forty thousand dollars at 12-percent interest, it doesn't really matter who the creditor is;  neither does either of the two parties have to think much about what the other party needs, wants, is capable of doing - as they certainly would if what was owed was a favor, or respect, or gratitude.  One does not need to calculate the human effects;  one need only calculate principal, balances,  penalties, and rates of interest.  If you end up having to abandon your home and wander in other provinces, if your daughter ends up in a mining camp working as a prostitute [he'd given such an example from Nepal], well, that's unfortunate, but incidental to the creditor.  Money is money, and a deal is a deal."

Thus when the bankers call on the City of Detroit to pay up, the public outside of Detroit is primed to assume the city has been deadbeat and even though it's unfortunate, the banks have a right to take over the art at the Art Institute and get paid before retirees get their pensions.  

The Art Institute raises other issues to be argued about, but not here now.

But the retired employees also had a deal with the city.  They worked for years with the knowledge, based on a written contract, that after they worked a significant part of their lives they would get a pension. For many - particularly those in professional positions - they gave up the immediate higher pay and bonuses they could have gotten in the private sector for the pension.

Graeber's point is that by adding the moral imperative to pay one's debt to the business impersonality of 'a deal is a deal' lenders have gotten away with insisting on being paid, even if the lending conditions and paying consequences are inhumane.  Because humanity has been taken out of the equation.

"From this perspective, the crucial factor, and a topic that will be explored at length in these pages, is money's capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic - and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene. The factor of violence, which I have been emphasizing up until now, may appear secondary. The difference between a "debt" and a mere moral obligation is not the presence or absence of men with weapons who can enforce that obligation by seizing the debtor's possessions or threatening to break his legs. It is simply that a creditor has the means to specify, numerically, exactly how much the debtor owes."

I already knew something about how the language of instrumental rationality has taken over the language substantive rationality.   Very simply that means that the rational thinking processes we use to achieve a goal or solve a physical problem (say build a highway) are different from the rational thinking processes needed to consider moral questions (if the highway through a neighborhood is a good a good thing.)   I studied under Alberto Guerreiro-Ramos while he was writing The New Science of Administration, in which he argues that the distinction between the two different rationalities has been lost as people use instrumental rationality to resolve moral questions.  As when economists are called into court to help determine the value of the deceased's lost life, so the family can be paid off.     Guerreiro-Ramos

"was one of the earliest scholars to point to the risks of a social science that took homo economicus as its referent. A solution that he offered for this dilemma was to recognize the importance of non-market settings in which people could pursue other, non-materialist interests."

But I hadn't thought about - and that is Graeber's point - how the moral weight of paying one's debt assists international lenders in collecting their money even though the both the terms of the original loan and the consequences of collecting payment are unjust, even inhumane.

He does point out that the financial crisis of 2008 did loosen people's firmly held beliefs enough to get a conversation about this started.  But that has faded.  But the terms of the Detroit settlement seem to suggest that maybe there's been at least a little shift.

I do think this is an important book.  The previous post on it gave an example of international lenders unconscionable actions in Madagascar.  Here's another one from the book about Haiti.

But debt is not just victor's justice; it can also be a way of punishing winners who weren't supposed to win. The most spectacular example of this is the history of the Republic of Haiti - the first poor country to be placed in permanent debt peonage. Haiti was a nation founded by former plantation slaves who had the temerity not only to rise up in rebellion, amidst grand declarations of universal rights and freedoms, but to defeat Napoleon's armies sent to return them to bondage. France immediately insisted that the new republic owed it 150 million francs in damages for the expropriated plantations, as well as the expenses of outfitting the failed military expeditions, and all other nations, including the United States, agreed to impose an embargo on the country until it was paid. The sum was intentionally impossible (equivalent to about 18 billion dollars) , and the resultant embargo ensured that the name "Haiti" has been a synonym for debt, poverty, and human misery ever since. 

The whole book is online and I would encourage readers to at least bookmark it, but even better, read the first chapter.  It reads far more interestingly than people would expect from a book on finance. You can find the passages in this post by cutting them here and pasting them into the search at the pdf file of the book.