Wichita State president keeps his job despite threats over Ivanka Trump snub
Wichita State President Jay Golden will keep his job despite a donor revolt over his cancellation of a speech by President Trump’s daughter, the student body president announced Wednesday night.
After more than four hours in closed session, the Kansas Board of Regents issued a cryptic statement that didn’t shed light on whether Golden would be fired, as some had demanded saying that his continued presence could threaten the university’s relationship with large donors.
But the straight answer came from student body President Rija Khan.
Khan live-streamed an address to students after talking on the phone to Golden and regents President Blake Flanders, who is not a regent but heads its paid staff.
“We are very excited to hear the news that Dr. Golden will remain in his position of president of our university (and) part of our Shocker family,” she said. “(Golden) has shown that he is more than talk, and for that we are appreciative of his actions.”
Ivanka Trump’s prerecorded speech was supposed to be the keynote graduation address to students at the university’s separate trade-school campus.
On Wednesday, students responded with a parking-lot rally supporting Golden and demanding changes in the university’s symbiotic relationship with big business, especially Koch Industries, which has donated $15 million in major pledges over the past seven years.
Koch Industries issued a statement Wednesday saying it would not make its support “conditional on employment decisions” at WSU.
On Wednesday, the regents met in a closed teleconference with Golden and a handful of staffers and returned to a public session where they took no action but promised to release a statement that would clarify the situation at WSU.
However, the statement was inconclusive, reading, in its entirety:
The Kansas Board of Regents is committed to working with all our universities and colleges to support and promote freedom of speech and diversity and inclusion.
During these unprecedented times, our universities have been forced to make quick decisions and act swiftly without the normal process of including all our stakeholders in decision making.
We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to improve communications during times of crisis.
We look forward to strengthening relationships with students, alumni and friends. It is vital that all stakeholders join us in this effort.
Khan, though not a regent, was somehow able to enter the public Zoom meeting after the final closed session.
“I’m not a regent member,” she said, “but I am the student advisory council chair and the (student body) president of Wichita State University. Is it possible that I may address the board right now?”
Khan’s request was denied.
“You know, we haven’t allowed any comment for the public, and I’m afraid if I do we’ll be here until midnight,” said Chairman Shane Bangerter. “But I very much will make time to visit with you, so if you would like to call me, I would be happy to visit with you.”
“Yes, please, I would love to do that,” Khan said.
Trump, the daughter of and special adviser to President Donald Trump, had recorded the keynote speech for the online graduation ceremony for WSU Tech.
But Golden canceled the speech after complaints and a petition from hundreds of WSU students who saw her as too divisive a figure.
The decision spurred a reaction from Ivanka Trump, who released the speech online and on Twitter cited cancel culture, calling it “antithetical to academia.”
It also drew condemnation from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a former Republican U.S. congressman from Wichita, who called the action “shameful” and said the university missed a chance to showcase itself to the rest of the nation.
Under pressure, the regents called a 3 p.m. Wednesday special teleconference meeting, where they almost immediately recessed to closed session in a private Zoom chatroom.
It was not a popular decision with those who tuned into the regents’ YouTube channel to watch.
They continued a chat thread long after their screens went dark, posting several hundred messages supporting Golden and criticizing the regents for making their meeting private.
‘We had Koch in the fold’
Multiple members of WSU’s presidential search committee, which recommended hiring Golden, called for him to be removed from office after six months on the job.
Officials from Koch Industries, Pizza Hut founder Dan Carney and several longtime donors and supporters are “very upset and quite vocal in their decisions to disavow any further support,” said Steve Clark, a former regent and former chair of the Wichita State University Foundation, in a letter to the Kansas Board of Regents on Monday.
Clark, who chaired presidential search committees for Golden and his predecessor, John Bardo, said the decision to cancel Ivanka Trump’s speech violates the First Amendment and has damaged the school’s reputation with high-profile donors that were drawn to Bardo’s leadership style.
“The Kochs never had any real confidence in the presidents we’ve had out there, and I’ve known all of them for 50 years. Then we finally got John Bardo in there,” Clark said in a phone interview. “He was a very decisive guy.”
Under Bardo, who was hired in 2012, the Koch influence at the university grew substantially as money poured in from the billionaire family from Wichita.
“We had Koch in the fold,” Clark said. “Now, we’re going to lose them, and they’ll never be back.”
According to university statements, Koch and its associated foundations have given or pledged more than $15 million for major projects at WSU in the past seven years, including:
▪ Charles Koch Arena: In addition to a $6 million donation to renovate the basketball arena and buy the naming rights in the early 2000s, Koch pledged $4.5 million in 2015 to help expand and renovate the arena and related facilities.
▪ Institute for the Study of Economic Growth: $3.6 million for a think tank to research and promote Koch Industries CEO Charles Koch’s long-held belief that open markets and minimal government intervention in economic matters create the optimum environment for innovation, entrepreneurship and growth.
▪ Go Create: $3.75 million to establish the Go Create “maker space” on the Innovation Campus, where university and community members can access sophisticated tools to make product prototypes.
▪ Honors College: $1.54 million pledged to create the Honors College Koch Scholars Program, a competitive award for high school seniors.
▪ Koch Innovation Challenge: $1 million to support a program in which WSU students compete for funding and scholarships to invent products and technologies.
▪ Koch Global Trading Center: $806,000, including $346,000 in 2013 to establish a training center where students receive professional-level market data and practice stock, energy and commodities trading. Koch has also pledged an additional $460,000 to help relocate the center to a planned new business school building on the Innovation Campus.
The Koch family also leased out a university building for a private elementary school on the main campus in 2018.
In his letter to the regents, Clark said he spoke with an unhappy Koch Industries chief financial officer Steve Feilmeier, who was on the Golden search committee and is chairing the fundraising campaign for a new business building planned for Innovation Campus.
“He advised me he’s resigning ... from any further association with the University,” Clark wrote. “He is also advising that Koch Industries rescind all their financial support for programs at the University they’ve previously funded.”
“These relationships can only be restored by Dr. Golden’s departure,” he wrote the regents. “I would strongly encourage you not to let this linger, and to immediately request his resignation.”
Feilmeier confirmed he was unhappy with the decision but said he could not speak on behalf of Koch Industries regarding donor relationships, adding that his conversation with Clark was in his capacity as a private citizen, and not on behalf of Koch Industries.
But Feilmeier did say he thought WSU handled the situation poorly and that he’s questioning his future with the university because of it. He has been asked to join the Wichita State Foundation Board but has not decided whether he will accept the position after the Trump snub.
“I will wait and see what happens this week and next as this matter is debated,” he said in an email.
“The right to speak freely is a basic right bestowed by our founding fathers and it is especially important that this basic right be protected in academic institutions,” he wrote. “As such, I believe WSU handled this situation incorrectly and the administration could have handled it very differently. This will weigh heavily on my ultimate decision. I am not seeking for anyone to be terminated.”
Jessica Koehn, a Koch Industries spokesperson, said that Koch will honor its commitments to the university.
“Koch is continuing its commitments to WSU, and we will continue evaluating new funding opportunities as they arise,” she said in an email. “We believe in academic freedom and respect the university’s independence in making employment decisions. We do not make our support conditional on employment decisions, which are the sole purview of university officials.
“At the same time, we object to speaker disinvitations. Universities offer students opportunities to encounter new ideas and think for themselves. Limiting access to unpopular speakers, viewpoints, and scholarship doesn’t protect students, it cuts off the chance to engage, debate, and criticize.”
WSU students fight back
About 70 demonstrators gathered Wednesday afternoon in a hastily called rally to support Golden and protest donor influence over the university.
The theme of the rally was “students over profits,” and several speakers railed against corporate control of university decisions, especially the influence wielded by Koch.
The protest took place in the parking lot of Charles Koch Arena, renovated and renamed in the early 2000s after a $6 million donation from Koch.
Brandon Eckerman, a student representative on the selection committee that hired Golden, said university decisions shouldn’t be influenced by “one billionaire donor.”
He said his admiration for Golden is so strong that he wants to graduate under his administration “because he’s someone I want to be.”
Also Wednesday, a petition started by the Black Student Union at WSU had generated more than 4,000 signatures supporting Golden in its first four hours online.
The students who rallied at WSU Wednesday compared Golden’s administration favorably with that of his predecessor, the late John Bardo.
Bardo got unending rave reviews from the Wichita business community and local government and is credited with transforming the university into an aircraft research and basketball powerhouse.
But that came with a cost, the students said.
“When former President Bardo was here, he had a big influence on campus when it comes to prioritizing business and engineering over liberal arts and sciences,” said student Tajahnae Stocker. “Under Golden, the first thing he did was heard our frustrations, heard what we were upset about, and he listened . . . and then he started giving us feedback and ideas.”
“Golden is getting all the heat from this, even though all he did was answer for us,” said Tajahnae Stocker, a WSU student in her fourth year and helped organize Wednesday’s rally. “He put students over Ivanka and politics, and I think that’s something we haven’t had around here in a very long time in a president.”
“The Koch brothers have had a huge influence for way too long, and now is about time to start supporting us instead of supporting a check to the university,” she said.
Diversity issues debated
WSU Tech president Sheree Utash, after Golden canceled Trump’s keynote address, apologized and called the timing of the announcement insensitive.
But that triggered some WSU donors, who said they feel Golden is more focused on diversity of identity than diversity of thought. They also worry that rejecting the president’s daughter could also have repercussions for the school’s federal contracts.
“I think it’s reason enough to fire him that he went directly and blatantly against the President’s executive order, which basically said if there isn’t diversity of thought on campus that some funds from the federal government could be withheld,” said David Mitchell, a Wichita State alumnus, longtime booster and member of the presidential search committee.
Mitchell said the move has sent him and several other prominent boosters into a panic.
“It’s a fire. It’s a fire. It’s a five-alarm fire,” he said Tuesday.
Free speech is at the core Wichita State’s identity, Mitchell said, and bringing controversial speakers is important to critical thinking. He said one past speaker at Wichita State changed his life: George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.
“Tremendous speaker. Tremendous presentation at Wichita State. The most important event in my life at WSU,” he said. “It turned me into a critical thinker. He almost took me down the rabbit hole. It was that important. I can’t tell you how important that was to my education at WSU — the single most important event — to hear someone so crazy on one side of an issue. It made me think for myself.”
Students were robbed of that opportunity when Golden canceled Trump’s speech, he said.
Mitchell, who served on the nonprofit organization that manages public-private partnerships on the Innovation Campus, said he resigned from his seat on the Wichita State Innovation Alliance because of the decision and said he won’t be involved with the university in any way until “the situation is rectified,” meaning Golden leaves the university.
“There’s no question,” he said. “He needs to either resign or be fired.”
“We were nationally known, finally prominent in our area of innovation and the Innovation Campus and learning at WSU. Now, in this one fell swoop, he has rebranded us as just another leftist university.”
Al Higdon, co-founder of the advertising company Sullivan Higdon & Sink and a former public relations executive at Beech and Learjet, said Tuesday that the move is a public relations nightmare.
“It just seemed so unnecessary,” Higdon said. “I mean, she (Trump) wasn’t invited here to make a political speech. ... But just because of who she is, or she’s the daughter of who she is, apparently, it was greatly rejected by a number of the faculty members who seem to have pressured the president to take the action that he did.”
“Without question” canceling Ivanka Trump’s speech will have consequences, Higdon said.
“This could have a significant impact on donor relations, certainly,” he said. “And just the feel-good feeling about Wichita State has been greatly diminished. ... When we see these kinds of closed-minded views on allowing a variety of voices on campus, there’s just a number of us who believe that’s not what higher education should be about.
“I’m really pretty much devastated this is happening on our campus here in Wichita, which so many of us have loved and felt close to,” Higdon said. “It’s almost like it’s being hijacked by a vocal group who wants only a single agenda addressed on campus.”
Student leaders weigh in
Three top student government leaders wrote a letter to the regents praising Golden and the decision to cancel the Ivanka Trump address.
“On behalf of over 16,000 students, far and wide, home and abroad, past, present and future, we ask that you continue to support Dr. Golden as our President, to support him and back him up to ensure he executes the vision we all have of Wichita State University,” said the letter, signed by student body president Rija Khan, Student Senate Speaker Olivia Babin, and Kitrina Miller, a former student body president and student representative on the search committee that picked Golden as president.
The student leaders said it would have been a mistake to allow Ivanka Trump to address the graduating class at WSU Tech, especially amid widespread protests across the nation in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd.
President Trump has stood in opposition to the protesters, including a widely criticized tweet on Tuesday in which he boosted an unlikely conspiracy theory: that an elderly protester injured by police in Buffalo, N.Y. was actually an Antifa tech whiz armed with a device to jam police communications.
“Regardless of political affiliation, it is undeniable that President Donald Trump is a divisive figure, especially for People of Color,” the WSU student leaders’ letter said. “The Trump name, regardless of the first name it is attached to, is a divisive political statement, especially during a time of incredible civil unrest in our country.
“A state institution like Wichita State University should be wary of allowing something this controversial to happen on our campus.”
This story was originally published June 10, 2020 at 8:09 PM.
