Other views: Don’t mess with UND pyramid

The Energy and Environmental Research Center is a spectacular asset for North Dakota. Two sentences from the center’s website explain why:

First, “the EERC’s staff is a multidisciplinary team of more than 345 highly skilled scientists, engineers and support personnel representing more than 120 different disciplines, making it one of the world’s leading developers of energy and environmental technologies.”

And second, “research (at the EERC) represents 45 percent of the total externally funded research at UND.”

The center draws talented scientists from around the world to Grand Forks, greatly enhancing the region’s economy as well as the research climate at UND. For years, it has been an exceptionally dynamic and robust branch of the university.

But a key word in the above appears in the last sentence: “branch.” The EERC remains a part of UND, not apart from it. That status may change some time in the future; maybe North Dakota will spin off the center in some fashion and grant it a measure of functional independence.

But until then, it’s a branch of UND, albeit a special branch. And for all matters UND, the university president must remain at the pyramid’s top.

That’s why the Legislature should make short work of a proposal to give the EERC director a veto over the fate of the old Ralph Engelstad Arena.

It’s never good management to forge bypass links into a chain of command. Higher education in North Dakota already endured one such episode in recent years, when the State Board of Higher Education failed to support then-Chancellor Robert Potts in his dispute with Joe Chapman, president of North Dakota State University at the time.

The Potts-Chapman conflict embarrassed the board and left a sour taste in the mouths of most North Dakotans, lawmakers included. Those lawmakers should recall the quarrel’s core lesson: Everybody needs a supervisor — even dynamic chief executives such as college presidents.

EERC director Gerald Groenewold isn’t commenting on the bill, but he might consider opposing it. After all, Groenewold has a reputation of running a tight and very effective ship. How would he react if he learned of a bill to give, say, his associate directors for research or technology commercialization vetoes over his decisions?

For that matter, how would lawmakers react to a proposal to let the Legislature’s staff experts overturn House and Senate votes?

End runs may work in football games, but they’re poison to modern organizations. The Legislature should reject the proposal and reaffirm the university system’s chain of command.

Tags: grand forks, other views, opinion, editorials, und, pyramid