STRONG REGENTS NEEDED FOR A SOLID UNIVERSITY

In a number of ways, Southeast Missouri State University might look desirously at the achievements of a sibling institution in another corner of the state, Southwest Missouri State. Southwest has accomplished several things that Southeast aspires to: the Springfield school built a gleaming business building, it moved up and excelled in Division I athletics, it realized a dramatic growth in enrollment, it attracted top-notch students. Along the way, Southwest has also stumbled a bit. Officials at Southeast should take note, learning from the bad as well as the good.

Southwest now has a university president who is that in title only. Marshall Gordon, who became the chief executive there in 1983, was deposed 12 days ago in the midst of a controversy concerning enormous cost overruns for a performing arts center. A cost overrun of $7 million (on a project first conceived at $10.8 million) is bad enough; Gordon compounded the offense by withholding information on the center from his board of regents.

In agreeing to a buyout of his contract, Gordon said, "It is obvious the controversy will not end unless I end it." Wrong again. The Springfield university, now the second largest higher education institution in Missouri, with 21,000 students, faces a series of problems as a result of this mismanagement. Gordon was less than a year into a five-year contract, and his severance package (totaling about $500,000) has drawn criticism from some in the Missouri General Assembly. The school also faces an investigation by the state auditor's office, in addition to confronting the challenge of coming up with $7 million to pay off the cost overruns. The school's reputation has suffered at the hands of this controversy. Far worse, at a time when leadership is critical in state higher education because of fiscal concerns, Southwest has a vacuum at the top.

What can Southeast Missouri State learn from this example? In the next few years, the Cape Girardeau institution hopes to construct a new business building, one of an approximate cost of the Southwest performing arts center. If nothing else, officials here might learn a few lessons about avoidance of construction excesses.

More importantly, the incident points to the need for good communication in the upper reaches of university management. Regents are obligated to do more than show up occasionally to validate the desires of the school's president. They must be partners in decision-making, contributors to the thought process, advocates with good questions for the administration. While they mustn't impede the chief executive's grant to manage the institution on a day-to-day basis, the regents must be vigilant for the red flags that signal calamity.

The incident in Springfield reinforces our long-held view that strong, attentive regents are essential to the respon~s~i~ble operation of a university. Without the information being shared, and without regents acting on their duty, embarrassments such as the one at Southwest Missouri State are sure to be repeated.