The risk-taking culture of gambling gets a lot of attention these days far from the floors of any casino: Not only in business - where a willingness to take a risk is an ordinary part of life, at least to a point - but in many other sectors, including government.
Zero risk-taking can lead to stagnation, but too much of it can lead to catastrophe, and the trick is in navigating the difference.
Idaho has just managed to do that, in the now averted meshing of the University of Idaho with the University of Phoenix.
In this case, it was leadership at the Idaho institution -- its top executives and its governing board -- who were willing to throw all the chips in the pot. It was a whole lot of other people, all over the map politically, socially and economically, who effectively blocked the play.
Here’s one of those cases where the broader impulse turned out to be the voice of wisdom.
The story began about two years ago with negotiations between UI and the sometimes-controversial U of Phoenix, with the aim of Idaho’s state-run land grant institution taking over the big private higher education institution. (What follows is a very short summary; you can find an excellent review of the whole story by Kevin Richert on the Idaho Ed News website.)
Verbs, even the use of “taking over,” are awfully dicey here. In May 2023, after initial negotiations at UI, the state Board of Education gave the UP deal the green light. As the Ed News said, “Thursday’s State Board vote represents an early milestone in a dizzying, complicated and costly process — one that came to light barely 24 hours earlier.” But the exact nature of the relationship between the UI and UP - and implicitly between the state and the private company - never has seemed entirely clear. It didn’t look exactly like a buyout, and what that would mean in the case of a state buyer wasn’t obvious. The post-UP operation (which would be renamed) would be governed by a board including state officials, but it wouldn’t apparently be a state board. Sort of. A massive bond sale was intended to underwrite the purchase, though the details of it (I always wondered who the big-time bond buyers would be) seemed murky too. How all these pieces would fit together over time never became obvious.
The university was no doubt in a mood to gamble. The anti-education political environment in the state, coupled with some dark atmospherics (the murder case involving four students killed at Moscow more than two years ago for which a trial still is some ways off) were just two of the downer elements the university was facing. It needed, wanted, a win. The UP deal offered the prosport of turning Idaho’s university into a national player with tens of thousands of new (mainly online) students; you could at least imagine a university transformed, powerfully positioned for the future.
Against that, how many ways could things go bad? That’s what gave people nightmares, and the development of all kinds of dystopian scenarios. These came from all kinds of directions. State legislators from both ideological ends - less so those closer to the middle - raised concerns, and legislation intended to ease progress of the deal instead stayed blocked in the Statehouse. Negotiations gradually fell apart after that, more than a year ago, and the process has been on life support for months.
That’s by way of saying, the new announcement that talks have been suspended was expected, sooner or later.
Would the purchase, or whatever it was, necessarily have been a bad deal? Maybe not necessarily. But it would have been a big risk.
Just how lucky are you, University of Idaho?
Odds are, the university’s luck has held this time, just enough.
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