UI Candidate Bucks The Trend Timber Exec Spells Out Non-Academic Vision

If state higher education officials really want a non-academic person to take the helm of their top university, they appear to have found one in J. Kirk Sullivan.

In appearances before students, faculty and administrators Monday, the timber executive repeatedly cast himself - and the University of Idaho presidency - as better geared toward the bottom line than the bookshelf.

“Do you define the president’s job as an academic position?” he asked one faculty member in a packed morning session.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then you and I have a difference of opinion,” he said. Instead, said Sullivan, the president’s “primary role” lies outside the university, and mostly with those who can give the school money. That can mean private companies, even a hypothetical rich widow - his own admittedly “crass” example.

“Before this whole conversation is over here today you’ll hear me say funds and money 10,000 times,” he said.

That’s just one reason many students and faculty worry about a Sullivan presidency, contending it will come at the cost of the university’s independence and integrity.

A handful of student protesters distributed “Corporate States of America timber dollars” calling for “no Boise Cascade University” and labeling the company a bad employer, polluter and political contributor.

The company donated $80,000 to 1994 political campaigns in Idaho, including $30,000 to Gov. Phil Batt, who since has appointed half the board that will choose a president Wednesday or Thursday.

Sullivan, who did not respond to media inquiries last week, denied Monday that his nomination is politically wired as a result.

“I don’t believe there’s any fix in,” he said in a hurried, 17-minute press conference. “I think the board of regents will be very objective in this. I think they have to make the right decision by interviewing the candidates and then they pick the one that they feel is the most qualified.”

He said he knows only two members of the board. He played golf with one and then only after being assigned to accompany him for six holes during the Governor’s Cup.

He acknowledged flying Batt and other governors around in the company’s corporate jet and said it does not give him an unfair advantage over the other finalists, as suggested by a recent Lewiston Morning Tribune editorial.

“Under Idaho state law there’s nothing illegal, immoral about that,” he said, “and if we can do something to increase the opportunity for the governor to fulfill his mission, then I have no problem with that.”

As he met with faculty, Phil Deutchman, a physics professor and faculty council member, questioned whether Sullivan can come from an “industrial culture” and learn about teaching loads, basic research for the sake of knowledge, and arts and humanities studies for the sake of ideas.

“I have some things I have to learn,” said Sullivan, who exhibited only a cursory knowledge of campus governance and referred vaguely to the land grant mission as a “three-legged stool” of teaching, research and service.

Sullivan said he was a firm believer in academic freedom, “as long as we don’t abuse it.”

As just one example of the value of academic freedom, he said:

“Nylon was invented in this country and look at what it has made in terms of a contribution to society.”

He could have picked a better example. Chemist Wallace H. Carothers invented nylon while working in the 1920s for the DuPont Co.

Sullivan also spoke of using the colleges of mines and forestry to raise the university’s public profile.

“Coming from a company that has cut trees, I understand what it means when you get up in the morning and it shows a clearcut across the area that says, ‘Look what this company did to this land.’ We can help in terms of structuring and understanding of what it means to use our natural resources and I think that’s a responsibility.”

For the most part, Sullivan stuck to generalities. When Donna Hanson, science librarian, criticized Boise Cascade as having “a reputation for being a very cold place for women and ethnic minorities,” he disagreed.

The company has trouble hiring some people “because they don’t want to come to Boise, Idaho.” Asked how he might bring minorities to as remote a place as Moscow, he said he would see that a set of recruitment procedures is in place and followed.

“That’s about all I as president can do,” he said.

But fund raising, that would be his strong suit, he said. It also would become his personal mission, he said, noting he helped with the $42 million Centennial campaign.

“If we target Mrs. X out there, and we know that Mrs. X is 72 years old - this is crass but let me give you my example - and she’s got $100 million and she doesn’t have the University of Idaho in her will, then it’s up to me to figure out how to get us into that will, assuming there’s a window of opportunity,” he said.

At one point, Jay Feldman, a student critic who trailed Sullivan throughout the day, asked if it might not have been more appropriate for him to have applied for the fund raising-oriented job of vice president for university relations, now held by Hal Godwin.

“The last time I looked at the advertisement, that job was not open,” Sullivan said.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo