Welcome to Kendom: 13% of students escape from Emporia State after ex-Koch exec’s takeover | Opinion

A year after new president Ken Hush took a scythe to the faculty of Emporia State University, fall enrollment figures paint a bleak picture of what his “realignment” has done to what once was the little college that could.

Figures released Wednesday show a year-to-year drop of 512 full-time equivalent students, a whopping 13% enrollment decline from last year.

Current FTE enrollment at ESU, 3,431, is the lowest in the past 20 years, which is as far back as statistics are available from the Kansas Board of Regents.

It’s also the largest year-to-year percentage drop on record for any state university. It nearly doubled the worst decline at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the small K-State veterinary school, which is counted separately from the larger university, posted a 6.6% enrollment loss between 2020 and 2021.

Lest you may think this is just symptomatic of a general decline in four-year college education, the next largest decline this year was at Fort Hays State, a more-or-less status-quo drop of only 1.1%. The only other enrollment loser in the state system was Wichita State, which dropped a minuscule 0.5%.

KU led enrollment gains with a hefty 7.5% increase and the rest of the universities were basically stable, with increases less than 1%. Even K-State was up a bit, its first increase in nine years.

So we can safely conclude the massive enrollment decline at Emporia falls squarely on the shoulders of Hush and the Kansas Board of Regents, which appointed him to his position and unanimously approved his chainsaw approach to university (mis)management last year.

Hush, a tennis standout at ESU in the early 1980s, had no experience in higher education management or teaching when he was hired as the interim president of the university in 2021.

At the time, he was running a company called BLI Rentals, an Emporia-based company that specializes in rent-to-own backyard storage sheds.

But it seems Hush’s primary qualification was that he’d held a variety of executive positions with Koch Industries, including president of its minerals and carbon division.

Koch has donated millions to ESU and other Kansas universities to promote the economic and public-policy goals of the company’s billionaire owner, Charles Koch, and it wields outsize influence throughout the system.

Hush’s tenure has been riled with controversy.

Just before the regents made his interim job permanent, he shut down the university’s Center for Early Childhood Education, which provided on-campus day care for employees and gave students experience working with young learners. It was a weird flex for a university that has always prided itself on being one of the nation’s premier teacher colleges.

In an interview with the university newspaper, the Bulletin, Hush said he laughed at the criticism of the decision to close the center. Then he tried to walk the comment back, and when the student reporters didn’t let him, he told them “I think this interview today will determine how our relationship is going to exist on a go-forward basis — and I’m meaning the whole newspaper on campus,” the Bulletin reported.

It was a foreshadowing of much larger controversy to come.

During the pandemic, the Board of Regents put forth a new temporary policy allowing its institutions to dump faculty, regardless of tenure or length of service.

None of them did, so the regents extended the policy to late 2022, long after widespread availability of vaccines and new treatments had blunted the COVID threat.

Hush took advantage of the policy extension to lay off 33 of the approximately 230 faculty members at the university, shuttering entire degree programs, mostly in arts and sciences.

Among the casualties was the university’s national powerhouse debate team, which in the world of college debate would be about equivalent to KU dropping basketball.

Oh, and Hush made good on his threat to those pesky journalism students who insisted on quoting him accurately. He’s refused to speak to reporters from the school paper ever since, and it’s no surprise he eliminated the journalism degree program and fired their professor and newspaper advisor, Max McCoy.

What’s been going on at Emporia State this past year is a mockery of what a state university should be.

Why would students go to a university where their major can be canceled and their favorite professor sacked, at the whim of a university president who thinks he has all the answers because he was a big success in minerals trading and selling prefab garden sheds?

An investigation by the American Association of University Professors called what’s going on at Emporia State “a direct assault on tenure and academic freedom,” and concluded that the regents, Hush and his cabal “are unfit to lead.”

In an “open letter,” released a day in advance of the disastrous enrollment report, Hush tried to put the proverbial cosmetics on the porcine omnivore he’s raising in Emporia.

“The fall semester is off to a great start with students back and signs of progress all over campus including construction on our new Nursing + Student Wellness Center, Cybersecurity Research + Outreach Center, Esports Arena and Feltner Student Union Square,” the letter said.

Sorry, Ken, but it’s going to take more than a few Alienware computers and new picnic tables to bring back the students you chased off.

Also in the open letter, Hush sought to deflect responsibility in any direction he could.

Some highlights: “Enrollment trends are changing and declining across the nation,” and “The national workforce shortage is a new competitor in the higher education landscape, pulling students directly into the workforce after high school graduation.”

And this: “As an industry, higher education is at a crossroads and can no longer afford to ignore the signs of the times: the popularity of online education, lucrative alternatives to higher education, corporations offering on-the-job training and national campaigns urging students and employers to forego higher education — paired with a shortage of workers and the increasing cost for students to attend.”

Then there’s the obligatory promise that the steep decline in enrollment was all part of the plan from the start, and better days are just over the horizon.

“As we forecasted 18 months ago, enrollment this fall will be down. Considering this news, as our valued community, supporters and friends, I wanted to connect with you to reinforce that we remain optimistic and excited about our path forward,” Hush wrote. “We are in the middle of a full-scale transformation, and change of this magnitude takes time … During our transformation, Emporia State will have declining enrollment before stabilizing in 2025.”

Or, like the sign on the wall at Joe’s Crab Shack says: “Free crab tomorrow.”