Shumaker the Short-Timer

Take a look down I-40 east and you can see the storm clouds hovering above the UT-Knoxville campus from here.

Huddled in his executive suite, president John W. Shumaker appears close to implosion.

In recent days and weeks, Shumaker has been plagued by an assault of journalists, who are kind of like locusts without the charm. The reporters want to know why he’s using the UT plane so frequently for trips that appear to be unrelated to his job. In particular, what’s up with all the flights to Birmingham? The Knoxville News-Sentinel has reported that Shumaker has landed there in his university plane nine times since Nov. 1, 2002.

Of direct interest to this story is that the president of the University of Alabama-Birmingham is a woman named Carol Garrison, who used to work at the University of Louisville while Shumaker was that university’s president. On at least one of the flights, Garrison joined Shumaker for a jaunt to Little Rock. Shumaker has described Garrison in press reports as “an old colleague.” Reporters want to know if Shumaker’s using public resources to maintain that personal relationship, whatever it may entail.

As the questioning has continued, intensified and attached itself to him like a bad dream, Shumaker has unwisely decided that the best defense is offense. Shumaker formally asked the state comptroller’s office in a letter to review his use of the plane. Fine enough. That should settle things, or at least provide the appearance of doing so. Unfortunately, when he made that request, he also complained about the condition of the plane, saying it was in disrepair.

The plane, a quarter-century old, is a King Air, which is nice enough. It comes with propellers, not jet engines, but Shumaker feels it needs to be replaced. Or, he wrote in the letter, it needs a complete overhaul. He said safety was at stake. Estimates for replacing the plane, by the way, run as high as $4 million. That’s a lot of jack.

At a time when the state has been forced to cut costs in many state departments by 9 percent across the board, and at a time when the UT brass has had to significantly increase tuition to make ends meet (9 percent for undergrads), Shumaker took out a shovel, buried a hole, jumped in it and then kept digging. It has been astonishing to watch a man commit such public hara-kari.

Part of the problem is that we’re talking about planes. And planes have sunk many a CEO before. Just ask any executive at any large corporation that owns a fleet of them. The first thing you do, if revenues are tanking and you’re looking to cut costs, is dump your personal airline. You fly Southwest, and you let everybody know it. Granted, private airplanes are sometimes the most time-efficient and cost-efficient way for organizations to go, but when the chips are down, nothing sends a message like pushing the planes over the cliff. Unfortunately, Shumaker took the other public relations route: He said he needed a better plane.

If Shumaker had any legs to stand on before this crisis, he might have survived. But the sense is that the long knives from the Bredesen administration may be out for him.

A month or so ago, the governor—who’s not a guy to raise his voice—drilled the UT Board of Trustees and its administration for failing to accomplish anything meaningful during its regular meeting. Bredesen had attended the meeting, at which, after an hour-and-a-half of no activity whatsoever and the governor having to sit through a 25-minute video about the university, he pitched a fit. Why, he asked, wasn’t the board getting anything done?

Bredesen is often fond of telling employees that if they have a problem, they should also bring him a solution. Obviously the administration has been brought nothing but the former from UT. What it wants now is some progress. What it does not want is a brand new plane.