Five candidates seek seat on NIC board

It isn’t a high profile or even a paid position, but the open seat on the North Idaho College Board of Trustees has gotten plenty of attention going into the Nov. 7 election.

Five candidates have filed for the six-year term, the most for one position that NIC Vice President for Administration Rolly Jurgens said he has seen in his more than 20 years overseeing the elections. The position is currently held by board Vice Chairman Denny Hague, who’s not seeking re-election. It is one of five seats on a board that hires and evaluates the performance of the president, among other tasks.

NIC President Michael Burke made headlines this summer after some local business leaders penned a letter of no confidence in him, citing long-standing frustrations in the college’s professional-technical educational offerings. They say they’re unable to fill jobs because of a lack of quality programs at NIC.

NIC administrators say it’s a time of great change on campus, with new top-level administrators and a new outreach effort to nontraditional students, and it’s that declaration of changing times that has sparked the interest of many of the candidates.

“The simple fact that there’s five candidates running indicates that there’s some level of dissatisfaction,” said candidate Dennis Conners, director of the graduate-level leadership program at Gonzaga University. He was the dean of instruction at NIC in the late 1980s.

Civil engineer Jim Coleman said he was encouraged to run by some of those who are dissatisfied with the way the college responds to businesses needs.

A former president of the Coeur d’Alene Chamber of Commerce, Coleman said there’s a lack of communication between businesses and NIC, and he can help the two understand each other. “I know most of the business leaders in the community,” said the former president of the NIC Foundation.

Coleman points to his extensive ties to both NIC and the business community as a sign he can improve things.

Coeur d’Alene real estate agent Bill Brooks said he classifies candidates for these types of boards in three categories: Bureaucrats, aristocrats and barbarians.

“Barbarians get in there and shake things up a bit,” Brooks said. “I certainly consider myself a barbarian” who will ask tough questions.

“You don’t need to do that in an objectionable or mean-spirited way,” he said.

Brooks thinks the board should televise its meetings and get more public input. As it is now, he said, if citizens showed up in numbers to a board meeting, “I think you’d have five trustees having a coronary.”

He said the college spends too much on athletics – more than $1 million out of an annual budget of about $33 million.

“Let’s put a little bit of that money into paying professors,” said Brooks, who wants to help the college get better professional-technical programs.

By far the most controversial candidate in the race is candidate Stan Hess, of Hayden, a self-proclaimed maverick and “European-American civil rights activist.” The Southern Poverty Law Center considers him a white supremacist of national prominence.

Hess said he doesn’t support segregation, “but I’d like to live in a predominately European-American neighborhood.”

“I moved up here so I wouldn’t be an ethnic minority,” said Hess, who moved to Idaho about four years ago from California after retiring as a bus driver.

Human rights advocate Tony Stewart, a political science instructor at NIC, and about 150 others in the campus community have taken out a half-page ad in local newspapers expressing concern about Hess’ comments as a candidate and his past leadership role in Ku Klux Klansman David Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization, among other things.

Hess said he’d like to establish a European-American heritage month at the college and coordinate speakers to discuss European cultures.

But he also shares some views with the other candidates. He thinks the board should televise its meetings, for instance, and spend more on scholarships for nursing students. He wants the college to either stop paying for athletes to travel out of state, or get rid of the athletics department altogether and offer intramural sports instead.

Conners and Coleman support athletics and don’t have any changes they want to make to the department.

Conners said his best quality as a candidate is his 30 years as a classroom teacher, a principal and an administrator at both the college and K-12 level. His wife Barbara was a full-time instructor at NIC until last year.

He contends that the NIC administration and its trustees address symptoms, like slumping enrollment, rather than causes.

“The lack of tough questions is alarming,” Conners said. “Either they don’t know the issues or they’re not getting issues, and they don’t know how to deliberate in public.”

Conners said he’s heard complaints from students and faculty about classes being canceled at the last minute because of low enrollment. Conners said faculty is concerned that short-term solutions to the budget problems facing the college will cause long-term harm to the college.

Conners said it’s important for the college to listen to all areas of the community but that the administration and the board have a “moral obligation” to provide high quality educational programs, and those aren’t necessarily professional-technical programs.

“Part of it is not reacting to a small group of what I say are special interests that say, ‘What can you do for me, my business,’ ” Conners said. “That’s treating the symptom.”

The vast majority of NIC students are there for academic courses, not professional-technical courses, Conners said, so it’s obvious where the focus should remain.

The fifth candidate, marriage counselor and ordained minister Ron Vieselmeyer, a former state representative, has been out of town. His voice mail said he would return home Tuesday, but he did not return phone calls.

In a press release issued when he announced his candidacy, Vieselmeyer said he would work for “more cooperation between North Idaho College, the taxpaying supporters of the college, the business community, the church community and other civic organizations.”

Vieselmeyer in the past has called himself a social conservative.