After eight years as one of the top people in higher education, Janice DeBauge has fulfilled her terms on the Kansas Board of Regents. It has been a satisfying time for a woman who never dreamed of getting involved in state politics. She’s helped hire a new university president. She’s helped create more accountability in college budgeting,
The one thing she hasn’t been able to do — and the one regret she still has — is in not convincing the Legislature to make higher education a higher priority.
“The unfinished business, I believe, is the lack of support for higher education from both the public and the Legislature,” DeBauge said in an interview Wednesday. “I think higher education is going to be the key to the future of Kansas and I don’t believe there is adequate interest or awareness of that across the state.”
This year’s legislative session was a case in point, and a frustrating one for her. The six state universities and the Regents lobbied for $633 million to catch up on overdue maintenance and postponed repairs. The Legislature pared that down to $380 million through a combination of loans, appropriations and tax credits.
“There’s not a sense of responsibility for these campuses,” DeBauge said. “There’s a perception that the colleges’ operating budgets should have addressed things, but those operating budgets are tight and were not intended to maintain buildings. In fact, the institutions have had to transfer money from teaching — their main mission — to maintain their properties.”
DeBauge was first appointed to the Regents in 1999 by Gov. Bill Graves. The appointment was a bit of a surprise to her. She’d been active with Emporia State University, particularly a campaign to renovate Beach Music Hall. But state politics was a new consideration.
She was dropped in the deep end from the word “go.” On her first day, the regents began looking at a proposal to restructure the 36 institutions governed by the board from state universities to community colleges. Two years of meetings across the state began.
“It was really a very exciting time,” DeBauge said.
One thing that ultimately came out of the board’s discussion was a performance-based budgeting system, requiring the colleges and universities to meet particular goals to receive full funding. That started about four years ago. The challenge, DeBauge said, was to gain accountability without losing the flexibility that a college needs.
“We don’t want cookie-cutter institutions,” she said. “We don’t want cookie-cutter education.”
Other pieces took longer to implement, such as an overall strategic plan for the colleges or a database for tracking their students.
And of course, some decisions have an immediate payoff in terms of satisfaction. The best example may be the board’s hiring of ESU President Michael Lane last year, the only president hired during DeBauge’s tenure on the board. A university president is one of the more powerful jobs in the country, DeBauge said, which made it important to take care in filling the top spot at Emporia.
“Dr. Lane has a very high level of energy,” she said last September after the Regents announced their choice. “I think he’ll bring a lot of good ideas to ESU. And I think he will be very effective in working in the higher education system of Kansas. He’s good with systems.”
With so much happening at the state level, DeBauge acknowledged that it took a little while to get her feet under her. But once it happened, she quickly became one of the board’s leaders. She was chair of the Regents from 2003 until 2004 and has also served as vice chair, chair of the coordinating committee and chair of academic affairs. This last year is the first one in a while that she hasn’t been asked to head something up.
Even if she’d known how busy it would be, DeBauge said, she would still have agreed to take the post.
“It’s difficult to say no when you work with so many wonderful people,” she said. “I feel grateful about those eight years. A lot has been accomplished and I’m grateful I had the chance to serve in that capacity.”
Having said that, with two terms finally coming to an end, DeBauge is looking forward to having some time that’s truly her own.
“I’m going to play with my 1-year-old grandson,” she said. “I’ve neglected a lot of things in my life, some extended family, so I’ll be playing catch-up, I think.”