To the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois:

We wish to state for the record that we have no confidence in Michael J. Hogan as President of this University. In our view he lacks the values, commitments, management style, ethics, and even manners, needed to lead this University, and his Presidency should be ended at the earliest opportunity. We reach this conclusion reluctantly and do not take the implications of it at all lightly. We recognize that there are real costs to ending another presidency so soon after the premature ending of that of Hogan’s predecessor. But we, as well as many others at our institution, find the situation with Hogan as President to be so intolerable that rectifying this mistake would be worth the admittedly serious costs. With the arrival of Chancellor Wise at the Urbana campus, each institution that comprises the University of Illinois is now in strong hands; thus we are confident that the University would be able to move forward and set its house in order. Many of the reasons for our reaching this conclusion were detailed in an earlier letter that Professor Michael Moore had sent to the Board (and circulated widely). In summary, those reasons were: • Hogan has repeatedly demonstrated an unseemly preoccupation with the material trappings of high office at the known cost of stirring up needless public controversy about the expenditures of the University for those trappings. • Hogan has exempted himself and those who immediately serve him from the financial discipline to which the rest of this University has been subject in times of frozen salaries and tight budgets. • Hogan has arrogated traditional Chancellor functions, such as those over athletics on this campus, into perks of his own office. • Hogan has by-passed the chain of command by meeting with deans and the Council of Deans on matters of substance without securing the presence of either our Acting Chancellor or Acting Provost. • Hogan engineered the supposedly “external” consultant report so as to make it conform to already pre-existing desires for a centralized, University-level enrollment, admission, and financial aid system, and then discussed what was essentially his report with the Board of Trustees without first having consulted with the faculty of this or any other campus. • Hogan has by his own admission attempted to spy on, interfere with, and even bully the Senate Conference’s in-house deliberations about possible responses to Hogan’s enrollment proposals. • Hogan’s acts and omissions surrounding the now famous, fraudulent e-mails bespeak a “failure of ethical leadership” (as found by a unanimous UIUC Faculty Senate), particularly since the person he most failed to supply with such leadership was his Chief of Staff, long-time friend, confidante, and one who was intimately acquainted with what Hogan wanted on this very issue and how he wanted to achieve it. • Given the circumstantial evidence provided by Hogan’s motive, opportunity, and characteristic modes of dealing, it has yet to be shown to our satisfaction that Hogan did not have an even more active role in the composing and sending of the fraudulent e-mails sent from his personal assistant’s computer than has yet been revealed -- although that assistant has coyly promised that “in the fullness of time” the truth will come out about this. • Hogan inappropriately directed those administering this campus that Hogan’s disgraced former Chief of Staff, Lisa Troyer, be elevated to a full-time tenured appointment in the Psychology Department of this campus – this, despite the ethical lapses of Troyer that no one (including Hogan) denies occurred, and despite the obvious conflict of interest Hogan had because of Troyer’s incentive to remain silent so long as some job security was obtained for her. These failings of President Hogan are independent of what we also consider to be the demerits of the enrollment proposals that have been so contentious on all three campuses of the University of Illinois. We are strongly opposed to these proposals, destructive as we think they would be to a campus whose academic excellence we cherish. But President Hogan’s failings transcend this issue. Rather, the list above is of failings personal to him and to his style of “leadership.” Added to these nine reasons given above is a tenth reason, one only revealed in documents recently produced by the central administration, under the compulsion of the Freedom of Information Act. We refer to the extraordinary bullying, arrogance, disrespect, and hubris that Hogan displayed in chastising Phyllis Wise, this campus’ new Chancellor, while she was just two months on the job. Sounding more like Louis XIV than a university president, Hogan told Wise that “my goals are your goals” (apparently necessarily so given the power structure between them as Hogan sees it). Hogan also chastised Wise for her “lack of leadership” in not following his directives to quell faculty opposition to the enrollment proposals; this chastising presupposes a meaning of “leadership” whereby a leader “leads” by doing exactly what she is told, nothing more and nothing less. Hogan also presumed to dictate detailed “talking points” to Wise that she was to use to overcome opposition from various deans and senators on this campus, talking points phrased in the first person as if they were Wise’s own thoughts when they were not. We are quite frankly appalled by this disrespectful manner of dealing with a Chancellor of this campus, particularly one new to the job. These insulting, disrespectful, and downright bullying kinds of communications from Hogan to our Chancellor are of a piece with Hogan’s expressed petulance and anger at Professor Chambers and other senators last December when they openly opposed Hogan’s enrollment plans. Hogan has thus shown us here in Illinois what he showed those overseeing his earlier Presidency at the University of Connecticut. As Connecticut State Senator Thomas P. Gaffey (Chair of the Connecticut Legislature’s Education Committee and thus Hogan’s overseer there) put it: “He [Hogan] was uncomfortable with it to the point of frustration if you had the temerity to ask him a question. He had an imperial view of his position. It was almost like a monarchy.” (Gaffey was so quoted in the New York Times.) We have no need of kings on this campus, or of petty tyrants with delusions of grandeur, particularly ones as preoccupied with their own power as this one. We are disturbed by President Hogan’s repeated demonstration that he is devoid of any respect for, and commitment to, the long-standing autonomy and academic excellence of the Urbana campus, characteristics that have served this campus well and propelled it to world-class stature. We thus write to express both our lack of confidence in Michael Hogan and our hope that, as stewards of the future of this institution, you will assess our reasons dispassionately, and do the right thing for the students, staff and faculty of the University of Illinois. That would be to ask for President Hogan’s resignation. Sincerely,