Sean Connery, as the old Chicago cop in “The Untouchables,” tells the young Elliott Ness that if you’re trying to avoid rotten apples, “Don’t go to the barrel — pick ’em off the tree.”
That line of reasoning might or might not be what prompted Alabama higher education leaders to go outside the state for somebody to head up — and lead the reform of — the state’s breathtakingly corrupt two-year college system. In either case, it was the right move under the circumstances.
The tree in this case is Georgia, and Alabama higher education’s new apple is Freida Hill, who has served as second in command of the Technical College System of Georgia for most of the past two years. She will be the first woman to serve as chancellor of the Alabama two-year system on other than an interim basis. She will replace Bradley Byrne, who after a long stint on the state school board, took over the troubled two-year system in 2007 following the ouster of Chancellor Roy Johnson, and is now running for governor.
Hill must like a challenge, because she’s taking on one.
The system over which she will preside had become particularly notorious in recent years, a swamp of kickbacks, nepotism, no-bid contracts and political sweetheart deals. To be connected to some of the two-year colleges in Alabama meant in many cases a lucrative job or state contract, often without qualifications or even legitimacy. Johnson, the former chancellor, has pleaded guilty to 15 federal charges, including bribery and money laundering.
But the problems with the system didn’t begin yesterday, or in the last year, or in the last decade.
Almost from its inception, it has too often been more about politics than about learning or training — a tree not of education apples, but of patronage plums: Play ball in Montgomery, and get a junior college in your district. Or, at the very least, a cushy job connected with one. (Roy Johnson had the authority to sign contracts without approval of the system’s governing board — a power Hill has already said she does not want.) The frequent results — aside from the obvious slush funding of taxpayer money — were superfluous schools and redundant programs.
It should go without saying, of course, that not everyone or every institution involved with Alabama’s network of two-year schools of higher learning is tainted. There are no doubt people of ability and integrity within the system who would do their best to lead it out of the slough it has sunk into.
But restoration of public confidence in a system Alabama desperately needs to be functioning and effective demands a really fresh start. If Freida Hill can provide that for an education infrastructure that desperately needs it, she will earn an honored place in Alabama history.
— Dusty Nix, for the editorial board
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