Emporia State University President Ken Hush’s open letter to Emporia media and the community touted the university’s method of giving performance stipends while sharply criticizing the city’s mayor for questioning the motives behind the bonuses.
Hush’s open letter, released to local media Monday afternoon, said comments attributed to Mayor Susan Brinkman in a Kansas Reflector article on April 5, which detailed almost $140,000 in bonuses to nearly 70 faculty members, were “uninformed,” “reckless” and “cannot be tolerated.” Brinkman was quoted as saying the bonuses give “the illusion, whether it’s true or not, that they are paying for your silence or for your support of the plan, even though we don’t really know how to articulate the plan.” Brinkman, who also owns Bourbon Cowboy, was quoted as saying, “When you’re making some radical changes within a business or organization, there are going to be staff that you identify that you want to keep, that you want to keep quiet, or that you want to be on your team shouting from the rooftops. And so they are awarded monetarily to do so.”
In an interview Monday with KVOE News, Brinkman, a former ESU faculty member, said, “How Emporia State runs its business is its business” — although she never received a performance bonus during her better than 20 years at the university. However, she says the timing and lack of background information didn’t look good from her perspective.
Kansas Reflector says ESU did not respond to several questions about the methodology behind the bonuses. KVOE News is making its own requests.
Hush says Emporia State “absolutely” awards stipends “to recognize high-performing faculty” and will do so in the future because “talent and value recognition are part of our new model.” He says some faculty members have voluntarily added workload to help ESU move forward, and he says it’s “disgusting” to imply staffers receiving stipends got the money for any other reason than their work and value to Emporia State.
