photo by: Nick Krug

Haskell Indian Nations University president Venida Chenault addresses graduates during the 2018 commencement ceremony on Friday, May 18, 2018 at the Coffin Sports Complex.

A former Haskell Indian Nations University president is calling for changes to how the university is operated, with hopes that more autonomy will mean greater opportunities for Haskell’s students.

Venida Chenault, who served as Haskell’s president for five years, shared her thoughts on that idea with the Journal-World earlier this week. Haskell is operated by a federal agency — the Bureau of Indian Education, a branch of the U.S. Department of the Interior. That means all of the university’s employees are federal employees, too, subject to the guidance of officials who are located in Washington, D.C., not in Lawrence.

Chenault said she thinks that’s a problem when it comes to Haskell’s independence — and that a bureaucracy simply doesn’t have enough agility to be responsive to the needs of rapidly changing colleges and universities.

Chenault knows that from personal experience. She described a two-year process just to get permission to change the university’s hiring process for new faculty members from requiring a degree in education to allowing educators with degrees in fields related to their specific subject areas to be considered.

“If you go in thinking you’ll be able to do amazing things in a relatively short amount of time, you’re setting yourself up to fail,” Chenault told the Journal-World.

In part, Chenault said that’s because the BIE tends to be slow to respond to requests and concerns — if it even responds at all. Even federal lawmakers such as U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, who represents Kansas on the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee, can have a hard time getting answers from the BIE. An inquiry from Moran’s office concerning allegations by Haskell student-athletes that they’d been forced to sign legal documents went unanswered earlier this year.

“That’s why I talk about mismanagement of the BIE; it’s coming from that level,” Chenault said. “If that level is indicating in any way, ‘We’re not going to respond to this senator’ — that’s a senator. A senator that wants to help.”

That’s especially a problem, Chenault said, because Haskell is an important educational resource to Native Americans. It’s one of only two federally operated tribal colleges and universities — the other is Albuquerque’s Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute — and is home to students from more than 140 tribes across the nation.

While there are another roughly three dozen tribal colleges and universities besides Haskell and SIPI, Chenault said those schools are operated by or largely serve specific tribes — and there are 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the U.S. That means the vast majority don’t have the capacity to have their own colleges or universities.

“Change is needed to give Haskell autonomy and the ability to operate like a university and to end bureau operation of both Haskell and SIPI, but that has to be supported by the tribes,” Chenault said.

Interruptions in the university’s leadership also don’t help, Chenault said. Hers was one such example; a federal investigation into allegations of nepotism and other misconduct took place near the end of Chenault’s presidency, but she said she didn’t know it had anything to do with her until it had been completed. She was reassigned to a post with the BIE working remotely in Lawrence at her own request, where she remained until leaving the BIE recently.

The findings of that investigation, according to a BIE Human Resources review document Chenault shared with the Journal-World, were found to be “not fully supported.” That document says that some claims from individuals interviewed during the investigation were “implausible and self-serving … pure speculation and born of spite and anger.”

There was a revolving door of university leadership after Chenault, first with a series of interim and acting presidents between 2018 and 2020. The next permanent president, Ronald Graham, was removed from office after also being subjected to an internal investigation, and earlier this year he submitted a complaint about the BIE with the Office of Special Counsel in Washington, D.C. Another round of interim presidents followed until Francis Arpan was appointed the latest permanent president in January.

“We’ve had these stops and starts, stops and starts,” Chenault said. “(Arpan) deserves the right to function like a president and not an agent of the Bureau … The BIE personnel practices and the revolving door of presidents does not help Haskell.”

The solution, Chenault said, could lie in emulating how public historically Black colleges and universities are operated. Those schools aren’t federally operated, but they are federally funded. That’d mean not just more funding potential from the government but also more potential to establish funding streams like endowment funds, which Haskell currently can’t do.

Being “locked into” the federal system isn’t conducive to that, Chenault said. The federal structure isn’t designed for the issues that affect a college campus, and she said problems will continue to manifest at Haskell as long as that’s the case.

“Until we’re allowed to operate like a university, these things are going to continue to happen and we’re going to fail people, not by commitment or determination but by the regulations and rules that impede us,” Chenault said.