Star Tribune
Amid howls from DFLers that Republicans were injecting an unprecedented measure of partisan politics into the process, the Minnesota Legislature elected one incumbent and three newcomers to the University of Minnesota Board of Regents on Monday.
The reasons for the outcry: Two of the newcomers are former Republican legislators, longtime House Speaker Steve Sviggum and Laura Brod.
In selecting them, legislators dumped an incumbent regent, Steven Hunter, secretary-treasurer of the DFL-allied AFL-CIO, and rejected a small-business owner and lifelong university volunteer from Chanhassen, Tom Devine.
The move was partisan, to be sure. But unprecedented? Not in the context of the regents' selections of the past eight years.
That history indicates that reforms enacted in the late 1990s that were intended to minimize partisan considerations in the selection of regents have not been as successful as hoped.
Now it appears a set limit on the number of former elected officials who can contend for regents' seats in a given year is in order, to ensure that politicians do not come to dominate the governance of this important state institution.
A partisan tit-for-tat has developed in regents selection at least since 2003, when defeated DFL gubernatorial candidate and former Senate DFL Majority Leader Roger Moe was rejected by a joint convention of the Legislature in which Republicans held the advantage.