Happy holidays, one and all, as Emporia State’s worst president ever finally leaves the building
Emporia State University president Ken Hush, who fired tenured and tenure-track faculty, outlined his philosophy of higher education administration for members of the Kansas Senate's government efficiency committee. (Grace Hills/Kansas Reflector)
Ken Hush gave Emporia State University the best Christmas present possible in 2025.
The former Koch executive and higher education outsider spent roughly four years as ESU’s president, claiming he was reshaping the institution’s future. What he actually did was create chaos. His successor, a veteran administrator named Matthew Baker, will now have to figure out how to rebuild a city and college fractured by ignorance.
Hush’s place on the naughty list was secure years ago.
He oversaw the firing of 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty without warning. Legal action continues. He sent secret bonuses to dozens of professors without explanation. He closed programs and departments. When enrollment cratered, he lobbied the Kansas Legislature ceaselessly for special, ESU-only payments (and received $18 million to balance the books). All the while, he refused to voice a scintilla of doubt about his path of destruction.
With his exit fast approaching, Hush embarked on a news media tour of sorts, talking about his tenure with the Lawrence Journal-World and pledging to donate the equivalent of his salary for the past four years to the university. That’s a cool $1.4 million, in case you wondered.
Generous? Perhaps. To me, it proves that Hush torched people’s lives and careers for the fun of it. He did it for free.
Who knows when or if ESU can fully recover. I doubt that highly qualified professors will want to take a risk on a university that has treated their peers so shabbily.
The American Association of University Professors’ 2023 report on the mess put it this way: “Remarkably, the Kansas Board of Regents and the ESU administration have insisted that they support tenure and academic freedom. If we take them at their word, we must conclude that they are unfit to lead, least of all during a crisis.”
We already know that students fled in the aftermath, likely leading to increases at other Kansas institutions. Hush and his cronies have hailed a recent increase in enrollment, but even a dead cat will bounce off the pavement when dropped from a great height. ESU’s enrollment is still down more than 17% over the past five years.
We should note here that Hush and his administration treated both student and professional journalists with contempt. They stonewalled open record requests, lied about our persistent and accurate coverage in public letters, and repeatedly refused to answer our questions.
They may have felt confident in their ability to steer the narrative to their own purposes. But all they did was wound a campus and town that needed care and attention rather than high-handed hackery.
I know that good people in Emporia hate when I write columns like this. They’re trying, they’ve told me. They want to build something great and strengthen their town. Those of us at Kansas Reflector have deep-seated connections to the university and empathize. Our editor in chief Sherman Smith graduated from ESU’s (now-defunct) journalism program. Sunday columnist Max McCoy ran that very program.
My parents received undergraduate and graduate degrees from the school. If they hadn’t met in Emporia, I quite literally wouldn’t exist.
We get it. We really do. But Emporia and ESU were never going to turn a corner with Hush in charge of the university. The fact that the Kansas Board of Regents picked a thoroughly experienced university administrator to succeed him tells us all we need to know.
Baker is a “proven leader with extensive experience developing and implementing initiatives designed to help students succeed in college and after graduation,” said Board of Regents chairman Blake Benson.
It would have been nice to have had one of those earlier, huh?
The “ESU model” has ended, in much the same way that former Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax-cutting “experiment” did. An ideologically driven chief executive wrecked something beautiful and precious. Now its up to the rest of us to clear the rubble and build anew.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.