So, the Regents wanting to part ways with their own president (the one they had selected), isn’t all that surprising or all that unusual in the annals of corporate, nonprofit or governmental settings. But usually this plays out in predictable ways which it did not in this case.
Having been part of these kinds of situations both as mayor and as a member of nonprofit boards, here’s how it usually goes. First off, nobody is surprised. By the time it gets to this point, the manager knows what’s coming. If anything, boards tend to wait too long to act. They want to avoid the uncomfortableness and so they try to convince themselves that the situation will improve. It never does.
So when confronted with the inevitable, the manager falls on his sword in exchange for some kind of severance and a lot of face saving. There’s almost always a formal or verbal nondisparagement agreement. The manager is allowed to resign, retire or take time to find another job. The parties agree to speak no evil of the other.
What was unusual about this case was that both those things were missing. Rothman claims he was blindsided — the Regents claim he wasn’t. But there’s no question that legislators and the public had no inkling that this was coming, save for the rearview mirror of the DEI agreement resignation threat. And Rothman, once confronted with the reality that he had lost the confidence of the board, did not go quietly.
All of which drives me to a set of conflicting conclusions. On the one hand, I now think Rothman should have done the honorable thing, He should have accepted the inevitable reality that he could not continue without the confidence of his bosses and announced that he had decide to retire or return to private law practice at the end of the year. He could have said, quite honestly, that he had accomplished all that he had set out to do. The Regents probably would have even thrown him the nicest party possible provided by UW catering.
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More.