TOPEKA — Republican legislative leaders agreed to pay former Emporia State University president Ken Hush $50,000 to spearhead their efforts to slash spending at public universities.
The five Republican members of the Legislative Coordinating Council, over objections from the panel’s two Democrats, approved a contract Thursday to pay Hush $10,000 per month for five months to be a consultant to the Legislature on higher education budgets. The committee members didn’t mention Hush by name while discussing the deal, but Senate President Ty Masterson, R-Andover, confirmed it was Hush after the meeting.
House Speaker Dan Hawkins, R-Wichita, said Hush would be tasked with finding “efficiencies” in university budgets while the Legislature works to cut annual state spending by $200 million.
Hush retired last month after leading ESU for more than three years. As president, he fired tenured professors without due process and eliminated and added programs without explanation. The so-called “ESU model” cratered student enrollment and required a pair of $9 million bailouts from the Legislature. An investigation by the American Association of University Professors concluded he was unfit to lead.
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Hawkins — Hush’s fraternity brother in the early 1980s at ESU — praised Hush’s leadership at ESU during the Thursday meeting.
“He has intimate insight into the higher ed budget arena, and certainly, as everybody knows, we have to be very careful and prudent with the dollars in our budget,” Hawkins said.
The Kansas Board of Regents already initiated plans to evaluate programs and faculty members at the state’s six public universities, and dismiss those who fail to meet expectations. In a brief exchange with reporters, Masterson said the effort was “helpful,” but that he wasn’t sure if it would go far enough. He supported the contract with Hush.
“It’s just valuable to have somebody who’s run a university be able to consult you on some of that, because those are vast budgets with multiple revenue sources,” Masterson said. “It’s gonna be well worth a few dollars spent. And” — he paused to bump this reporter’s shoulder — “we didn’t have a special session this year.”
The comment was in reference to GOP leaders’ failed plans to hold a special session in November 2025 to try to gerrymander U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat, out of office. The LCC had allotted $460,000 to fund the special session.
Rep. Blake Carpenter, R-Derby, said he supported the move to hire Hush because he and his staff already identified $100 million in what he considered to be “questionable spending” by universities. He said their findings included $75,000 “in travel reimbursements to a vanilla bean manufacturing tour guide in Africa,” $96,000 “to a nutritionist guru specializing in vegan cookbooks,” and $111,000 “to a social justice head-hunting firm specializing in placing executives into leadership positions and nonprofits.”
“So I think that if we’re able to find about $100 million just on our own over the interim with my staff and I looking through these line items, then I think it makes a lot of sense for us to hire an executive that has run one of these universities,” Carpenter said. “They know how they operate, and they can give specific details as to where and how we can be more efficient with these higher education systems. And I think the $100 million at this point is scratching the surface, and we need to continue to dig.”
Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes and House Minority Leader Brandon Woodard, both Lenexa Democrats, questioned whether Hush’s work would duplicate the work of the Legislature’s existing budget analysts and research staff.
Sykes also questioned the transparency of handing a costly, no-bid contract to an unnamed consultant without making the plan public in advance of Thursday’s meeting.
“I find it interesting with all the talk we have about finding efficiency in government, and I think we keep growing government, honestly,” she said.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.
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