Editor’s note: This story is part of a series on the role of corporate influences in Syracuse University’s governance and campus politics, based on dozens of interviews with faculty, staff, students, university leadership, higher education experts and other outside experts.

Eric Spina was leaving out a key piece of information as he addressed the Syracuse University faculty and staff gathered in Hendricks Chapel.

It was November 2013, and Spina, then SU’s provost and interim chancellor, was leading a forum about a university-wide assessment being administered in partnership with consulting firm Bain & Company.

The assessment, Spina said, would culminate in a report containing “a set of facts and a deep knowledge base” that would be presented to Chancellor-designate Kent Syverud, serving as a crucial foundation to guide his decisions. Data was to be collected through budgetary analysis, interviews with campus leaders and surveys of faculty and staff.

Further input would be provided from the assessment’s steering committee, which was a mix of faculty and administrators. Spina emphasized that the steering committee would play a leading role in the assessment.

“It’s not really the Bain project,” he said. “That’s a clear message I want you to hear. This is the Syracuse University project that is being run by the steering committee.”

What Spina didn’t mention was that there was another committee involved: the assessment’s executive committee, which was privy to more information than the steering committee and had authority over it. The executive committee consisted of Spina, four other upper-administrators, SU trustee John Riley and, notably, trustee Steven Barnes.

Barnes is an executive at Bain Capital, the investment firm with close historical ties to Bain & Company. Bain Capital’s founders were a group of partners from Bain & Company. Although Bain Capital and Bain & Company are separate entities, some faculty said they perceive the intersection of the two at SU as a possible conflict because of their historical similarities.

Serving on the assessment’s executive committee was an early sign of the influence Barnes would have in guiding SU’s institutional planning under Syverud. A long-time donor to SU and a voting trustee since 2008, he was named chairman in 2015, making him the university’s highest-ranking individual authority. It gives him the responsibility of leading SU’s central governing body that has ultimate rule over the university.

On Wednesday evening, Barnes sat in a first row pew inside Hendricks Chapel as SU community members — including Barnes — participated in a discussion about discrimination on campus in light of the Theta Tau videos.

It was a rare public appearance for Barnes, who has operated mostly in quiet as chair. Last week, he penned a message to the campus community saying he was “appalled” by the behavior in the Theta Tau videos. That was the first time he has personally addressed the full campus community as chairman, according to SU News archives.

Even as Barnes has functioned in a space unseen by some, he has left a lasting mark on the university, where policies and initiatives in recent years have closely resembled common Bain managerial approaches.

Barnes has brought 30 years of experience as an executive at Bain Capital to his positions of power. The firm has developed a healthy reputation of creating profit for its investors, but it has also generated controversy for what critics call “vulture capitalism.” Bain has sometimes profited from companies — like Toys R Us — that it led into bankruptcy and through periods of mass layoffs.

The Bain & Company-led assessment of SU suggested several Bain models that have fundamentally changed the institution. Efforts to cut costs, a regular Bain strategy, reduced and rearranged the university’s staff. The creation of the Academic Strategic Plan set a new institutional mission that features a heavy emphasis on SU’s military and veterans programs — a pocket of campus Barnes has long financially supported and led.

Prominent university officials see the influence Barnes has had and speak glowingly of him. Vice Chancellor Mike Haynie, who holds a faculty position endowed by Barnes, in an email called Barnes “a deeply passionate alumnus.” Dick Thompson, who served as chair of the board before Barnes, said Barnes has “done an exceptional job.” Syverud said in an email that Barnes “has a unique understanding of and respect for the culture of Syracuse University.”

Others within the campus community are less encouraged by the institutional changes SU has endured since Barnes was named chair. Some staff and faculty say SU’s cost-cutting tendencies have reduced morale and productivity in academic departments. Others fear the military-focused mission will undermine academic freedom by discouraging research and teachings critical of United States foreign policy.

“The head of the Board of Trustees works for Bain. How is that possible? Bain’s policies are the ones that are being pushed at Syracuse University,” said Tula Goenka, a professor of television, radio and film, and a University Senator. “It’s a very corporate model. And it’s not a model for education.”

Barnes was not made available for an interview for this story, nor did he agree to answer questions via email. Instead, he provided this statement:

“Syracuse University had such a positive impact on my life and for that I am deeply appreciative. It is a privilege to be able to give back to the University through my volunteer service and through my family’s philanthropic support to help ensure that others have similar opportunities to achieve their dreams. Helping the University achieve its vision of being a pre-eminent and inclusive student-focused research university is at the core of everything I do — as an alumnus, as Board chair and as a supporter of my alma mater.”

‘Building something to collapse’

SU Magazine and SU News stories about Barnes often include that he was once CEO of Dade Behring, a company that manufactured machinery for the medical diagnostics industry. These references to Dade are published alongside praises for Barnes — a “turnaround expert” with “a unique capacity to grow and build great companies” — and his career, “an epic success story.”

But while Barnes was CEO of Dade, the company struggled to survive. After Bain Capital used mostly debt to purchase the company, Barnes drove Dade into further debt, and it ultimately went bankrupt. But Barnes, Bain and its investors made millions by having Dade pay Bain generous dividends.

The tactics Bain used at Dade fell in line with the strategy the firm typically employs, according to experts. When purchasing companies, Bain often uses significant amounts of debt, so the firm risks less of its own money and still gets a controlling stake. It’s then on the individual companies — not Bain — to repay the debt, and Bain and its partners can often guarantee a profit for themselves even if the companies fail by extracting fees and dividends, experts said.

“Whenever I say this, it just blows people’s minds,” said Eileen Appelbaum, co-author of the book “Private Equity at Work” and a private equity expert, referring to the debt-financing strategy. “… That’s like you buying your neighbor’s house with the big mortgage. You own the house, but your neighbor has to pay the mortgage.”

In a statement, a Bain Capital representative said the firm “has been focused on growing great companies and improving their operations” since its founding.

Bain and other investors, including Goldman Sachs, purchased the company that would become Dade Behring in 1994 for more than $400 million, using mostly borrowed money, according to media reports and “The Buyout of America,” a book examining the effects of private equity on the U.S. economy. Bain put down about $30 million of its own money.

Barnes left Bain to become an executive at Dade in 1996 and became CEO the following year. With debt soaring in 1997, Barnes had the company begin cutting costs by laying off hundreds of workers and reducing employee benefits.

In 1999, Dade, still under the direction of Barnes, borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to repurchase shares from Bain and Goldman Sachs. Through that agreement, Bain earned $242 million — about eight times its original investment — and Barnes personally received about $3.38 million, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents. Shortly thereafter, Barnes stepped down as CEO and returned to Bain. Dade eventually filed for bankruptcy and was taken over by creditors after failing to recover from the debt it faced following the stock repurchase program.

“If you are Barnes or Bain or their investors, you probably would look at Dade as a pretty good success story. They made a lot of money from Dade,” said Josh Kosman, author of “The Buyout of America.” “But if you were to look at it in another way, Dade went bankrupt largely because of Bain’s actions, and a lot of people got fired.”

Bain’s strategies are common in private equity, but experts said Bain is sometimes particularly aggressive. A 2012 Wall Street Journal analysis found that, of 77 businesses Bain invested in from 1984 until early 1999, 22 percent either filed for bankruptcy or went out of business within eight years after Bain first invested, “sometimes with substantial job losses.”

But no matter how poorly its companies have performed, Bain and its partners have rarely suffered the financial consequences, experts said. Even in the case of Bain-owned Toys R Us, which filed for bankruptcy in September and announced in March it will close or sell all its stores, Bain profited. When purchasing the toy retailer in 2005, Bain, Vornado Realty Trust and private equity firm KKR loaded it with several billion dollars in debt. Bain contributed about $43 million and was later paid $61 million in fees, thus profiting about $18 million.

“Everybody else is a loser,” said Appelbaum, who is also co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “The workers are losers. Communities lose because stores shut down. The creditors and the vendors who provided all the goods for Toys R Us, the retailers, they’ll be lucky to get pennies on the dollar.”

Since its origin, Bain’s purpose has been to use companies as engines of profit for its investors. Mitt Romney and other partners from Bain & Company left the consulting firm in 1984 to create Bain Capital under the direction of Bill Bain, the founder of Bain & Company. In 1985, Romney said the firm would look to take over companies and, after five to eight years, “harvest them at a significant profit.”

Barnes became affiliated with Bain that year. The firm was his “biggest client” as he worked for auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers, he said in a 2014 interview with Privcap. In 1988, he left PwC for Bain, where he has since worked as an executive, aside from when he has left to lead Bain-owned companies.

Barnes isn’t SU’s only high-ranking trustee with ties to Bain. David Edelstein, one of four vice chairs to Barnes and chair of the board’s Academic Affairs committee, worked under Barnes as an executive for Dade beginning in 1998. Michael Thonis, another vice chair, was a consultant for Bain & Company in the 1970s.

Other Bain Capital companies that Barnes has helped lead have endured fates similar to Dade and Toys R Us, including radio giant iHeartMedia, which Barnes invested in and served on the Board of Directors until 2012.

Bain and Thomas H. Lee Partners used more than $13 billion in debt in 2008 to purchase iHeart. Burdened by its debt, iHeart fired more than 8,000 of its roughly 31,000 workers in 2012, according to Appelbaum’s book.

Years later, iHeart still hasn’t been able to shake its debt. The company filed for bankruptcy in March. Bain will at least break even, experts said.

“I think Bain’s activities — the track record is very questionable,” Kosman said. “Good for investors, but it shows a complete disregard for the companies they own and it puts a lie to the idea that they’re building something. They’re really just building something to collapse.”

Fast Forward Syracuse

Bain & Company’s final report assessing SU, published in April 2014, signaled that major change was coming to the university. The report found that the majority of faculty and staff believed SU needed “to change significantly” within five years. SU needed a strategic plan and needed to cut costs to improve its budget, the report said.

That change began with Fast Forward Syracuse, a three-pronged initiative implemented by Syverud in 2014 that served in part as the second step in the Bain & Company assessment. The initiative intended to reshape academic planning, create a plan to improve campus infrastructure and identify areas to cut costs.

Nearly four years later, change has been realized through policies, programs and initiatives that grew out of that planning. The Academic Strategic Plan has set a new vision for SU and identified institutional priorities. The Voluntary Separation Incentive Program, a buyout program, reduced SU’s staff by 254 employees. The Campus Framework Plan, a 20-year guide to revamping SU’s infrastructure, was designed in alignment with Academic Strategic Plan priorities. Last year, SU implemented Invest Syracuse, an initiative to raise $100 million to fund the Academic Strategic Plan — in part by saving $30 million through cost-cutting.

The degree to which Barnes was personally involved in conceiving those policies is not clear, but they all stem from the report he was a leader in creating, and they were implemented while he’s served as SU’s highest-ranking officer. Some faculty expressed concern that SU’s institutional policies are being informed disproportionately by a Bain perspective between Barnes and Bain & Company, whom SU paid about $8 million in consulting fees between 2013 and 2015, according to SU’s tax returns.

Sandra Lane, a professor of public health and a member of the steering committee for the Bain & Company report, said the issue of a possible conflict wasn’t raised during the assessment process. She added that she personally hasn’t interacted with Barnes or other trustees.

“I don’t know whether I think that was properly disclosed,” she said. “It does look questionable.”

Bain Capital and Bain & Company are separate companies, but they’re closely connected historically. In his book “Turnaround,” Romney describes Bain Capital as a sister company to Bain & Company.

Harry Strachan, both a Bain Capital and Bain & Company partner, wrote in “Bain Stories from the Early Years” that the two firms have used the same “process of improvement” — Bain Capital with its companies and Bain & Company with its clients. The process consists of combining a “strategic focus” with “operating excellence” and reducing costs, he wrote. Bain & Company’s final report at SU suggested the university “achieve operational excellence” in line with a strategic plan.

After that report was published, most members of the assessment’s executive committee didn’t have a prolonged role in implementing its findings. Three of the five upper-administrators — Spina, CFO Lou Marcoccia and Senior Vice President Christopher Sedore — left SU by 2016. Kal Alston, senior vice president of human capital development, stepped down in 2015 to return to the faculty. Riley is no longer a voting trustee.

Barnes stuck around, becoming chair in May 2015. As chair, Barnes is a voting member on each of the board’s nine committees. Syverud has described Barnes as a “great partner, advisor and leader during the strategic planning process.” Barnes also personally helps fund the strategic plan: In August, he made a $500,000 “annual fund challenge gift” to Invest Syracuse.

Barnes is closely affiliated with Vice Chancellor Haynie, who has played a leading role in developing and implementing the Academic Strategic Plan.

Haynie, who became the Barnes Professor of Entrepreneurship in 2011, was named vice chancellor for veterans and military affairs in May 2014. In 2016, his responsibilities were expanded to include oversight of the Office of Government and Community Relations as well as University College, SU’s part-time school. He is among the university’s highest-paid employees, according to SU tax returns.

Haynie is one of only 15 people who served on both the Academic Strategic Plan Steering Committee, which drafted the plan, and the Academic Strategic Plan Implementation Oversight Committee, tasked with implementing the plan. Of the other 14 people, three were exclusively faculty members and one was a staff member. The remaining 10 were administrators, but four have since left the university: Marcoccia, Sedore, Senior Associate Vice President Andy Clark and Kenneth Kavajecz, former dean of the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

In alignment with the Academic Strategic Plan, there are two major ongoing construction projects underway as part of the Campus Framework Plan. One is the Barnes Center at the Arch, a wellness and recreation complex where Archbold Gymnasium currently stands, named after Barnes in recognition of his $5 million gift to the project. The other is a massive complex for military and veterans organizations and communities.

Christopher Newfield, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara who spoke at SU about university governance in March, said it’s become increasingly common for individual trustees to have widespread influence at universities.

“It’s not so much that senior officials are rooted in their own communities and listening to basically everybody,” he said. “There are privileged actors that are having a disproportionate influence, in my view, on academic management, particularly consultants and donors, members of boards of trustees.”

SU officials, including Syverud and Thompson, said Barnes has not overstepped a trustee’s traditional responsibilities, which include general oversight but not involvement in management. Syverud said in an email that Barnes “has deep appreciation and respect for shared governance.”

“Chairman Barnes is steadfastly committed to ensuring a high-functioning board that ultimately supports students, faculty and the University’s academic and strategic priorities as identified collaboratively by our campus community,” Syverud said. “He recognizes and appreciates the bright line between his role as board chair and my role as Chancellor.”

Lingering consequences

Low morale. Fewer support systems for students. A loss of institutional memory. Reduced productivity.

Those are recurring themes that have developed in some academic departments since SU bought out 254 staff employees in 2015. Some of those workers were academic support staff, such as administrative assistants, who students and faculty said provided essential services. Faculty, remaining staff and students described day-to-day life within those departments as more demanding, more stressful and less efficient than it was prior to the buyout.

Syverud has acknowledged that the genesis for the buyout was the Bain report, which indicated SU’s operating expenses were outpacing its revenues, and that a primary driver of that trend was staff salary expenses. The buyout was a standard exercise out of the Bain playbook: downsize in an effort to improve the operating budget. The program was announced in June 2015, the month after Barnes became chairman.

The report said inefficiencies were driven by raises and promotions for employees earning above $120,000 annually. Some faculty interpreted that as an indication SU would cut back on upper-administrators, but SU’s tax returns for Fiscal Year 2016 indicate only three upper-administrators took the buyout. Instead, the buyout operated mostly among secretarial staff and other lower-level administrative workers, faculty and staff said. Administrative work that was previously left to two or three staff members in a given department is now the responsibility of one or two remaining staffers.

Samuel Gorovitz, a professor of philosophy at SU since 1986, said the changes implemented through the buyout have exerted “a downward pressure on the quality of staff.”

“What it does to morale is indescribably negative,” he said. “It reflects a management outlook driven by people with little insight into how human beings actually work and how an institution of higher education actually works.”

One administrative assistant who remained after the buyout said in her multiple decades working at SU, she’s never seen staff morale as bad as it is now. Her department lost one of its three staff members. She said the added work has caused her to feel persistent anxiety.

“The amount of stress and additional pressure that not only our department but other departments have felt, I think if all of us could have just walked out the door, we would have,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a fear of backlash. “But we can’t.”

Departments where staff members were replaced are still in some cases less efficient, faculty and students said. The new employees don’t have the same institutional memory of former staff members, many of whom had worked at SU for decades.

Terese Gagnon, a doctoral student in anthropology, said she and other graduate students often rely on staff members for a number of administrative requirements, including paperwork and course registration.

“There are so many little things you have to do as a graduate student that aren’t intuitive so you don’t necessarily know, because you’re doing this thing year-round,” Gagnon said. “(Staffers) who are brand new have so much to learn.”

The geography department’s staff was reduced from three to two after the buyout. One of the two remaining positions has been filled by a temporary employee, said Thomas Perreault, a geography professor. Before the buyout, the position was filled by a person who had been at SU for about 15 years, he said.

The long-time staff member was better equipped than the temporary employee to support students because, given her years of experience, she understood the bureaucracy of the university, Perreault added.

“It’s not the temp’s fault,” he said. “They were put into an impossible situation. It’s the fault of these decisions that are handed down by Bain because, from a consultant’s perspective, that’s how you save money.”

In an email, Syverud said he knows “it is not easy to make changes in the way that we operate by reducing staff” and that he recognizes “that some of our faculty members remain disappointed in the process.” But he also said he believes the program has improved the university’s efficiency.

Syverud added: “Ultimately, the voluntary separation incentive program allowed deans and other unit leaders to have the flexibility in making decisions about appropriate staffing levels in line with our effort to have resources available to address our academic priorities.”

Academic priorities

Visitors will soon be welcomed to SU by a 115,000-square-foot complex dubbed the National Veterans Resource Center, which is expected to open in spring 2020 at the intersection of South Crouse and Waverly avenues.

The building, which will cost $62.5 million to construct, will serve as the hub of veterans and military life at SU and house the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, the Office of Veteran and Military Affairs and the Army and Air Force ROTC programs, among other offices. With the NVRC, SU is seeking to solidify central New York as the “nation’s hub of research and programming” for veteran and military sectors, according to the NVRC’s website.

The NVRC is a culmination of the institutional commitment to veterans and military-connected sectors that officially began when Syverud took office. The origin of that commitment can also be traced to Barnes, who has been closely connected to SU’s veterans and military programs as they’ve ascended within the past decade to become an institutional focus.

As SU has become increasingly associated with military communities, some faculty have grown concerned. They worry the university is conflating support for veterans with support for national security interests, and that doing so will infringe on their ability to freely criticize military policies.

“People who are critical of U.S. foreign policy or the national security state are going to seem to be out of step with the priorities of the institution,” said Mark Rupert, a professor of political science whose research specialties include militarism. “… It’s going to be a real challenge for people who are here for the coming years and decades to deal with that.”

Years before military communities became a pillar of SU’s mission — before even the IVMF existed — there was a veterans program hosted in the Whitman School: the Barnes Family Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities.

The program was created in 2007 by Haynie, who arrived at SU as an assistant professor in 2006. Barnes’ later endowment of the program has allowed it “to endure in perpetuity,” Haynie said.

In June 2011, Haynie became the Barnes Professor of Entrepreneurship after Barnes made a donation to create the professorship. Before becoming the Barnes Professor of Entrepreneurship, Haynie’s title was the Barnes Fellow. That month, SU also announced the creation of the IVMF, considered the crown jewel of SU’s commitment to veterans and military communities.

Haynie previously told The Daily Orange that the process for creating the IVMF began with the expansion of the Barnes-funded bootcamp program. As the program achieved success, there was an “opportunity recognition” that sparked the establishment of the IVMF, he previously said.

When the IVMF launched, Haynie was named its executive director, and Barnes was soon named one of two co-chairs of its advisory board, a position he held until 2016. As noted in a 2016 SU News article, the IVMF grew considerably under Barnes’ leadership, from a staff of four to more than 70 across eight states. It amassed corporate and government partnerships and expanded its program locations to several military bases. The IVMF’s growth prompted the University Senate budget committee — in a February report — to call on Haynie to “address the Senate or hold an open forum to broadcast these activities more widely across the university community.”

Inside the offices of the IVMF, there is a plaque recognizing the institute’s largest donors. Among them are a number of corporations and a handful of individuals, including Barnes.

“Steve has been a long and early supporter of this work,” Haynie said. “… When I had an idea to start (the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans), the first institutional supporter of that program was Steve Barnes. And not only did he make the program possible and viable and sustainable, but then he became a champion for our subsequent work.”

The Academic Strategic Plan references both the bootcamp program and the IVMF as it describes SU being “uniquely positioned to serve as a thought leader” in areas relating to veterans and military communities.

Ellen Moore, author of “Grateful Nation: Student Veterans and the Rise of the Military-Friendly Campus,” said it’s common for universities to conflate support for veterans and military interests as being one and the same.

The strategic plan states that SU “will leverage and enhance faculty expertise focused on veteran, military, and national security interests.” To accomplish that, the strategic plan suggests hiring “clusters of new faculty” with expertise in those areas and “incentivizing faculty interest” in those areas.

“In those quotes you have the exact link,” said Moore, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. “That is the exact moment of conflation.”

That conflation can be “very threatening to academic freedom,” Moore said, and has the consequence of professors being discouraged from teaching openly about ongoing wars.

The distinction between a veteran-friendly and a military-friendly campus was a point of discussion during a University Senate meeting in January, when associate professor of sociology Jackie Orr asked Syverud if there was a difference to him between those two pursuits. Earlier that month, Syverud sent an email to the university community saying SU would seek an expanded relationship with Fort Drum, the military base 85 miles north of Syracuse.

“I think the needs and issues of those two communities are somewhat different, and as you suggest, the university’s interest in those communities may be different,” Syverud responded. “I haven’t thought through all the empirical differentiations, and I suspect we might come to different views on it, but I’ll think through that issue more clearly now that you have raised it.”

Orr said she brought up the issue because she’s seen SU become “obviously, simplistically a military-friendly campus.”

“I think pressing on that difference between veteran-friendly and military-friendly becomes one little wedge into trying to have some public conversations very rapidly on a campus that I can barely recognize compared to the campus 10 years ago,” Orr said in an interview.

For Rupert, an early dissenting voice in SU’s prioritization of military communities, the “ship has sailed.” As he sees it, SU has become fundamentally linked to military interests through the Academic Strategic Plan.

Rupert, who plans to retire in five years, said he hopes current and future faculty are able to maintain a space at SU where they can be critical of foreign policy “without feeling like they’re undermining the Academic Strategic Plan.”

“We’re a different institution (now),” he said. “… The priority is what we can do for the national security state. And to the extent that we tie our institutional future to their priorities, it’s going to be very hard to undo that.”

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Banner illustration by Sarah Allam | Head Illustrator