Meet Huron Consulting, the Corporate Firm Behind The New School Restructuring
Huron Fact Sheet
Huron: A Questionable History
Huron Consulting Group was formed in 2002 by 25 former executives of Arthur Anderson, an accounting firm that went under as part of the Enron scandal in 2001-2002.
Huron is a global management consulting company offering services to sectors including Education, Energy Utilities, Financial Services, Health Care, Industrials and Manufacturing, Life Sciences, and the Public Sector.
In 2009, Huron was accused of overstating pretax income from 2005 to early 2009 and in 2012 Huron agreed to pay a $1 million civil fine to settle for US regulatory charges. No Huron executives contested the charges.
What does Huron Promote?
Huron’s investment portfolio reflects its values, the world it advocates for, and helps others build through its consulting services. To date, we know that Huron leadership invests in: John McCain, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, The National Republican Congressional Committee, George W. Bush, and Ted Cruz.
Huron is an investor in Shorelight Education, which specializes in the recruitment and retention of international students, namely through online platforms. In 2019, Huron’s investments in Shorelight were valued at $49.5 million.
Peter Stokes (Managing Director of Huron’s Higher Education Practice) advocates for universities to align curriculum with corporate needs through “economic clusters” and what, in some instances, he has called this “experiential learning.” Stokes has also long been an advocate for the merits of online teaching as well as measuring a university’s “success” by the job outcomes of students.
Huron’s metrics use the Credit Hour Production (CHP) per faculty in order to adjust the “faculty mix” (mix of TT, PT, FT lecturers) in a cost-efficient way. This is in-line with Peter Stokes’ plan to “unbundle” faculty roles as part of a larger effort to “redesign of the labor model” and create greater efficiency.
Huron promotes Post-Katrina Dispossession as a model for how we might re-build universities in the aftermath of COVID-19. For example, Huron points to the value and necessity of immediate furloughs and layoffs to mitigate crisis. Other lessons learned, according to Huron, include the need to declare a formal claim of “financial exigency” under AAUP policy for universities planning on firing tenured faculty.
Huron’s Track Record
In 2017, Huron was hired by the University of Wisconsin to manage a state-driven austerity plan. As part of their signature protocols, Huron established a committee to ensure “that a broad range of stakeholders” were engaged. The state’s austerity plan and Huron’s recommendations were strongly protested by institutional governance bodies—protests which included a no-confidence vote. The “cuts resulted in over one hundred employee layoffs and reduced employment for many non-tenure-track staff, and some tenured faculty have experienced forced reassignments and restructured positions.”
In 2019-2020 the University of New Hampshire paid Huron $600,000 to develop a plan that would save the university 12 million over the course of two years. Staff and faculty will be involved in the teams charged with implementing Huron’s recommendations. UNH President Dean said that there will be “no sacred cows” in the layoff process. The process launched at UNH was termed a “reimagining.”
Sound familiar? It should. Similar language and processes have been employed at The New School and it remains to be disclosed by the administration how much Huron is being paid for what appears to be cookie-cutter approaches to restructuring.