Judge denies regents’ motion to dismiss Harreld lawsuit

A district court judge has denied a request to dismiss a lawsuit filed against the Board of Regents for meetings it held with now-UI President Bruce Harreld last year while he was a candidate for the job.

The lawsuit - filed over the summer in Polk County by Gerhild Krapf, a UI alumnus who worked for 10 years as counsel at the UI Hospitals and Clinics and later as special assistant to the dean of the College of Law - accuses the board of violating Iowa's Open Meetings law by scheduling meetings between several regents and Harreld.

'This case concerns the board's attempt to avoid transparency into the University of Iowa presidential search process through a series of closed door meetings and other indirect methods that violate the letter and spirit of the Iowa Opens Meetings Act,” Krapf stated in her original petition.

The board last September hired Harreld, a former IBM executive, to replace former UI President Sally Mason, despite widespread criticism of Harreld's candidacy. In the weeks after his hire, news emerged that Harreld had met with members of the search committee and Board of Regents when he was a candidate - meetings not afforded other prospects.

Among those meetings were two at Board of Regents President Bruce Rastetter's business. One involved regents Katie Mulholland and Milt Dakovich, and another involved Larry McKibben and Mary Andringa.

Before the meetings, Harreld emailed his resume to Rastetter and gave him permission to forward those documents to the other regents, according to media reports and the lawsuit.

Krapf, in the lawsuit, asserts the meetings violated open meetings laws, which require gatherings related to policy-making duties involving a majority of a governmental body's members be open. Even though five of the nine regents weren't present at any one meeting, the 'gatherings occurred in close temporal proximity to each other,” Krapf argued.

Her lawsuit seeks to void 'all actions taken as a result of the unlawful July 30 meeting, including the election of Bruce Harreld.”

District Court Judge Robert Blink, in deciding whether to dismiss the lawsuit, said the court must consider the petition in the light most favorable to the plaintiff.

'The only issue when considering a motion to dismiss is the ‘petitioner's right of access to the district court, not the merits of his allegations,'” according to the judge's ruling.

And, he found, the plaintiff 'has pleaded a cause of action under Iowa Open Meetings Law and provided sufficient notice to defendants to allow them to response to the charges,” he wrote.