The large, land grant University of Minnesota has just hired a new Vice President for University Services. She is Alice Roberts-Davis, who has come over from a similar position at the State of Minnesota, where she was the Commissioner of the Department of Administration.
Image by Photo courtesy of Alice Roberts-Davis
As one might expect, Roberts-Davis has something that's increasingly required for any senior bureaucrat no matter what their duties might be, a law degree.
Her movement from government to academia, even in the administrative sense, might well have been made easier by the fact that her new boss at the U, Myron Frans, was also her old boss at the state. This is a frequent path for government figures. Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm slid over to Cal-Berkeley, and then became the Secretary of the Department of Energy when the Biden-Harris regime took power. It might be expected that at some time in the future Roberts-Davis will be needed to fulfill some state function and she will be available just 8 miles west of the capitol.
There's another interesting aspect to the biography of Roberts-Davis. Before her move to the Minnesota state administration she had a similar position with big box retailer Target corporation. She was a leader in the retailer's failed expansion to Canada between 2011 and 2015, her last year with the company. The lady now occupies a significant position at one of the most prominent educational institutions in the country. Shouldn't the taxpayers responsible for her salary have some knowledge of her successes and failures? Her hiring doesn't seem to have generated any questions from an obsequious and incurious local press corps. But it's also obvious that the media is the third part of the triumvirate that includes academia and the government. That's the way it all works.
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