Whenever it comes to delivering on property tax relief for the good, hardworking citizens of Nebraska, governmental entities with tax asking authority always seem to find ways to shut it down, and that is exactly what is happening in Nebraska again this year. Today I would like to inform you about how the Nebraska Department of Education is undermining the Legislature’s efforts to provide property owners with some much-needed property tax relief this year.

Earlier his year Sen. Tom Briese of Albion introduced LB 589, which became known as the School District Property Tax Limitation Act. The Legislature amended this Act into LB 243, passed the bill, and Governor Pillen signed it into law on May 31, 2023. LB 243 put a cap on each school district’s revenue growth. This was done with the intention of giving property owners some much-needed property tax relief. However, a provision in the bill allows school districts to exceed their property tax authority whenever 70 percent of the school board members agree to do so.

Because school districts all across Nebraska will soon have their revenue growth capped, they are becoming nervous about the future. As a result, Bryce Wilson, a fiscal analyst for the Nebraska Department of Education, has begun suggesting to superintendents and business managers across the State to consider this provision in the bill. As a result, some school boards have begun the process of allowing them to use the unused property tax authority granted to them under LB 243.

Summerland is one such school district. The business manager for the Summerland School District told the members of his school board at a recent school board meeting that Bryce Wilson had suggested that the school district consider adjusting their property tax authority. So, the school board took the first step in this process by voting to make LB 243’s seven percent threshold in the tax levy available to them, and the school board will soon be voting on whether or not to actually raise the tax levy. Because of this provision in the law, it has now become incumbent upon concerned taxpayers all across Nebraska to begin attending their school board’s monthly meetings.

Nebraska State law (NSS 79-1027) puts restrictions on how much money school districts can stash away in their cash reserves. However, schools have found other ways of getting around these restrictions. For example, extra cash can be stored in funds which are not connected to the school district’s general fund or the general cash reserve fund, thereby skirting the restrictions in the law, and that is what I expect some of them will do. Bryce Wilson has only been suggesting that school districts take advantage of their unused tax asking authority when it is actually needed.

Helping property owners and taxpayers survive during hard economic times is not something which falls within the scope of the Department of Education.

Many governmental entities with tax asking authority have demonstrated over the years a gross negligence in caring about the plight of property owners and taxpayers, especially during hard economic times, and this is a major reason why I introduced the EPIC Option Consumption Tax. The EPIC Option Consumption Tax would solve the problem of governmental entities taxing you beyond your ability to pay. In other words, the EPIC Option Consumption Tax plan contained in LB 79 would finally force these governmental entities to live within their revenue means, and this is the only way that Nebraskans will ever be able to solve this difficult problem.

As long as we continue to live with our current, broken tax system, governmental entities with tax asking authority will continue to abuse the system and over-tax the people, and that just might prove to be a blessing in disguise. As my high school FFA adviser told me this week, “Taxes are not yet high enough for tax reform.” What he meant by that statement is that tax reform will not come to Nebraska until enough Nebraskans finally come to the conclusion that they can no longer pay their taxes. Sign the petition!

Are Nebraska’s elections fair, accurate, and transparent? To answer this question, concerned citizens must consider how Nebraska counts its ballots in statewide elections. Nebraska uses ES&S vote counting machines to count its ballots during statewide elections. ES&S stands for a company called Elections Systems & Software. Understanding how these ES&S vote counting machines work is critical for answering these crucial questions about the integrity of our elections.

The use and accuracy of vote counting machines have come under attack ever since Stacey Abrams lost her 2018 gubernatorial race to Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Secretary of State, who conducted the election, and Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. In addition, when Fox News in April of this year agreed to pay Dominion, another manufacturer of vote counting machines, $787 million in order to avert a defamation lawsuit, the settlement left more questions than answers and further raised suspicions about the use of these vote counting machines.

There is a lot of important information that citizens who are concerned about the integrity of our elections need to know about our state’s use of vote counting machines and that information is not being made available for public viewing. So, today I would like to update readers about some recent developments regarding our use of ES&S vote counting machines.

Christopher Gleason recently invoked the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on behalf of The Justice Society in order to request Audit Logs from ES&S. An Audit Log is like the little black box on an airplane. The Audit Logs record every action and every event that ever occurs when using a vote counting machine. If any nefarious activity ever occurs, the Audit Logs would catch it and make a record of it.

ES&S is not releasing important ballot counting information to the public. ES&S denied the FOIA request filed by Christopher Gleason on the grounds that releasing the Audit Logs could compromise the security of future elections. In responding to the FOIA request, ES&S said, “The Logs should additionally be protected from disclosure as the Logs contain sensitive information that if publicized could provide a roadmap to bad actors to attempt to compromise your ES&S voting system.”

Concerned citizens do not need to know any sensitive information which would compromise the integrity of future elections; instead, they merely need enough information from the Audit Logs to ensure that past election results have never been compromised or tampered with and ES&S has the capability to release this this kind of information to the public with ease. For example, ES&S machines can be told to print election summaries and precinct reports without compromising sensitive data. In fact, ES&S advertises the ease of this function as a major selling point on its website: “The DS200 generates a detailed audit log of all actions and events that occurred on the unit, which can be printed at any time.”

Without a mechanism of transparency to hold election officials accountable for the results of elections, suspicion will likely continue to grow around the use of these vote counting machines. Concerned citizens in Nebraska have now been backed into a corner and are being asked to believe the good word of ES&S.

What many Nebraskans don’t know is that Nebraska has just committed itself to using these ES&S vote counting machines for the next seven years. Nebraska’s Assistant Secretary of State, Wayne Bena, recently signed a contract with ES&S for $15,746,546.10 for use of the machines over the course of the next seven years. What this means is that any desire to move to hand counting ballots will be off the table for the next seven years.

Earlier this year I introduced legislation that would have required Nebraskans to show a photo ID when voting at the polls, required the use of paper ballots, and required ballots to be counted by hand at the precinct level during statewide elections. Counting ballots by hand is how we used to count ballots in Nebraska, so it can be done. Had the Legislature adopted these methods, we could have averted all of the controversies that will continue to surround the use of these ES&S vote counting machines for the next seven years.

Last week Nebraska State Senators learned that the federal Bureau of Land Management will soon begin enacting the Buffalo Resource Management Plan in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. This means that a moratorium is being placed on the mining of coal in that region because the lands are federally owned. In their attempt to go green, the Biden Administration is refusing to renew lease agreements in the Powder River Basin, which supplies roughly 40 percent of the nation’s demand for coal.

This decision will have a direct effect on folks living in Western Nebraska. To give you some perspective, consider that the Gerald Gentleman Station, located along State Highway 25 in Sutherland, Nebraska, supplies electricity to approximately 600,000 Nebraskans using clean, low-sulfur coal from the Powder River Basin. Because Nebraska relies so heavily upon coal from this region for its energy needs, 19 Nebraska State Senators signed a letter last week to the project manager, asking him not to move forward with the moratorium or any other prohibitions against coal mining in the Powder River Basin.

Nebraska, along with many other states, cannot afford to go without coal. Recall that during the winter of 2021, Midwestern states experienced a unique weather event which shut down power lines and caused rolling blackouts from North Dakota all the way down to Texas. Wind turbines as far away as Texas froze and natural gas was in short supply. Without coal, the winter of 2021 would have been much worse.

Renewal energy alone cannot supply Nebraskans with energy on demand. Wind turbines produce energy only when the wind is blowing and solar panels produces energy only when the sun shines. There is currently no efficient way to store wind and solar energy, so going completely green would result in untimely black outs. Because it takes a few hours to get a coal plant fired up, wind and solar can only supplement our reliance on coal, that is, so long as we value having our energy on demand.

Renewable energy is also inefficient. What makes renewal energy so inefficient is its energy density. Energy density is how you measure energy, such as by volume, weight, or area. When it comes to energy density, renewable energy comes out much lower than traditional energy sources. Because renewable energy sources also require some kind of storage, they represent the most inefficient ways of producing energy.

Renewable energy can be very expensive to transmit. In cases where electricity generated from wind or solar has to be transmitted long distances to a population center, such as in the Nebraska Sandhills, the costs associated with energy transmission are very high. For this reason, former State Senator, Mike Groene, once famously remarked on the radio that the City of Lincoln needed to put a wind turbine on the 50-yard line at Memorial Stadium. The point is that wind energy become much less expensive to transmit when it is generated near a population center, but the people living in the cities do not want the noise pollution nor do they want to look at the wind turbines.

I share these things with you today in order to alert you to the green policies of the Biden Administration which are now threatening Nebraska’s power needs. A responsible energy plan would be one that meets Nebraska’s needs for energy on demand, respects the pocket books of those who pay the energy bills, and one that does not leave Nebraska vulnerable to another winter storm like the one we experienced in 2021.

High School shop classes are beginning to make a comeback. For those of us over the age of 50 shop classes were considered a high school staple, but many high schools have since retired these classes and switched to technology classes. According to the National Center of Education Statistics, this trend of students taking fewer credits in shop classes started in the 1990s. The result of students taking fewer shop classes over the years is that demand has now gone up for people working in trade industries, such as electricians, plumbers, welders and building contractors.

Nebraska does not fair well when it comes to supporting skilled workers in these kinds of trades. For example, Nebraska ranks 41 out of the 50 states for the best places for electricians to work. The average income of an electrician in Nebraska is only $40,237 according to Zippia. Nebraska is home to 2,810 plumbing companies, but Iowa has 3,326 companies, Kansas has 3,371, and Colorado has 5,457. So, Nebraska needs to improve in this area.

The primary reason that people avoid the trades is the desire to obtain a college degree. According to the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, those who graduate with a bachelor’s degree still have an 84 percent higher earning potential than those with only a high school diploma. Obtaining that bachelor’s degree usually results in a wage increase of $36,000 or more.

The tide is beginning to turn in favor of those working in the skilled trades. According to the most recent JOLTS report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job openings in the skilled trades climbed during the months of April and May even though overall job openings declined. Demand for workers in the skilled trades is increasing, and when demand goes up, so do the wages.

Now might be a good time to consider training for a job in one of the skilled trade industries. Consider the fact that the Regents at the University of Nebraska this year had to face a $27 million budget deficit for next year. To make up for the loss President Ted Carter decided to increase student tuition by 3.5 percent. In-state tuition and fees at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL) will run $10,108 for the next academic school year. After you add in food, housing, personal expenses, books, supplies, and loan fees, the grand total for the year is $28,594.

Going into a skilled trade has the potential to give students a big head-start in life as an adult. For example, instead of paying back $100,000 or more in student loans along with interest, a students could get trained in a skilled trade for a fraction of that amount and become debt free in just a few short years. For example, a student at Western Nebraska Community College attends school for only two years at $106.50 per credit hour compared to $268 per credit hour at UNL.

The growing demand for skilled trade workers is already beginning to benefit those working in the industry. For example, Tyler Sasse was a high school dropout who became certified as a welder and started his own welding school in Gillette, Wyoming called the Western Welding Academy. Nolan Brunn, who is only 22-years old, recently graduated from Western Welding Academy, and he is now making $30 per hour and up to $70,000 per year as a certified welder. Not bad for someone with only a trade school degree.

The hottest debate going on across Nebraska right now is the debate around school choice. Earlier this year the State Legislature passed LB 753 otherwise known as the “Opportunities Scholarship Act.” The Act allows individual taxpayers and corporations to make contributions to scholarship granting organizations and receive an income tax credit up to 50 percent of their state income tax liability. The scholarship monies raised would then be used to send students to private schools with a cap set at $25 million for the program.

The opponents of school choice have launched a referendum petition drive to repeal the Opportunities Scholarship Act, and they have until August 31 of this year to collect 61,000 valid signatures. While leaders of the movement have claimed that the referendum movement has been entirely citizen-led, we now know that they have spent $300,000 to hire paid circulators to meet their goal of collecting 90,000 signatures before the August 31 deadline.

Most of the money being used to pay these petition circulators is money coming in from out-of-state. According to Accountability and Disclosure Commission reports, the organization called Support Our Schools has raised $1.26 million for the referendum campaign. Of that total, $800,000 came from the National Education Association while 262,000 came from the Nebraska State Education Association otherwise known as Nebraska’s teachers’ union.

By way of contrast, the organization that is opposing the referendum petition drive is called Keep Kids First and their campaign is known as the Decline to Sign campaign. Keep Kids First is asking citizens to sign an oath called the “Pledge for Education Freedom.” The oath has not been registered with the Secretary of State and would have no bearing on the referendum petition drive. Nevertheless, Keep Kids First has raised $504,810 of which $494,710 came from the American Federation for Children, which is headquartered in Columbia, Maryland.

I share these things with you today in order to bring clarity to the debate that is going on across our state. Petition circulators employed by Support Our Schools have not been honest with the public about the nature of their referendum on school choice and the fact that they are using paid circulators. For example, when asked about these things at Firth Fun Days, the circulators there denied that Support Our Schools was using paid circulators and they denied that the petition was a referendum on school choice.

Sen. Lou Ann Linehan of Elkhorn was the sponsor of LB 753. Sen. Linehan told Paul Hammel of the Nebraska Examiner that the public school advocates of the referendum are “scam artists.” Because these circulators misinform the public about who is really getting paid to do the work and the true nature of their petition drive, I believe Sen. Linehan’s assessment of them is completely accurate.

Nebraskans need clarity about school choice. Nebraskans need to know what they are signing. Hiding the fact about who is doing the work is dishonest and skewing what the petition is really about is deceitful.

Nebraska’s tax system is broken and cannot be fixed. Whether it is the Nebraska State income tax, the State sales tax, the property tax, or the inheritance tax, each of these taxes is beyond repair.

The State individual income tax is too complex for the average citizen to understand. In order to show this, consider this instruction from the Nebraska Department of Revenue’s own website:

“Taxpayers whose federal adjusted gross income is larger than the threshold amount determined under section 68 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) will recalculate their tax on taxable income by multiplying the maximum tax rate by ten percent of the excess amount above the section 68 threshold and subtracting from the result the amount of tax from the tax table.”

Sound confusing? This statement was taken from the very first paragraph of the Department of Revenue’s instructions on calculating the individual income tax!

The State sales tax has outlived its effectiveness. Over the years, the Nebraska Legislature has given away too many exemptions. The Legislature has given away billions of dollars in taxable sales in the form of various sales tax exemptions. For example, in Nebraska we exempt such things as gold bullion, feminine hygiene products, and zoo fees. By exempting the sales of so many different kinds of products, the State sales tax has rendered itself ineffective.

Nebraska’s property tax system is overburdensome. A tax good tax system is one that is reliable from year to year without overburdening the people. Each year Nebraska’s property owners get a valuation notice in the mail indicating the new value of their real property. Those notices never seem to go down. Instead, each year property values go up and so do the property taxes. These property taxes go up regardless of the property owners’ ability to pay the tax and that is what makes it unbearable. According the Economic Research Service of the USDA, Nebraska now ranks behind Georgia and Wisconsin as the third highest state in the nation for farm bankruptcies and these bankruptcies are mostly due to high property taxes.

Inheritance taxes constitute double taxation and that is why only six states continue to impose inheritance taxes and Nebraska is one of them. Chief Justice John Marshall once wrote in the 1819 case of McCulloch v. State of Maryland that the power to tax is “the power to destroy,” and that is exactly what the inheritance tax is doing to our state. Anyone with an estate who wishes to pass it on to his or her heirs know that Nebraska is not a good place to die. Nebraska’s inheritance tax is an incentive for people to move to another state before they die and that is what many of them do.

Nebraska’s tax system is broken and cannot be fixed. We have experimented with these tax systems since 1967 and the situation has only grown worse. The solution is to replace the system with one that works and that is the EPIC Option Consumption Tax.

Last week Dannette Smith announced her resignation as director of Nebraska’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) effective August 4, 2023. I was not surprised by the announcement. I am not suggesting that Smith did a poor job as director. Dannette Smith did about as well as any director could have done given the set of circumstances she inherited and the state of affairs of DHHS that she was dealt when she first took over the Department four years ago.

DHHS is Nebraska’s largest state agency. The agency employs approximately 5,000 people and has an annual budget of $6.3 billion, which includes both state and federal dollars. The agency is comprised of five divisions, namely behavioral health, children and family services, developmental disabilities, Medicaid and long-term care, and public health.

When Dannette Smith took over as director in 2019 DHHS was already in a heap of trouble. Let me explain. In 2018 the voters approved Medicaid expansion at the ballot box, and DHHS took two long years to roll out a new plan which was ultimately rejected by the federal government. DHHS also oversees the state’s Youth Rehabilitation and Treatment Centers, which were also already in disarray. In August 2019 mismanagement of the facility in Geneva allowed several of the resident girls to trash their living quarters and set off the fire sprinklers. This resulted in the girls having to be moved to a temporary facility in Kearney, DHHS closing the facility in Geneva, and DHHS opening up a new facility in Lincoln. Adding insult to injury was the fact that St. Francis Ministries, an outside non-profit contract company from Kansas City, which had already been hired before Smith arrived to oversee child welfare cases in Omaha, was mismanaging state monies and was about to ask for an emergency bailout.

When Danette Smith took over as director of DHHS in 2019 she had no knowledge of the pandemic which would soon reach Nebraska. Armed with little knowledge of COVID-19, DHHS had to write new statewide directive health measures and work with local health departments to curb the spreading of the disease. As you know, these directive health measures temporarily closed schools, churches, and businesses, mandated mask-wearing for everyone going out in public and quarantines for those contracting the disease, and distributed testing and vaccinations discriminately according to those who were deemed to be most vulnerable to the disease.

I share all of this information with you today in order to help you see the current state of affairs that we have with DHHS. Over the course of the past several years, we have seen directors come and go while problems persist at DHHS.

The new director that Gov. Pillen will appoint will have more to clean up at DHHS besides what has already been mentioned. Nursing homes in rural Nebraska have been struggling to survive and few can afford to stay open much longer, Medicaid recipients can no longer find a doctor or a dentist anywhere in Nebraska who accepts new patients, and DHHS will soon run out of $26 million in ARPA funds that the division of child and family services spent on starting new licensed child care programs.

Whoever the Governor appoints as the new DHHS director, I will wish him or her the best and pray for that person’s success. There is much work that needs to be done at DHHS, and we need a director who possesses the skills, the knowledge, and the experience to fix these many problems. Finally, I thank Danette Smith for her service to our State and wish her well as she moves forward with her career.

If Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus went to school today, their test scores would likely be much lower than when Charles Schulz first started writing about these cartoon characters back in 1952. I say this because the National Assessment of Educational Progress recently released their 2022 test scores and the results are not good. Our students are failing.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is considered by many to be the gold standard for testing student academic achievement. The scores for America’s 13-year-old students fell to their lowest levels in decades. Math scores were the worst, falling nine points between 2020 and 2023, while reading scores fell four points for the same period.

The pandemic is not to blame. Some blame the pandemic for the sharp decline in these academic test scores, but we know from data released by the National Assessment of Education Progress that these scores were already slipping prior to the pandemic.

Socio-economic factors are also not to blame. Some insist on blaming the slippage in scores on socio-economic factors; however, the data shows that students from all socio-economic backgrounds and performance levels saw their test scores decrease significantly this year.

The elephant in the room that no one seems to want to talk about is the National Education Association and the teachers’ unions. During the pandemic, it was the National Education Association and the teachers’ unions which fought vigorously about reopening schools and letting teachers return to the classroom. Teachers are not to blame. Instead of focusing on the basics, teachers are now being told to teach on non-essential topics.

Refocusing on the fundamentals is why I believe Nebraskans need school choice. Although the State Legislature passed LB 753 this year for school choice, the bill did not go far enough. My bill, LB 177, would have allowed the money to follow the student so that parents could make better decisions about where to send their children to school.

Over the interim period I will be conducting an interim study on school choice. Specifically, I want to explore the best ways to fund school choice. Many of the states around us, such as Iowa, have now passed more complete school choice bills than LB 753. If Iowa can do it, then I believe Nebraska can do it as well. Therefore, one of my goals next year will be to introduce a bill that will give Nebraska’s parents a much better option for school choice.

As we celebrate our nation’s independence this week, let me remind you that liberty and independence are not events that we enjoy just once a year. Because we enjoy our liberty and independence every day, we should remember these things and celebrate them all year long.

Nebraskans are still fuming about their new property valuation notices and I don’t blame them one bit. The deadline for filing an appeal is June 30, and this year we could see the highest number of property valuation protests ever filed in the history of our State. High property taxes are the number one reason why people leave our State.

Nebraska’s property tax system is a failed experiment in taxation. In 1966 the citizens of Nebraska voted to amend the Nebraska State Constitution, creating what is commonly referred to as the three-legged stool. The three legs of Nebraska’s taxation stool are state income taxes, state sales taxes, and property taxes. After 56 years of taxing the citizens in this way, we can now safely conclude that the three-legged stool is a failed experiment in taxation which does not work.

The main reason that the three-legged stool does not work is that two out of the three legs of the stool are confiscatory taxes. Confiscatory means that the government takes your money before you ever have a chance to spend it. The state sales tax is the only leg of the stool which is not considered a confiscatory tax. When the government takes your money before you can spend it, you no longer have control over your money or your taxes.

This year the Legislature passed LB 243, which will allow taxpayers to claim 23 percent of their property tax bill as a refund or credit on their State income taxes. But, even if local units of government were to lower their levies by ten percent, the new valuation of your home or property will most likely result in an increase in your overall tax burden. In other words, LB 243 will result in a decrease in the amount of your increase.

The only way out of this mess is to end the experiment. The solution to Nebraska’s tax problem is the EPIC Option Consumption Tax. The advantage of the EPIC Option Consumption Tax is that it would repeal the state income tax, the state sales tax, the property tax and the inheritance tax and replace all of these taxes with a 7.5 percent consumption tax on services and new goods.

The beauty of the EPIC Option Consumption Tax is that it puts the taxpayer back in control of his or her taxes. It puts the taxpayer back into control because it allows the taxpayer to spend his or her money before the government can collect it. In short, it operates on a pay-as-you-go basis and so it is the only kind of tax which can never over-tax the people.

The EPIC Option Consumption Tax is not too good to be true. Many people ask, “Where does the money come from to run the State?” or, “Would it be revenue neutral?” These are great questions and the answer is that we can be revenue neutral with a consumption tax rate of 7.5 percent. By switching over to a consumption tax, all of the current sales tax exemptions would go away. Over the years, the State Legislature has given away $75 billion in taxable sales in the form of various sales tax exemptions. By eliminating those sales tax exemptions and by taxing services, the EPIC Option Consumption Tax would be revenue neutral at a rate of 7.5 percent and still generate an additional $400 million cushion for the State of Nebraska.

So, where to we go from here? First, let me remind you to file your property valuation protest by June 30. Then, after you file your appeal take some time to visit the website for the EPIC Option Consumption Tax at www.epicoption.org. Finally, sign our two petitions to put the EPIC Option Consumption Tax on the ballot for 2024. The only way we can solve Nebraska’s tax problem is for the taxpayers to speak out and assert themselves, and you can do this by signing our petitions and voting in 2024. Nebraska’s tax system will never change until the voters feel enough pain from the current system to make the change for themselves.

On June 22, 2023 the Regents of the University of Nebraska will vote to approve Rodney Bennett as the new chancellor of Nebraska’s flagship university. Although the Regents are accepting feedback from the public, the procedure is just a formality. The vote will essentially be a rubber-stamp, ceremonial vote because the decision to hire Bennett has already been made.

If you were to ask me what the three highest priorities of the new chancellor should be, I would answer as follows: First, the University of Nebraska needs to reclaim its rightful position as a land-grant university. What that means is that the University of Nebraska system exists first, and foremost, to service the educational needs of the people of Nebraska. The University of Nebraska is supposed to be accountable to the people of Nebraska by supplying them with their basic needs in higher education. Until that goal is reached nothing else really matters.

Second, the University of Nebraska system needs to learn to live within their means. This means that the University’s leaders must resist the temptation to raise tuition on students, manage state dollars well, and refrain from shifting the balance of the University’s budget to financing from outside sources.

Third, the University of Nebraska system needs to reclaim its rightful place as an institute for higher learning. This means that the University of Nebraska system must resist the urge to become an institution for social and political change and stick to the business of educating students. This does not mean that controversial ideas should never be taught; instead, it means that University faculty and staff should never be in the business of pushing students to embrace controversial ideas and failing students who refuse to comply with the professors social or political agenda. A quick glance at the English Department’s webpage is all the evidence needed to show how this has been a major problem at UNL.

Unfortunately, Rodney Bennett has not said anything to suggest that he holds any of these values as a top priority for the University of Nebraska system. For instance, in the interviews that I have read, I have never heard Rodney Bennett recognize the fact that the University of Nebraska is a land-grant University, that the University is accountable to the people of Nebraska, or that the University’s first duty is to service the educational needs of Nebraska’s citizens. Instead, Bennett has stated publicly that one of his top priorities is to reunite the University of Nebraska with the Association of American Universities (AAU).

Membership with the AAU runs counter to servicing the basic educational needs of most Nebraskans. When Nebraska lost its membership with the AAU, it wasn’t because the school was adequately servicing the educational needs of Nebraskans. According to chancellor Harvey Perlman, the University of Nebraska lost its membership with the AAU because they lacked enough professors on tenure track, lacked an adequate number of faculty awards and citations, and didn’t divert enough money into research. While all of these things are good for the making of an elite research university, none of them relate to servicing the basic educational needs of Nebraskans.

Next, Rodney Bennett has no plan for fixing the University of Nebraska’s budget shortfall. University president, Ted Carter, informed the regents last month that the University of Nebraska is facing a $50 million shortfall for the 2023-2024 academic year and another $80 million shortfall for 2024-2025. When asked how he intended to resolve this problem, Bennett told the Lincoln Journal Star newspaper that he “…could not offer a specific recommendation for how to move forward.”

Finally, Rodney Bennett will come to the University of Nebraska as a social change agent, specializing in the indoctrination of students in WOKE ideology. Instead of focusing on the basic educational needs of students, teaching students how to interact with controversial topics with critical thinking, or helping students find their own way through the maze of controversial ideas, Bennet told the Lincoln Journal Star newspaper that as chancellor, he intends to lead the university to “lean into the effort [of diversity and inclusion], and help drive the conversation about what diversity means on a university campus.” Unfortunately, diversity and inclusion on university campuses never means that conservative ideas will be honored, respected, or valued. Nebraska’s motto is “Equality before the Law,” not “Equity before the Law.” Equality means equal opportunity, whereas equity means equal outcomes.