On the day he was presented with a preliminary report from the Faculty Senate ad hoc committee, University President Bruce Speck took his case to the airwaves.

Speck appeared on the KODE morning show to discuss a possible vote of no confidence in his presidency and the controversy surrounding Missouri Southern.

In an interview with KODE’s Shannon Bruffet, Speck said he was not completely surprised by the recent developments.

“Last spring the Faculty Senate president Carla Huntington [Walter] had talked to me and she talked about this very issue,” Speck said. “During that time we talked about it and I said ‘well what are specifics?’ and there weren’t a great deal of specifics and she said she would not pursue that but the faculty came back and they wanted to pursue that.”

The first portion of the two-part interview focused largely on Speck’s decision to cut Southern’s early childhood development center during part one. That decision was later reversed.

Speck said he realized the school was losing money on the center and subsidizing it out of Southern’s operating budget, which wasn’t good.

“The information I initially got, and this comes up to us from the people in charge, is we couldn’t increase our rates because we’d be above La Petite, which is the premier place, that people wouldn’t take that increase, that we were limited to the number of children we could take. Based on all that we ran the numbers and realized we couldn’t operate it,” he said.

After an uproar, Speck said the decision was reconsidered and new information came out, including an increase in the maximum number of students they facility could take in, and a waiting list to get into the program.

“We said we’ll try it, if you think you can make it run and make it profitable or break even that’s great,” Speck said. “So once we got different information we reconsidered, which is absolutely reasonable.”

The second part of the interview focused on criticism of plans to update athletics facilities at a time when Speck says the school budget situation is critical.

“I was fortunate enough last year to travel with the football team so I saw most of the stadiums where we went,” Speck responded. “Our stadium is, I would say, probably the least pleasing in all of the MIAA. For instance, all the stadiums I went to have an elevator that goes up to the second floor to the president’s box. We have no elevator. The stadium is an old stadium. It does need to be renovated. That’s what the committee recommended.”

During the end of the segment, Bruffet asked Speck why there was so much discontent with him and if he thought it would be happening under a different leader.

“The second part of that question is sort of theoretical,” Speck responded. “But I think that when you go into a culture and you have to change that culture, because there was clearly a need to change it, we were running a deficit budget, and when you make the decisions we made which were hard decisions, you’re going to have some discontent. But if the discontent is a matter of people saying ‘I don’t like you’re decisions,’ that’s a management issues. My job is to make decisions to move the institution forward. If someone says ‘well there’s something illegal or immoral you’ve done,’ that’s a different issue. There will be none of that, because there’s nothing like that I’ve done.”