In March 2006, about 100 people gathered at a Lake Ozark, Mo., resort to discuss the sale of a student loan organization’s assets. The board of the state-affiliated Higher Education Loan Authority of Missouri, or MOHELA, had already decided once, a couple of months earlier, to sell $2.4 billion worth of student loans to generate about $450 million for state coffers. The idea, originally pitched by then-governor Matt Blunt and scaled down, was to use the proceeds generated from the sale to fund Blunt’s higher education priorities. The notion was controversial given that MOHELA was founded by state lawmakers to ensure Missourians could attend college affordably through low-cost loans and the organization’s assets theoretically were earmarked for that purpose.
MOHELA’s board had initially considered and approved the idea in private, drawing scrutiny from Missouri’s attorney general, who said the process violated the state’s open meeting laws. So now they were back to debate the idea in public. Some university presidents spoke in favor of the plan, which would use the proceeds from the sale to pay for capital improvements at colleges, boost the schools’ technology profile and other higher education initiatives. But critics worried it would allow MOHELA’s assets to drift towards a use that was distant from the reason it was established by the Missouri state legislature in the first place. One of critics was Faith Sandler, the executive director of the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis. “I understand MOHELA’s mission to be to prov …