Parnell signs deal requiring ‘mutual agreement’ with Ted Stevens Foundation on choice of UAA employee to supervise Stevens collection

The Ted Stevens Foundation and UAA Chancellor Sean Parnell signed an agreement under which the Stevens family and the foundation will be able to continue to sanitize the papers of Ted Stevens, a massive collection of thousands of boxes that is to be donated to UAA.

First, it will take one or two more years for the foundation to “complete initial curation of the collection,” according to the agreement with Parnell, the former governor.

Second, the Stevens family would continue to have the authority to define what items are “personal” and should be excluded from the collection.

Third, the curator or archivist to be employed by the university, will be “chosen by mutual agreement between the Ted Stevens Foundation and the university,” paid for five years with money raised by the foundation.

The new plan from Parnell represents the next step in a drive to create a “Ted Stevens Institute,” now being called the “Alaskan Leaders Institute,” a political shrine to be anchored by the papers of Stevens and perhaps of the late Rep. Don Young.

It’s not clear how many more years will pass before historians have access to the Stevens papers or what will be removed.

A decade ago, as governor, Parnell put $1 million in the capital budget for the foundation after contacting Catherine Stevens, widow of Ted Stevens. He “expressed an interest in ensuring the papers were properly processed and potentially digitized,” according to the foundation.

Last year Sen. Lisa Murkowski put a $6 million earmark in the federal budget to start renovating and expanding the UAA library, a process that is likely to take years. The university is seeking at least $14 million from the state over the next few years. There is talk of raising private funds and it’s not clear what the total cost would be.

Given the traumatic manner in which Stevens’s monumental career in the Senate ended, it’s not surprising that the family and the foundation named for Stevens would try to regain and retain control over the record of his Senate career, making sure the paper trail does not contain unflattering material.

The foundation said it will donate the funds necessary to pay the curator or archivist for five years. That might be $1 million or more. But that will not begin to cover the costs of processing.

The foundation had net assets of $2.2 million in 2020, according to an IRS filing.

Stevens approved a plan with UAF in 2009, depositing his papers in Fairbanks, while retaining ownership of them. The university said UAF had the only facilities appropriate for the purpose. There was no commitment from Stevens that the papers would remain with the university because of the “significant tax advantages” for not disposing of them until after his death.

In the years after Stevens died in 2010, his family and the Ted Stevens Foundation grew more unhappy with the arrangement at UAF until they terminated it on Feb. 9, 2015. About 4,500 boxes of papers were shipped to Anchorage, where the foundation has them.

By then the foundation had gotten $1 million from Parnell in the capital budget.

Emails and other documents from the period in which the papers were at UAF, documents released years later after requests by Alaska historian Ross Coen, shed some light on what took place.

While UAF spent hundreds of thousands on new shelving and about $1 million in grant funds over six years, it clearly could have done more to keep the Stevens papers—making the collection a higher priority, cutting some other unidentified priority—but the Ted Stevens Foundation and the Stevens family had unreasonable expectations and demands.

The family and the Stevens foundation, who were overly worried about what the papers may contain and what some unknown person might find, wanted all 8 million or so pages to be individually inspected before making the collection public. That was and is unreasonable.

I don’t see how an expensive multi-year effort for a Ted Stevens project could be justified when UAF did not own the collection or have any assurance that it would remain on deposit.

The Stevens Foundation wanted the university to create a Ted Stevens Institute for Political Leadership, and announce its creation on what would have been Stevens’s 90th birthday a decade ago, but that never happened.

As to what level of support the family and foundation expected from the university a decade ago, the family wanted to have someone look at every page.

“My understanding is that prior to making any papers available, a very detailed review, including reviewing each page of the relevant papers has to be completed,” McKeever wrote to the UAF archivist handling the project, saying he didn’t see how that level of inspection could be completed to allow public access by 2015.

It would have taken about 40 hours of work to examine and process each box of 1,100 or so pages, as requested by the Stevens family and foundation, the university estimated in February, 2014.

“Each item in a folder is examined for material that needs to be reviewed by the Stevens family or the foundation and noted on a separate document, keywords and detail are added to the description of each item is given a unique name for future digitization, and an acid free refoldering is done,” according to the library plan.

Digitization would add a great deal more labor and cost.

“For one archivist and one assistant archivist, it would take approximately 40 years to completely digitize the Stevens collection. This is a long time, but the volume of material is tremendous,” the estimate said.

Each box holds about 1,100 pages and two employees could handle two boxes a week, or 2,200 pages. The cumulative cost of having two people work for 40 years to process 4,150 boxes was estimated at $21 million,

The 40-year plan was obviously impractical, so the library suggested it could be finished in a much shorter period by adding more staff or by processing on a folder level, without requiring someone to check every piece of paper in advance.

McKeever said that under the 2009 UAF agreement, family correspondence was to be removed from the papers within 30 days and given to the family for disposition. “Please assure me that is being done,” McKeever wrote to archivist Mary Anne Hamblen.

Hamblen replied on Sept. 16, 2013, that portions of the material could be made accessible to the public by 2015 under tight controls. The archivist would control which papers would be made public and when, interview researchers and decide whether they would be permitted to use the papers.

“The archivist also controls the research procedure, and there will be a mandated waiting period between a patron’s request and access of the materials,” she said. “This gives archival staff time to pull and review documents before the visit.”

Regarding personal items in the collection and family correspondence with Stevens’s sons, Hamblem said there was little material of that kind.

“I can assure you that evidence of personal materials in the collection, as outlined in the agreement, has been negligible,” she said.

“Any possible items, such as a brief email between the senator and a son that was mentioned, were noted as restricted material upon creation of the record in our database,” she said. “I will pull those items and forward to you and Mrs. Stevens for an assessment.”

There was a single email that had been found between Stevens and one of his sons, she wrote on Oct. 7, 2013, and she sent that to the Stevens family.

On April 8, 2014, McKeever complained to UA President Pat Gamble that the university needed to direct more resources to dealing with the Stevens papers.

He also said that Parnell had approached Catherine Stevens, the widow of Ted Stevens about supporting the project. In September 2013, Parnell asked the university for an update and soon added $1 million to the capital budget.

Parnell asked the Ted Stevens Foundation for estimates on how much was needed to handle the processing and there were testy exchanges between McKeever and the UAF head of libraries about why it took months to get estimates that he said should be easy to create.

On May 9, 2014, UAF Chancellor Brian Rogers wrote to McKeever that the agreement with the Stevens family was not that every document had to be reviewed and that the university hoped to make some papers available in 2015, meeting the original plan to lift the blanket restriction on public access five years after Stevens’s death. The university had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars so that some parts of the collection could be made public, which was the goal all along.

Rogers wrote that requiring an inspection of every document before any public access could be allowed “would place UAF and the Stevens Foundation at a crossroads where our goals may fundamentally diverge.”

On Feb. 9, 2015 Catherine Stevens terminated the agreement early, contending that much more work had to be done before anything was opened to the public.

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