the bistro off broadway

The views expressed on this page are soley those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County News Online
text

The perils of those rankings
By Susan Olling

It’s come a long way from its start as a Roman Catholic seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland in the early 19th century to a national news story in 21st century.
 
Here’s what can happen when a university hires a president with a finance background.  Why a university would hire, as its president, someone with no professional higher education on his CV is a mystery.  Nevertheless, he was hired last year and started the job with big ideas and a market-driven attitude that was evidently a bit unsettling to some.  He was hired apparently to “raise the university’s national profile”.  He did, just not in the way he probably intended.
 
Mount St. Mary’s University, or “the Mount” (as the good folk up there call it) is one of the oldest Roman Catholic colleges in the country. It’s been the center of a firestorm after this same president opened his mouth and inserted his foot all the way to the ankle.  His reported comments compared struggling freshmen to bunnies that should be killed.  The comments are more graphic than that, but I’ll spare you.  In addition, he proposed a plan to identify freshmen who would be likely to fail and offer refunds if those students chose to leave.
 
All to make retention numbers look better, evidently.  Better retention numbers, of course, will raise an institution’s ranking in the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities.  Does anyone really pay attention to these things?
 
After these comments were published in the student newspaper, the newspaper’s faculty adviser was fired.  He appears to have deep roots in the university, if his pedigree is any indication: Mount St. Mary’s alumnus, law professor, and former university trustee.  A tenured philosophy professor, who had apparently been openly critical of the university president, was also fired.  Both were supposedly disloyal to the university.
 
Wait, what happened to free speech and open debate AKA academic freedom?  Aren’t these part of any university’s mission?   It doesn’t sound is if the university president was aware of this.  Nor, evidently, was the chairman of the university’s board.  He apparently sided with the university president.
 
There will always be students who struggle with college courses and/or drop out because of poor grades.  I can’t imagine having to deal with this or try to solve the problem.  However, demeaning struggling freshmen, who are trying to adjust to college, in the crude way that was done by the president of Mount St. Mary’s University was completely beyond the pale.
 
The poo hit the whirling blade up there last week.  National news outlets aired the story.  There was a digital petition, signed by several thousand scholars throughout the country, asking for the reinstatement of the two professors.  By the end of last week, they had been reinstated. The faculty overwhelmingly voted, 87-3, to ask the university president to resign.  It’s unclear whether the two professors will return.
 
Two things are clear, however.  For the good of Mount St. Mary’s University, the president needs to resign.  Immediately.  He’s done much damage to the university he was hired to lead.  The other: this should be the last year for U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings.
 
Y’all know I’m an alumna of Buckeye Nut U.  But the comments, and the fallout from them, make me wonder what’s going on in this country’s institutions of higher learning.
 
I leave you with this question.  When something like this happens at a small, liberal-arts university, what’s going on elsewhere in higher education?


 
senior scribes
senior scribes

County News Online

is a Fundraiser for the Senior Scribes Scholarship Committee. All net profits go into a fund for Darke County Senior Scholarships
contact
Copyright © 2011 and design by cigs.kometweb.com