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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?
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