Are Struggling College Students Like Cuddly Bunnies That Should Be Drowned?

“This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies,” he told Gregory W. Murry, an assistant professor of history, according to the student newspaper. “But you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies.”

The president’s plan was to identify students who had been pegged as less likely to succeed and to keep tabs on them for the first month of the academic year. If they didn’t seem to be on the right path by late September, the college would encourage them to drop out.

That idea has been controversial enough, but the bunny-drowning remark made the president’s proposal a national news story, so it bears exploring how well his metaphor holds up to scrutiny. Drowning cuddly bunnies may or may not be a good policy, but is it a good analogy?

Uproar at Mount St. Mary’s

A controversial freshman-retention plan at Mount St. Mary’s University of Maryland, and the way the institution handled the ensuing criticism, cast the small Roman Catholic campus and its president, Simon P. Newman, in a harsh light. Mr. Newman resigned after weeks of controversy, having drawn the ire of his own faculty and many others in higher education. Read full Chronicle coverage, along with commentaries, in these articles.

I called two experts to help answer the question. One was Jon Boeckenstedt, associate vice president for enrollment management at DePaul University. The other was Kathleen Wilsbach, the head of the Maryland, D.C., and Northern Virginia chapter of the House Rabbit Society.

First things first: Are students like cuddly bunnies?

Let’s see. Rabbits eat a lot of hay, said Ms. Wilsbach. Veterinary care can be expensive. Plus you need to create and maintain some kind of enclosure. That used to mean building a hutch in the backyard, but Ms. Wilsbach and other rabbit advocates now encourage owners to nurture the animals’ social needs by welcoming them into a rabbit-proofed part of the home. A safe space, if you’d like.

There’s more. “They need mental stimulation,” said Ms. Wilsbach. “They love to play with toys, they like to have outlets for their natural behaviors — digging, chewing, running, jumping.”

Housing, academic programming, athletic facilities, a meal plan. So far, so good. But what about this drowning business?

Neither Ms. Wilsbach nor Mr. Boeckenstedt had heard of people drowning bunnies specifically, although both had heard of drowning kittens, puppies, and other cuddly animals. Before spaying and neutering pets became commonplace, drowning litters was a popular strategy of do-it-yourself population control in rural areas.

“What I understand, from listening to my father and other people,” said Mr. Boeckenstedt, who grew up in Iowa, “is that, in the country, if your dog would have a litter of pups and you didn’t have any other way of getting rid of them, and didn’t need any more dogs on the farm, you would — and this is crass and horrible — you would put them in a burlap bag with a brick and throw them in a river.”

That is probably the tradition of cuddly-animal euthanasia the Mount St. Mary’s president was drawing on when he talked about getting struggling students to drop out early and often: the idea that “it’s better to put them out of their misery early, and in some sense more humane,” said Mr. Boeckenstedt, “than it is to let them grow and suffer and continue to be a menace or a nuisance or whatever.”

But what kind of a threat could cuddly bunnies possibly pose? For an answer, Ms. Wilsbach pointed me to Australia.

Australia has been dealing with a rabbit infestation for well over a century. It all started in 1859, when a wealthy homesteader named Thomas Austin released two dozen rabbits on his property. Rabbits since have become a scourge, outcompeting the country’s livestock, not to mention its native species, for grazing grass and costing farmers 110 million Australian dollars annually.

The Australians have tried killing the rabbits with disease. They have tried sequestering them with rabbit-proof fences stretching across the continent. If they could drown them all, they would. Unwanted hares nonetheless continue to wreak havoc down under.

Australia offers an extreme example of the cost of allowing creatures, however cuddly, to remain in an unsuitable environment. Where a professor might see struggling freshmen as innocent bunnies, Mr. Newman might see an invasive species that could imperil the local ecology. Australian authorities have determined that killing bunnies would ultimately redound to their country’s economic interest; ditto the Mount St. Mary’s president.

“The analogy for me, I guess, would be the ecologist or environmental scientist who’s thinking about an ecosystem writ large, as opposed to an animal-rights advocate,” said Mr. Boeckenstedt. “Hunters will always say, ‘Hunting culls the herd, and long term it’s better for the entire deer population if, in fact, there are fewer competing for the limited resources and food,’” he continued. “And an animal-rights activist would say, ‘Yeah, but we shouldn’t shoot them.’”

And so Mr. Newman’s analogy takes shape: The Mount St. Mary’s campus is Australia. At-risk students are cuddly bunnies that don’t belong in the ecosystem and threaten its economy. Mr. Newman, the president, is a hunter-conservationist who wants cull the herd (or, at least, shoo them to the other side of the rabbit-proof fence). His opponents on the faculty are animal-rights activists who can’t stomach the thought of bunnies’ drowning under any circumstances.

But that tableau has a major structural flaw. There are differences between the bunnies running amok in the outback and the ones struggling to find their footing at a Maryland liberal-arts college. For one thing, Mr. Newman was talking only about the removal of 20 to 25 freshmen. More to the point, they were invited just a few months earlier.

Australia’s seek-and-destroy approach to its rabbit problem can be forgiven, perhaps, by the fact that the country is still fighting the effects of Thomas Austin’s original sin. New generations of wild rabbits now arrive unbidden. Not so college freshmen, who are recruited annually. Whether drowned or merely banished to the far side of the fence, the struggling students at Mount St. Mary’s would be casualties of buyer’s remorse.

“In all probability, you’ve been telling these kids for 18 months that you’re the best place for them,” said Mr. Boeckenstedt. The presence of cuddly bunnies on the campus was not an accident of nature. They were sought, bought, swaddled, and taken home. “You can’t just take humans back to the pet store,” he said.

(Mr. Boeckenstedt, who was a good sport throughout what we both agreed was an absurd interview, asked that I make it clear that he is against bunny-drowning, both real and metaphorical.)

In the weeks since Mr. Newman’s plan went public, along with the colorful language he used to rationalize it, professors have found many reasons to condemn him. Most of those critiques have focused on the more-substantive matters at hand — including, most recently, what many see as the university’s attempt to do away with another nuisance: administrators and faculty members who opposed the bunny-drowning agenda.

But if the integrity of an analogy matters anywhere, it is on college campuses, where a talent for metaphor may determine whether a student sinks or swims. In the end, Mr. Newman’s metaphor does not really hang together, even with a generous amount of spit and duct tape. If professors did not object to the intent of their president’s overture, they might still be inclined to drown it in red ink.

Steve Kolowich writes about how colleges are changing, and staying the same, in the digital age. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.