How a Freshman-Retention Plan Turned Into a PR Disaster for One Campus

Emails and conversations about freshman-retention plans don’t typically set the world on fire. But when they appeared in the campus newspaper of Mount St. Mary’s University of Maryland last month, they thrust the small Roman Catholic campus and its president, Simon P. Newman, into a spotlight that Mr. Newman never anticipated — or wanted.

In one of the emails, which were first obtained by the student-run paper, The Mountain Echo, Mr. Newman discussed his strategy in stark terms: “My short-term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th. This one thing will boost our retention 4-5%. A larger committee or group needs to work on the details, but I think you get the objective.”

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.

A conversation described by The Mountain Echo, said to have taken place between Mr. Newman and Gregory W. Murry, an assistant professor of history, was even more direct. According to the newspaper, the president told Mr. Murry: “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

The article’s publication, in January, set off a chain of fiery reactions on the campus and among alumni and others, triggering a wave of media attention that has roiled Mount St. Mary’s over the past two weeks. Mr. Newman has adamantly defended his plan, but many faculty members and students say they’re shocked by the president’s language and apparent goals. Still, since Mr. Newman has been generally well liked on the campus, some aren’t sure what to think.

The most heated response came from John E. Coyne III, chairman of the Board of Trustees, who published a statement on the university’s website outlining a “forensic investigation” that the board conducted after reading a draft of the article. Mr. Coyne wrote that the board had found “incontrovertible evidence of the existence of an organized, small group of faculty and recent alums working to undermine and ultimately cause the exit of President Newman.” He hinted that some professors could face punishment for violating the university’s code of conduct.

He wrote in an earlier letter to the campus newspaper that he was disturbed by the students’ decision to publish the article “without any concern for either the individual privacy interests of the faculty involved or the damage you will render to the university and its brand.”

The two student journalists behind the article, Rebecca Schisler and Ryan Golden, said in interviews on the campus last week that Mr. Coyne’s criticisms of their work were unfounded.

Mr. Newman didn’t mince words about the student journalists either. The article, he said on Thursday, “inserted certain sound bites and pieces of emails and comments made in private conversations to concoct a story that we’re trying to kick people out.” Whether or not that was part of Mr. Newman’s plan, though, the university is now doing public damage control while quelling some ugly campus disagreements.

‘We Had to Do Something’

During a wide-ranging, hourlong conversation with The Chronicle, Mr. Newman laid out what he described as his original intentions behind the retention plan.

When he came to the campus last March, he said, he noticed that the university had lost more than 70 freshmen between the first and second semesters. That resulted in a retention rate of around 75 percent — several percentage points lower than usual.

In the long term, Mr. Newman said, he planned to raise the university’s admission standards. At that time, however, admissions decisions for the fall had already been made. “Based on the profile of students we were getting” for the next academic year, he said, “we were concerned that it was going to get worse. We had to do something.”

The university already had a number of resources to support students, including counseling and chaplains, he said. The concern was that at-risk students weren’t getting identified and referred to the right places within their first six weeks on the campus, he said.

Mr. Newman and his staff began working on an updated freshman-retention strategy during the summer. The plan included a survey, designed in-house, that would be given to freshmen in late August. Mr. Newman described it as “a check-up” that would measure qualities like grit and perseverance.

As the academic year began, Mr. Newman also hoped to use students’ university identification cards to track how often they were attending social events and eating at the campus dining hall. He also wanted to learn which students were missing classes or assignments.

That information would help university staff members know which students to “intercept” during the first couple of weeks, he said. After the first month or so of classes, he said, he expected to identify a group of students “who just don’t want to be here.”

Someone on the campus — Mr. Newman suggested it might be a counselor, a resident adviser, or a faculty member — would then sit down with those students and talk about the tuition-reimbursement deadline, which was September 25. “It’s moral,” Mr. Newman said, “to at least have the conversation and say, You know, you can get all of your money back if this isn’t the place for you. I’d rather you be happy.”

‘Poisoned’ Plan

Some faculty members say that before the article’s publication, they weren’t aware of a retention program that was different from what the university was already doing. But Mr. Murry, the history professor, knew more about the president’s ideas than most. Last year he oversaw the university’s Veritas Symposium, a required seminar for freshmen; the professors teaching those courses were asked to administer the survey.

He challenges Mr. Newman’s portrayal of the survey’s intent. “It’s not true to say that there were no goals to actually retain students,” Mr. Murry said in an interview. “But it is also true that getting 20 to 25 students to leave was a fundamental part of the overall plan. And that’s what poisoned the whole thing.”

His concerns surfaced when he realized, on the day the survey was to be administered, that students’ responses to the questions — many of them deeply personal — would be used to identify certain students as “at risk” and, eventually, to encourage some of them to leave the campus.

Late in September, at an impromptu meeting that included Mr. Newman, Mr. Murry, and several others, Mr. Murry said the president “explicitly argued that getting students to leave was necessary in order to prevent a drop in the rankings.” The discussion, he said, “involved proposals for both convincing students to voluntarily withdraw and using involuntary dismissal.” Mr. Murry said Mr. Newman also asked him for a list of freshmen who could be encouraged to leave.

Mr. Newman is well aware that retention rate is a factor influencing colleges’ rankings in U.S. News & World Report and other lists. “I’m looking at our retention numbers, and believe me, I’m all over it,” he said. But he said he was never trying to force students to leave.

Mark J. Riggs, a board member and a Mount St. Mary’s graduate, stood behind Mr. Newman’s characterization of the plan. “I’m a kid that the Mount took a chance on,” he said, describing his background as a mediocre high-school student who came to the university after attending community college. “To think that I would agree with anything other than a plan to help students is completely inaccurate.”

More broadly, Mr. Newman said he was concerned about “this default belief that everyone leaves high school and should immediately go to college.” He said he wanted to reduce the number of “expensive mistakes” made by students who drop out of a four-year institution after a semester.

Mr. Murry believed that the president had some good ideas for retention. “There might’ve been a way to do this program, given enough time and buy-in,” he said. But, he said, “we needed to test the survey first and not make decisions about students based on an experimental survey.”

Communication in Question

When Mr. Newman first saw a draft version of the Mountain Echo article — which newspaper editors emailed to him and the Board of Trustees in early December, hoping for comment — he said he was “horrified.”

But comment from Mr. Newman never appeared in the final piece. Student journalists and administrators dispute why that was the case: Christian A. Kendzierski, a university spokesman, said the reporters reneged on a promise to get back in touch before proceeding with their article, but Mr. Golden said he and Ms. Schisler had given the president ample opportunity to comment.

Instead, Mr. Golden said, the president sent a campuswide email in December — before the article had been published — contesting its accuracy.

The article omitted critical context about the retention plan, Mr. Newman said. “As written in that thing, it looks like my goal is to get rid of those people,” he said. “If that’s all I read, that’s what I would conclude, too.”

Mr. Newman’s August email mentioning the removal of “20-25 students” was in response to a long message from David B. Rehm, the provost, who had expressed support for some proposed uses of the freshman survey but outlined concerns about using it to “help students understand themselves.”

Mr. Rehm forwarded Mr. Newman’s message to several professors, including Joshua P. Hochschild, then dean of the College of Liberal Arts and an associate professor of philosophy, who responded that “Simon clarified a goal: to dismiss some students. This new bit of information is deeply disturbing.”

Should professors, who interact with students on a day-to-day basis, have been informed about the president’s vision for freshman retention? “I thought they had all been told,” Mr. Newman said.

The emails suggest that even Mr. Rehm, the university’s second-highest-ranking administrator, wasn’t fully primed on the president’s intentions. Mr. Newman said his biggest mistake last semester was communication. “I take complete responsibility that the implementation of this didn’t work,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that it was a bad idea, or that it can’t work.”

Hoping to Move On

Mr. Newman, whose background is in business, came to the campus last year with an ambitious strategy of aggressive fund raising and substantial growth for the university’s small endowment. Many members of the campus community, including students, are aware of the financial difficulties facing the university, and some say they see Mr. Newman as an agent of change.

Olivia Eldrenkamp, a sophomore, didn’t like how Mr. Newman talked about the retention plan in the emails collected by The Mountain Echo, but she welcomed his willingness to take an unconventional approach to running the institution. “The school is very much in debt, and he’s trying to fix it,” she said. “I do understand why he’s trying to shake things up.”

Still, several freshmen said in interviews on Thursday that the inflammatory comments were the first significant impression they had had of Mr. Newman. And while they acknowledged that he had apologized, they weren’t impressed.

Brianna Cherney and Sydni Bavis, both first-year students, said they had talked at length about the article the previous evening. “We were really offended by it,” Ms. Cherney said. “We really enjoy it here, and we love the Mount. To hear that he thinks of freshmen that way is kind of disappointing.”

Abel Gonsalves, the university’s student-body president, was “taken aback” by the article. “I talk candidly with the president,” Mr. Gonsalves said. “I’ve never heard him use that language before.” Now that more details have surfaced about the plan, he said, “it has started to make sense.”

Dana P. Ward, an associate professor of biology, pointed out that “our universitywide retention plan is more than this one recent initiative of the president.” She is ready to move on, and she believes a number of faculty members share her view. “To continue to rehash this is not particularly productive,” she said.

Mr. Newman said he’s done a lot in less than a year at the helm. He cited a new on-campus Starbucks, investments in athletics, forums with students, and a retreat with faculty members.

He, too, hopes that the publicity will die down soon. It’s a distraction from more-pressing matters, he said, such as fund raising. “We’ve been hit by this, badly,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr. Golden and Ms. Schisler, the reporters whose article is at the center of the controversy, can’t believe the attention that their little-known publication is receiving from international media outlets. But they stress that they told an important story, and looking back, they wouldn’t have done anything differently.

“We love the Mount,” Ms. Schisler said. “That’s obvious in everything we do. At the same time, we are not a marketing tool of the university.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.