When Simon P. Newman was interviewing for the presidency of Mount St. Mary’s University, he promised to bring the small Catholic institution in rural Maryland national exposure. Now he and the board are probably just wishing that would all go away.
For weeks the university has made national headlines. The president’s clumsy “drown the bunnies” metaphor for easing out struggling freshmen kicked off a public-relations fiasco that spiraled into a deeper controversy after he decided to fire two professors, one of whom was tenured, and to demote the provost, who had challenged him.
On Friday the president extended an olive branch to angry faculty members, who had gathered to consider a no-confidence vote in him, by offering to reinstate the two fired professors.
In a statement the university called the offer “a first step of reconciliation and healing in the season of Lent and the Year of Mercy.”
But the university’s leaders stood by the embattled president.
“We embrace his vision for the future of the university and believe he is the best person to carry it out,” the Rev. Kevin Farmer, a board member, said. “We have every desire to resolve the tension on campus and move forward together.”
It may be too late for that.
Late Friday faculty members voted 87 to 3 to call on the president to resign by 9 a.m. on Monday.
“Our community is suffering. In recent weeks we have been divided due to miscommunications, missteps, and misunderstandings,” the statement said.
The controversy has hurt recruiting, it said.
“We have come to the sad conclusion that this state of affairs cannot be resolved while you continue in your current office. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart, in a loving spirit of compassion and forgiveness, that we appeal to your generosity of spirit and ask that you resign your position for the good of our community by 9:00 a.m. on February 15, 2016.”
Meanwhile, the two professors he had offered to reinstate reacted coolly to his offer.
“Hell no,” Thane M. Naberhaus, a tenured associate professor of philosophy, said in response to an email asking if he would agree to the reinstatement. “Not going back until he’s gone,” he said, referring to Mr. Newman.
The other faculty member, Ed Egan, is an untenured professor who advised The Mountain Echo, the student newspaper that broke the story about Mr. Newman’s plan to use a survey to help identify early in the semester students who were unlikely to succeed. The idea, the president said, was to intervene early, offer tutoring and counseling, and if that didn’t work, encourage them to drop out in the first six weeks.
Mr. Newman has said the university has an ethical obligation to help prevent students from taking on student-loan debt if they’re unlikely to succeed. The kindest thing to do for such students is to offer them a tuition refund and suggest other paths they might want to consider. But emails obtained by The Mountain Echo and also by The Chronicle show that the president hoped that if 20 to 25 students left early, the university’s retention figures, which factor into national rankings, would improve.
Mr. Egan said the president called him on Friday afternoon and offered to reinstate him as an act of “mercy,” which implied that he and the student journalists had done something wrong.
“I told him I’d have to think about it,” Mr. Egan said.
He drove to the faculty meeting and told his colleagues he was considering his options.
“I told them I thought this was an attempt to placate the faculty” to pre-empt a no-confidence vote, Mr. Egan said. “I said that reinstating Ed Egan and Thane Naberhaus won’t make all of the other serious, fundamental problems we’ve been hearing and reading about in the national media go away, and that I think the president needs to show mercy to Mount St. Mary and resign.”
The president has not responded to numerous interview requests.
Unusual Portfolio
As the pressure on Mr. Newman to step down intensified, many wondered whether, in retrospect, hiring a private-equity chief executive with no real higher-education experience was too much of a stretch for a Roman Catholic liberal-arts institution. Mr. Newman was named president in December 2014, succeeding Thomas H. Powell.
Even though he came with an unusual portfolio, “we were incredibly enthusiastic about him, and it wasn’t just the board,” the board’s chairman, John E. Coyne III, said in an interview on Friday.
“You could see in the eyes of the faculty that they saw hope with this guy,” said Mr. Coyne, who is an executive with an investment-management firm. “He thought differently. He listened.”
As a onetime consultant with Bain & Company and L.E.K. Consulting, Mr. Newman was seen as someone who turned troubled organizations around and could help a small, tuition-dependent, and financially strapped university grow.
His freshman-retention plan was part of a broader vision, Mr. Coyne said. That included doubling enrollment, graduating students with more-marketable skills, and creating more global exchanges.
The university, which had conducted a search a few years earlier that failed to come up with an acceptable president, used a search firm and spent six months looking for the right person. The finalists included two candidates with traditional academic backgrounds — a former law dean and a student-affairs administrator — but they didn’t “wow” the search committee the way Mr. Newman did, Mr. Coyne said.
“The traditional academics came across as ‘I can take this school and keep it where it is,’” Mr. Coyne said, while Mr. Newman’s approach was “I can take this school and reimagine it.”
The two faculty members on the search committee were the ones who wanted to fly Mr. Newman in, Mr. Coyne said.
He was referring to Christine S. McCauslin, an associate professor of science, and David M. McCarthy, a professor of theology. If they were excited about Mr. Newman’s selection last year, they weren’t eager to talk about it on Friday. Contacted by phone, Mr. McCarthy declined to comment. Ms. McCauslin did not return requests for comment.
Murmurs of Dissent
Becoming a college president wasn’t on Mr. Newman’s radar, he told the board, until his wife stumbled across an online job posting and talked him into applying. He threw his hat into the ring in September 2014, on the last day applications were being accepted.
One former employee who was at Mount St. Mary’s during the presidential-search process said that explanation had turned some faculty members off: “I think he thought it was cute, but the community kind of said, ‘Eww — you didn’t even want to be a president?’”
Mr. Newman visited the campus in November and was introduced as the new president three weeks later.
The search committee had been looking for a new leader with fund-raising, strategic-planning, and fiscal-leadership skills. Board members also spoke about wanting someone with strong communication skills and a deep Catholic faith.
In an interview with the Baltimore Business Journal, Mr. Newman said he was looking for a position where he could achieve a larger “social impact.”
“In private equity, I’ve had a very good run,” Mr. Newman said. “But I was getting to the point where I was realizing a lot of the focus was on wealth creation for a relatively small number of people.”
While Mr. Coyne described Mr. Newman as a quick study who was well received by faculty members, some professors bristled when he hired outside consultants and took steps they felt were antithetical to their mission.
Murmurs of dissent became louder in November, when he announced a sudden cut in retiree health benefits.
But it wasn’t until the The Mountain Echo broke the story about opposition to his freshman-retention plan that the tension became national news.
Last month Mr. Coyne wrote a letter to the campus defending the president as a “transformational leader” and accusing “a small group of faculty and recent alums” of maligning him and of manipulating student journalists into giving a distorted picture of Mr. Newman’s retention plan.
The board continued to stand behind the president as questions swirled around whether his actions were inappropriate for a Catholic institution. The Cardinal Newman Society, which promotes Catholic education, released a statement on Friday saying that “any plan to weed out matriculated students without first providing substantial assistance and demonstrating a sincere commitment to the students’ personal formation and well-being would be contrary to a university’s Catholic identity.”
The society also expressed concern about the faculty firings and unsubstantiated reports that the president had wanted to play down the university’s Catholic mission for marketing purposes.
Several board members contacted by The Chronicle said they had been instructed to refer all calls to the university. Current and former faculty members and administrators, who said they would only speak anonymously because they feared retaliation, described the university’s 33-member board, which is dominated by financial executives but also has eight members of the Catholic clergy, as cumbersome and ineffective.
One former administrator said he was puzzled over why the board continued to back Mr. Newman.
“Either they don’t get it, or they think we have no other choice,” he said. “We need to salvage this guy because if he goes, who’s going to want to become president?”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
