Give Transparency a Try
Is it just human nature that some college leaders cheerily say everything’s fine even when their institutions are teetering on the brink of fiscal disaster? Time and again, we hear of presidents’ painting rosy pictures for faculty members and alumni, sometimes even for trustees, while their institutions’ budgets are circling the drain. You can almost hear the gurgling.
And you know what? Nothing compounds everyone else’s misery like finding out they’ve been misled. That’s the takeaway — or one of the takeaways — from last week’s announcement that New York’s attorney general had brokered a deal between the Board of Trustees of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and a group of faculty members, students, and alumni who sued the college last year. Their goal was to prevent the prestigious design-and-engineering college from starting to charge tuition, which it had not done in over a century (thanks in part to an endowment that includes the land under New York City’s Chrysler Building).
The deal keeps the new tuition plan in place, under the scrutiny of a financial monitor appointed by the attorney general, but also establishes a committee to explore ways to return to the free-education model envisioned by Peter Cooper (above), the industrialist who founded the college in 1859.
Just as important, the deal requires the board to “increase transparency and participation” by adding two students as voting members and by including five to nine members elected by alumni, with one of those members serving as chair or vice chair. The requirement follows disheartening findings by the attorney general, whose account says the college’s past two presidents made a succession of bad calls that were either backed by the board or not rigorously questioned — and that the first of those two leaders hid growing deficits. (The board said it did not agree with the findings.)
The settlement came the same week as an announcement from Sweet Briar College that the group organized last spring to save that institution had made the third and final payment on a $12-million pledge essential to keeping the campus open. The pledge is part of a settlement brokered by Virginia’s attorney general after the college’s Board of Directors and then-president stunned students, faculty members, and alumnae by revealing, with no warning, that Sweet Briar had been in difficult straits for months and would close. (Read more about the Cooper Union deal here.)
Discounts Hit a New High
In case you missed it, by the way, the National Association of College and University Business Officers’ annual survey of private colleges’ tuition discounts is out. It found that discount rates had again hit “all-time highs” — 48 percent for first-year students and 41.6 percent for all students. At the 411 colleges taking part in the survey, an average of 89 percent of freshmen were offered discounts.
As a consequence of discounting, net tuition revenue remained flat. But despite the cuts in cost, the organization said, enrollment at nearly half of the institutions in the survey fell from 2013 to 2014 — almost certainly not what the colleges were hoping for.
A ‘Hostile Environment’
Last week the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights released a 42-page letter concluding that “a sexually hostile environment existed for and affected numerous students and staff” at Michigan State University during several years in which the office was investigating how well the university responded to two assault complaints. If you’re not usually involved with Title IX investigations, the letter makes for interesting, if disconcerting, reading.
The assault complaints were certainly serious — and the letter says the university “failed to provide a prompt and equitable response” to them — but the letter’s detailed account of the years-long investigation may well leave you wishing for a better, simpler, more cost-effective approach. So much lawyer time! So many subsections of regulations! And so many qualifications to the investigators’ conclusions (“OCR found insufficient evidence to conclude that Students A or B continued to be subjected to a sexually hostile environment as a result of the university’s failure to provide them with a prompt and equitable response to their complaints”).
The university did promise to resolve the two students’ complaints and “address the other Title IX violations and compliance issues OCR identified,” so there’s that. But still it’s hard to imagine that anyone involved ended up genuinely satisfied. Could that be the inevitable result of attempting to apply bureaucratic solutions to broad societal problems? Or might there really be a better way out there?
A Win for Researchers
In brighter federal news, a four-year overhaul of rules for human participation in medical trials is wrapping up, in a way that will save time and money for researchers.
Last week the Department of Health and Human Services released a 519-page proposal for revising the rules, which largely date to 1991. Among the revisions: Consent forms for medical-study volunteers would be simpler; a single ethics review could cover a study even if it involved multiple universities and locations; and research that poses little risk to subjects, like interviews and surveys, would not be have to be reviewed.
The Gift That Wasn’t
When Portland State University invited the governor of Oregon, the mayor of Portland, and reporters for The Oregonian and other news media to an event at which a $100-million donation was to be announced, the invitation attracted attention, even though it came with a stipulation that the news could not be reported until half an hour beforehand. So when the event never happened — no announcement, no $100 million, nothing — The Oregonian started asking questions.
Fact is, the promised gift was to have come from “a self-described billionaire who turned out to be a recently bankrupt bitcoin dealer known for peddling grandiose schemes,” as the newspaper put it. But it wasn’t until the would-be donor was on a conference call with the university’s president, Wim Wiewel, that suspicions got too serious to ignore. Two employees of the university’s foundation are resigning in the aftermath: Françoise Aylmer, president and chief executive officer, and Kristin Coppola, a fund raiser.
And of Course This ...
Joe Robbins/Getty Images
A report commissioned by California’s 113-campus community-college system says its accreditor, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, is uncooperative and won’t listen to calls for change. The report suggests that the system look for a new accreditor, such as the Western Association of Schools and Colleges’ Senior College and University Commission. ... The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fired Tim Beckman (left), its head football coach, after an external investigation found that he had tried to “deter injury reporting and influence medical decisions that pressured players to avoid or postpone medical treatment and continue playing despite injuries.” … The White House disavowed a hint by Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, that President Obama would return to Columbia after finishing his second term in office. Nonetheless, speculation abounds that Mr. Obama may end up teaching law at the university, from which he received his undergraduate degree. ... Late last week the University of Iowa’s Board of Trustees chose J. Bruce Harreld, a former Boston Market and IBM executive with little background in higher education, as the university’s next president. A survey of faculty members had found that less than 3 percent thought he had the necessary qualifications for the job.
