‘This One Thing’
It’s not an old saying, but it is a wise one and bears repeating: Never put anything in an email that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times. Or, in last week’s example, The Mountain Echo.
The Mountain Echo is the student newspaper of Mount St. Mary’s University of Maryland, and last week it published an extraordinary article. “Even before this year’s freshman class arrived on campus, in August,” it began, “President Simon Newman was developing a plan to dismiss 20-25 of them before the end of September as a means of improving the Mount’s student-retention numbers.”
The article, by Rebecca Schisler and Ryan Golden, noted that September 25 was the cutoff for Fall 2014 enrollment numbers, on which retention statistics for the semester would be based. It quoted an email Mr. Newman sent to an administrator who had questioned a survey the president wanted all first-year students to take. “My short term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th,” wrote Mr. Newman, a businessman who took office as president last year. “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.”
Most faculty members and administrators didn’t know why the president’s office had added the survey to the freshman-orientation schedule, but students taking it had been told that “there are no wrong answers,” rather than that their answers might help identify which of them were unprepared for college. Faculty and staff members who did know about Mr. Newman’s plan argued against it — and, more effectively, they stalled.
The newspaper said the president told Gregory W. Murry, an assistant professor of history who is in charge of a freshman writing seminar, “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.”
As unfortunate as a statement like that might be, coming from a college president (and Mr. Newman told The Chronicle last week, by way of clarification, that he might have said “puppies,” not “bunnies”), it was perhaps less unfortunate than an angry letter that the chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, John E. Coyne III, sent to The Mountain Echo after it asked the board and the president to comment on the forthcoming article. Without pointing to a single error, Mr. Coyne denounced the article as slanted and “grossly inaccurate,” and said that the newspaper’s having gained access to the emails in question was a violation of the campus’s Code of Conduct.
For his part, Mr. Newman did not dispute the article’s accuracy, although he said that some of his statements had been taken out of context and that his aim had been to spare students who didn’t really want to be in college from borrowing money to stay there. “Maybe they want to join the Army or go to a community college first,” he said. He did not explain why Mount St. Mary’s was admitting such students in the first place.
Mr. Golden, who is The Mountain Echo’s managing editor, said in an editorial that the article was “based on fact, documentation, and reliable sources, including those who risked their livelihoods and reputations in order to make this information available.” He added: “We at the Echo are proud to produce the Mount’s student newspaper. We will continue to serve the truth, and we aim to continue promoting the excellence of the university we call home.”
Attack in Pakistan
Last week Bacha Khan University, in northwestern Pakistan, was preparing to remember the pacifist for whom it is named when four members of what appeared to be a Taliban splinter group attacked the campus, killing at least 22 people. The terrorists eventually blew themselves up with suicide vests.
The attack came on the morning the university planned a poetry reading in memory of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who advocated using civil disobedience to oppose British rule on the Indian subcontinent, and who later opposed the creation of Pakistan.
The spokesman for one Pakistani Taliban group claimed credit for the massacre, but the spokesman for another said its members “strongly condemn the attack.”
‘These Are Demands’
Black students’ efforts to prompt change continue to simmer on a number of campuses, but with varying degrees of success. Last week the president of Oberlin College, Marvin Krislov, answered a 14-page list of demands from black students by saying that while “some of the challenges outlined in the document resonate with me and many members of our community,” he would “not respond directly to any document that explicitly rejects the notion of collaborative engagement.”
Many of the students’ demands “contravene principles of shared governance,” Mr. Krislov wrote, adding that they also “contain personal attacks” on faculty and staff members.
The students said that Oberlin was “an unethical institution” and that “the time for direct and immediate action reforming higher education is long overdue.” They also said: “We will not be attending any more forums, speakouts, teach-ins, convocations, working groups, committees, etc. in lieu of our liberation.”
“These are demands and not suggestions,” the students said. “If these demands are not taken seriously, immediate action from the Africana community will follow.”
Among the demands are a 40-percent increase in black enrollment by 2022, the hiring of more black faculty members, the immediate tenuring of three professors, the firing of eight faculty and staff members, the renaming of four buildings, and regular payments in lieu of taxes to the City of Oberlin.
1 Holiday, 2 Speeches
The federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. brought a couple of surprises last week.
- Amherst College said it had discovered in the archives of its student radio station a recording of a February 6, 1964, speech that King gave at the New School. The tape — the only known recording of the speech — was played on the Amherst station in December of that year.
- Liberty University chose to mark the holiday by welcoming Donald J. Trump to speak at one of its regular convocations, where he was warmly introduced by the Christian university’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr. But Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, stumbled slightly in his attempt to make a good impression on students, some of whom laughed when he cited a Bible verse from what he called “Two Corinthians” — the book that regular churchgoers refer to as “Second Corinthians.”
And So Much More
The Obama administration wants Congress to make Pell Grants available year-round again, and to encourage students to take a full load of courses. … The Education Department says it will release the names of colleges that have been granted religious exemptions from provisions of the Title IX gender-equity law. The move responds to concerns that the exemptions hurt lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. … A nine-campus survey inspired by the work of a White House task force found that one undergraduate woman in five has been sexually assaulted on campus. … The University of Cincinnati has agreed to pay $5.3 million to the family of an unarmed man shot and killed by a university police officer during an off-campus traffic stop.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
