The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post, Getty Images

Promises, Promises

Donald Trump is still facing fraud charges left over from his long-defunct Trump University, but that didn’t stop him from offering Radford University students brash promises during a visit last week. “Hey, is everybody all set with jobs?” he asked. “Raise your hands, who’s got jobs? OK, who doesn’t? Oh, no. That’s a lot of hands. That’s a lot of hands.”

“That’s going to change, folks. You’re going to get jobs. You’re going to get such great jobs. We’re going to bring jobs back from China. We’re going to bring them back from Mexico. We will start — before I’m finished, I guarantee you that we will have Apple products made in the United States, not in China. I guarantee it.”

But some black students were led out of the event after they started shouting “No more hate! No more hate! Let’s be equal, let’s be great!” Later that same day, at Valdosta State University, about 30 black students who said they had been waiting quietly for Mr. Trump’s speech there were forced to leave a campus building before he appeared. The local police said the Trump campaign, which had rented the venue, had asked that the students be removed, but a campaign representative told USA Today that was not true.

Meanwhile, it appears that an endorsement from Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, may not have done Mr. Trump much good on Super Tuesday. He won Virginia, but the website Christian Post reported that in Lynchburg, where Liberty is located, Mr. Trump finished behind Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. And the chairman of the executive committee of Liberty’s board, Mark DeMoss, told The Washington Post that he was “concerned” by Mr. Falwell’s endorsement. Mr. Trump’s “bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense — and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ,” Mr. DeMoss said.

Exit Mr. Newman

Jamie Turner, Mount St. Mary’s University

Would you trust a plumbing repair to a car salesman? Seek retirement-account advice from a barber? Of course not. So why do some college trustees think it’s a great idea to hire a president with no experience whatsoever in higher education?

Let’s be real here. Even someone who’s been a success leading some other kind of organization will face serious challenges getting up to speed with any college’s elaborately nuanced problems and processes — to say nothing of constituencies as different as football fans, faculty elders, and the parents of incoming freshmen. Yet as soon as the appointment is official, a president must be able to give smart answers to hard questions, win the confidence of donors, and make decisions that pit worthy interests against one another. Would you really want to hand a higher-ed novice responsibilities like that?

Maybe you wouldn’t after seeing what Mount St. Mary’s University has gone through since January. That was when the student newspaper, The Mountain Echo, ran an exposé detailing how the new president — Simon P. Newman (above), a former private-equity-fund director — had hoped to improve the university’s retention statistics with an effort to get rid of at-risk students before the date on which they’d have to be counted as enrolled. While careful readers were most offended by the dishonesty of the scheme, which relied on a new survey touted as a “valuable tool that will help you discover more about yourself,” what made news was Mr. Newman’s insistence that faculty members be willing to “drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

Those were only the most tone-deaf of Mr. Newman’s corporate-style moves. Others included sending consultants to interview administrators before he had even met them himself and having people he was firing escorted off the campus by security officers within minutes of being given dismissal letters.

Last week, though, it was Mr. Newman who resigned, effective immediately, after the university’s accrediting agency fired a warning shot in the form of a demand for a “supplemental information report.” The agency, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, gave Mount St. Mary’s until March 15 to address questions about “recent developments at the university which may have implications for continued compliance” with accrediting requirements on leadership, integrity, admissions and retention, and faculty.

In a statement, Mr. Newman said “the recent publicity relating to my leadership has become too great of a distraction to our mission of educating students.” The board appointed the business dean, Karl Einolf, as acting president.

Is there a lesson here? The Mount St. Mary’s board isn’t alone lately in having looked outside higher education for a president — indeed, for a model you can look as far back as Robert E. Lee’s post-Civil War presidency at what is now Washington & Lee University (though, of course, Lee didn’t have the Internet to deal with, or the Education Department, or college rankings, or any of a hundred other worries that beset contemporary campus leaders). The difference may be that Mr. Newman was among those who have come to college presidencies expecting to play by corporate rules rather than higher education’s. Colleges certainly have plenty to learn from the business world in an era of straitened finances and heightened competition for students, but at the end of the day, they’re unlike businesses in a lot of ways that still turn out to matter.

Enter Ms. Spellings

Speaking of nontraditional presidents, Margaret Spellings took over as president of the University of North Carolina system last week. The Board of Governors’ choice prompted four months of protests, not least because many people blame partisan politics for the board’s ouster of her predecessor, Thomas W. Ross. But at least Ms. Spellings, who was U.S. secretary of education under President George W. Bush and created a high-profile commission to study higher education’s problems, knows how universities work. And at least some people are willing to give her a chance. “We need a hero,” said Jeffrey P. Braden, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University. “I hope she’s it.”

Grim Outlook

Public institutions in a number of other states are also looking for heroes, and nowhere are they looking harder than in Louisiana. The state’s legislators are meeting to figure out how to cover a $900-million deficit for the fiscal year that’s already halfway over. Higher education expects a minimum of $70 million in cuts — on top of $684 million in cuts since 2008 — and some state-college administrators are just hoping to get to the end of the spring semester without missing a payroll or having to end classes early. Worse, the state’s budget for next year is $2 billion out of balance, so even more cuts are likely.

Also on the lookout for heroes is Illinois, where a battle over the state budget has affected numerous campuses — including John A. Logan College, a two-year institution that said last week it would lay off 55 faculty and staff members.

Also, This

Prosecutors in New York filed assault charges last week against three black students at the University at Albany who set off a social-media storm after they said they had been victims of a hate crime on a city bus in January. The prosecutors said surveillance video showed that the three women had not been attacked but instead had themselves hit a young white woman. … Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student detained in North Korea after traveling there with a tour group, was shown in a video confessing to having stolen a sign with a political slogan from the staff-only area of his hotel. … Nine Republican members of the House voted against naming a post office in Winston-Salem, N.C., after the poet Maya Angelou, who was a longtime faculty member at Wake Forest University. At least two said they opposed the honor because Angelou was a “communist sympathizer,” but the measure passed anyway.

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.