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To the Editor:
Your recent article, “A Tough-Talking President Tried to Fix a College. Then He Came Undone
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To the Editor:
Your recent article, “A Tough-Talking President Tried to Fix a College. Then He Came Undone” (The Chronicle, March 18), is painful reading for members of the Edinboro University community. I appreciate the opportunity to share a more positive picture of the university.
Like some of the other schools in the Pennsylvania System of Higher Education, Edinboro has struggled financially in recent years for demographic, legislative, administrative, and other reasons. But it continues to have much to offer students. There are distinguished faculty in all our schools, the flagship art department has a national reputation, the honors program is thriving, and the online master’s degree in nursing is highly ranked nationwide. We are also one of the most disability-friendly universities in the country; students with disabilities come here from all over the state, and some even from out of state, partly for that reason. There are abundant recreational and extracurricular educational activities; my own department in particular mentors majors for conference participation, publication, and internship.
Overall, Edinboro University provides valuable educational opportunities to students from diverse backgrounds, especially working-class ones, while offering the lowest tuition of all the four-year colleges and universities in Pennsylvania.
I am proud to serve on the devoted, hardworking Edinboro University faculty, and I believe the university will overcome its current difficulties and emerge stronger than ever.
Stephen J. Sullivan
Assistant Professor of English and Philosophy
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Edinboro, Pa.
***
To the Editor:
Your article’s focus on President Fred Walker and his strategy to turn our university around fiscally, by re-tooling our offerings to respond to current market forces, fails to capture a more complex and subtle picture. I understand the relevance of the article’s lens, as it gives unusually frank insight into a president’s calculations, and Walker’s rhetoric and cuts corroborate a burgeoning narrative of the death of the humanities. While this reflects a current reality in public higher education, perhaps another compelling story about Edinboro could have been the miracle that many of our humanities programs have been preserved despite the perceived lack of job-market readiness of trendier majors.
Edinboro’s art department, in which I teach, has one of the strongest and most comprehensive art programs in the state, and draws students beyond our region. At a university filled with working-class, first-generation college students, the administration was bold to preserve small programs within the department such as Wood Furniture and Metalsmithing/Jewelry, along with 12 areas of study, without a single program being cut. We nurtured the MacArthur “Genius” Award-winner LaToya Ruby Frazier, who came from the poverty of Braddock, Pa. Our students are leaders in the art world in the fine and commercial arts, many becoming entrepreneurs who start their own businesses, feeding the economy and cultural life of our tri-city area and beyond.
If I look beyond my department, I see students from modest means that still have the only affordable opportunity in the region to study subjects in the humanities such as anthropology, English literature, and history. Parallel to the death-of-the-humanities narrative, perhaps these stories can lend insight into how and why some public institutions and their leaders decide to preserve at least some of these opportunities for all, despite tremendous pressures to do otherwise.
Suzanne Proulx
Assistant Professor of Art
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
Correction (3/22/2018, 9:25 a.m.): An earlier version of this letter misidentified where LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up. The text has been updated.
