By Professor Doom
I’m looking at the
downfall of Sweet Briar College, a fine women’s school with a stellar
reputation, which, without warning, announced it was closing its doors
tout-suite, no need to ask where the money went, or so admin advises.
I think asking
about the money is a good idea, but faculty rarely are blessed with true
information. Luckily, a trustee of the school is willing to discuss some of
what went on behind the scenes. So let’s
get on with the trustee’s version of events:
--Dalton was on the board of
directors and chair of the governance committee.
So, the board of
trustees was quickly whittled down. I can’t help but suspect that the trustees
that had integrity and were indeed trustworthy were not on the Executive Plundering
Committee. I know, that sounds cynical, but with close to $100,000,000 missing
and obvious mismanagement, I have to be a bit suspicious.
“Five other members resigned over the previous two years out of frustration at the ham-handed, myopic and dictatorial way board affairs were conducted.
“…As far as senior staff positions are concerned, during President Parker’s term, the vice president of finance resigned. The academic dean of the faculty resigned. The director of development resigned. Two successive deans of admissions resigned. Two successive directors of marketing resigned…
…In short, every senior staff position was replaced, some twice, in a five-year period.”
I’ve mentioned
before how you can tell when a school is being plundered—shady deals,
no-confidence votes by faculty, and huge Poo Bah pay are obvious signs, as well
as bloating administration and dwindling faculty. I forgot another sign: high
turnover of administration and faculty.
In the two years
where my state school transformed from legitimate to bogus (after receiving
accreditation), we lost a Chief Financial Officer, Vice Chancellor, Marketing
Officer, and several other administrators, in addition to at least five
faculty…this is high turnover for a small school. When you see this many people
scrambling to escape, it’s a sign that the
people with integrity are seeing the ship sinking, and making prudent plans.
The people that
remain are usually pretty desperate for their jobs…they won’t make waves as the
pirates plunder away.
The other signs of
plundering are here as well:
We did have a planned program, introduced by Parker, to reduce faculty over a five-year period from a ratio of 8 to 1 to 10 to 1.
--I again want to point out, removing just
a few administrators would have offset the decline in the student base.
And…shouldn’t you need less facilitators for the students when there are less
students?
Again, growth in
administration, reduction in faculty…these are not rare signs in higher
education. Our leaders in higher education work hard to justify their useless
but highly paid jobs, and Sweet Briar was no exception:
The “Plan
for Sustainable Excellence” (only the third strategic plan in seven years) did
involve the entire college over a two-year period and it was, in fact, endorsed
by the full board, some of whom were just happy to not hear any more
platitudinous fluff replete with unrealistic numbers.
Ah, the Vision for
Excellence idiocy I’ve written of before. Administrators spend
collectively thousands of hours on insane, grandiose, ridiculous plans, which
they roll out every few years. Then they shelve them, never to show them again,
and work on another insane, grandiose, ridiculous plan.
Most students and
faculty never get to see all the details of the plan, but I was lucky enough to
get to look at one in detail (I asked a lot of questions before leaving that
school…). To give just one example, my own school’s Vision for Excellence plan
involved multiple playing fields, and a stadium that could hold 5,000 people.
The school had less than 1,000 students on campus…and the town the school was
in had a population of 1,200…it was sheer gibbering madness to believe we’d
ever fill a stadium of that size, particularly since the school has no sports
in any form (and still doesn’t…). I’ll spare the gentle reader the rest of the
details, and re-assert that these plans are grandiose to the point of
ridiculousness. Administrators don’t care, they just need a plan to justify
their jobs.
This is what all
those administrators spend much of their time on, making Sweet Briar’s
“leadership” so busy it was unable to deal with a 2% loss per year of the
student base, over the course of 5 years, a loss that could have been
compensated by paring down the administration a tad.
So many classic
signs that something was going on here, it’s a shame the trustee, like most
trustees, has never served as faculty at a school. If so, he could have seen
what was coming:
“…all board
members were specifically instructed not to contact a member of the Senior
Staff without first obtaining permission of the relevant committee chair and
the president. They even brought in a coach from the Association of Governing
Boards (AGB), an organization solely funded by the presidential budgets of our
nation’s colleges, to reinforce this stifling of involvement.
“As I can
personally attest, those who even accidentally violated this rule were
reprimanded by the president.”
Ah, the seal of
silence, and again, I’ve written of this before. The primary purpose
of the seal of silence is to allow lies to be told, with nobody in a position
to correct them, lest they risk breaking that seal. As soon as you hear “ok,
stop talking to other people” you know that there are some lies going around,
lies that could be quickly resolved if people were allowed to talk openly to
each other.
The former
trustee believes the school could have been saved but for the poor leadership of
the Poo Bah, but I suspect there’s more to it than that. I hope some
independent investigators will take a long hard look at where the money went,
and I’ll certainly suggest looking at the finances of the Poo Bah and the
Executive Board, because much like with
another plundered school, the numbers just don’t add up.
No discussion of a
school’s failure is complete without mentioning how accreditation failed. Every
single fraud, every single scandal, every single failure in higher education always has the “if accreditors did
their job, this wouldn’t have happened” clause:
Regardless of board size, the SACS--which accredits
Sweet Briar and other southern colleges and schools--has as one of its
"core requirements" that "The board is not controlled by a
minority of board members..." What Mr. Leslie describes is a board that
had, indeed, evolved into a body that was controlled by a minority of its
members. I think a case might be made that this board as it was operating when
Mr. Leslie resigned was in violation of that accreditation requirement.
I can’t begin to
count the number of times I’ve identified the useless, bogus, nature of
accreditation as a hugely contributing factor to the decay of higher education.
Could Sweet Briar be saved by attentive accreditation? A moot point, as there
are no penalties for violating accreditation anyway (probably why I’ve seen
every accreditation rule violated with impunity, except payment of accrediting
fees).
One last comment
that gives a fair assessment of what happened to Sweet Briar:
700 women can't support enough administrators, so it's
time to close.
Very sad.
Very sad.
I can’t help but
think of my friend, a former faculty of Sweet Briar; he only dropped hints of
what he saw, but it was enough for him to throw his mathematics Ph.D. in the trash and get
away from higher education. He was obviously much smarter than I am, and I should
have followed his example. Staying in higher education may well have been a big
mistake for me, but I’ll accept my mistake and go down swinging all the same.
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