DE Closing Editorial

The editor of the DE, Leah Stover, published a very fine op-ed on the events of the last semester in Wednesday's paper: You Can't Save Face by Censoring Others.

I've been all too willing to criticize the DE over the years--student reporters do get things wrong, and do sometimes write poorly. Experto crede: I was a student reporter for one year--my freshman one--at a tiny college where anyone who showed up became a reporter, with no faculty oversight. What I did, for the most part, was get things wrong and write poorly.  Not to mention my sins of commission and omission as a blogger. 

But one can't help but be impressed by the fine work the DE did this semester. When the administration was reporting business as usual on campus, the DE reporters were going to the picket lines, to student marches, and to classrooms, and reporting the truth. DE reporters consistently made a valiant effort to understand the complicated process of negotiations (a process complicated in large part, of course, by the very different stories they were getting from the two sides). Take this article by Sarah Schneider, with a headline that nailed the public debate: Unions Say Strike Not About Money, Cheng Begs to Differ.  Tara Kulash's summary article just the other day on Chancellor Cheng's reign thus far, Her First 556 Days, was a very impressive piece of work. These aren't pro-union hack jobs--far from it. They are carefully crafted, balanced articles by student journalists of great promise.

Above all, the DE's principled stand against the administration's attempt to control information flow shows tremendous courage and integrity. It can't be easy for student journalists to criticize the SIUC administration in this outspoken a manner. If that sort of courage and integrity were more widespread on campus, we'd all be far better off.

At any rate, as I reflect on the events of this past semester, one bright spot will certainly be the positive role played by SIUC students. Those working for the DE have given us all something to be proud of. 

College athletics in the news

The Chronicle has an interesting series of opinion pieces on the following rather frankly worded question: What the Hell Has Happened to College Sports?

Locally, the Southern Illinoisan ran a series of articles recently on the state of athletics:

Small but strong: Reduced staff keeps SIU afloat in academic race
Doing things the Saluki Way: Athletic facilities took priority at SIU
Take a look at the whole picture
The state of Saluki sports

This came before the most recent news, the investigation of a Saluki basketball player accused of sexual assault (though no charges have yet been filed): Police investigating SIU's Bocot. We of course also have the sexual harassment scandal regarding athletics--a problem exacerbated by the administration's unwillingness to bargain a transparent set of procedures for addressing accusations of sexual harassment (which would have made the university's own finding that there was no real violation here more credible).

The series in the Southern asked many of the right questions, but the answers were given, overwhelmingly, by Mario Moccia, who naturally enough defended his programs. Thus the overall result was something of a whitewash. While the recent losing records of the football and basketball teams were duly noted, and there was some attention to the spending for Saluki Way, there was no mention of the fact that SIUC doubled athletics spending in the last five years. Nor did anyone make the argument that our huge investment in athletics was paying off in terms of our wider goals--including increasing enrollment. It seems to me rather clear that SIUC made a huge gamble by pouring most of our disposable revenue into athletics. We've obviously lost this bet.

We've lost not simply because our teams are losing--as many college teams lose as win each and every game, and as the Southern pointed out, SIUC is no exception. We'll have up seasons and down seasons when it comes to the win loss record. And there will be scandals, given the pressures and contradictions between academic, athletic, and business values. The real problems are structural: the idea that a university's success depends on, or can be measured by, how good of a job it does supplying entertainment to its basketball and football fans. Athletics drains resources from academics. That's true even at top of the line big-money academic programs, and it is even more true among mid majors like SIUC.  The last five years were the worst possible time to exacerbate the problem by engaging in a building boom and budget boom for athletics.

Her first 556

The DE ran a rather comprehensive review of Chancellor Cheng's first year and a half in office last week, a story I've just gotten around to reading. The money quote, for me, came early on:

“I think people that are critical either don’t know me, haven’t paid attention, or don’t really want anyone in the chancellor’s office to make the final decision,” Cheng said.

One has to be careful about judging someone's attitude based on a single quote in a newspaper, but, that said, this quote is rather revelatory. The Chancellor did not (at least in this comment, or any from this article) take the obvious opportunity to suggest that she could be fallible, or even that there could be honest differences of opinion about the issues we face.  President Poshard, to his credit, did note that there will be always be "contention" about shared government and academic freedom--though his wording implied that such contention, like the poor, will always be with us, and hence isn't something to take all that seriously.

But has Chancellor Cheng or anyone in her administration, ever apologized for the Facebook screw up--ever walked back from the initial false story that they were only censoring "inflammatory" postings?  In the article even Mike Eichholz, bless his heart, characterizes some of the Chancellor's emails during the strike as "blunders."  But there's no admission of any error, or that there may be honest disagreement, from the Chancellor's side.  Criticism is instead due to the following factors:

Unions and Unity

The following post is by Dan Nickrent, Professor of Plant Biology. 

Unions and Unity

Today in my SIUC email I received yet another communication from Mike Eichholz (copied below).  And as usual, it appears that the FSN is not only naïve but complacent about transpired history and the messages that history conveys.  The email states that 162 signatures were collected from those who “have supported us to this point.”  If I recall correctly, turning in the signature cards was SUPPOSED TO BE only an indication of interest in calling an election, with support of the FSN’s position (decertification) as only one of three options. But as I suspected, the FSN used the fact that a card was turned in as evidence of support, and that was exactly why I didn’t do it. 

Chancellor Cheng, the DE, and Freedom of Information

Today's DE has a story on their victory in a Freedom of Information Act dispute with the SIUC administration. While the administration was able to conceal many emails from the DE, they did have to release at least one email relevant to SIUC's policy on limiting reporters' access to administrative sources.

The DE got interested because administrative sources kept telling them that all interviews with the press to be funneled through Rod Sievers, spokesman for the university. Just who this policy applies to (i.e., whether all employees are supposed to follow it) isn't entirely clear--though if it is supposed to apply to all campus employees, some of us have been, ahem, acting contrary to university policy. Oh my.

Money quote, from the email released following the FOIA filing:

In that email, which the university released to the DE, Cheng tells Sievers to make sure administrators have DE reporters go through Sievers for their stories.

“We cannot have the DE kids shopping for responses. Please remind them all to go through you to coordinate official responses,” she said.

"DE kids shopping for responses" is a particularly nice example of contempt for our students. "Shopping for responses"--i.e., reporting, isn't something we want our kid reporters to do. The university has tried to escape via obfuscation: this isn't a "policy"--because only things they ask the BOT to approve count as "policies". And it's just an attempt to be more efficient, not an effort to control information. Of course it's an attempt to "coordinate" & control information.