A few days ago, I wrote about the Mott Community College Board of Trustees’ unusual selection of an interim president who has no previous academic experience outside of being a student. According to one of the trustees who voted to select Shauna Richardson-Snell, the Board chose her because of her business background.
They didn’t seem to grasp that publicly funded higher education institutions aren’t businesses. I mean, even business schools don’t try to operate like businesses. (Largely, I imagine, because they’re schools, not businesses.) I did point out that Eastern Gateway Community College went the route of behaving like a business, and for its troubles, it’s shutting down.
EGCC has a long history on the dark road to Businessville. (It’s truly sordid. EGCC President Jimmie Bruce signed a deal with a group of unions to offer “free” online degree programs to their members. In addition to being huge, it was also a run-of-the-mill federal financial aid scam.) Bruce resigned. The HLC raised a bunch of academic and financial concerns about the school. The US Department of Education got prickly, and the EGCC Board started making decisions that made a very bad situation worse.
The EGCC trustees appointed the school’s Chief Financial Officer, to the Big Chair first as an interim, then as the permanent president over the objections of the faculty and second-level executive staff. Whether or not this was intentional, the elevation of the CFO sent a big, fat message to the HLC and to the Department of Education – which those agencies interpreted as “We’re all about the Benjamins.”
The second-level executives issued a vote of No Confidence, which the Board ignored. The CFO President fired the union-connected Online Program Manager, which resulted in a multi-million dollar breach of contract lawsuit that remains unresolved.
Trustees choices may affect accreditation
The faculty issued another vote of no confidence in the CFO President AND the Board of Trustees. That was also ignored. The Board finally parted company with the CFO President but went back to the same bench and elevated the new CFO to the President’s Office. (Same message sent. Same message received.)
Meanwhile, the HLC was flagging academic problems (teacher-student ratios, the number of part time instructors, the lack of qualified academic leadership, the influence of the OPM over the college’s day-to-day operations, the federal financial aid issue, etc.) The US Department of Education placed the school on Heightened Cash Monitoring 2 status, which effectively cut the river of federal dollars that were flowing into the school down to a trickle. That ultimately killed EGCC.
The moral of the story here is that the HLC doesn’t play when the academic staff at a higher education institution doesn’t take its marching orders from someone who isn’t qualified to lead a college or university academically.
Lowering academic qualifications for the role, hiring an unqualified leader, bringing in a President whose career has focused on money rather than teaching and learning – all create a strong basis for concern at the HLC. Those concerns will focus on the qualifications of the school’s leadership, the lack of leadership by the Board of Trustees, the lack of support from the faculty and more importantly, the leader’s inability to support the faculty in academic matters.
Hiring an industry outsider to act as the interim President of an educational institution will not be viewed as a clever move by the HLC. Worse, it’s really not what Mott Community College students need. Hopefully, the Board finds the academic leadership Mott needs quickly, without worsening the impact of this damaging decision.
Photo Credit: Keith Avery , via Flickr
