terrapinsanity.com

The Admissions office has finally gotten around to shipping its first big wave of decision letters to applicants for the next class of Terps. This is late, as usual, though smaller waves have long since gone out to applicants who enjoy priority treatment in special programs – elite students applying from China, athletes or the like. Nevertheless, huzzah! Families across Maryland (and half of New Jersey) rush to open their email for the news.

Did I get into Honors? Did I make it into my preferred limited enrollment program? Or is it off to Towson with me? To get details of your admit, you are directed to check at your account on campus but the email’s link takes you first through the Unstoppable web site. This is not a bad advertising idea. You get to hear the catchy jingle and watch a recruiting video before clicking on the link to take you to your account, all under the new Unstoppable Starts Here banner.

Unfortunately the site for getting details of your admission is down – borked for the evening either by the load or someone forgetting to turn on some little chromium switch to make it available before heading home at quitting time.

So as you impatiently hammer on the dead link that says “See your admission decision and learn how to become a Terp!” you can contemplate whether the slogan for your new Alma Mater should be Unstartable stopped here! … or maybe Blue Devils Rule!

We commend to you a very nice opinion piece appearing in the Friday Washington Post written by Heather Wilson.

A graduate of the Air Force Academy, a Rhodes scholar and former U.S. representative from New Mexico, Wilson comments on the quality of students emerging from today’s universities, and in particular on their ability to focus on a big picture, understand trends and then determine courses of action necessary to achieve important goals. (Here’s a teaser: she observes that there are problems in our system.)

Based on the title of her piece, we first did a double take and had to quickly see if she was talking about College Park’s new I-series component of General Education.

This morning’s announcement to campus began “Farvardin Named President, Stevens Institute of Technology” – an announcement from President Loh that Farvardin will step down as our Provost in February.

Good riddance.

Farvardin was out of his depth as an administrator – insulated by senior staff, deaf to input from the campus he led, and blind to the effects of his decisions. Under this Provost, the strategic plan became a joke (an aggregation of buzzwords for show but never followed), the general education program became a dumbed down advertising operation, and, for want of adult supervision by any member of the professoriate, the Office of Admissions became a patronage shop that optimized for job security among special programs – not quality at the flagship.

Rather than perform serious studies of campus programs, Farvardin’s senior staff engineered “made as instructed” reports in order to justify decisions he handed down. The Provost himself is on record as simply ignoring basic reporting duties and processes in interaction with the Senate, which he viewed as a large rubber stamp and used as such. Our mission suffered accordingly.

This change could not happen soon enough. All eyes now turn to Dr. Loh, in the hope that indeed, this new broom will sweep clean.

This week we’re all back to the grind in College Park, pulling the belt a bit tighter, stretching out the hours to get things covered for the students and of course looking at below-the-fold news that foretells of more furloughs and cuts. The uninterrupted service in spite of such austere times is a remarkable display of dedication by so many people who believe in what we’re doing.

Too bad leadership doesn’t feel the same way.

It has been a couple weeks now since campus announced it needed a new football coach. Ralph Friedgen is out at Maryland – at a cost of $2 million to buy out his next year contract, on top of the cost of paying the new coach at the same time.

Football? Really? We’re all eating furlough days and reduced health care benefits in order to pay for a freaking football coach?

We long for the days when out-of-touch leadership would only invite the hungry rabble to simply eat cake. Cake would have been a lot cheaper than a new football coach.