terrapinsanity.com

Chancellor Kirwan’s ‘megamail’ fundraising message rolled out this morning to all employees, asking for donations to Maryland Charities. He reminds us, as “remarkably generous and civic-minded men and women”, that:

[T]he demand for the essential health and human services MCC organizations provide continues to expand. Whether it be food and shelter for the needy, heath care for the elderly and infirmed, or assistance for our veterans, there remains tremendous
unmet need in our communities.

We agree. But judging from the newly-razed president’s house (making way for an event facility), lavish parties feting transitions of administrators, and immense buy-outs of athletic staff contracts in order to cherry pick an elite even if non-academic operation, Brit must have sent a very different fundraising letter to the one-percenters.

Lots of emergency text alerts today as the community was notified of a fire in JM Patterson building. Good information scramble this time, and we’re glad there are no reports of injuries. We all still need to learn details of what happened but … one detail is awkward. JM Patterson is home of (drum roll please) the Fire Protection Engineering program.

Oops.

In response to the campus decision to build a new president’s mansion (err, “event center” – yeah, that’s it, event center), yesterday’s Post LTE had what seems to be a representative view: “The president’s fancy new house may be meant to win over donors, but what it says about priorities is further reducing my interest in donating.”

Unfortunately, leadership continues to demonstrate how they still don’t get it. John Lauer, head of the Foundation through which funds are being laundered, defends the actions (and at the same time demonstrates how they don’t get media relations either – hammering home the same wrong message and stretching out the bad press into more news cycles.)

Lauer is pretty explicit: he and his fellow one percenters think it is just gauche to have their exclusive wine-and-cheese events in an old building, or one of the many other “event centers” where they might have to share. Rossborough Inn, Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, the Grand Ballroom in Stamp, the Atrium in Stamp or reception areas specifically crafted for this purpose in new buildings like Knight, Kim or Van Munching. Good Lord … hold activities where rich donors might actually see students? The humanity of it all! We all know that the only time it is appropriate to see students is when they are busing your table for minimum wage or cheering a sports team (so long as you are safely ensconced in your expensively-build skybox in Byrd Stadium.)

Heaven forbid that Mr. Lauer and his crew be forced to erect tents in order to gain the exclusivity they deserve. Students in substandard classrooms must clearly wait in line behind such priorities. These millionaires need their own place, and UM’s campus leaders are just being sensitive to their needs.

One of President Loh’s earliest moves upon arrival here was reversing course on the Purple Line, a proposed east-west transit priority of politicians eager to put even more tax dollars into motion.

The Purple Line’s impact to campus will be terrible – cutting it in half what is today described as the “campus core”, increasing risk with Metro’s first-ever at-grade crossing in a pedestrian mall, and embedding another “crime conduit” (as some long-timers call them after they appeared in their neighborhoods years ago) right in our midst. Campus leaders at first opposed it (at least in the milquetoast way academics do these things), until Loh inexplicably (except in terms of “politics”) threw UM support behind the Purple Line. Since then, some respected campus figures who had spoken against the Purple Line have been mute, evidence that Main Admin continues to rule top down and with an iron fist.

Loh should have been careful what he signed up for in flipping policy, since today the very first feathered friend of a very large flock came home to roost. The Post reports state planners are holding back details of preliminary planning so as to not trigger stronger opposition from people affected by the Purple Line. Over three hundred homes and businesses will be directly razed to make way for the line (details still said to be changing “daily”.) That doesn’t count impact to what will surely be thousands of properties and businesses that are immediately adjacent to the land which the state will take at gunpoint.

Loh’s message to our neighbors in the surrounding community is effectively “We like you so much we think you should be paved!”

They have it this morning, as the Washington Post reports on campus plans to build a new president’s mansion … in spite of budget cuts, slashed athletic programs and languishing efforts to provide for immediate student needs. (You’ll recall that we reported on this last month in the same article congratulating Freeman Hrabowski on successful student projects.)

Front page no less. They must be delighted. Except … they’re letting Brodie Remington take point on this. The reason is obvious – he’s walking wounded already, so let the guy who is already a known short timer be the face to unpopular moves we’re driving through.

What’s not obvious until you look a little closer is how hard the administration is trying to keep President Loh out of this entirely. As the Post reports, spokesmen have repeatedly denied requests to reach Low for comment, and the same has been true in other reports. Central has scrambled former President Mote to give some weak justification for that which he never came out on while on the job. No credibility there … he’s just saluting and trying to draw a little heat away from the kitchen.

The prevailing mood is simple: weather a little PR for one news cycle and we’ll get what we want regardless of how it looks.

An opinion piece in this morning’s Post presents a thumbnail of a topic which has been discussed quietly on campus, and which will likely get a lot more attention by the time it is settled. It is the fed’s role in promoting harassment claims by means of lowering the bar. With a reduced barrier to not just bringing a claim but concluding guilt, harassment actions are actively invited, and (this is the particularly troubling part) with potentially huge impact on free speech.

College Park has not been at the forefront of debate highlighted in the above-linked piece, but not because of any absence of harassment on campus, rather, because leadership does such an effective job of quashing open expression among faculty and staff, let alone open and informed debate about policy. There is simply less opportunity for an honest contest of ideas to become cast as “harassment” of one employee by another. UM’s system optimizes for breeding of cultural sheep. (There, you didn’t think you’d see a post on harassment here without an illustration of what could rise to a violation, did you?)

There will be more to say about this topic … at least until the very act of discussing policy becomes a potential violation, which, while absurd, is one of the potential outcomes of the fed’s move.

UM Physics Professor Joe Reddish on NPR on Sunday: “With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it. Get ‘em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.”

An unfolding story, many years in the making, will reach a key point today as plaintiffs in a desegregation case will get their day in court. Four historically black universities, together with alumni, argue that the state of Maryland has not done enough to desegregate their campuses.

Morgan State University, Coppin State University, Bowie State University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore will argue many points, but among them is the claim that by allowing duplicate programs between their campuses and others in the state, Maryland has run a de facto ‘separate and unequal’ system which kept students away from their programs. A presumption one might make from this is that they would seek injunctive relief so that overlapping programs are merged by relocating the resources to just one or the other campus (presumably theirs.) They have argued that in specific cases in the past (as we have reported). Nevertheless, they have a different goal in this case: cash.

Plaintiffs aren’t asking for policy change that might affect opportunity to excel. They just want cash. Lots of it. Price tag if they get what they ask? $2 billion. Just like the famous Thornton plan channeled a couple billion tax dollars into Maryland high schools as salve some perceived inequity but with no connection to quality or outcomes, the colleges just want payola. Apparently they think equity means getting a big piece of the taxpayer take. So far, nobody has made any connection between a cash payout and some objective outcome like improved standards of excellence or more students competing for a seat in those classrooms.

Many of the MHEC moves in recent years have been nuanced by an awareness of how things might play to a judge – sort of the elephant in the room of which people do not talk in mixed company – and we’ll soon see how those decisions have played out.

And there’s that upstart UMBC campus again, winning national recognition in the Chronicle’s “Great colleges to work for in 2011″ list too. President Hrabowski is on a roll.

(Looking for College Park? Effectively the entry says “not here.”)