The initial selection of a school based on its
security policy is one of the best ways for parents to keep their children
safe, but it can go only so far in reforming security for U.S. universities as
a whole. Nor does the answer lie in simply improving technology. In the final
analysis, the most expensive and sophisticated security system is only as good
as the people in charge; the best psychological counseling is only as good as
the individuals doing the counseling, and the best contingency or emergency
plans are only as good as the people who implement them. Improving campus safety begins at the top. Therefore, correcting
the current system under which school presidents and senior officials are
selected is a critical part of the campus security equation.
Priority:
Fundraising or Safety?
Somewhere along the way higher education in the
United States lost its focus on students and scholarship, and we are paying a
terrible price. We have to ask for a reexamination of how and why school
presidents are selected. If faculty members are concerned about their safety
and the safety of their students, yet school administrators ignore signs of abnormal
violent behavior on the part of students or staff, then the atmosphere is
counterproductive to learning and unequivocally counterproductive to safety.
A contributing factor to this deterioration in the
quality of school leaders was the change to running state-funded colleges and
universities more like businesses than institutions of learning—Virginia Tech
being a primary example. With that change in attitude came school leaders with
little or no background or concern with campus safety.
Professor Lucinda Roy points this out in her
firsthand account of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, No Right to Remain Silent. She writes: “… Nowadays, some of those
in leadership positions at universities have little experience working with
students and almost no experience in the classroom. It has become more
important to hire administrators who know how to raise money than it is to hire
those who know much about students.” She
further asserts, “If you examine a typical state-funded university, you will
find that many of its resources are dedicated to generating funds. As the
public began to opt out of subsidizing public education in the past two
decades, something had to fill the gap. A university that is focused on staying
afloat cannot pay as much attention to students as it did in the past.”
Sometime in the 1970s state governments throughout
this country decided to reduce financial support for state colleges and
universities. A professor at Virginia Tech told me that when he joined the
faculty in the 1980s over 60 percent of the university’s budget came from the
state government. By 2011, he said, that figure was down to around 17 percent.
He did not reveal his sources, but I have heard similar figures from others.
The point is that state schools needed to raise money and turned to private
sources of revenue. The net result has been that schools seek presidents who
are more public relations experts than educators and few, if any, have had
training in crisis management. Here again, Virginia Tech is a prime example of
the serious consequences of this trend and the dangers in moving to the
business model to run state schools. Under President Charles Steger’s
leadership, Tech had signed a legal document with the state’s General Assembly
allowing the university to act like a private institution and seek vast amounts
of funds to offset the reduction of state funding. This move alone ensured that
Steger would concentrate on fundraising above all else. This document is one of
Steger’s signature achievements.
Robert Bickel and Peter Lake, in their exhaustive
and insightful look at risk and responsibility on college campuses, point out
that the net result of this move toward funding of state universities is that
most college presidents today are “glad-handers” and fund raisers—not
educators.
Even worse, most college and university presidents
are woefully lacking knowledge of safety and security matters. Indeed, Virginia
Tech’s President Charles Steger is a case in point. Read his biography or
listen to his defenders—the repeated emphasis on how much money he has raised
for the school drowns out all else.
In order to make our colleges and universities
safer, we will have to spend hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars
on such things as security training and equipment, and mental health programs.
These expenditures cannot be tallied on a profit sheet—they are expenses on
behalf of our nation’s future; they are long-term investments we must make to
preserve this nation’s greatness. These expenses defy the business model and
account sheets, but they can be—and are—crucial to saving lives.
To run state colleges and universities on a
for-profit basis is not only counterproductive in the long run, but it has
cheapened the quality of education. Look at it this way: if you pay for your
daughter or son to go to college, under the business model some lawyers argue
that you have paid money and established a contract, and your child is owed a
degree. This is nonsense. In fact, all the money does is give a person access to facilities that offer the
opportunity of getting an education. There is no guarantee that anyone, once
enrolled, will meet the standards the school has set to grant a degree. The use
of this business model has lowered standards.
At one point in my career I worked with a former
senior member of an English Department at a major Washington DC area
university. She designed and implemented a test that all graduating seniors
from the school, no matter what their major, had to pass in order to get their
degree. So many seniors were flunking that the alumni association and parents
were up in arms and were threatening to cut off money. The school dropped the
test.
I suspect that what happened to my friend has
happened elsewhere. A few years ago I was asked to teach 140 intelligence
officers in a major component of the U.S. Intelligence Community. At the end of
the training I was asked by senior management to evaluate the quality of their
officers. My evaluation was that approximately 43 percent of the people I
trained were sub-standard in basic English; an English sentence was an alien
concept for many of them. The vast majority of these officers had a four-year
college degree.
More recently, in 2013, I was working for a
component of the Intelligence Community and when I was through, the consulting
company who had hired me asked for an evaluation of the students I had worked
with. I reported that one of the students was seriously lacking in his
abilities to be an intelligence analyst. The company asked me to rewrite the
evaluation because of the “tone” of what I had written. They wanted me to say
everything was just fine. I did rewrite, but the reference to the deficiencies
stayed in.
Whether it is our students, or our fighting men
and women, their lives seem to be expendable as long as a profit is made. To
say that this country is in a sorry state of affairs doesn’t begin to describe
the magnitude of the problem. Is it surprising then, to find that we are hiring
glorified bankers and campaign managers to lead some of our greatest
educational institutions? (To be continued)
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