Robin Wilson’s article about Syracuse University in The Chronicle of Higher Education has generated much national attention, but little serious inquiry. The attention is mostly assertions. These are the undisputed goods: diversity of all sorts, an expanded recruiting base, globalization, realizing that a city and its leading university are stronger when they help each other thrive. The Post-Standard has provided a venue for opinions about how Chancellor Nancy Cantor pursues her vision and has endorsed her views. That’s fair and fine. Local civic leaders even sent a simultaneous cascade of letters, extolling accomplishments that are not in dispute. But the paper has done no reporting on the questions roiling the SU campus.  

The Chronicle article missed them, too. Cantor’s supporters howl that it failed to reveal her accomplishments; her critics complain that it gave her a supportive platform and ignored the corrosive internal problems. The only serious investigative reporting has been by The Daily Orange, which has started looking into the facts and has editorially called for ‘honesty from everyone involved in the conversation.’

The central issues are internal to the university. They concern the cost at which Cantor’s social agenda is pursued and the management practices that suppress informed discussion on campus about those costs. Consider these examples:

• Members of our University Senate budget committee complain of being denied budgetary information that exists but is kept confidential, even while the administration claims transparency.

• Enrollment statistics are presented with a shallowness that prevents serious scrutiny. (The faculty knows medians and ranges can hide the realities. We seek the shape of the distribution, not aggregated figures that obscure realities.)

• The extraordinarily rapid growth in enrollment has brought more students than we can serve well; on the front lines of teaching them, there is considerable chaos. Basic disciplines like mathematics have too little space for the present students, let alone capacity for more.

• The First Year Forum program, once a bright spot of our curriculum, had groups of 15 students mentored by a professor who often maintained connection with them for years. Now more than a third of the groups are led by instructors who are not regular faculty; in many cases they are office staff who are not faculty at all — commandeered in desperation by an administration that cannot manage the hordes without a dilution of quality, which it steadfastly denies.

• The rhetoric claims we teach students the skills, including writing, they need for success. In reality, our underfunded Writing Center fails to help many of the students sent to it.

• As construction of the Connective Corridor disrupts our teaching environment, many classrooms are in disrepair and so badly maintained that students complain of the filth.

These problems flow from Cantor’s priorities. I don’t claim that my view of those priorities should prevail — only that they merit serious inquiry and discussion on campus. Every week, I hear from faculty who agree. Reporting on why that open and informed discussion does not occur would be a contribution by serious journalism.  

The D.O. reported Wilson’s view that ‘finding sources to talk about SU on the record was, at times, more difficult than getting people to talk about illegal behavior.’ But student journalists are undeterred and are doing serious investigative reporting. They want to understand the costs in educational quality, in reputation, in value to the student experience, of all the good that Cantor’s social agenda incurs.  

The Post-Standard does superb reporting on many problems within the institutions in our community. Having devoted so much space to opinions about Cantor’s vision, it’s time to shine a reportorial light on the problems and practices keeping this debate alive.     

Samuel Gorovitz

Professor of Philosophy

 

Published on November 9, 2011 at 12:00 pm