[June 19, 2017] Last week I was traveling through the Kansas City airport and picked up the Kansas City Star newspaper. In it was an article on University of Missouri financial troubles caused, in part, by a backlash from a series of racially charged protests. Leadership failures at several of the university system’s campuses were center stage nationally.
The protests led to the resignation of several top college officials who failed to handle student activism properly.1 From MU leadership perspective, bad things occurred as a part of a parent and alumni-centered backlash. First, students and their families went looking elsewhere for their advanced educational needs. Second, the Missouri legislature threatened and then carried out a series of aid cuts.2 And third, donations plummeted, team sport attendance dropped, and the college’s reputation was marred.
A backlash can come in a variety of forms to any organization but it is usually directly due to what the leadership does or fails to do during a crisis; in this case dramatically failed to do. The UM system can expect more of the same in the near future especially if the new leadership doesn’t immediately take steps to admit the problems which occurred, how they learned from it, and come up with a fix-it plan. So far, only minimum progress has been made.
Some claim that colleges across the U.S. have failed to truly learn a lesson from the events over the past two years. Many have doubled-down on “diversity” and “inclusiveness” to the exclusion of everything else. This approach, they say, is appeasement at its worse and will only foster greater racial problems, a decline in enrollment of the best students, and a restriction of outside funding. Like cities that are failing, colleges are experiencing a flight of the talented.
All these issues center on the core problem of advanced education. For most of the Western world, college-level education is about selling a lifestyle, prestige, and status. It costs money, a lot of money, to attend any level of post-High School education and the return on investment is poor unless the student obtains a degree that allow them access to quality employment opportunities.
How this will work out in the future remains an unknown. What is known, however, is that college leadership (and its administration of policies) is not well suited for the leadership challenges necessary to be flexible, creative, and proactive to provide the right kind of education to those yearning to better themselves.
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- http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/11/09/university-missouri-president-resigns-amid-race-backlash.html
- http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/missouri/article154134704.html