On Wednesday, The Post published a letter from retired professor Francine Childs claiming an unnamed professor of journalism and other professors advocating annual faculty evaluation of the OU president and provost were trying to destroy McDavis' presidency.
Not so. The 259 professors from all Ohio University campuses and every college on the Athens campus who signed the petition for a Faculty Senate vote on annual evaluation sought broad faculty input into the trustees' review of OU presidents and provosts from this year forward, and long after President McDavis and Provost Krendl have left these positions.
In her letter, Professor Childs rhetorically asked a series of questions that boil down to where faculty who now advocate this annual evaluation were during the Glidden years of administrative bloat, low faculty salaries and abuse of faculty rights.
Professor Childs should check her facts a bit more carefully before attacking the motives of 259 faculty members, more than 20 percent of the faculty, supporting an annual evaluation. Had she examined The Post published Feb. 16, 2004 (during the Glidden years), she would have found Suzanne Wilder's article Group protests OU spending. (It may be retrieved at www.thepost.ohiou.edu/articles/2004/02/16/news/2080.html.)
The lead paragraph of that story stated: A group of Ohio University professors and students carried picket signs Saturday to protests administrative decisions about money.
The article continued to note faculty members and others participating in this protest of Glidden's spending decisions. A photograph of one picket sign which read Sell the $4.8 million airplane ' Cut Bloat! was prominently featured.
I was quoted stating, We're sick of money being thrown away. The article described the protestors' flier as citing problems such as a disproportionate increase in administrative positions in the past 10 years
rapidly increasing tuition and fees lower-than-average faculty salaries and insufficient classes and noted the chief complaint was the purchase of the $3.7 (actually $4.8) million used airplane in November.
Finally, why is Francine Childs so fearful of an annual faculty evaluation of the president and provost? Every quarter in every class, students evaluate faculty members. Every year faculty members evaluate deans. What is so special about the top two administrators at Ohio University that justifies not evaluating them annually?' Joseph Bernt is a professor of journalism and secretary of the OU Chapter of American Association of University Professors.
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Letter to the Editor
