With the Board of Trustees meeting tomorrow, there has been a lot of debate concerning the legitimacy of a $30,000 presidential review being done after President McDavis had been given a new five-year contract and an $80,000 raise. The Trustee Board is doing this at a time when we have seen the largest outpouring of student, faculty and staff dissent since 1970 at Ohio University. What is happening tomorrow is not a presidential review by university constituents; it is a neatly choreographed puppet show.
By cutting the presidential review from a yearly process to a review that occurs after contracts and raises have already been handed out every five years, the Trustee Board is doing nothing less than tokenizing the democratic process itself. To me, this seems to speak to the reality that our problems on this campus are not simply the consequence of a few administrators' bad decisions. President McDavis is not the center of the problems that face our university. His past autocratic actions are symptoms of a much greater problem at our university. By turning our review processes at OU into theater, the Trustee Board has exposed itself to the reality that the current governance structures no longer serves their own stated function within the institution.
It exposes an underlying conflict of value systems between the Trustee Board and the Ohio University community. Recently the secretary of the Trustee Board made a statement that appeared in The Athens News that stated that OU functions in the same manner as any major corporation. The president of the Trustee Board, Mr. DeLawder, in an e-mail obtained by The Post, expressed his open contempt for freedom of the press on campus. At the same time that they are giving President McDavis a significant raise, they have laid off janitors and other university staff. We are about to undergo a projected $30 million deficit, which will mean deep cuts in educational programs and departments across the university. At the same time, our tuition is projected to be increased by 6 percent next year, when our public education system is already one of the most expensive in the country.
It is these facts that make Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of freedom, equality and democracy so relevant to the OU context today. It's why I think it's so important we, as the OU community, come together to decide whether democracy is a value that we believe to be essential to a free society, and whether or not we think it's worth fighting for. I believe the modern university is one of the chief energizers and creative forces for our entire social system. It preserves and transmits knowledge and values, and serves more and more as a center for research and innovation. It fosters the leaders and creative thinkers for our generation.
The university's function is to advance the free exchange of ideas, the highest level of scholarly knowledge and our nation's vision of democracy and freedom. How can we ever expect our government, or any other American institution, to implement those visions if we are not allowed to run our own universities by some real form representative democracy?I have great hope that our generation at OU can transform the power relationships on this campus. Ten years from now, looking back at these moments in OU history, I think we will be struck by how quickly this community was able to transform itself, once we became conscious of our own creative potential and collective power. I have a feeling that in these hard times, we may yet throw off the yoke of consumerism, apathy and boredom for something a little more meaningful, and a lot more fun.
Will Klatt is a senior studying media studies.
4 Opinion
