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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

"I have no choice but to wonder
whether he actually does care
whether students graduate from
his university in a timely manner."



The president of Florida Atlantic University, as the editor of its student newspaper suspects, doesn't seem to care very much about the whole educating students thing of his university. He cares about trading the good name of the university for big money donations (scroll down); he cares about enriching his friends (see below); but he doesn't seem to care about graduation rates:


As an FAU student, I'll be the first to tell you that I am not happy about the generous severance package given to former Vice President of University Advancement Lawrence Davenport.

But being the editor of FAU's student newspaper, The University Press, means that I truly am in the middle of FAU's equivalent to the front lines of a battle between students and President Frank Brogan over this matter. I have experienced first-hand the campus-wide protests and have fielded phone calls and e-mails from students who range from enraged to outright confused (though mostly the former). In fact, those of us at the paper thought this was such a big deal that we dedicated a whole issue to showing students what Dr. Davenport's $577,950 payment could have done for them.

Sure, in the grand scheme of gigantic state budgets and complex university financial allocations, $577,950 doesn't seem like all that much. In fact, it's peanuts when you consider that FAU operates on an annual budget of $239,949,841, as reported by its Web site. But when you're a student who needs to graduate and can't, because of a lack of teachers and a supposed lack of money to hire them, $577,950 doesn't sound so minuscule.

I recall sitting in the office of the No. 2 man in the communications department and asking him why they couldn't open more classes. More important, I remember believing him when he told me, "We just don't have the funds to hire extra teachers." After I heard about the Davenport payout, though, all I could think was, "Man, you've been duped." And I'm not the only one who feels this way.


Many of my contemporaries from a range of majors - such as business, criminology and sociology - have come to me with the same question: How can President Brogan give away so much money when there's not even enough in the budget to allow us to graduate in four years?

The fact is that more than half of FAU's students don't even graduate in six years. According to the university's latest "enrollment and persistence" report on graduation rates, 14 percent of full-time students graduate in "four years or less," while only 37 percent graduate in six. Keep in mind, the latter figure includes the 14 percent of students already accounted for, so this leaves one to wonder what happened to the other 63 percent of students.

Naturally, the report doesn't include statistics on the high number of students who take longer than six years to graduate, but it doesn't take a whiz to figure out that this is the obvious scenario.

With this in mind, these figures bring me back to my original question: What exactly could the $577,950 that Mr. Brogan gave to Dr. Davenport have done for students like me?

According to FAU statistics, the average full-time professor makes about $89,000 per year. With this in mind, the money given to Dr. Davenport could have financed the hiring of six full-time professors and presumably helped raise FAU's clearly lackluster graduation rates.

According to Palm Beach Post reporter Kimberly Miller's story on April 17, the state auditor general's office has stepped in to see whether the money used to finance Dr. Davenport's severance - money that supposedly will come from campus vending machine proceeds - is working in the best interest of the public. As far as I can see, the "public" in this case refers to the students who are supposed to benefit from the vending machine money. After all, under state law, FAU, being a public university, is under the same guidelines as all public institutions - to serve those who generate its revenues.

Whether Mr. Brogan disregarded his responsibility to act in the best interest of those he serves - in this instance, the students who use the vending machines - is unclear to me. But based on his actions, I have no choice but to wonder whether he actually does care whether students graduate from his university in a timely manner and, even further, did he take this into account before he offered Dr. Davenport such a large severance package?

You have the figures. You decide. I can tell you that from an insider's perspective, it's very hard to believe that President Brogan cares the least bit about the students he's paid to represent.


This guy's an excellent writer.



By the way, there's a wonderful blog written by a professor at FAU. It's called Culture Industry.

Culture Industry's author calls University Diaries "splendidly splenetic."