If anyone doubted there is controversy boiling over on the Missouri Southern State University campus, those doubts have certainly been laid to rest.
It's in today's Joplin Globe so it must be true. The Globe noted the vote by the Faculty Senate Monday to create an ad hoc committee to explore a no-confidence vote for University President Dr. Bruce Speck.
During a time when the MSSU campus has been racked with one mindboggling occurrence after another, most of them thanks to the leadership of Speck, the Globe has been serving as a public relations agency for the Speck administration.
As I wrote in an Aug. 3 post:
The following are recent headlines from Southern News Service, Missouri Southern State University's public relations operation:
-MSSU to open new bookstore
-Big three projects planned at MSSU
-Impressions prove lasting for new MSSU A.D.
-Hola: 79 enrolled in MSSU's Spanish language village
-MSSU notes summer enrollment hike
-State OK to be sought for medical program at Joplin university
-Partnership could bring osteopathic medical program to MSSU
-New MSSU board chairman says keeping education affordable top priority
-FCA reborn at MSSU
-MSSU president gets contract extension through 2011
-MSSU introduces new athletic director
-Five questions for MSSU Athletic Director Jared Bruggeman
-MSSU selects athletic director
-MSSU summer registration begins today
-MSSU committee chooses two finalists for athletic director post
CORRECTION: These are not headlines from Southern News Service, but from Missouri Southern State University's other public relations office, The Joplin Globe.
While the International Piano Competition has been axed, the university's international program virtually gutted, raises withheld from faculty due to a dubious interpretation of depreciation, and a university official quits a new job only 18 days into it, noting the negative tactics and intimidation used by the university president, everything is lollipops and rainbows as far as the Joplin Globe is concerned.
I hope for Rod Surber's sake that no one realizes the university can save money by eliminating his p. r. job so that it is not duplicated by the Globe's Melissa Dunson.
(And to be fair to Melissa Dunson, I would guess the problem is further up on the Globe's food chain.)
Miss Dunson has moved on to continue her public relations career at TAMKO and Greg Grisolano has taken over the newspaper's education beat. Whether this has resulted in the shift in coverage or whether events have simply gone so far that the Globe could not ignore them is a hard question to answer.
What is not difficult to ascertain is that if the Globe had been doing its job the situation at Missouri Southern State University may have never reached this point.
3 comments:
The Joplin Globe should have played a part in vetting the candidates and investigating them during the process of hiring a new president. As a former newsman, I'm aware that often local papers are loath to take these steps, but the big papers never shrink from such revelations. It would have been easy to find out about Speck's problems at Austin Peay, and also to find out where he had applied and been denied a job. MSSU should not have settled for sloppy seconds. I think we have Dwight Douglas, the rest of the board, and a complacent public and news media to blame for all of it.
Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. -George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The Globe... A day late and a dollar short.
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