Baylor University (not BLS, we’re a distant outpost) hasn’t had a good piece of news in, oh, ten years? The basketball scandals. Massive NCAA rule violations. Rotating presidents. Absurd battles over teaching creationism. Tenure issues that pissed off an entire faculty.
Well, here’s the latest embarrassment. In brief, Baylor was paying undergraduates to retake the SAT. Once those students proved they could improve their scores, they got scholarship money and everyone went on their way. Wait, Oh, right, it was a scheme to fudge all-important rankings:
A [Baylor] professor of higher education, said, “I do think there was an underlying motivation to increase the average SAT scores and therefore then improve our position with regard to the rankings.” Baylor then got to misrepresent its median SAT scores.
Who thought that was a good idea? Did anyone consider how a big Baptist school, with a “distinctive Christian mission,” a school that’s faced crisis after embarrassing crisis, needs to be especially wary of even mild chicanery? This school has been under the microscope for a while. This doesn’t help anything.
This would bother me less if I went to “Brazos River Law School,” or “Jaworski School of Law.” But it’s Baylor Law School. When the mothership looks bad, WE ALL look bad. Even if BLS students know we’re hardly a part of the mothership, we’re still tainted by what goes on across the street.
And so I ask all administrators at Baylor: Please stop screwing up, at least in high profile ways. Seriously. Stop. Grow some common sense flowers in the finely manicured gardens. Perhaps consult the bears because it seems like they would have said “NOOOO RAARARA!” to this plan and they would have settled all previous debates by roaring and eating the obstinate. And so help me, if I hear someone say “Well WK, administrators are people too and they make mistakes!” I’m going to lose it. That’s like giving a pass to a student for cheating on an exam, repeatedly. “Oh it’s OK, I won’t fail you. You get five more mistakes though!” That would never happen. That student would be canned in a heartbeat.
It’s a common refrain, but it’s true – some of us pay way too much (I’ll be an indentured servant for 20 years) for our administrators to further tarnish the name and brand of this school. Yeah, we’re your students and low men on the totem pole. Students complain all the time about all kinds of trivial things. We’re usually told to grow up and stop complaining, or, my favorite, you just don’t understand. But it’s a totally well-founded complaint, one that has nothing to do with maturity or experience, when one complains about the school’s brand gradually being turned into a punchline.
Universities are giant businesses. I know that. But believe it or not, students are your clients. Do your job like we’re your clients. I’m not saying bend over backwards and cater to every whim, but we’re owed the same respect and duty a professional owes to their client. Why? One day, in the future, you’re going to use some undergraduate at a phone bank, call us up on our high tech space phones, begging for donations. If this is the kind of stuff that we remember about our institution, good luck getting my nano-credits from my cold robotic hands.
Thanks.
On a lighter note, this guy ate a 20 pound hamburger.
Posted by WK 