The entrance sign to Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland, United States. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.

Is a valid strategy to improve a college’s retention rate to encourage students at risk of dropping out to do so in the first few weeks, so they won’t be counted in the total numbers reported to the U.S. Education Department and others?


That is a question raised by emails leaked to the student newspaper at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. The emails suggest that the president had such a plan in motion—despite opposition from some faculty members and other administrators. The board chairman at Mount St. Mary’s released an open letter in which he did not dispute the emails but said they were taken out of context. The board chairman’s letter did not detail what was allegedly out of context. Primarily, his statement blasted student journalists for publishing the contents of confidential emails.

The president, Simon Newman, acknowledged to the Washington Post that he was pushing a plan to intervene early on with students who may be having difficulties. But he said that this was to help them, although he said that the help in some cases might be for them to see that they might be better off a less expensive public institution. The student newspaper also reported (and the Washington Post quoted a professor confirming) that Newman told some faculty members they needed to change the way they think of struggling students.

He reportedly said, “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

The president told the Post that he didn’t remember the language he used in that discussion. But he acknowledged that he sometimes uses harsh language, sometimes to his regret.

“I’ve probably done more swearing here than anyone else,” Newman told the Post. “It wasn’t intended to be anything other than, ‘Some of these conversations you may need to have with people are hard.’ ”

The emails quoted in the student newspaper, the Mountain Echo, suggest more than just trying to reach at-risk students. The emails describe using a survey given to new students to help identify those who may be likely to drop out. And then an email from President Newman says: “My short term goal is to have 20-25 people leave by the 25th [of September]. This one thing will boost our retention 4-5%. A larger committee or group needs to work on the details but I think you get the objective.”

According to Education Department data, the six-year graduation rate for full-time first-time students at Mount St. Mary’s is 66 percent, and 78 percent of freshmen return for a second year. While both rates are above national averages for four-year colleges, many private, residential colleges that serve traditional-age undergraduates boast of significantly higher rates.

A letter to the Mountain Echo from John E. Coyne III, chairman of the university’s board, does not dispute the various emails quoted in the article but says the article is based on “selected quotes” that give the article a “slant” and create a “grossly inaccurate impression on the subject of the Mount’s efforts to improve student retention.”

The letter goes on to criticize the newspaper’s editor, saying that the emails in question are confidential. “You propose to use those private, confidential emails to advance your journalistic interests and to do so without any concern for either the individual privacy interests of the faculty involved or the damage you will render to this university and to its brand,” the letter says.

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Couldn't we just put them in the trunk and drive them a few miles into the country, to let them loose?  More...

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Coyne adds that using confidential emails is “quite frankly irresponsible” and violates the college’s code of conduct.

Newman became president of Mount St. Mary’s last year. His prior career was not in higher education but in private equity and business. His biography says that he founded or co-founded four businesses and worked at various times for Bain & Co., JP Capital Partners, and Cornerstone Management Group.

How to Deal with Lack of Coverage of Public Meetings

You could enlist citizens.

“There are hundreds of public government meetings, from the police board to local school councils, the education board, it goes on. A lot of these meetings are not reported on, and some of that’s through lack of [local reporters] — for example, DNAinfo,” said Darryl Holliday, City Bureau’s co-founder/editorial director and a former DNAinfo Chicago reporter, in explaining the existing setup in Chicago. “A lot of those meetings are not attended by the public. There will be meetings that go on where there’s literally no one there from the public present for these really big decisions that affect us in a lot of different ways. Documenters can be trained, and in our case paid, to go out and document these public meetings for the public.”

Laberinto 1 (del Nordisk familjebok) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

* Begin with a scene from the labyrinth, or at least the church. I want you to interview at least three other people who are there, either walking or observing. If the cathedral has not changed the way the walk is organized, a docent will take groups into a side chapel and explain the history of labyrinth walking. You will quote him or her.

* Of course, I want you to walk the labyrinth. This may become a very personal experience during which you think on your past life and philosophy, or on some current challenge. You may choose to write in detail about this or you may not. You may choose to be "objective," relying on observation and description, and on comments by others. But if you do choose to share your own experience, make it a separate story, a sidebar.   

* You have an option. One of these two stories may be longer than the other. You may choose to emphasize your personal experience or the news feature.

* Here are some leads from past stories from Arts Review classes. These approaches are fine for your personal story. But in any case, I want you to write a traditional news feature about the experience. I urge you to give this experience a try. This is extra credit, though it can substitute for a story you missed. No one gets a bad grade on this assignment:

- Driving east up the hill on California Street, Grace Cathedral’s size and ruddy color loom from the surrounded buildings, playground and opulent hotels and venues. Inside, I find the architecture and artistry astonishing, busying with myself with taking photographs I might share with my mother. It was also to stall in participating in the “meditative labyrinth," something which made me feel the opposite of the enthusiasm I had about playing photographer.

This “meditative labyrinth” and its accommodating choir was exactly what I wanted to avoid. My mother said, “You should try it and take it seriously,” but I had already done such things in elementary school all the way through high school, completely being negative to the whole experience or what they call, “closing yourself from God."

- I can not remember the last time that my Grandpa broke-wind in a church.  I actually can not remember the last time he was even in a church.  But there he was, crop-dusting his lunch gas across the Grace Cathedral's candle-lit corridors.  My Grandma was quite embarrassed, but I believe that it added to the experience.

There we were, at the top of Nob Hill inside the old stone place of worship, where pigeons and bums take refuge and all religions are welcome.  It wasn't the devotion service or the architecture that drew us in, but what was built into the nave's floor. 

- Many people seek to find themselves. I’ll admit, growing up in my teens, I did not know who or what kind of person I wanted to be. In the Jewish Community, a Bar Mitzvah signifies as a rite of passage to who a boy is to become but I wasn’t Jewish. For others, finding self can occur through hot-stone yoga, a run at Golden Gate Park, or at the Labyrinth in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. 

- There it lay, the labyrinth at the center of the church. It wasn’t exactly what I expected to be there when I heard that I was visiting a labyrinth. My first thought was that we were going to be lab rats in a maze in search of the cheese.

- I was raised a Christian Scientist – no, not Scientology (though I do favor the notion that aliens exist) – a religious practice that puts the power of healing into God’s hands and not a physicians. I would go to Sunday school, draw some pictures of God (who apparently looks like a firefly...), and not pay any attention to the Bible stories being taught. As the members of our church steadily began to die from old age, untreated sicknesses and suicide, I began cementing my notion that religion is utter garbage. This is the view I had all throughout my adolescence: that religion is a bunch of trite fiction that gets renamed and recombined; subsequently spurring people of “different” faiths to annihilate one another through endless warfare. As we all recall, adolescence is a time full of angst, and these notions were certainly fueled by my anti-authoritarian fervor. 

Here's a recent San Francisco Chronicle story on the labyrinth.


 Only about half of the people who’d arrived at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral for a recent Candlelight Labyrinth Walk decided to attend the the Rev. Dr. Lauren Artress’ pre-walk explanation of the labyrinth’s process and purpose. Artress gathered her small group out of the main cathedral and into the AIDS Interfaith Memorial Chapel, in a wing just off the front doors. A portion of the original AIDS quilt hung on a wall facing Artress as she cheerfully offered advice and history on walking the labyrinth.

Outside the chapel, many of the folks who had already begun to walk had no idea they were missing a free explanation by the godmother of the modern labyrinth movement.

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