This has been a big semester for MSU. In addition to the opening of the renovated Bobcat Stadium, the football team won the Big Sky Conference Championship for the second year in a row, the College of Business received a record $25 million donation and our campus’s Engineers Without Borders chapter was named among the strongest university-based outreach programs in the nation.
The buzz around campus is that it’s a great time to be a Bobcat — a direct testament to the leadership of President Waded Cruzado, just finishing her second year in office. However, the university’s progress has been far from uniform, with budget constraints and several unaddressed issues casting a shadow of doubt over the sustainability of MSU’s successes.
In crafting The Exponent’s week-to-week coverage, we find ourselves focusing on particular instances and events, often presenting snapshots of our campus rather than establishing their moment’s significance within a bigger picture. This is the nature of campus journalism, but it seems worth taking the time to paint with broader strokes as our semester comes to an end.
Cruzado’s direct, forceful leadership since taking office has been key in reenergizing MSU’s mission as a land-grant university. While her management has led to higher achievement, it also raises questions about what sort of culture a university community ought to cultivate.
Spirit and Criticism
Perhaps the most apparent aspect of Cruzado’s leadership is the degree to which she has injected a sense of enthusiasm into our campus. While top-down attempts at creating school spirit often seem hokey or insincere — and MSU’s are by no means always an exception — the university has been able to boast impressive accomplishments in academics, athletics, research and community service that should foster genuine pride.
Through avenues such as ‘Pure Gold’ awards and Cruzado’s Monday Morning Memos, MSU’s administration has put significant effort into highlighting the university’s perceived bright points. However, not all is necessarily well in Bobcat nation. Budgets are becoming tighter, faculty are increasingly departing for better opportunities, and many departments, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are visibly deteriorating as a result of inadequate funding.
While the emerging “Go Cats” culture is a great tool for recruiting students, creating a sense of community and securing donations, public dialogue about MSU’s hurdles and shortcomings must occur if we are to become a truly vigorous, healthy university. That’s something that Cruzado’s administration must do more to foster.
The sexual harassment scandal involving former University Orchestra conductor Shuichi Komiyama in many ways exemplifies the administration’s hesitancy to negotiate its public image through responsible and productive conversation.
Komiyama was placed on paid leave last April after allegations emerged that he had sexually harassed a female student. An internal investigation by the university determined that the professor abused his position’s power by pressuring the student into sexual acts while also failing to maintain appropriate professional boundaries with other students. Komiyama, a tenured professor who has a prior conviction for sexual assault of a minor, resigned his position in October.
Concerns regarding faculty and student privacy aside, the university failed to exhibit proactive leadership regarding the scandal, opting to remain silent throughout the ordeal rather than openly addressing the issue. As we argued in an editorial after Komiyama’s resignation, the administration missed an opportunity to initiate a campus conversation about faculty-student relationships and the university’s policy on background checks.
The point here is not to belabor the Komiyama incident, but to demonstrate how Cruzado’s administration has tended thus far to shy away from difficult conversation rather than work to cultivate a culture of mutually respectful criticism.
This is the trouble with the strength of Cruzado’s vision: While highly efficient, her leadership rarely seems to accommodate negotiation and dissent.
Cruzado has consistently held listening sessions and other forums throughout her tenure as president, but it is unclear how — or if — the feedback she receives is incorporated into her administration’s decision-making processes. Though such commitment to public input is laudable, students and community members must feel as though their voices constitute more than token participation.
MSU’s Evolving Vision
The change of university leadership in 2010 has prompted renewed interest in crafting MSU’s goals as a land-grant institution. This fall, Cruzado organized a Strategic Planning Committee to rewrite MSU’s mission statement and establish a set of values that will guide the university’s growth over the next five to ten years. The group has solicited public input and generated a list of core themes which Cruzado intends for future projects to follow in order to be considered for funding.
In her inaugural speech last September, Cruzado placed the land-grant mission at the forefront of her vision for MSU, highlighting the university’s responsibility to provide wide accessibility to higher education in order to create educated and successful citizens. As such, she has emphasized extension and outreach services, and has made it a goal to build “One MSU” by working more closely with the other branch campuses across the state.
For example, Cruzado’s administration intends to develop MSU’s online course offerings as an important way the university can provide affordable and accessible education. Cruzado is now making funds available to professors to create new online courses or adapt existing courses to online formats. Targeted efforts to make MSU more accessible to Montanans are important, particularly as limited funding from the state makes broad growth difficult.
However, while the land-grant philosophy remains relevant to MSU in many ways, the university must be careful with the manner in which it embraces this identity. Land-grant institutions were founded with very pragmatic aims in mind, namely to train the working class in practical fields and to produce more engaged citizens.
Today, of course, land-grants are large universities offering a broad spectrum of studies. But valuing the accessible and practical alone asserts a shallow notion of education, as it encourages the university to approach its mission by treating students as customers.
Finding cheap, efficient ways to educate students is a struggle between balancing financial concerns with the reality that education is an inherently inefficient, messy process. The most valuable parts of the experience a student has at MSU are not the large, lecture-based courses — they’re the opportunities for personal interactions with professors, or individual research, or involvement in student-driven extracurriculars.
Fostering that sort of ethic means giving students opportunities to shape our curriculums and the ability to participate in the governance of the university that directs our educational existence up to the highest levels.
The land-grant vision asserted by Cruzado is a powerful one, and it is having a clear impact on MSU. But if she hopes to truly develop MSU into an institution capable of developing the citizens our state needs, she must lead with the understanding that open dialogue concerning the university’s goals and challenges is fundamental.
