Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Rally planned at CSU as anger grows over search for president

Chi-Town Daily News:
Students and faculty at Chicago State University are planning a rally tomorrow afternoon against the school’s presidential search process. And petitions are circulating to ask Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn to remove the current Board of Trustees and appoint an entirely new board.

The actions come following a closed-door meeting Friday in which 13 of the 15 members of a campus advisory committee resigned and walked out of the meeting in protest of what they described as a flawed search process.

Last week Wayne Watson, the chancellor of the City Colleges of Chicago, and Carol Adams, the secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services, each spent a day at CSU answering questions from students, faculty and staff in sessions that sometimes turned contentious and argumentative.

“They’re going to keep struggling against this,” says sociology professor Pancho McFarland. “Nobody is happy at all with what’s going on.”

And today the University Professionals of Illinois, which represents faculty at colleges across the state, issued a statement supporting CSU's faculty. The statement read in part, " It is our collective belief that flawed searches lead to flawed candidates, which in turn produce flawed leadership."

Students and faculty oppose the candidates for a variety reasons, including their status as political insiders and their lack of scholarly writing. Adams is an appointee of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Watson is a longtime adminstrator who was backed by Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Drama at our friendly neighborhood university!

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