After a 2½-hour meeting Thursday afternoon between University of Akron President Scott Scarborough and the Faculty Senate, its members still walked away expressing little confidence in him.
About 65 members attended the special meeting called for the sole purpose of hearing the president’s explanation of administrative actions cited in the faculty’s no-confidence vote three months ago.
Scarborough spent an hour going through the faculty’s list of complaints, which include:
• Recent layoffs.
• Rebranding UA as Ohio’s Polytechnic University — a strategy that is apparently being abandoned following backlash.
• Declining enrollment (for the fall 2016 class compared to 2015).
• Declining donations.
• A reduction of services information technology
• Operational changes at E.J. Thomas Performing Arts Hall and the University of Akron Press.
Faculty members said they were grateful that Scarborough agreed to meet, but said the explanations were all heard before and the president didn’t add anything new. Some said Scarborough demonstrated that he’s completely out of touch with reality, wasn’t truthful, shifted blame and did not admit mistakes were made, and never apologized for making decisions without shared governance.
“All I can say is there was never, ever, any malicious intent not to respect faculty members,” Scarborough said. “We thought we were having shared governance by going college-to-college and going to the University Council; we thought having brief summit meetings with leadership we were contributing to shared governance.”
He said a no-confidence vote was new territory for him, and he came to the meeting hoping to work out differences.
One faculty member, Janet Klein, a history professor, wanted to know why UA was trying to do business with companies that are facing allegation of fraud elsewhere, including Aramark (the outsourced food company) as well as ITT and Trust Navigator (both investigated for fraud and unethical business practices).
Scarborough said it was the first he had heard anything about Aramark, but with Trust Navigator one of the principal business partners involved another business and ITT is no longer an issue because those negotiations have been cut off.
Faculty member Dane Quinn from the Engineering Department said faculty are more than advisers.
“It’s not just communication of the decision that is the problem; there needs to be some voice of faculty in the decision-making process,” he said. “We have a room full of untapped expertise.”
Goals explained
Scarborough, who became president in July 2014, told the faculty members that he was hired to attack declining enrollment and strengthen finances.
“The status quo would not reverse enrollment. We had to find ways to make the university more distinctive and establish new initiatives to do that,” he said. “Our initiatives had to have a big enough sample so there would be some winners and losers, not all the initiatives were expected to work, but for those that are working we could build a strategy around them.”
He said the rebranding initiative was a way to set UA apart, but 50 percent of the population didn’t hear it that way.
“Other universities were employing the same technique ... It’s all part of we just need to be known for something. I still get people who love the idea.”
Though Scarborough himself did not call the rebranding a mistake, UA Board of Trustees Chairman Jonathan Pavloff told the Akron-Ohio Student Association in a meeting last week that it was a mistake and that the university has dropped the initiative.
As far as Trust Navigator, the student success coach program that was hired for one year at a low cost of $804,000, Scarborough said the university is still looking at data to determine whether the company’s contract will be renewed. He said the group was never hired to replace advisers but to reach out to students to get them to the resources they need.
The ITT partnership initiative was also addressed. The faculty was told the plan was a way to grow enrollment with nontraditional students — “doing something different than what was being done on the main campus.”
Unhappy listener
Scarborough’s explanations didn’t change the no-confidence vote of political science professor Daniel Coffey, who chaired the ad hoc committee that drafted the no-confidence resolution. He told Scarborough that the administration has squandered money for initiatives like rebranding and accused the president of establishing a nondisclosure agreement about the ITT talks to hide the deal.
“You weren’t going to tell us about it until after it was done ... despite letters from professors and deans saying the academic quality of the university is being threatened because of all the secret deals,” Coffey said. “Stop going for deals. ... Talk to us first, until that happens we have a serious problem here. All you talk about is you didn’t communicate well. This is not a communication problem, we have a policy problem with you in charge.”
Marilyn Miller can be reached at 330-996-3098 or mmiller@thebeaconjournal.com.