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Confidence in the provost is shattered

Matthew J. Franck
Franck is the professor and chairman of political science at Radford University.

In October 1996, Dr. Douglas Covington, in his second year at Radford University, faced the first-ever formal evaluation of a president by the university's board of visitors. Some of us at RU were concerned about how fair the process would be. I wrote then in the pages of this newspaper that it should be "an orderly and institutionalized process rather than ad hoc ... deliberately paced rather than rushed." The same alternatives present themselves again in Radford's current crisis of mistrust between the faculty and the administration. In recent years, familiar and proven processes of academic decision-making have been bypassed, ignored or reinvented on the fly by an administration more concerned with immediate results than with the legitimacy of the process by which they are achieved, or even whether the new curricula and programs make the best sense for the education of Radford's students.
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