Editorial : More honesty, less emotion needed in debate over chancellor’s initiatives

Is Syracuse University sliding?

It was a question The Daily Orange Editorial Board raised in February. We certainly were not the first to ask — or the last.

Since February, there has been a landslide of commentary about SU’s reputation: Heated discussion at a March University Senate meeting. Inside Higher Ed wrote a cursory article. Chancellor Nancy Cantor defended her initiatives when SU’s ranking dropped this fall. The Chronicle of Higher Education delved into the debate, and professors, staff, alumni and others responded with more than 90 online comments. The Chronicle published a follow-up. The Post-Standard put together a spread in its Opinion section.

And countless hushed discussions and explicit rants accumulate each day about where SU is headed. Up or down? Right or wrong? Sustainable or not? Pioneering or destructively radical?

Out of the chaos come two conclusions — SU is in the midst of significant change, and the campus has become deeply divided.

Under the chancellor’s guidance, SU is trying to uplift the city, pushing students and faculty to focus their academic work locally. SU stepped up recruitment efforts abroad and beyond the Northeast, started feeder programs to get community college students to SU and strives to enroll a more diverse student body.

Simultaneously, SU’s ranking by US News and World Report slid to No. 62, a seven-spot slide from last year. SU left the prestigious Association of American Universities before getting kicked out. The administration rejects traditional metrics, like acceptance rate and SATs, which peer institutions continue to uphold as valid measures of academic quality. The undergraduate population has increased by 20 percent, aggravating the student housing shortage and increasing class size in some departments. Meanwhile, basic infrastructural problems persist, namely the shabby — though improving — state of E.S. Bird Library.

For many this is old news. But which of these changes are correlated and which are not continues to puzzle us all. Even administrators appear to scramble for evidence that all is well, offering a patchwork rationale of the most optimistic admissions statistics and outright rejection or disregard for criticism. The critics, too, put their spin on the data and apply their own logic to argue the institution is headed for disaster.

The argument on all sides has clearly turned visceral, judging by the dozens of accusatory, frustrated comments on The Chronicle article. Emotion doesn’t help. It’s frankly embarrassing that a community of respected academics has regressed into petty squabbles.

The campus needs unaffected honesty from everyone involved in the conversation. The chaos and anger — and ultimately fear — cannot be alleviated unless the campus puts all the facts, context from peer institutes and carefully crafted predictions on the table. Participants need to shed all allegiances and prejudices that have risen from this debate, and understand they are responsible to the students and academic quality before anything else.