Newspaper Adviser Is Fired After Students’ Scoop Roils Maryland Campus

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Newspaper Adviser Is Fired After Students’ Scoop Roils Maryland Campus

By MIKE McPHATE FEB. 10, 2016

When student reporters at Mount St. Mary’s University, a small Catholic institution in Maryland, published an article in January that quoted the university’s president likening struggling freshmen to bunnies that should be drowned, they knew it might get a big reaction. ... It finally came this week, it appears — in the form of a pink slip for the faculty adviser of the campus newspaper. ... The university informed the adviser, Ed Egan, that he had been disloyal and was now fired, a move seen by many on the campus in Emmitsburg as a retaliatory strike.

The decision, along with other recent punishments of faculty members at Mount St. Mary’s, has triggered outrage well beyond its rural campus in northern Maryland, earning condemnation from thousands of academics across the country as well as national monitors of academic and journalistic freedom.

The article, by Rebecca Schisler and Ryan Golden, was published in The Mountain Echo under Mr. Egan’s tutelage on Jan. 19 and presented two explosive pieces of news.

The report said that the administration was planning to cull struggling freshmen from the institution as part of an effort to improve retention numbers — a big factor in rankings published in outlets like U.S. News & World Report — and that the university’s president, Simon Newman, had used disturbing language to sell the idea to a skeptical professor last fall. ... “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t,” Mr. Newman is quoted as saying. “You just have to drown the bunnies.” ... He added, “Put a Glock to their heads.”

[RufusTFirefly]

1. If in doubt, shoot the messenger. But not literally, please.

Mr. Newman, a former private equity chief executive, was hired last spring to help raise the college’s national profile and increase its endowment. Some faculty members have since pushed back against what they see as his sharp-elbowed business approach.

Well, isn't that special!
Are any of these private equity types not sociopaths?

[annabanana]

6. THAT explains a lot.

Maybe it's the private equity executives who should get that "bunny treatment"..

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. Ugh. Worst analogy ever

[GeorgeGist]

3. Another MBA ruining America.

[KamaAina]

4. "disloyal"?

Who's the prexy, Joe McCarthy?!

[Jim Beard]

5. Has the Pope made any comments?