Fifty Years Ago: A Flashback to Campus Life in the Mid-Sixties

The year: 1966.  The place: Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster (PA)

      At the start of the year, I was a second-semester freshman.  F&M had an all-male student body of about 1200, who supported no fewer than 11 fraternities.  I pledged Phi Kappa Psi, the animal house located about two blocks from the campus.  Watch the movie "Animal House" and you can see exactly what Phi Psi was like at the time I pledged it.  Pledging was a rough and tumble experience then.  I suffered a broken nose during hazing.  Every character in the film had a counterpart in the Phi Psi I joined.  Every antic depicted in the movie had its parallel in my fraternity... with the sole exception of the film's climax, when the brothers trash the homecoming parade.  The homecoming parade had been done away with at F&M a year or two earlier, or we probably would have trashed it.

   

     But, despite how my experience with Phi Psi resembled the frat world depicted in the movie, change was "blowin' in the wind."  A year earlier, Bob Dylan had released two milestone albums, "Bringing It All Back Home" and "Highway 61 Revisited."  In '66 he followed up with his remarkable double album, "Blonde on Blonde."  

     Following a summer of work as a bricklayer's helper ( the bricklayer was my dad), I returned to a campus that was on the cusp of change.  The question circulating among the student body was "Have you turned on?"  To what?  Mainly marijuana... but LSD was also making the rounds.  One classmate, whose long hair made him look a lot like Jesus, invariably thought he could fly when he dropped acid.  He proved himself mistaken from the roof of his residence hall and from a balcony on my own dorm.  On a third occasion, he crashed through a plate glass window while tripping.  Fortunately, the window fronted the emergency room of the local hospital.

     The advent of drugs on campus coincided with the decline of the fraternity system at F&M.  But it didn't go down without a fight.  Although at Phi Psi we filled our soda machine with beer bottles, we voted to ban drugs.  This wasn't out of a sense of good citizenship.  It was out of fear of arrest, as uncover cops posed as students and infiltrated less cautious frat houses.  A half dozen brothers resigned as a result of the vote and rented a house of their own, where they could smoke dope and drop acid as they pleased.

     Students for a Democratic Society started a branch at F&M around this same time.  The SDS guys weren't all that radical at conservative F&M in conservative Lancaster.  But the SDS president did walk into the F&M president's office with a pig on a leash... more of a sh**-in than a sit-in, I suppose.

     For Phi Psi, psychedelic was more of a curiosity than a life style.  A "Phi Psychedelic" themed party was about as flower-powered as we ever got.  

    In the years immediately following, pledge classes declined in size, and some fraternities disappeared entirely... although to this day, they persist at my alma mater despite sporadic administration efforts to eradicate them totally, once and for all.

     Change didn't come to such tradition-bound schools as F&M in a tsunami.  It happened more gradually... and some traditional features, including frats, have never entirely vanished,  But 1966 was without a doubt the tipping-point year.  

     

Disruption and reconfiguration at regional public universities

       While most flagship state universities from Rutgers and PennState in the East to Florida State in the Southland to UCLA on the West Coast, are flourishing, regional public colleges and universities in many parts of the nation are in crisis mode.
       Consider for example Western Illinois University.  The Illinois legislature is involved in an 11th month old budget standoff.  Already 150 employees, including non-tenured faculty have been laid off.  Declining enrollments at the school reflect the drop in Illinois's population... last year alone .2 percent. WIU's student body has declined from around 11,000 to around 9,000 over the past decade.

       How to replace the lost numbers?  Flagship schools can recruit from around the country.  Their reputations as sports powerhouses give them brand recognition.  And their facilities and amenities often match the best that private higher ed can offer, and at a lower sticker price, even if out-of-state tuition is significantly higher then in-state price tags.
       But that's a difficult strategy to pull off, if you are a regional public institution, according to an article in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education.  Traditionally drawing upon and serving a local student population, and frequently being primarily commuter schools, these universities typically must rely on intensifying regional recruitment.
      Additional strategies include:

• Targeting potential transfer students from community colleges in the neighborhood.
• Establishing a presence on these two-year institutions' own campuses.
• Developing more robust programs for non-traditional students.
• Enabling high school seniors, who have completed their core requirements, to pick up college credits during their last year of K-12 education.
• Venturing into the advancement arena by strengthening their alumni base and competing toe-to-toe with private colleges for donor gifts, as well as grants.

      The more these regional publics become players in the advancement arena, the more the line grays between the public and private sectors of higher ed.  As an acquaintance of mine from the regional-public sector once said to me, "We used to be state supported; now we are little more than state located."  And the money has to come from somewhere.

      To the extent that such student-recruitment and advancement efforts succeed, in what is today essentially a zero-sum game (albeit recruiting of non-traditional students and fund raising among one's own alumni may be mining new ore), the reaction of these regional publics to their disruption will be at the expense of the private, non-profit colleges in those regions.  

Recalling the more relaxed regulatory environment of 40 years past

 

    My first stint as a higher education administrator fell between 1974 and 1978.  Based in the Department of University Communication at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, I served that R1 institution as an editor/writer and after two promotions the director.  I remember those 4.5 years as a time of significantly less government oversight than we live with today.  One example should suffice.

      Round about 1976 or ’77, I received a call from my boss, the executive vice president.  Peter informed me that an anthropologist on the Western Reserve College faculty had a good story for me.  I had my secretary set up an appointment and dutifully tramped from old main, across Euclid Avenue, to the Anthropology Department in a venerable stone building.  Climbing the stairs, I detected a smell not unlike the one you may have encountered when first opening your tackle box on the first day of trout season.  Reaching the landing, I turned to the open door of Mohammed’s office.

                                        This image comes very close to what I remember.

        Staring at me from empty eye sockets from atop a four-drawer file cabinet was a mummy.  Entering the office, I introduced myself to the moustachioed, dark-skinned Egyptian anthropologist seated at the desk.  Invited to sit, I produced my notebook and heard his story.  A specialist in nutritional issues, Mohammed had been conducting summer research among Native Americans somewhere in the Southwestern U.S., when he came across the mummy in a burial cave, surrounded by the artifacts with which it had been buried some hundreds or thousands of years ago.  Popping the naturally mummified gent into the back of his pick-up truck, Mohammed had brought the old boy back with him to Cleveland.

      Excited by the story, I contacted the late, great afternoon daily newspaper, the Cleveland Press.  A photographer was dispatched to the Case campus.  The next day, Mohammed’s mummy was on the paper’s front page.  My buttons were popping.

       Later that day, I got another phone call from the university’s executive veep.  Did I think there might be some blow-back from the Native American community?  After all, Chief Wahoo, the Cleveland Indian’s mascot, was already a target of Native American wrath all those 40 years ago.  Gee, Peter, I was so excited about a front page in a major daily that the thought had never crossed my mind.

       Think you know the outcome of this story?  Think again:  we never heard a discouraging word from any American Indian or any Native American organization.  Nor did any federal agency raise a cry of protest.  What could, and undoubtedly today, would be branded as grave robbery raised no eyebrows four decades back.  A different regulatory environment, indeed. 

       Need more convincing?  Same four-year stint, separate setting:  A group of materials scientists in CWRU’s Case Institute of Technology received a $4.2 million NSF grant to develop artificial arteries.  A Cleveland TV station indicated interest in doing an evening-news piece.  I brought them to the Principal Investigator’s lab.  Anxious for some visual interest, the TV reported inquired about how the arteries would be tested.

     “We test them in rats,” came the PI’s reply.

         The reporter’s eyes brightened.  Rats were visual.  And so the lights and camera were set up in front of a lab table.  The PI produced a rat in what appeared to me to be a Tupperware container. 

         “How do you handle them?”

         “Oh, we pick them up by their tails.” And with that, my scientist hoisted his specimen from the container by its tail.  What happened next can only be described as the rat going “ratshit.”  Spinning and gyrating madly under the alien spotlights, the rodent dropped to the table and scurried to the floor and off into the shadows. 

       Smiling onto the camera, the PI held the pinkish appendage between thumb and forefinger and pronounced, “He unscrewed himself from his tail.” 

       Needless to say, we made both the six o’clock and eleven o’clock news broadcasts.  And --- you get the ides --- not a squeal nor a bark out of the animal-rights establishment.

Nor any protest from the NSF or any other federal or state agency.  A different regulatory environment, indeed, indeed.

How parents impact students' success

A new book  by Sociologist Laura Hamilton "on how family matters for college women's success argues that four-year public institutions are increasingly dependent on active -- and wealthy -- parents, and that can harm students with less-involved parents," according to Inside Higher Ed.

Dr. Hamilton identifies varieties of "helicopter parents": the professional parents, who focus on fostering their kids' careers v. the "pink" parents who want their daughters to marry wealthy men.

Concerns about over-parenting resulted not long ago in a TIME Magazine cover story (above).  The term "helicopter parent" has earned a substantial entry in Wikipedia, as well.  Having grown up in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1950s, I can appreciate the point.  During the summers Mom would remind us to be back in time for dinner.  Beyond that, we were on our own to roam the woods, bike the highways and byways, build club houses and raid those of our "enemies," and generally do as we pleased.  This freedom probably did make us more independent than our contemporary counterparts coming to our campuses today.

But I believe there are worse things than over-parenting.  And one of them is the opposite: under- (or none-) parenting.  The disintegration of the American family is a phenomenon all too prevalent today, especially in our poorest communities.  In West Philadelphia and neighboring Upper Darby, for example, it's not unusual to find one-parent families.  It's not rare to encounter families in which one or both parent(s) is/are or was/were incarcerated.  It's far from unknown that a grandparent is raising the children.

In such households, there is little time or inclination to socialize the toddlers for kindergarten.  Few little tikes get read to regularly.  Pre-kindergarten programs have disappeared.  These kids arrive in their school districts from ground-zero.  Many of them will never catch up with their more affluent, "over-parented" contemporaries.

And to my mind, this is the more significant problem we face as educators and concerned citizens.

One gadfly critic of higher education cautions that technology is a Trojan Horse poised to bring down higher education

Author, blogger and public intellectual Audrey Watters cautions that Silicon Valley is out to gut higher education as we know it.

She is neither alone nor unique in taking this stance.  Harvard Biz School's Clay Christensen  beat Watters to the punch with his application of disruptive-innovation theory to higher education several years ago.  Christensen argues that never before was there a core technology that enabled ease of entry into higher education, until along came online learning.  In all previous eras, you had to create a bricks-and-mortar campus in order to compete.  Now entry is easy.

So is technological change inevitable? And is it good or bad... and for whom?

Let's consider the example of the atomic bomb.  The bomb was developed by the U.S. during World War II for what I see as three reasons:

1.  We feared that the Nazis were building one.

2.  We wanted to win the war.

3.  And, quite imply, we had the brains, money and other resources to do it.

Dr. Edward Teller later successfully argued for the development of the hydrogen or "super" bomb, ostensibly because the USSR was doing so.  All this smacks of inevitability.

But, on the other hand, in the 70 years since WWII ended, no nation has ever used an atomic bomb on another nation.

This last fact suggests to me that we, as a species and as organized societies, are able reject technology that poses a great-enough (existential?) threat to our existence.

The problem I see is that we don't recognize the magnitude of this threat.  I firmly believe that technology is destroying far more jobs than it is creating.  But we blithely comfort ourselves that education will retool people to fill new jobs, that will appear to replace those being eliminated by what in effect is the relentless automation of human labor.

Now we are warned that technology is poised to gut the very institutions which are supposed to provide the education to create and fill all these prophesied new jobs.

So... If I'm right that technology is destroying more jobs than it's creating, what evidence is there in higher education? Well, for starters, we see that the 75:25 ratio of full-time, tenure-track to adjunct/contingent faculty of the 1970s has been reversed in the 21st century.  This is not unlike the shift from good-pay, good-benefits manufacturing jobs of the 1970s to low-pay, poor-benefits service jobs of today. In fact, the analogy seems to me to be rather compelling.

What did we get in return for the gutting of our manufacturing sector?  Cheaper goods from abroad.

What do we get for the "adjunctification" of our faculties?  Actually, so far, not cheaper education for the most part.  Somehow, it seems to me, we have gotten the worst of all worlds: cheap, part-time professors together with ever-increasing tuitions, especially at private colleges and universities.

 Of course, one could argue that college costs would be even higher, were it not for the proliferation of part-time teachers.   If so, that won't last long, as more and more adjunct faculty unionize and demand better pay and benefits.

However, students may realize real savings from the pressure on us "privates" to accept ever more transfer credits, life-experience credits, MOOC credits, etc. toward degrees.  Will this help or hurt four-year colleges?  That may depend upon whether we can make up in the volume of enrollments what we lose in duration of those student enrollments (from 4 to 1, 2 or 3 years)  in our institutions.  Just now that volume isn't there for most of us.

Can we, like feudal Japan, close our doors to these trends?  Or will the Admiral Perry's on the high tech seas of the Fifth Wave force us to open our doors ever wider to technological innovation at our own expense?

I think about this a lot and will have more to say in future posts.

Burlington College announces it will close next month

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education,  the college's president, wife of Senator Bernie Sanders, made a bad financial move when she had the school purchase property from the local Catholic archdiocese some six years ago.  In April of this year, the local bank yanked the college's line of credit, pushing it over the brink.

Mrs. Sanders's successor resigned suddenly in 2014 in the midst of student protests.  Main complaints against her seem to have revolved around mishandling of finances.

The New England Association of Schools and Colleges has placed the college on probation, making for a perfect storm.

The official college statement is as follows:

In recent years, Burlington College has struggled under the crushing weight of the debt incurred by the purchase of the Archdiocese property on North Avenue. Through sales of property, the College has worked to reduce this debt to a manageable level.
Since July 2014, the College has been on probation with its accrediting agency, The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) due to not meeting its financial resources standard. The Federal Department of Education allows a college only two years of probation. Hence, we anticipate notice from NEASC that we have not met the Commission’s financial standard, and, therefore, our accreditation will be lifted as of January 2017, and the College will not be able to award academic credit after this time.
These hurdles are insurmountable at this time.
On May 13, 2016, the Burlington College Board of Trustees voted unanimously to close the College’s programs effective May 27, 2016.
The higher education community has extended their support to the College and all of our current students will be able to continue their education at a neighboring college and graduate as scheduled. Newly deposited students for fall 2016 will also be welcomed by colleges within Vermont, of their choosing.

It is with a great sense of loss to the educational community that Burlington College’s progressive and unique educational model will no longer be available to students.



So what to make of this?  Is it the crest of the fifth wave breaking over private higher education?  Or merely a rare example of such blatant mismanagement and bad judgment as to be an aberration?  Or perhaps a bit of both?

Another interesting question: Will it impact Bernie Sanders's run for the presidency?  My answer to that one is that Bernie's wife could hardly be more of an embarrassment than Hilary's hubbie.  She'd really have to go some to top him.

Tuition discount rates are at an all-time high

According to a new report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the average discount for freshmen is just a tad below 50%.

Remarks Inside Higher Ed, "Tuition discount rates keep climbing to previously unseen levels at private colleges and universities, leaving institutions caught between the need to enroll highly price-conscious students and the squeeze discounting places on the amount of money they end up netting."

Despite trying to buy students with such deep discounts, private higher education has been experiencing enrollment declines.  Inside Higher Ed again: "At the same time, many private institutions have experienced declining enrollments. In the new report, 37.5 percent of institutions reported enrollments declined in both their freshman classes and across their entire undergraduate bodies from 2014 to 2015. More than half of institutions, 51.2 percent, reported a decrease in total undergraduate enrollment, and 53.5 percent said freshman enrollment dropped."

Questions looming on the immediate horizon:

1.  Is this level of tuition discounting sustainable?

2.  What can be done to halt and hopefully reverse enrollment decline?

3.  Will private universities need to cut tuition and fees up front?

In the longer term, the real question is whether private higher education is in for a big shake-out.  And if the answer is yes, then the next question each of us must ask is, how to we ensure that our private college or university survives this "rationalization" of the industry,

These are questions with which I am wrestling, like so many others at private non-profit schools.  In addition to my day job, a book contract with Peter Lang has me pondering these hard questions right now.  That's the main reason I started this blog.

The working title of my book is "Riding the Fifth Wave."  This was drawn from an article I published a number of years ago in University Planning and reproduced on this blog.

Trouble is, we all can articulate the problem.  Answers come a bit harder.  In the next few months I will be trying to work out some of these answers on this blog and in my book manuscript.  I hope you will follow along.

Angel or devil? White knight or black prince?

Charles Koch --- one of the famous brothers who perennially strive to impact national elections and spread their free-market philosophy --- has poured $50 million into George Mason University, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

According to the story, "While there is little question that George Mason owes a great deal to Mr. Koch’s generosity, there is considerable disagreement over whether the philanthropist’s donations lend him undue influence over the direction of the university or merely serve to enhance a few discrete academic programs that have long attracted scholars with a free-market orientation.
This long-festering dispute reached a tipping point earlier this spring, when George Mason announced that it would name its law school for Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice, in recognition of a $10-million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation and a $20-million donation from an anonymous benefactor."

This latter event resulted in 24 hours of hilarity in the blogosphere, as I noted in a previous post.

But should we really be concerned if Mr. Koch has undue influence at George Mason?  I think not.  The United States has thousands of institutions of higher learning.  Many are public and thus under the sway of governors, legislators and bureaucrats.  And many are private, and thus prey to the whims and whimsies of wealthy donors seeking immortality on the faces of buildings and stadia and even whole universities (witness Rowan University in South Jersey, changed from Glassboro State when zillionaire Hank Rowen dropped a hundred mill on the place).

And, no doubt, sometimes, these gazillionaires will want to influence the orientation of the research and pedagogy of the place.  So what?

I have argued in this blog that higher education --- especially private higher education --- needs to take the place of the news media in this nation, as the primary seeker and purveyor of truth, given that newspapers are a dying breed and TV has turned almost entirely to infotainment.

But if we are filling this void, let's recall that newspapers always have had their political and philosophical biases.  The Chicago Tribune has historically been a voice on the conservative side, especially during the years when Colonel Robert McCormick was at its helm.  The Hearst yellow journals of the last turn of the century played a significant role in precipitating the Spanish American War.

And that was OK, because there were many voices to be heard, many views to be considered by the citizenry.  And the same pertains to higher education.  It's entirely appropriate, even desirable, that some schools are oriented to particular religions, while others are aligned with the orientations of big shots such as Koch.  In the marketplace of ideas, many voices with varying viewpoints are the desired status quo.

So whether Mr. Koch seems to you or me to be a demon or a demigod makes little difference in the grand scheme.  All the Koch money didn't get Mr. Romney elected in 2012.  And all the bucks poured into George Mason U. will not do anything more than give the Brothers Koch a voice among many.  I imagine that is at times frustrating for them.  But I don't think it should concern us.

Back in my day, LBJ and Richard Nixon branded these activists "Outside Agitators"

As this story reports,  professional organizers are on college campuses to rally the troops for protests against sexual assault, racism, and other causes.

They are finding fertile fields to till.  Today's undergraduates are the most likely to hit the campus bricks in decades.

What are the hot issues, besides race and sexual assault?

1.  The fall national elections

2.  Insufficient federal aid to offset college costs

3.  LGBT rights

4.  In some instances, religious issues

5.  The still less than robust job market for recent grads

There's no war to protest at the moment.  But a Trump presidency could certainly change that.  'The Donald' says he will "Bomb the s*** out of ISIS."   The reality of warfare is that you don't get too far with bombing, unless you follow through with boots on the ground.  And so, we may yet see a new anti-war movement on our campuses in the next few years.

Ah, you say, but 'The Donald' can never get himself elected.  Well, let's recall that a year ago we were laughing at his candidacy.  Today, he will be making nice with the GOP establishment on Capital Hill, the very leaders of the party whom he has been denigrating for the past 18 months.  Bill Maher noted in his show last week that if Chris Christie, the esteemed governor of the state wherein I write this post, who was the first loser to kiss 'The Donald's' tushie, is selected as his running mate, it will be the team of "Trump and Plumb."  That's neither here nor there.  I just wanted to mention it.

Maher has the ability to capture the essence of almost anyone.  Here's what he said recently about Mr. Trump, the man himself.   Even if you are a Republican, you ought to find it funny.  But who will have the last laugh?

It will be ironic if college students actually help enable the Trump nightmare to become reality.  How?  By not voting for Hilary in silent protest of  the Dems' failure to nominate Bernie.  Just as that self-absorbed a**hole Nader sank Gore's bid for the White House, Bernie enthusiasts may help the GOP win the White House if they don't rally to Clinton's banner in the fall.

And that, of course, has always been the problem with student activism.  Typically, it is transitory, naive and impractical.  Hilary Clinton may not be the most likable lady on two legs.  And the fact that her Manhattan campaign headquarters is two blocks from Wall Street is a bit disturbing, albeit it's in the AFT headquarters building.  And unions themselves are only all too human.  But if students had any practical instincts they would be flocking to Hilary and organized labor --- as, admittedly many GAs, TAs, and even college athletes actually are doing.  That could result in sustained progress in the directions that the new breed of campus activists and their "outside agitators" presumably want.

Is the latest random-attack incident an argument in favor of "concealed carry" laws?

As has been widely reported, universities in Texas are struggling with the Lone Star State's new "concealed carry" law.  While public universities must permit concealed carrying of licensed pistols, except in residence halls, private colleges are permitted to opt out of the requirement.  Most major private universities in the state, such as Rice and SMU, have announced that they are exercising that option.  But is that the right decision?

Yesterday in Taunton, Massachusetts, a madman crashed his car into a house and stabbed the two women occupants, killing one.  He then proceeded to the local mall, where he stabbed four more people at random, killing one of them.  And then he was shot dead by an off-duty cop who was carrying a concealed weapon.

How many more would he have killed or maimed, had the police officer not been armed and trained to use his weapon?

I am not suggesting that licenses to carry concealed weapons be granted willy-nilly.  That has never been the case in Israel, where concealed-carry is a well-established public policy.  And it ought not to be the case in the United States.  But why not grant licenses to responsible adult citizens, who pass regular psychological evaluations and engage in regular firearms training?

I called the Massachusetts perp a madman.  But who is really mad here?  One definition of insanity is to keep trying the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.  That was the madness of the generals in WWI, who kept throwing millions of victims up against the other side's barbed wire and machine guns.  And I suggest that it may be equally mad to leave ourselves exposed and unprotected in the face of these recurring random attacks.

Is it perhaps time to try something different?  Texas legislators apparently thought so.  I am eager to see how their bold experiment works out in the next few years.

No hijabs at the Citadel

The South Carolina based military college will not allow an incoming freshman student to wear her hijab --- her Muslim head scarf --- with her uniform.  Uniformity is a hallmark of the school's program, says the commanding general.  Here's General Rosa's statement.

Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Abercrombie & Fitch, which refused to accommodate a job applicant's desire to wear her hijab to work.

However, the SCOTUS has generally ruled in favor of the U.S. military in religious-accommodation cases.  The leading case, Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), resulted in a 5-4 decision against the plaintiff's right to wear his yarmulke in lieu of his service cap.

Of course, the Citadel is not quite a branch of the U.S. military.  So whether or not Goldman v. Weinberger will control remains to be seen, if the decision of the President/Commanding General goes into federal court and eventually winds its way to the top bench in Washington.

The Citadel is described as one of six "Senior Military Colleges" in the U.S.  It is state supported and offers what is basically a ROTC program on steroids.  Whether this will be military enough to fit the institution under the Goldman umbrella awaits an answer, if the decision becomes a federal litigation.

North Carolina was sued yesterday by the U.S. Department of Justice over that sister state's new law restricting transgender folks from using bathrooms that don't match the sex on their birth certificates.

It will be interesting to see how the DOJ and the EEOC react to the Citadel decision.  Given the EEOC's win in the Abercrombie case, the Citadel might make a good new target to test how far that new precedent extends.  And any state containing the word "Carolina" may almost automatically be on the DOJ's sh** list.  On the other hand, suing the Citadel does feel a bit like Uncle Sam suing a part of himself.

10 May 2016

Citadel President Statement

An American Muslim student admitted to the Class of 2020 requested a religious accommodation to wear a head cover, called a hijab, with the standard uniform of the South Carolina Corps of Cadets. While we hope the student will enroll in the college this fall, the Commandant of Cadets, after considerable review, determined the uniform exception cannot be granted. Captain (Retired) Geno Paluso’s decision was made with my support and the support of The Citadel Board of Visitors.
As the Military College of South Carolina, The Citadel has relied upon a highly effective educational model requiring all cadets to adopt a common uniform. Uniformity is the cornerstone of this four-year leader development model. The standardization of cadets in apparel, overall appearance, actions and privileges is essential to the learning goals and objectives of the college. This process reflects an initial relinquishing of self during which cadets learn the value of teamwork to function as a single unit. Upon graduation, The Citadel’s graduates are prepared to enter a life committed to principled leadership in military service and civilian careers.
The Citadel recognizes the importance of a cadet’s spiritual and religious beliefs, providing services for specific needs whenever possible. For example, during the first week of school faith-based organizations on campus and from the community meet with freshmen cadets. Cadet religious officers arrange transportation to churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship for those without cars. Accommodations for prayer and dietary needs are common at the college.
The diversity of religions and cultural backgrounds represented in the Corps enriches the overall cadet experience and better prepares graduates to become principled leaders in all walks of life, underpinned by The Citadel’s core values of honor, duty and respect.
Lt Gen John Rosa, USAF (Ret)
Citadel President

- See more at: http://www.citadel.edu/root/citadel-president-statement-may-2016#sthash.WEhdxZ6i.dpuf

10 May 2016

Citadel President Statement

An American Muslim student admitted to the Class of 2020 requested a religious accommodation to wear a head cover, called a hijab, with the standard uniform of the South Carolina Corps of Cadets. While we hope the student will enroll in the college this fall, the Commandant of Cadets, after considerable review, determined the uniform exception cannot be granted. Captain (Retired) Geno Paluso’s decision was made with my support and the support of The Citadel Board of Visitors.
As the Military College of South Carolina, The Citadel has relied upon a highly effective educational model requiring all cadets to adopt a common uniform. Uniformity is the cornerstone of this four-year leader development model. The standardization of cadets in apparel, overall appearance, actions and privileges is essential to the learning goals and objectives of the college. This process reflects an initial relinquishing of self during which cadets learn the value of teamwork to function as a single unit. Upon graduation, The Citadel’s graduates are prepared to enter a life committed to principled leadership in military service and civilian careers.
The Citadel recognizes the importance of a cadet’s spiritual and religious beliefs, providing services for specific needs whenever possible. For example, during the first week of school faith-based organizations on campus and from the community meet with freshmen cadets. Cadet religious officers arrange transportation to churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship for those without cars. Accommodations for prayer and dietary needs are common at the college.
The diversity of religions and cultural backgrounds represented in the Corps enriches the overall cadet experience and better prepares graduates to become principled leaders in all walks of life, underpinned by The Citadel’s core values of honor, duty and respect.
Lt Gen John Rosa, USAF (Ret)
Citadel President

- See more at: http://www.citadel.edu/root/citadel-president-statement-may-2016#sthash.WEhdxZ6i.dpuf