It may not be as bad as inmates running the asylum, but students running the college is a bad idea, too. Both situations represent an inversion of the proper order, with the responsibility for supervision wrested from the rightful guardians and transferred to parties who need guidance and are utterly unqualified by training or experience to exercise authority.
What could go wrong, if not everything? If students were empowered to make critical decisions about how a college is run, how long would it be before they removed all the incentives for industry and all the penalties for slacking? Tuition would be free, dormitory rooms would be free, beer and pizza would be free and plentiful, class attendance would be optional, testing would be prohibited, everyone would get A-pluses for every class no matter how they performed, and the whole campus would be one giant “safe space” where no one ever learns how to deal with the real world after graduation.
Only a Democratic state legislator could consider such a recipe for disaster a good idea.
Two days before Halloween, State Rep. Monica Bristow (D-Alton) filed House Bill 3944 to give an official vote to the student representative who serves on the board of trustees at Lewis & Clark Community College, whose adult members recently voted not to extend the contract of its lavishly compensated, longtime president, Dale Chapman.
Chapman received nearly $2 million in lump-sum pension benefits when he “retired” from the presidency of the college in 2010, only to be rehired to the same position two months later. He currently enjoys an annual salary of $337,000, expense accounts totaling $43,200, and more than $120,000 a year in annual benefits.
Chapman’s amply compensated wife is vice president of the college, his son an employee of a consulting firm with a $500,000-per-year, no-bid contract with the college.
The current student trustee voted in favor of renewing Chapman’s contract, but her vote didn’t count because she’s only an honorary member of the board. Maybe that’s the way it should be.