Who's Manning the Ship at CU?

The Ward Churchill incident is just the latest in the saga of mismanagement at the University of Colorado. As much as I despise Churchill and his beliefs, the root cause of the problem is that no one seems to be at the helm in Boulder.

According to Mike Rosen's article in the RMN this morning:

"The University of Colorado is a government enterprise. What happens there is a legitimate matter of public policy. CU has an elected board of regents accountable, first and foremost, to the citizens who put them in office. The administrators and faculty are employees, not owners. The school belongs to the people of this state."

As administrators who are accountable to the citizens that elected them, the regents have done a poor job of selecting professors to represent the university. Of course, I'm sure that they gave Churchill a job in order to increase the diversity of the campus. This is the lamest excuse for ever giving anyone a job (obviously not a fan of affirmative action).

I know that it may be difficult to research every professor that applies for a position at CU, but would any employer who is going to pay someone $92,000 not check references and past work experience? A professor's writings and speeches serve as his or her resume.

The attitude at CU seems to be reactive so as not to impose on anyone's opinions or beliefs. They react to underage drinking by restricting freshmen from going through rush. A few years ago, they were voted the nation's #1 party school. Wouldn't that have been the time to address the issue, instead of waiting for a student's death to drive the point home.

It takes a criminal investigation to prompt a clean-up of the football program. In this day and age of NCAA compliance and internal procedures to ensure institutional control, what was CU doing?

No one seems to have any idea what is going on in Boulder until it blows up into a national scandal. There is serial scandal going on there, and the single reason for it all has to be the leadership.

CU needs to clean house without regard to tenure or political correctness if it ever hopes to achieve a standing among the nation's elite universities.