Garrison should step down from WVU post
POSTED: May 7, 2008
WVU President Mike Garrison is right when he says there’s a lot of work left to do at the university.
It’s just that he’s not the guy to do it.
The university’s Faculty Senate issued a no-confidence vote in Garrison on Monday evening, demanding he step down or that the university’s Board of Governors require him to resign in the wake of a scandal involving the conferring of a master’s of business administration degree on Gov. Joe Manchin’s daughter, Heather Bresch, which she did not earn.
Garrison contends his record at the university shows improvements and growth.
And while the numbers are on his side, a university’s reputation is more than just numbers.
University Provost Gerald Lang and business school dean R. Stephen Sears have already resigned in the wake of the Bresch scandal, which involved doctoring records to retroactively award her an MBA. That degree has led her to an executive career with Pittsburgh-based Mylan Inc.
If Garrison had the most stellar numbers on his side of any college chief executive in the nation, if the donor money was flowing at record levels, students were excelling in all phases of life and the football team managed to win a national championship, WVU still would have an asterisk after its name. It would be the place that allows governor’s daughters to earn degrees without completing coursework, while all the “regular” students from “regular” families struggle to pay for higher education, struggle to work their way through school and to keep their coursework up to date and on time so they may someday earn a degree that leads to a good job.
Garrison has culpable deniability, that wonderful phrase from the Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair on his side. Reports so far show he wasn’t directly sitting in on meetings where it was decided to fake Bresch’s records, though his aides were.
A university has to stand for academic excellence, not political expedience or the ability to stay “connected” to donors and governors.
To leave a president in office when such a scandal against academics has taken place is to offer the public an image that WVU is about something other than academics. That would be a true slap at those over the decades who worked hard, who learned, who made good livings and led good lives because of the lessons taught in WVU labs and classrooms.
It’s time for President Garrison to go.
