"LQC": Lipstick on a pig

Victoria Valle is the assistant vice Chancellor for enrollment management. I know you were thinking that Victoria Valle is a city in Colombia. And you would be right. But OUR Victoria Valle is a bureaucrat at SIUC, or "Southern" as she hopes to "brand" it.

Ms. Valle began feathering her nest down here in Carbondale last year after having been a short term "enrollment manager" at the San Francisco Art Institute. She also spent time at SIUE, Mudelein College in Chicago, Penn State, UC- San Diego, Spelman College in Atlanta, Loyola University - Chicago, Elmhurst College, and Cal State Sacramento. According to our count thats 10 institutions. One thing about the management geniuses at SIUC, when you find someone like Victoria Valle who has made more pit stops than Kyle Busch, then you just gotta get her on your team.

So our peripatetic Ms. Valle has been studying the enrollment issues. She's got big ideas. For instance, she was quoted in the DE saying that she wanted this place to be called "Southern". "We feel that 'SIUC' kind of puts us in a place we don't want to be". And she has another groundbreaking idea: a full colored brochure extolling the wonders of "Southern".

Ms. Valle, this is called putting lipstick on a pig.

The news you may have missed is that the decline in enrollment happened among students FROM Southern Illinois. In other words the people that already know us. Maybe no one told you but here are some more factors in the enrollment decline that your brochures won't help.

(A) 6 acting/itinerate/interim/fired Chancellors since 1999.

(B) A plagiarism scandal that swooped back and forth between SIUC and SIUE before ensnaring the President of SIU, Glenn Poshard. You probably didn't see it, but the Chicago Tribune (which may be read by potential students and their parents) called for the resignation of President Poshard. Luckily we have expert faculty like Peggy Stockdale, a psychologist and Faculty Senate President, who investigated and came up with the felicitous phrase, "inadvertent plagiarism". We understand that Dr. Stockdale is now listed as an expert on sexual harassment and is advising on the new guidelines. No doubt there will some more English language barriers broken. But I
digress...

(C) A bizarre Marxist Dean of the College of Mass Communications, Manjunath Pendakur, who drove off some of the best journalism faculty in the University and replaced them with lunatic deconstructionist/jargonist "theoreticians". Aside from a revolt by alumni who withdrew millions of dollars in donations, the entire network of SIUC journalism was enraged by the actions of this Dean. Which means fewer recommendations to students to attend SIUC.

(D) Most recently there has been the issue of John Simon and Cal Meyers, long time faculty who were driven off campus by the sexual harassment secret police. That has led to the US Grant Association taking its archives elsewhere, many lawsuits, and non-stop, inane comments by the interim Chancellor Sam Goldman. Just today Goldman said that Simon was not fired, even though he received a notice of termination from the university. Goldman's analogy? "You know the line, until the fat lady sings nothing happens". What in God's name goes through Goldman's mind before it passes his lips?.

So you've got a terrific environment to pursue your work at your six figure salary - you can put out all the full colored brochures you want - and the rest of the university will be driving students away. You may have found lifetime employment after all.

LQC