Michael McKinney Retires As Arts & Sciences Dean

From an e-mail send to all Arts & Sciences Chairs, and forwarded to faculty.

After forty rewarding years as your colleague and friend, Department Chair and Dean of the College, I have decided to retire from the University, effective December 31, 2007. It has been my privilege to serve you and the University in these capacities. During my remaining months at the University I will continue to support your teaching and scholarly efforts. You have made the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences a stellar example of how to carry out, with excellence, the educational mission of the University.

Provost Madeline Wake will convene the Department Chairs and faculty of the College to discuss the search process for the next Dean of the College.

McKinney generally gets high marks from Arts & Sciences faculty. He seems to understand what academic excellence means.

We’ve seen that in recruitment efforts in Political Science, where he has gone out of his way to offer salaries, benefits, time off for research and so on to attract scholars whom we wanted to hire. And we have recruited excellent young scholars.

Nobody is perfect, and McKinny has made a few missteps.

The most visible one has been junking the traditional Arts & Sciences graduation ceremony and replacing it with a tedious and boring event.

And he has allowed something called a “Senior Experience” requirement in the Arts College. Sounding like a good idea, it ended up being an unfunded mandate imposed on departments, who responded by arbitrarily designating some courses “senior experience” courses. The courses so designated are perfectly fine courses, but they were perfectly fine courses before anybody came up with the notion of a “senior experience.”

Another source of discontent in the Political Science Department is the fact that the College of Professional Studies has been allowed to offer a course in American Politics under the number POSC 020. Arts & Sciences faculty have taken a dim view of Professional Studies, as Brian Collar correctly reports on GOP3.COM.

The Economics Department successfully rebelled when Professional Studies offered courses with the prefix “ECON” and got that banned. McKinney failed to take up the cudgels for Political Science. Faculty interpret that as his having to “pick his battles” and feeling that the power position of Professional Studies among higher level administrators is too strong.

The hiring of McKinney followed a national search for an Arts & Sciences Dean in 2000-2001. It involved interviewing three candidates from outside the University. McKinney, who was serving as Interim Dean at the time didn’t make the short list of candidates to be interviewed -- an outrageous blunder on the part of the selection committee. When all three outside candidates bombed (we Political Science faculty were instrumental in knocking off one of them, ironically an alum of our own department) the job went to McKinney.

Marquette lucked out big time on that. McKinney, with decades of service to Marquette, has been a vastly better dean than any of the outside candidates would have been, and better than Marquette had any right to expect, given the blundered selection process.

We now face that process again.

The pitfalls are clear. Will we hire an activist who wants to implement whatever academic fad is current? Will we hire some résumé builder who wants to spend a few years at Marquette before moving on to a higher paying and more powerful position elsewhere?

Will we hire somebody too committed to increasing revenue and reducing costs -- neither of which is something that a dean can ignore, but both of which are things that can be obsessed on to the long-run detriment of the institution.

Or will we hire another Michael McKinney?

Given the lack of vision and judgment in higher levels of the Marquette administration, one has to fear that our luck has run out.

Alumnus Chimes In: Arts & Sciences Graduation “Total Joke”

We have regularly blogged about the Arts & Science graduation ceremony.

In brief, a ceremony that was once brief, enjoyable and encouraged contact between faculty and students has been changed into a ponderous, tedious and boring exercise.

A recent post of ours brought the following e-mail from a former student.

Right on with the description of the A&S Graduation. As an ‘06 A&S Grad, I can say that the college graduation last year was a colossal waste of time. If they had handed out diplomas after the main graduation ceremony at the Bradley Center, and I had known what was happening at the Al that afternoon, I would have packed up my apartment early, headed home and just not come.

The faculty meet and greet would have been nice if there actually were faculty there. As you know I completed two majors (POSC and HIST) at MU and I only had 2 profs for multiple classes . . . and yet on Graduation day, I could only find Dr. Meissner from the History department at the Al [McGuire Center]. He was the only prof I saw that I had that had bothered to show up, and I suspect it might have been related to his daughter graduating at the same ceremony.

The “Meet and Greet” after the ceremony was a total joke, and I was on the road back to Chicago less than an hour after the ceremony concluded.

Lame Arts & Sciences Graduation Ceremony to Be Repeated in 2007

Back in May 2005, we posted about how Marquette’s College of Arts & Sciences had substituted a new-style graduation ceremony for the traditional one.

Our bottom line: lame. Really, really lame.

The traditional graduation ceremony didn’t take all afternoon, didn’t require everybody to listen to turgid speeches, didn’t require everybody to sit around while each and every Arts & Science graduate walked across a stage, and maximized faculty-student interaction.

The Arts & Sciences College repeated the fiasco in 2006, and will repeat it in 2007.

We talked to Sue Farrell in the Arts College, and she confirmed to us that “feedback from the faculty came back the way you said” (that is, highly negative).

But Ferrell insisted that student and parent feedback was much more positive. She said that they seemed to like the “pomp and circumstance.” Ferrell said that no systematic data has been collected, and that the college has gotten only “informal feedback.”

One of our former students wrote to us last year saying:

. . . I would like to know where I can find these parents who lobby for a second, never-ending ceremony [in addition to the one on Sunday morning], because I think my parents would like to smack some sense into these people.

Ferrell admits that the “meet and greet” after the ceremony needs to be “more effective.” In 2005, we could not even find the supposed “meet and greet.” In the traditional ceremony, one could not avoid meeting and greeting students and parents, which was splendid.

We frankly think the Arts College should gather some systematic data on this, rather than relying on a few (likely unrepresentative) people who happen to talk to Dean Michael McKenny.