Right now, at the end of President Rodney Smolla’s brief tenure and during a period of transition for the university, we are in a unique position to reflect on who we are as a university and who we want to be. Now is the opportune time to reflect on the recent past and the future of Furman University and to evaluate what policies and practices are worth maintaining.
When Smolla began his duties at the beginning of the 2010 school year, the university faced a number of unique and unprecedented challenges, many stemming from the ongoing recession and the regressive state of higher education. Smolla and the university administration began to put in place a number of policies aimed at addressing problems like the increasing cost of tuition, the decreasing number of applications and the difficulties related to applying the principles of liberal education to an ever-changing and uncertain world.
As one would expect, some of these policies were more effective than others. By increasing international admissions and supplementing the already expansive study abroad program, Smolla’s administrationworked to bring a new group of talented students to campus while working to better connect Furman to the outside world. The renovation of the Trone Center, Football Stadium, and Dinning Hall parking lot improved facilities at Furman that will receive extensive use in the next decades.
Less successful were the administration’s attempts to reduce the amount of financial aid provided to students and increase the size of individual classes, causing tension between the university administration and the university faculty.
Most importantly, however, Smolla’s greatest accomplishment also highlights one of the largest and most pervasive problems Furman faces today. Smolla accentuated the need for elevated civil discourse, a hope undermined at Furman by a lack of transparency and clarity regarding university policy. The idea that open dialogue and constructive debate is the best way to generate solutions to problems is consistent with a liberal education — the cultivation of creative, critical thinkers open to the merits of different perspectives — and is antithetical to an institutional culture that privatizes information and policy, a culture all too prevalent at Furman.
The housing debacle of the spring semester embodies this self-inflicted dilemma of transparency and an absence of civil discourse. Faced with the need to better manage university resources, uncertainties about the size of the incoming freshman class and a large rising junior class, Housing and Residence Life attempted the apply two solutions. First, Housing no longer allowed students studying abroad to reserve rooms, and when this policy was rescinded due to backlash from students, Housing proceeded to place a number of rising juniors in the dormitories and a number of rising sophomores on the waitlist for living spaces.
This second policy allowed Housing the flexibility to better assign living spaces once Admissions confirmed the size of the incoming freshman class, but this policy left many students feeling as though they had no recourse or choice in selecting their housing. A manageable institutional problem — irregularities in enrollment that lead to uncertainty in how to best allocate student housing — was compounded by a failure of the administration to communicate the reality of the situation to the student body and the inability of students to communicate their misgivings until after the policy had been put in place.
How might the situation have played out with civil discourse as a guiding principle? First and foremost, the administration would inform the student body of the situation before implementing policies that directly affect the student body and offer forums and spaces for discussion before the implementation of policy, not after. By integrating students into the institutional decision-making process, this approach would require students to take responsibility for the problem and recognize the need for sacrifices, instead of simply looking for ways to preserve their own individual interests, and would optimally allow for a solution that solves the problem but does not unduly disadvantage any one group. A full integration of the student body, faculty, and administration in the decision-making process through the use of open forums would allow every interest and perspective to be represented and ultimately result in the best solutions to the problems we as a university face.
Smolla’s greatest legacy at Furman will be his advocacy for civil discourse, paving the way for the trust and openness that such a commitment requires. Our responsibility as students, faculty, administrators, and alumni is to live out this goal. We all have different and often competing visions of what Furman university should be. A commitment to civil discourse should not diminish these differences. Instead, civil discourse and the trust and transparency it entails remains the best way to address differences of perspective and make those collective visions a reality.