Ad blocker detected: Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker on our website.
Western_101 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2019 2:18 am
Hey the Board of Trusties wanted to hire this "ethnic person" from a nondescript second tier university with his basic entity being HBCU.
Cool, let's create an HBCU school in Illinois. Apparently demographics to some degree support this.
Yeah but he was from a good HBCU like Howard. Oh, you mean it was Alabama A&M?
Well we had no other choices and no other good candidates at the time......
W101, you know I'm pretty tolerant about the stuff people post on the message board, but I'm not cool with racist crap, and that's what you're getting really close to here. I'm fine with people criticizing former President Thomas or the BOT for valid reasons...god knows there's plenty of valid reasons...but ethnicity/race is not one of them. And yes, saying that they only hired him because he's black...that's making it about race. He was a qualified candidate for the position, he was already familiar with the university (because he had been the provost for a while), and the board decided they wanted to go with someone they knew. You can disagree with that decision based on what he did while a provost or based on "hindsight" of how he handled things as president, but bringing race into it is a step too far.
This is a "line" for me, and I would highly recommend that nobody cross it.
Scott Lawson - Board Admin
Western Illinois University Alum/Fan/Employee
Member of the Marching Leathernecks - 1996-2000
Amen, ST! I hope most of the LN Crew read W101's post and cringed.
ST - You do a fantastic job moderating this board and I applaud you for speaking against comments that flirt with outright racism, as that post most certainly did.
And if you are by chance a parent or prospective student stopping by here, know that WIU and Macomb have a long history of diversity and tolerance. Do we need to continue to get better? Absolutely, and I think the community in particular is working hard at "catching up" with the University in these regards. But, all are welcomed and we NEED YOU to help build WIU and West-Central Illinois into the places we dream they can be.
Maybe the biggest factor is really just the same as it is in real estate business, i.e. location, location, location. The schools the furthest away from Chitown will suffer the most. SIU-E is the exception, but it has another major metropolis (St Louis) to pull students from. Graduate programs are always easy to fill in high population areas where you can draw in a big crowd for evening classes. Try getting a parking spot on the George Mason campus on the evening of basketball game. Unless you are a big donor, you are parking a long ways away from the arena cause all of the parking spots are taken by evening students. When I was at Western in the 70s, it seemed to me there were a lot more students coming from West Central illinois. The population in that area has not kept pace with what is going on up in the Chitown and the burbs.
Western_101 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 06, 2019 2:18 am
Hey the Board of Trusties wanted to hire this "ethnic person" from a nondescript second tier university with his basic entity being HBCU.
Cool, let's create an HBCU school in Illinois. Apparently demographics to some degree support this.
Yeah but he was from a good HBCU like Howard. Oh, you mean it was Alabama A&M?
Well we had no other choices and no other good candidates at the time......
W101, you know I'm pretty tolerant about the stuff people post on the message board, but I'm not cool with racist crap, and that's what you're getting really close to here. I'm fine with people criticizing former President Thomas or the BOT for valid reasons...god knows there's plenty of valid reasons...but ethnicity/race is not one of them. And yes, saying that they only hired him because he's black...that's making it about race. He was a qualified candidate for the position, he was already familiar with the university (because he had been the provost for a while), and the board decided they wanted to go with someone they knew. You can disagree with that decision based on what he did while a provost or based on "hindsight" of how he handled things as president, but bringing race into it is a step too far.
This is a "line" for me, and I would highly recommend that nobody cross it.
Understood. Point taken. Please accept my apologies. I am sorry for straying from civility and decency and the use of better judgement. You were in the right I was in the wrong.
Fall enrollment numbers for the three UI's, Northern Illinois, Chicago State, Northeastern Illinois, and Governors State should be coming out this week.