errata west virginia university
The AP and sundry other media today reported that the West Virginia University president, Mike Garrison, resigned without leaving campus. Garrison, who looks like a middle lineman on the Mountaineers football team, plans to stick around until September.
He’s leaving then for the usual reason: the corruption of power. The West Virginia governor’s daughter had been claiming on her resume that she had an MBA. A little resume padding never hurt anyone. Nonetheless, for some reason, she decided she actually needed an MBA and needed to have a little transcript modification done at WVU to get the MBA (she’d apparently done some of the coursework but was a few credits short of the degree), which is where the dean of the business school and the provost entered the picture somehow. The details in the AP story are fuzzy.
The bare facts are that the daughter’s WVU transcript was modified by adding courses she’d never taken, courses that added up to enough credits to award her that MBA. The AP doesn’t say who pressured whom to have the daughter’s records fabricated, but the story does say that the faculty rebelled, the dean and provost are looking for new jobs, and, though Garrison and the governor were found to be innocent (or at least maintained deniability) in the whole matter by a committee that allegedly conducted an investigation, Garrison resigned anyway for the good of the university. The governor is still in office, and the AP didn’t say whether he had a heart-to-heart with his daughter or if she’d lost her corporate job.
Breaks our heart. Garrison, a young man only 39, cut down in the prime of life by phony grades. We agree with Mike Garrison’s supporters that there’s nothing wrong with a little cheating here and there, now and again, to grease the skids for budget support from the governor’s office. The WVU dean, the provost, and the president all made only one mistake—they got caught.
As a consequence, the WVU faculty lost a champion for a cause much greater than academic integrity—a raise. Garrison was advocating a big raise for the faculty and staff, which is what university presidents do (see “400/1 student/prof ratio” on this site). That and a daycare center. With all the other corruption on university campuses from coddled athletes to nepotism for trailing spouses to exploitation of part-time faculty to junk science, you’d think that awarding one little phony degree would not cause such an uproar.
