[ale] [OT] Merger of Southern Polytechnic State with Kennesaw State

[David Tomaschik]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Jonathan Meek <jonathan.l.meek at gmail.com>wrote:

> David,
>
> Thanks for the great points on budgeting and my mind has been trying to
> reconcile that one as well. I am a numbers guy at heart and have stood on
> the side of fiscal responsibility when it has come to things within SPSU.
> Personally, the more frustrating part is the fact that this was announced
> on Friday and the vote on the merger set to happen 11 days from the
> announcement. It appears that the SPSU staff/faculty has been not included
> in the decision to be made. At best, this is just a bad PR thing from
> University System of Georgia for not doing a good job of in timing the
> announcement. At worst, this comes across as a very heavy-headed move by
> the Chancellor of the Board of Regents where a bigger school with more need
> of resources is engulfing a smaller school without any considerations to
> people associated with the smaller school.
>
>
Yes, the process is being botched, either due to an effort to railroad the
SPSU community, or sheer incompetence.  (I suppose, if you believe in
"never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence",
you have to believe the latter.)


> For me, it would have been nice to be able to find the financial line-item
> records of both institutions and have someone in the Board of Regents
> explain the merger well in advance to the November 12th meeting.  As an
> SPSU alumnus, I shouldn't be finding out only a few days before the merger
> that the merger is set to be voted on and the administration of SPSU didn't
> find out until the day before the merger was publicly announced.
>  Transparency would have gone a long way in this whole thing but now I
> think the Board of Regents will be stuck doing some form of damage control
> given the amount of student/faculty/alumni outrage this seems to have
> generated.
>
>
I agree -- one would think state universities would have to make their
budgets available to students and taxpayers (among others) and they
probably do, but just make it impossible to find in a timely fashion.



-- 
David Tomaschik
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com
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