Administrators and other cruel jokes

As an SGA senator in the Spring of 2006, I had the chance to meet two professional consultants hired for the new presidential search. Needless to say, it seems they knew very little about NEIU except that it is located in Chicago. One would expect that a highly qualified and paid consultant, who is herself a Hispanic woman, would already know that NEIU was federally designated Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI).

One would assume that these consultants, with extensive experience in institutions of higher learning, were aware of the teachers strike in the fall of 2004. Surely they must have known that NEIU faculty are already some of the lowest paid of all state universities in Illinois.

At the time of the teachers strike, university president Salme Steinberg earned a salary of $210,000, along with a housing allowance and two cars. In the aftermath of the strike and as a gesture of good will, she declined a raise in her salary. Predictably, however, she later accepted a significant increase in salary to makeup for lost time.

Against this backdrop, it is little wonder few of us manage to receive that hard-earned college degree. The never-ending ineptitude of NEIU administration is apparent with its so-called Free Speech Task Force, which was created in part to address the presence of a homophobic hate group on campus.

As a member of the GLBTA club, I saw the group Heterosexuals Organized for a Moral Environment (H.O.M.E.) bring their anti-gay message to NEIU. Vice President of Student Activities Melvin Terrell is the same person who "forgot" about a moratorium against H.O.M.E. Without question, administrator heads would roll if it allowed a white supremacist group on campus; and no, I'm not talking about the College Republicans.

Ultimately, however, it is in the administration's own self-interest to maintain the status quo and to silence those who dare rock the boat. Also, it would be disingenuous to assume that the only three people in the entire school care about free speech on campus were the ones who showed up at the last task force open forum. The problem is that such information needs to be more readily available so that students have a better chance to know about these issues.

When former SGA president Evelyn Nazario-Rose said that students should take responsibility for shared governance, she certainly did not apply this principle to her own administration. For example, Nazario-Rose appointed herself a member of the student presidential advising committee, a move Mussolini himself would have admired.

It is standard protocol that when the CEO of a company fails, he or she has the dignity to resign and give someone else the opportunity to do a better job. For NEIU, perhaps that time has come.