Levi Meyer

Is CMU a school or a business?

This week, the University chose to cut ties with English professor William Brown, an 11-year CMU professor with 31 total years in higher education. He spent 18 years as a professor at Fairfield University, and has an impressive list of published works to his name.

Despite his accomplishments and experience, Brown never earned a tenure-track position at CMU, teaching on a year-by-year basis.

Brown is an atypical professor by CMU’s standards – he is an eccentric, lecture-based teacher who uses his unmatched knowledge of literature and composition to stimulate the minds of students. He is a supporter of educational self-discovery, using interesting anecdotes and discussions to promote learning outside of the classroom. His intelligence and knowledge of his craft are unrivaled amongst professors at this school. He is more experienced, worldly and successful than any other professor in his department.

Now, he’s out of a job.

Unfortunately, Brown gets thrown under the bus because his teaching methods aren’t easily quantifiable. No Child Left Behind stresses that education must be “measurable,” and that’s exactly the approach Tim Foster and administration have taken. Students are spoon-fed tedious worksheets, tests and teacher evaluation forms in an attempt to prove that students are learning.

However, students don’t learn a damn thing.

The only thing Foster accomplishes by quantifying education is keeping the feds off his doorstep. As long as administration can uphold ridiculous educational “standards,” the school’s doors will stay open. It’s more profit for Foster, and more profit for the university.

It’s an easy system to cheat. I can sleep through class to earn my attendance grade, turn in multiple-choice worksheets, take the tests, and forget all of it two weeks into summer break. If I repeat the process for another three years, they’ll give me a degree – and I won’t learn anything.

With a professor like Brown, learning is about engaging the mind and discovering new ways to improve reading and writing. Rather than spending hours trying to highlight the technical aspects of formatting an MLA-style paper, Brown directs students to form original ideas through analysis and reflection.

In a normal CMU class, I learn how to double-space a paper. In Brown’s class, I learn how to put my thoughts to paper. He makes students smarter, not better attuned to margins and text size – and somehow, he’s getting canned anyway.

Brown’s termination shows that Foster and his staff are out of touch. It’s a move that is disrespectful to Brown and detrimental to the school. If administration cared about higher learning more than money, they would keep a professor who serves as a breath of fresh air at a suffocating educational institution.

Foster chooses to run CMU as a business rather than an institution of higher learning, and the students are worse off because of it. Dollars and cents trump scholarship at this school. It’s a corporatized leadership style that plagues many universities.

We are no longer students – we are walking checkbooks that put cash into the university’s pocket by paying for thoughtless education and terrible Sodexo food. If those who run this institution are willing to part with an inspiring educator in order to save a few bucks, they need to get their priorities in order.