Dr. Evans:
Our first piece of advice is for you to quit listening to your administration’s spin masters whose advice includes “stay low-profile for a month” and “we’ll run the commercials with you interacting with students.” Why? It’s false advertising because you have managed to frustrate the student body, the alumni, and your staff and faculty.
Instead, you need to do you.
Our second piece of advice is to contact former president Clyde Campbell so you can seek his wisdom. Make no mistake, a vote of “no confidence” was never recorded during his tenure, but he did deal with on-campus controversies that could have derailed his presidency. His decisions concerning one particular case, in fact, could have soiled his reputation beyond repair, but Clyde played everything the right way.
You, sir, have not.
Our third piece of advice is to meet with as many students as possible, apologize to them, and welcome all questions. Ask your professors for a time during their classes, make the sacrifices, and request forgiveness. Plagiarism was an “F-minus nightmare” when we were students on the hilltop and that was well before the invention of the internet and especially Google. We entrenched ourselves, instead, inside the Elbin Library and scoured the Dewey Decimal System for as many references we could find for the bibliography.
We all wish to be judged by the content of our character, President Evans, but if we forget to remind people who allowed us to identify with that specific wish, we cheat the inspiration in more ways than citation. Dr. King was one of the bravest men of our lifetime, but he was assassinated before smashing anything close to the glass ceiling you have at West Liberty.
What that means is that you have your own path to share and your own tales to tell. So, you do you and make it right so we can believe again.
“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Sincerely,
Your Hesitant Donors
