This story has me fuming. As a Lehigh alumnus, I’ve already lamented at length about the idiotic trend established by the past two presidents, namely wreaking havoc upon the engineering college in order to fund the Arts and Crafts, errrm, Sciences and Business schools. First, they changed the mascot from the “Engineers” to the “Mountain Hawks”. Seems no one told Gregory (C. Montgomery) Farrington or Peter “My one claim to national fame is that one of my nursing students shot up my new school” Likins that “Engineers” were train engineers, not slide-rule-wielding-dorks-about-town. It gave the school a bit of panache, IMNSHO, to have such a distinctive mascot, much like Purdue has the Boilermakers or Carnegie Mellon has the, ummm, Tartan.
But I digress.
Farrington screwed the engineering school by “reapportioning funds freed up” by an incredibly generous donation by an old Lehigh alumnus, P.C. Rossin. His continued meddling caused a great engineering dean to resign and the majority of the EE/CS department quit in a huff.
Here’s the irony of it all: the multiculti crap that they’ve screwed 130 years of engineering tradition for just plain sucks. The departments don’t have the recognition nor the reputation of their peers at the other “great” liberal arts colleges in the area, like Penn, Princeton, Haverford, etc. The philosophy and religion studies departments are filled with poseurs of the first order (wait, doesn’t that apply universally?). One of them maintains that he was the inspiration for DeLillo’s Jack Gladney, professor of Hilter Studies at the “University on the Hill”.
This is most decidedly not the way to get nationwide exposure, nor is it the way to continue to receive donations from alumni. Art exibits like the one mentioned in the above article just show how clueless the administration has become.
*sigh*
[UPDATE]
Here’s the art exhibit in question.
