My alma mater, Lehigh University, has been creeping away from its engineering roots for years, thanks largely to the efforts of C. Montgomery BurnsGregory Farrington, the evilformer University president. Apparently, Lehigh’s board of trustees has named a successor:
Alice P. Gast, a world-renowned researcher with a passion for teaching, has been named Lehigh University’s 13th president.
Gast has served as vice president for research and associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for almost five years. She will succeed Gregory C. Farrington, who announced last fall that he would conclude his eight-year term at Lehigh’s helm in June.
A researcher… from MIT? Is it too much for me to hope that this selection is the board’s way of trying to reverse Farrington’s idiotic policies, designed to keep Club RauchRauch Business School afloat sheerly at the expense of the P.C. Rossin School of Engineering?
I might reconsider my non-recommendation of LU to my little brother if that ends up being the case.
Farrington was continuing the track set forth by his predecessor. Not that it’s any excuse, but he was from UP, Wharton no less. He wouldn’t know what do to with an school of engineering if it had it’s own endowment fund. Likens was/is the one who should shoulder most of the blame, and the board has to get kicked in the shins too.
Just think – Lehigh Engineering is STILL top 40 in the US, and that is with no support from above. Ms. Gast need only cast a few glances down the hill (or upward for those strange ChemE’s) to break top 20…