Nearly two years after Loyola’s administration announced the Pathways Plan, a controversial guide to restructuring Loyola after Hurricane Katrina, many people are still upset about it and are venting their frustrations in the blogosphere.
Pathways raised a furor on campus after it dissolved and reorganized many of Loyola’s major, and resulted in the firing of 17 tenure and tenure-track faculty.
“I can honestly say that I’ve never blogged in my entire life, until this was created. I didn’t post at first, I just observed,” said Lynn Koplitz, chemistry professor and president of Loyola’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the organization that censured Loyola in the spring.
One popular anti-Pathways Web site is http://www.loyno.info. The site was created, according to its mission statement, “To provide truthful information about the ‘Pathways’ plan as well as to present faculty, staff, student and alumni reaction to it.”
Koplitz said she knows the alumnus who created the site, but would not reveal the name, citing privacy concerns. She said the creator updates the site regularly, including a detailed timeline of university actions from the day after Hurricane Katrina to the present, and moderates the blog on the site.
“The blog moderator has reported a usual amount of traffic at hundreds of hits per day. One hundred is a slow day and a really busy day is around 800 hits,” Koplitz said.
The Rev. Kevin Wildes, S.J., university president, said he is aware of the Web site and blog, but has not looked at it since he first heard about it.
“I don’t find it constructive,” said Wildes. “We, the city, we’ve all got significant challenges to face and I don’t find anonymous postings useful – there’s no dialogue.”
Faculty members, including Koplitz and Stephen Scariano, mathematics professor, say they have exhausted other forms of dialogue with Wildes and Walter Harris, provost and vice president for academic affairs, with little success.
“I couldn’t say the blog is a solution, it’s a way to communicate which is not available on campus,” Koplitz said. “In the College of Humanities and Natural Sciences we have the college assembly made up of all the faculty members in the college and we meet once a month. There isn’t a university-wide faculty meeting.”
Scariano said he commented on the blog as a faculty member and alumnus to express his frustrations about what was going on. He wrote, “Kevin Wildes and Walter Harris have handicapped Loyola administratively, diminished Loyola academically and impoverished Loyola spiritually.”
“Some people go on there and vent and I don’t have a problem with that. Many people come on with some data or they point to places where faculty can go look. Is it more than that? I don’t think so. Is it read by administrators? I don’t know,” Scariano said.
Both Wildes and Harris say they do not read the blog regularly and say their focus is on moving the university forward in a positive direction. Wildes said good communication and dialogue with faculty is an important aspect of moving forward.
“If the dialogue is about going back then I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. If the dialogue is about going forward then I’m always interested in that. I spend a lot of time listening to faculty both formally and informally,” Wildes said.
Harris said the blog gives people the opportunity to express themselves; however, some of the criticisms sound more like attacks.
“I’ve also been told that sometimes there have been awful attacks there and vitriolic attacks on people. I don’t think that’s helpful and I think some of the same people who write some of that stuff would be the same people who say they love the university while at they same time creating this very negative view of the university,” Harris said.
Wildes said he has done and will continue to do a lot of listening, but “I think sometimes people confused being listened to as doing what they suggest. There’s a lot of things I’ve listened to that I haven’t done.”
Recently at the bottom of an e-mail to faculty from Wildes, he addressed the blog, writing that many have asked him why he doesn’t block it from Loyola’s server.
“I would be hard pressed to do that … Universities are about argument and free speech. Just because somebody has written something I don’t like, I’m not going to stop it,” Wildes said.
In response to the e-mail, Scariano said, “What arrogance is it that leads one to believe that he could stop a blog? Not that he wants to stop it, but the way he wrote it was as if he could take some action against it.”
Wildes acknowledges some faculty fear more program cuts and use the blog to express those fears.
“We need to grow ourselves out of where we are. Could you in theory cut more? Yes. But the amount you would have to cut to get what we would need to get would so significantly damage the university that I would not want to do that,” he said.
Jordan Hultine can be reached at [email protected].
