Lies, changes, and reactions: Consolidation opinions continue

Con­sol­i­da­tion, con­sol­i­da­tion, CONSOLIDATION! It seems as if the mad­ness has not ceased since stu­dents, fac­ulty, and staff found that our col­lege would com­bine with North Geor­gia Col­lege and State Uni­ver­sity to become one school.

Hank Huck­aby, chan­cel­lor of the Uni­ver­sity Sys­tem of Geor­gia, thinks this will reduce admin­is­tra­tive costs at insti­tu­tions and help the uni­ver­sity sys­tem recover the esti­mated $1 bil­lion in state fund­ing that the state has taken away since 2008.

Along with our insti­tu­tion, six oth­ers will be under­go­ing this new change. Schools like Way­cross Col­lege will com­bine with South Geor­gia Col­lege, Augusta State Uni­ver­sity with Geor­gia Health Sci­ences Uni­ver­sity, and Mid­dle Geor­gia Col­lege with Macon State College.

Since its offi­cial announce­ment, con­sol­i­da­tion has become one of the most talked-about sub­jects around cam­pus, mostly because we have no answers.

This con­sol­i­da­tion has been one of the worst deci­sions that the USG could have ever made, aside from the cre­ation of Geor­gia Gwin­nett Col­lege. I find it inter­est­ing how the sys­tem is des­per­ate to save money now, yet the con­struc­tion of GGC just a few years ago (and just a few miles away from us) cost tens of mil­lions of dol­lars, and sur­prise, sur­prise, they won’t be affected by the changes. Talk about equality.

Then there’s the prob­lem of cred­i­bil­ity. Early in fall semes­ter, I was in charge of cov­er­ing the retire­ment of GSC Pres­i­dent Martha Nes­bitt. In the inter­view, she talked about the process for select­ing can­di­dates to replace her. GSC was sup­posed to have a com­mit­tee of stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff to inter­view the can­di­dates when they came to campus.

A few weeks later, Chan­cel­lor Huck­aby came here to ded­i­cate Aca­d­e­mic 4. Accord­ing to doc­u­ments the Board of Regents released to Mor­ris News Ser­vice, Huck­aby prob­a­bly knew about the upcom­ing con­sol­i­da­tion when he was here, yet he dis­cussed the search com­mit­tee to replace Dr. Nes­bitt as if it were going to hap­pen, never giv­ing a hint about what lay in our future.

One thing that I will never under­stand is how he could sit down with stu­dent lead­ers as he did on that visit and assure them that the search process for a new pres­i­dent was mov­ing along.

Only weeks later we at GSC would find out through an Atlanta TV sta­tion that there was to be no search for a new president.

I have no objec­tion to the idea that change is good, but when it comes to sit­u­a­tions of this mag­ni­tude, then I have a problem.

Lead­ers like Huck­aby lead us to ques­tion the cred­i­bil­ity of all our leaders.

What both­ers me is not so much that he thinks that this change will be some­thing that will bet­ter the sys­tem or that merg­ing col­leges will offer greater oppor­tu­ni­ties for stu­dents. It’s more the fact that six months is not enough for a recently selected indi­vid­ual to be in the chan­cel­lor posi­tion and make such an intense and rather impul­sive deci­sion as this one.

Yes, maybe he was try­ing to do some­thing good, but why not take the time to get to know the real essence of each insti­tu­tion? Why not take the time to con­sider the needs of the stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff that make up each institution?

And why not take the time to do a care­ful cost-benefit analy­sis? It’s not even clear that the con­sol­i­da­tions will save money. Accord­ing to the doc­u­ments the BOR released, they didn’t exam­ine the ben­e­fits and cost sav­ings. They didn’t even con­sider con­sol­i­dat­ing other schools. They sim­ply looked at a lit­tle infor­ma­tion from the eight schools they had already picked.

The Mor­ris News Ser­vice story quoted Exec­u­tive Vice Chan­cel­lor Steve Wrigley, who was in charge rec­om­mend­ing the schools to con­sol­i­date, that no one on his staff had both­ered to take a close look at any finan­cial infor­ma­tion about the schools to see if con­sol­i­da­tion made sense.

These are big changes for both GSC and NGCSU. All of these changes could result in the extinc­tion of the indi­vid­ual per­son­al­ity, spirit and value of each school.

And now there’s noth­ing left for us to do other than to adapt to the changes, while the youngest insti­tu­tion in the Uni­ver­sity Sys­tem of Geor­gia remains untouched.