Lack of transparency compounds Western’s problems

These are difficult days for higher education.

The Trump administration wages war on elite universities and takes the economically reckless stance of restricting international students. When budgets get tight, state governments fail to support public colleges and universities. As costs rise, families re-evaluate the value of a college degree. Facing a “demographic cliff,” institutions compete for a limited pool of future students.

The dignified cocoon of the ivory tower has turned into a demoralized meat-grinder. If you’re in an industry where fewer people want to pay for what you’ve got to sell (and the news industry knows a thing or two about that), then you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Short of a time machine that takes us back to headier days for higher education, it becomes necessary to re-assess, re-invent and become more responsive to what students want and the economy needs. To its credit, Missouri Western State University has done that.

It also becomes necessary to avoid self-inflicted injuries. To its detriment, Western has failed to do that.

The latest example comes from the short-lived decision to cut the university’s track and field program. Western announced the program’s re-instatement about 10 days later. This abrupt reversal came as a relief, but the whole experience isn’t exactly a confidence-builder in the university and its process for making decisions.

The bigger unforced error came in 2022, when the university sent an ill-advised email that ordered Missouri Western recruiters to stop conducting visits at 23 urban and inner-suburban schools in Kansas City and St. Louis.

This decision, too, was short-lived. The Kansas City Beacon reports that the order was issued in 2022 and rescinded less than a year later, in 2023. Missouri Western has resumed recruitment efforts with the institutions in question – including Kansas City and Hickman Mills schools – but the university’s lack of transparency isn’t sitting well with inner-city lawmakers who wonder why an open-enrollment institution would pursue a policy so in conflict with its mission.

The rest of us wonder about the advisability of alienating the two constituencies that Western needs to survive: future students and lawmakers who make funding decisions.

The University’s Board of Governors has taken a “nothing-to-see-here” approach, which has the effect of pouring gas on the fire. State Rep. Kem Smith, D-Florissant, issued a statement calling for the release of information on who ordered the email and why.

The university will always have its critics. But it has supporters, too, people who value higher education and see the university as an essential element of the city’s future. Sadly, it’s those supporters who are feeling shellshocked by some of the university’s recent decisions and the board’s tendency to deflect.