More Than Meets The Eye
Watson was on his way to a life of retirement after leaving the City Colleges of Chicago as its long-time chancellor when the CSU Presidency came about. Friends and community and business leaders urged him to apply, recognizing his educational record and knowing the reality of the trend at CSU.The trend is that the school was being postured for a takeover by another state school, or a land grab, and it may not have continued to serve the African-American community as it has.The student population of Chicago state is an older working student who typically has a family and who might be the first in his/her family to graduate.The typical student may not go to school continuously but may come and go for a semester or a year due to family and/or work challenges that are usually financially based.The reality of Watson's CSU tenure is that the morale on campus has moved from negative to positive, and freshman student enrollment has increased.The rates of retention and graduation have increased. Faculty and administration have been right sized. Incompetence has not been tolerated.The worse misconception of the audit report states that students were not being billed for tuition during the spring semester.Actually, the billing process was undergoing a transformation of notification from paper to electronic and the actual collection of tuition and fees increased.Some of the audit findings were found from internal self discovery and brought to the attention of the state auditors by Chicago State University staff itself and corrective actions were in progress, prior to the state audit.Watson's administration gave incoming freshmen iPads, providing students with the capacity to download books rather than hard copies.CSU graduates nearly 20 percent of African-American students attending a public university in the state. The federal government has cut Pell grants and in these hard times, Chicago State University students will be hit hard by the Pell grant cuts.State legislators have called for a hearing resulting from the Tribune story. I hope they also call for one for the University of Illinois and their audit findings, which were more than Chicago State's.Indeed, we need accountability and responsibility in state funding, but the context and accuracy of the findings should be fair and honest and then let the chips fall where they may.
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