the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Pomp and circumstance

(May 17, 2007)  Congratulations to Humboldt State University’s Class of 2007! Under soggy skies, about 2,500 of our best and brightest paraded the hell out of here on Saturday — perhaps not a moment too soon.

Things are none too sunny for those who remain behind, as is well known. A couple of weeks ago, at a meeting of the Academic Senate, the most hopeful thing that University Provost Rick Vrem could think to say was that Humboldt State was at its lowest point. This from a man known for his collegial good cheer — the message that considering how bad things are, they can only get better.

We’ve always been suspicious of the tendency to lay this sorry state of affairs squarely at the feet of HSU President Rollin Richmond. It seems to us that Richmond, in his five years at the helm of HSU, has taken a bad hand and played it remarkably well. He inherited a university that had languished for 30 years, at least if measured strictly by the number of students served. It was still recovering from the John Sterns scandal, in which a mendacious administrator was discovered to have been cooking the books on a shocking scale. He walked in to the deepest state budget crisis in history, a crisis that had inevitable repercussions on the state university system.

Now, through no fault of Richmond’s that we can find, the university is at a financial nadir. Naturally things must change. Class sizes must increase and programs must be pared back or eliminated. These things are painful. But Richmond’s long-term plan to right the ship has always seemed sound. In a word, he wants to market the university better to California’s growing population of college-aged students, to show them the many unique things that HSU has to offer — an ethos, as well as particular courses of study. Apparently it is working. More students will come next year than came the year before, and more came that year than the year before that.

But Richmond is certainly feeling the heat. The refreshing candor that once marked his administration is long gone. It’s all but impossible to get either him or other top administrators to talk about university policy, or budget decisions. All of which is a long way of noting that Richmond signed a five-year contract when he was hired in 2002, and it’s now 2007. Will he stay or will he go?

Despite all the turmoil at the university, academic life plods on as per usual. Or perhaps less ploddingly than is usual in other places. Humboldt State is a bit different from other universities, given the outsized role we ask it to play in our small community. Local governments, local businesses, local nonprofit organizations call upon the faculty to provide their expertise in all sorts of matters, and the faculty usually responds. This was the case even before President Richmond changed the rules of faculty promotion to mandate that the professoriat play an active role in their fields.

Case in point: Our very own Marcy Burstiner, whose investigative reporting class this week gives North Coast Journal readers a little slice o’ life story about working class people in Fortuna and Arcata. When we first approached Burstiner with the idea of critiquing the local news scene — what was to become our “Media Maven” column — she whined and grumbled at the meager wages on offer. And so she has whined and grumbled every month since. But she has soldiered on nevertheless, and we are grateful. We do not know what role Richmond’s directive has played in her thinking, and we do not want to know.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE