Alma Matters

I am in my third decade of employment at Missouri State University. It is not my alma mater, but it matters greatly to me. Hence this blog.

Dr. Marshall (no middle initial) Gordon, who was the president when I arrived here, is best known today for financing almost all of the Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts and for putting the second deck on the football field now known as Plaster Stadium. Which of the two he considered more important is clear from his famous statement that "potential donors never ask how your chemistry department is doing." Dr. Gordon was not what you would call a particularly "accountable" leader. What Dr. Gordon did, and why he did it, and the outcomes of what he did... was nobody's business but his. Not mine, not yours, not even the Board of Regents'. The Board eventually got wise to his modus operandi, but even so the process of flunking Dr. Gordon took time, and money, and more under-the-table machinations.

From February 1992 to June 1993, Dr. Russell Keeling served the University as "Chief Executive Officer." Although Dr. Keeling was rightly regarded as one of the biggest old boys on campus, he also enjoyed a justly deserved reputation for personal probity. I personally knew Dr. Keeling would never be ready for prime time when he selected, as his three top assistants, one colleague from the Communications Department and two of his former graduate students. His choices showed more concerned for his personal comfort level than for the advancement of the University; he was allowed to be a finalist for the permanent Presidency but it was well known that the Board was looking elsewhere. It would be churlish to say Dr. Keeling flunked, when in fact he served the University very creditably under exceedingly difficult circumstances. On the other hand, it would be difficult to contend that he passed, either.

Dr. John H. Keiser became President in 1993 with a mandate to clean house. Heralded as a "what you see is what you get" type of leader, he pretty much lived up to his billing. From the beginning he was very clear about what he wanted to accomplish, and how he planned to accomplish it. To this end, his administration developed and disseminated the first of three highly detailed Five-Year Plans. The University would focus on five major themes, with the Public Affairs Mission bringing the themes all together. And so it did. The Public Affairs Mission became a reality - or maybe a surreality; general education was trimmed down and reorganized, admissions became more selective, and so on. That's not to say, though, that things didn't go on under the table. In the late 1990s, Dr. Keiser threatened to dismantle the Economics Department, which was at that time just one of several underperforming departments on campus (in the interests of fair disclosure, mine was another), but counted among its faculty one of his most vocal detractors, Dr. Thomas Wyrick. Another instance was Dr. Keiser's steadfast - and in my opinion, ass-headed - refusal to include sexual orientation in the University's standard non-discrimination language. Incompetent administrators who toed the party line were rewarded, and incompetent faculty asshats who didn't make waves were allowed to collect their across-the-board raises. I could say it stronger, but it's too much trouble.

Besides, I have to admit that I became personally rather fond of Dr. Keiser. The last two or three years of his term, he came to visit one of my classes at least once a year. The last of these times he got into an animated (if not quite heated) argument with three young women in my GEP 397 class. For someone who had spent the last four decades administrating things, he did a very good job of holding his own, which impressed me a great deal. A traditional faculty gripe about administrators is that they have no idea of what goes on in a college classroom. We had a few of those administrators during Dr. Keiser's presidency, but he himself was not one of them. I can't say that I miss him terribly, but I have to credit him for giving the University a sense of focus and for steering it successfully through some genuinely trying times - such as the Hancock II Amendment of 1994 and the State revenue crisis of the early 2000s. He gets high marks in my book.