JE SUIS BUNNY: College controversy over contested screening out of freshmen as "drowning bunnies"

[emilynghiem]

Sam Cohen on Twitter

Oh dear, more college controversy.

The controversy at Mount St. Mary’s goes national after professors are fired

This time, a university president concerned about high retention rates
asked professors to support a process of "screening out" students in advance
who weren't going to stay anyway. Some professors objected, for various reasons.
After some were either fired or demoted, protests spread among the faculty and alumni.

The controversy began months ago, when the provost and some professors had raised concerns when the president asked for a list of students unlikely to succeed in college several weeks into the school year; one said it was too early to separate those who would do well from those likely to drop out. Simon Newman, the president, told professors, “there will be some collateral damage.”
Newman also said, as first reported by the student newspaper the Mountain Echo and independently confirmed by The Washington Post, that “this is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

[University president says struggling freshmen are bunnies that should be drowned]

Unfortunately, the wording used by the president compared struggling freshman
to bunnies that needed to be drowned, thus sparking this image to be circulated by social media:

I hope this gets resolved, because it looks like the mistreatment of very well respected faculty has otherwise marred relations with the greater community, and that's a shame.