Well unless she was recruited upward by a better university of better job, her departure summarizes the viability of selling Valpo to students. Schur was an alumna with great passion for the school. And she brought a familiarity with the priority on HSI. How will that be replaced by a better fit for the job?
She was being asked to sell a $45,000 truck full of ice to eskimos who can buy the same trunk full from dozens of other truckers at $20,000. If she was let by "mutual decision" then Padilla is looking for a 5th person who can make that sale more often than her.
Interesting news - The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has revised its Fall report after realizing a methodological error, to say that Fall 2024 enrollments were actually higher (not lower) nation-wide. Sheesh:
(I remember we had a lot of chatter about this when it seemed that at least part of VU's steep enrollment downturn this Fall could be explained or excused by the FAFSA fiasco and contextualized by depressed enrollments on a national scale... But that seems not to have been the case after all, whereas unfortunately VU's particular enrollment drop was real.)
@realist77 Your $47,000 ice truck metaphor is pretty harsh, but I agree Sifuentes Schur had a tough task. With VU shooting itself in the foot so much with all the bad VU publicity and other headwinds, I would struggle to identify what she could have done differently these past <2 yrs- tho who knows? At any rate, its hard to see how MORE TURNOVER is going to help...
My assumption is that enrollments across public schools would cause that trend VUIndiana. Heard of a lot of kids who had to turn down private school offers over financial concerns. Heck. 2 football players just had to turn down offers over financial concerns. I know there is push to become a HSI, but with administration changes in Washington, and a focus on education reform. How long does the HSI program last theoretically? Or rather, how long does the HSI program continue to receive the amount of funding it currently gets.
Rez - I know that I am repeating a prior post, but some private schools were able to successfully work around the FAFSA problems by telling prospective students what they expected their financial aid to be. The students, if they attended the university, would then get the greater of the estimate or the actual - with the university making up the difference if their estimate was high. If you think about it, the costs are pretty minimal doing this. My understanding is that only 10-20% of private universities did this, but that (at least for my university) it was very successful.
More turnover in enrollment: Jill Sifuentes Schur is leaving as the Vice President of Enrollment and Marketing. A new national search will begin soon.
Not a reassuring sign about the senior leadership situation...someone who returned to her alma mater is now leaving after 2 years on the job.
Regarding faculty doing more for recruitment...When Padilla came to VU he mentioned more than once that we need a "all hands on deck" approach to save this place and it made sense. Problem is, when you absolutely fail to take minimum care of the human factor and destroy whatever morsel of morale was left, those "hands on deck" will be too weak to provide much "rowing power".
The only thing that still amazes me is how bad this leadership is at people relation. Our people that is...Every single time when faculty, mildly and politely would raise some valid objections the immediate reaction was on the line of: "I'm not gonna tell you what you want to hear", " I disagree (without providing counterarguments)", "I don't HAVE to tell you what I will do (so expect surprises)" , "I can eliminate entire departments if I want to (read the fine print in the handbook next time)" etc... And these types of answers were for fundamental BASIC questions such as: can you show how this or that brings or save money, does not hurt more than it helps, can you do this instead of that, etc...
I completely understand that the crisis may require the most draconian measures imaginable. Yet I still in my naivety expect a leader to be able to have a different relationship with the subalterns. I see none of that here. Meanwhile, while the tone during behind the doors meetings is such as above, we regularly get campus wide emails with words like these:
" Celebration: Let’s continue highlighting and sharing our successes—so they can be celebrated more broadly. Most importantly, let’s keep finding time to be in community together."
With successes like these, who needs failures?
I had hoped that President Padilla's experience as a university general counsel -- a position that gives one a pretty good view of how things can go wrong at a university, including institutional culture -- might inform how he relates to faculty in a positive way. After all, if you want team players on your faculty, then you need to treat your faculty like fully-fledged members of the team. Instead, it appears that his general counsel experience gave him a more top-down perspective on how university leadership should relate to other stakeholders.
Presidents can weather no-confidence votes when they've got plenty of other tangible successes to show for themselves, especially major fundraising gifts. But the latter has not manifested under his leadership, at least not yet. (Hence, you sell off the treasures of the art museum to pay for residence hall reno work.) While it's premature and incorrect to label his presidency a failure, it's getting harder to see how it can end as a success.
