It has not been a great couple of years for my university, PR-wise. First, there was the student who took the SAT for high school kids. Soon after, a homeless shelter sued us. We arrested students protesting our dining services contractor’s poor treatment of workers. Then, the local paper broke the news about our admissions department inflating student scores to boost our rank. The New York Times name-checked us in a story about college debt crushing the dreams of the poor.

More recently, there was an unpopular set of department cuts (including visual arts), announced via an email attachment on a Friday.

And then, the first Gawker-featured scandal of 2013: our alumni magazine’s Letter from the President*, in which our university president wrote about American compromise, presumably in reference to the cuts. His example was not, as you might guess, the Bill of Rights, or a bicameral legislature. It was the 3/5 compromise. During Black History Month. A few weeks after a (terrible) student TV show made a lynching joke.

Like I said: rough couple of years. Courageous inquiry leads you to hire bad PR people, apparently.

And it is so, so frustrating to me because I want to like Emory. If I liked Emory, I would probably be less unhappy than I am. And I remember being at Oxford (referred to, horribly enough, as Emory’s “separate but equal” campus), and being–at least some of the time–really, truly happy about being there, even when I was frustrated with the institution.  Continue reading →