UCONN's Future

[JMick]

Michael Gilbert Vice President for Student Affairs 29 Wilbur Cross 860-486-2265
vpsa

Your beef is misplaced. Her role is much greater than "daily student needs". She's trying to overcome a $40 million dollar deficit. I imagine one of the daily student needs is to not see their tuition raised even more. (And, relatively speaking, UConn does not cost an "exorbitant" amount of money. It's a steal).

I reached out to Michael Kirk when he was VP of student affairs and he was a . Hopefully Michael Gilbert is a little better.

Seriously, Michael Kirk was the worst person I interacted with while at UCONN

 

[CTMike]

You care a lot about things that don't affect you day to day... It sounds exhausting. None of things you mention prevent you from going to class/work, getting good grades/working harder than your peers, being a good person and not get arrested... Good luck to ya.

 

[UConn9604]

This was not a former president, it was an underling.

And the quote is a successful university "has sex for the students, sports for the alumni and parking for the staff."

I can assure you that the words I typed came straight from a former President's mouth and went into my ears.

 

[Pudge]

My daughter - a student - says that there is major unrest on Tuition.

Not much Herbst can do there. This is the STATE dictating what they'll contribute to a World Class University. This state has been very supportive. But, at the moment, there are priorities that pushed this a little out of balance. I am certain that Herbst continues to lobby and fight for more.

 

[Point6]

Circa 1987, John Casteen was the UConn president and Burger King was running a promotion/commercial "Where's Herb" campaign. If you found Herb at your local Burger King, you would win cash. I know exactly where Herb was hiding out, he was hiding out in Storrs.

I remember the April Fool's Day Daily Campus article on that. I married into a UVA family and shook his hand at a reception at his residence at UVA once. I brought up UConn but not the "Herb" controversy.

 

[J187Money]

You missed the entire point. Maybe you should have taken a few more English classes or a couple philosophy courses and you could have learned how to properly frame an argument.

I don't know why you started talking about 2.2 GPA's or STEM degrees in the first place. I never mentioned anything beside the fact that Susan likes to pal around the STEM department and ignore other departments. That's all I said on the issue and you started creating some weird argument attacking me for things I never even said nor implied.

Its as on point as your point about previous generations ruining everything and nobody can buy a house till they are 50 - neither of which has anything to do with Susan Herbst. But maybe only you can go off topic? You opened the can of worms right there...anything that comes from it you can't shout it down as being irrelevant.

But back to the original issue:

I get why you don't like her. You want her to be an advocate for things you care about. She isn't. Makes perfect sense. Others of us have seen a handful of UCONN presidents, and find that on balance she is WAY better than most if not all of her predecessors. You have no frame of reference as you don't have that experience. Therefore we can agree to disagree on her effectiveness. Most of us are looking through the lens of what is good for the school or the state in general. You are looking at it through the lens of individual students, which is fair. But when you have over 20K students enrolled at any given time, there are a good 5% at a minimum that are probably miserable and hate the school and everything about it. She can't manage the school to handle the edge cases.

http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/uconn-29013/student-life

71% of students live on campus. Out of the remaining 29%, I'm sure that a small percentage of them are really ticked off at the town due to housing regulations. I'm sure that the vast majority of the people don't care, and just go about their lives.

Running a gigantic organization is REALLY difficult, and you have to juggle a myriad of priorities. There is a 100% chance that by choosing priorities, you disenfranchise certain people. You may be among the disenfranchised. Which sucks for you, but it bears no weight on whether she is doing a good job or not when evaluated holistically.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Woah..don't go that far. Economics is a liberal arts major(at UConn) yet its one of the top earning majors post graduation.. Everything else I agree with.

Agreed. I started in Econ before switching to business.