Chronic secrecy
The Board of Trustees met Thursday to discuss hotel development, campus improvements and - psst! - a CMU medical school.
The Board unanimously approved the development of a medical school, despite the fact that the topic was mentioned nowhere in the Board's meeting schedule.
This is a grievous lapse in transparency.
The entire point of making the Board's meetings open to the public is to give concerned individuals the ability to hear first-hand what the Board has to say, and to make their opinions heard at or around the meeting.
Likewise, the meeting schedule, a binder released prior to the meeting, is a way for people to decide whether to attend. That is why Central Michigan Life always runs a preview in the issue prior to the Board's meetings.
A medical school is an enormous investment and one of the university's largest expansions in history. It seems reasonable to expect the subject to be treated with at least the same gravity as ventilation work.
But it wasn't. Trustees may have deliberated long and hard on the topic, but they didn't make public that they were even considering making such a significant decision Thursday.
The meeting's docket, printed only earlier this week, should have at least included the medical school as a subject of discussion, even if University President Michael Rao proposed the resolution. Instead, the proposal was suddenly revealed when the Board moved to "Other/New Business," a nondescript header.
The proposal should have arrived with enough time to include it in the formal docket. Its significance warrants special notification.
If it was a deliberate exclusion, the Board was inexcusably deceptive.
If it was a last-minute addition, the decision was brash. Trustees need to know far ahead of time whether a vote will arise; they need to know for which topics to prepare and on which they will vote. They cannot have encyclopedic knowledge on every possible subject.
Rao is not without blame, either. He should have publicly announced his proposal long before the meeting.
Not having the medical school on the printed schedule is reason enough to postpone the decision. If the Board wants to take competing viewpoints seriously, it needs to allow those viewpoints the chance to be heard.
But at the meeting there could be no public protest, no commentary - all because nobody but the Board and its coterie knew the decision was coming.
That isn't the transparency the CMU community should expect from a powerful public body.
The Board has considerable work to do to justify its underhanded tactics. This is not something to be taken lightly. Students, faculty and community members have every right to be outraged.
A CMU medical school carries tremendous promise but considerable cost. It is a hefty investment and should not be approved nonchalantly.
And - psst! - that's no secret.
