One of the key indicators of Main Hall incompetence is the approach to "recruiting." UM was very good at it under George Dennison, the results speak for themselves. It wasn't big on pamphlets and advertisements, but was very good at positive public relations. Dennison himself was a terrific recruiter.
Engstrom of course decided to make a very public "PC" approach at the outset of his administration that simply and quickly blew up in his face. Compared to Cruzado's handling of a music professor run sexually amok, with faculty and staff knowledge, to the point that the high school music teachers across the state were refusing to allow him on premises -- never heard about that one did you? There's a reason. -- Engstrom went the "full confessional," followed by two public hangings that he thought would establish his Liberal bona fides.
No one, in their right minds could have thought that would have a positive recruiting message: women were prey and men were predators, predators that would be pre-judged and their civil rights removed -- But, there he was right out in front of the mob, leading it forward. It had worked so well at Duke University, what could possibly go wrong?
Students stopped applying.
As that focused then on UM's administrative recruiting efforts, it was obvious how poor they were in the absence of a strong and positive leader. In some odd fashion, the blame was placed on the lack of pamphlets, not the absence of a strong, positive leader.
With great fanfare, UM "redesigned" its public relations. It went from being "THE University of Montana" to just "University of Montana." One of several, apparently. The ad agency that thought of that one replaced "Truth is Light," -- a neoclassic University motto of great dignity -- with "Thrive," inspiring posters of which are all around campus, and replaced UM's standard neoclassical logos with a limp lightning bolt that was supposed to resemble a mountain ridge, ostensibly Mount Sentinel, which looks to be in a pretty weak mountain range, and adopted a Helvetica type style that lost favor in the 1970s.
Then, the "Welcome to Montana State University" email blast fiasco. That underscored what Main Hall was. There was no monitoring in place, no feedback, no oversight. Frankly, that could not have happened under George Dennison. He wanted to see everything first. He took his job seriously. It also underscored Engstrom's hands-off approach -- the one that had him signing the DOE agreement without reading it. They had hired a recruiting firm. That was all it took. He didn't need to DO ANYTHING which fit his style perfectly.
And of course it was an unmitigated disaster. A million bucks down the rathole and a thousand more students lost.
Gosh, "let's change agencies!!" That's the ticket! Of course, the new folks were burdened with the legacy of the logo changes; can't undo that expensive mistake! It would "look bad!!!"
Another million bucks. Bad letters, bad pamphlets, and, oh, a series of generic television ads of the kind that such agencies were peddling to universities all across the country. And just that -- completely generic, formulaic, and required no imagination or even knowledge of the University itself -- just disjointed campus scenes showing cool stuff like break dancing and interviews with "diversity" students that showed that the UM campus had all the strengths of any other campus in the country, students that had accents! They are flacccid, the scripts could apply to any University in the country and probably do. The one ad that did mention academic achievement -- Rhodes, Fullbright, etc -- did so on the overlay of an uninspiring student with a visible and painful-looking case of acne sitting morosely in a class-room making desperate looking attempts to engage in some class discussion.
The ads are unbelievably bad. They are beyond stupid. But that underscores what goes on in Main Hall. Nobody has responsibility. No one says "no." No, after blowing another million, and losing another 1,500 students, UM figured out -- as part of the budget cutting process! -- that it can do just as good a job recruiting by taking the tasks in-house and doing the mailing lists and high school graduation research in Lommason Center -- just like they were doing when they started losing thousands of students! But, that's not the bad part. The bad part is that UM paid a million bucks to an Iowa company with a so-so track record to do exactly what UM had already been doing, in-house. Exactly what was the contract supposed to accomplish?
There's that "Main Hall Competency" problem again. No one could ask that question. "These guys aren't proposing to do anything differently than what we are already doing. What's the point?" Seriously, Engstrom is so overwhelmed and inept, he cannot make those kind of analyses. And anybody else that could have is gone.
That's the key here: incompetence is hiring incompetence. It is now an established track record. Nothing could be clearer than in how Engstrom has handled these successive outside contract fiascoes.
The bad part -- yes, "there is a bad part" -- is that nearly every study on the point, points to athletic team success as being a leverage toward increased enrollment, higher selectivity in applications, higher average ACT and SAT scores, and larger public and private support. We can assume those have been in play at UM. In other words, all of this hemorrhaging under Engstrom would have been much worse but for the athletic team success -- a key positive point that Engstrom himself, in the only bold action he ever took, nearly scuttled -- and but for that UM's enrollment declines would have been worse, possibly and even probably much worse, something the Kaimin editor ought to think long and seriously about, as should the Bored of Regents.
