Those pesky wackos are back again ... Finally time to do the right thing?

In a seemingly endless stream, pesky wackos roll off the line at a bottling plant ...

Source: Flickr

"Carl" is Dr. Carl Elliott, Pathetic.

Background

Earlier posts on the Markingson case have appeared on the Community Voices site:

Send in the wackos ...

and

Although the Faculty Senate at the University of Minnesota voted overwhelmingly for an outside, independent, investigation of the Markingson case, it appears that an attempt to ignore what went wrong in the case is in progress.

President Kaler said in a recent interview with the Minnesota Daily:

"it's not a review of the Markingson case"

"It's certainly resulted as a consequence of a lot of repetitive publicity about the Markingson case, but it's not a review of the Markingson case."

These remarks seem more than a little defensive. And the direction in which they lead do not seem much different from the one we've seen out of the University of Minnesota administration since the inception of the Markingson case.

And so it should be no surprise that these wackos who have been generating a lot of repetitive publicity about the Markingson case are back whining and writing more letters, this one requesting that a promised outside investigation be done right.

The nerve of these wackos ...

Lemmens Follow Up Letter Senate Dec 11 2013 by MarkingsonCase

Time to do the right thing?

Da Mayor: "Doctor, always do the right thing."

Or, as Mark Yudof said in his inaugural address as president of the University of Minnesota:

Mark Yudof handled a horrible scandal in the athletic department with grace and dignity, with no excuses and no dissembling. I have been very disappointed with the University of Minnesota administration since his presidency. Yudof fired people (the athletic director as well as coaches and support staff) and had Tonya Moten Brown essentially take over the athletic department. And his humility was not false.

The time for stonewalling has passed. Trying to dodge the issues inherent in the Markingson case is a fool's game. A university without integrity is not really a university. Bread and circuses do not a great university make, nor idle chatter about the infamous third greatest public research university in the world.

Time to walk the talk, President Kaler. Otherwise, disappointed University of Minnesota alums will have to take a hike from their alma mater. In the Twin Cities alone there are plenty of places for higher education philanthropy besides the University of Minnesota - Augsburg and Macalester colleges being two examples. Note that at these two schools the student debt at graduation is lower than that at the public University of Minnesota, to our everlasting disgrace. I hope not.

One might whine that Mac is a school for the rich, a terrible and untrue argument, but such a charge ridiculous on its face for Augsburg College with its much more modest endowment. When Auggie, as it is familiarly known, got donor money of questionable provenance, they gave it back. This is what doing the right thing means. And the education available at Auggie is hardly for chumps. An Auggie, Peter Agre, recently won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Nice ROI on that, I'd say. Kudos, Auggie, a Minnesota school that makes me proud. Macalester is also in this category as well as many other fine Minnesota small liberal arts colleges, or SLACs to use au courant higher ed jargon.

And of course if one desires to contribute money for medical research, there is always the Mayo. What's been going on at Fairview-University hospital lately does not exactly inspire warm and fuzzy feelings in the hearts of the populace. People will vote on the University's performance with their feet and their checkbooks. This goes also for the people in the state legislature.

If the University wants to see private philanthropic support, perhaps they should give us something to be proud of? Manufactured hash tags like #umnproud will not suffice.

Is it finally time to do the right thing in the Markingson matter?