In his rush to make our little Northern New Mexico College a university, president Jose Griego cut a few corners and “misstated” some names and positions. You have to love that word “misstate” and right behind it “misremembered.” They’re both euphemisms for when someone gets caught lying.
On the September accreditation report, submitted to the state, Griego listed four full-time faculty, one with a PhD, one a medical doctor and two other full-time teachers. Actually, the two full-time teachers were part-timers and of the two full-time people who actually work at the college, one left five days after the report was submitted.
It’s not clear in the Albuquerque Journal’s Nov. 11 story who’s who in the musical chairs of the science department because all these giant egos insist on putting Dr. in front of their names. They’re not doctors, they’re PhD’s with no self esteem. There is one doctor in the bunch but he or she is mixed in with the other “doctors.” Regardless, Northern does have someone with a “Dr.” in front of their name running the science program. He or she is just lonely.
Griego tried to throw some water on the fire and fired off an e-mail to the state after the Journal caught wind of the “misstatement.”
This may be a harbinger of things to come for our future university. A group of men with larger ambitions than common sense and too little money are trying to force the community college into a university mold. We’re all for vision but it must be tempered with reasonableness. Griego’s ambitions fall along the line of a college with champagne tastes on a beer budget.
It’s fortunate the Journal caught the “misstatement” and brought a light to a problem in meeting higher education standards. The light was shone a few years ago during a planning meeting when someone questioned money and qualified teachers, but somehow it was snuffed out and the college forged ahead, trying to create a four-year science degree with $118,000.
We don’t expect reason to enter the picture. The college has some sort of plan, albeit one concocted and executed by the seat of their collective pants but it wouldn’t be Rio Arriban for them to turn back now and think things through.
So those of us who pay the bills at the college will have to be content to sit and watch all those “doctors” chase their tails.