Let me explain the game.

I have received a couple of emails and wanted to clearly spell out the goals of going after SIU and its management team.

Clearly SIUC is mismanaged. I have had readers complain about my fire the chairmen posts, but no one suggests that SIUC isn't mismanaged. Feel free to jump in, anyone feel like SIUC is reasonable managed? Well managed?

SIUC is full of good people, who work hard and have become discouraged by the many years of poor management. It is clear that these discouraged employees need to grow a back bone and help make the university a better place. The problem they have is as employees they can suffer attacks to their jobs, promotions, raises and all the rest of the benefits of employment. I'm not sure they should do anything but circulate their resumes or wait for retirement at this point.

Since the local press has been purchased by a large and very conservative, money grubbing corporation, we can expect them to do nothing. OK, they report the news that might lead to a strike or criminal charge, but they certainly will not publish stories about mismanagement.

I'm about to work my way through the BOT's, but I expect them to be bought and paid for political pawns. Hopefully this is incorrect.

That leaves the owners of SIUC, the tax payers to start pushing for change. Last time I checked the taxpayers of Illinois own SIU. We paid for it in total. Granted we don't pay the expenses of everything all the time, we collect fees for services like every other company or institution.

Does anyone think if they were a shareholder in a company like SIUC they would be happy? Management has announced plans they can't pay for and never will be able to pay for. The very best employees leave, the rank and file has been mismanaged enough to form a union(!), a large number of employees at all levels are doing very little work (if the non-workers make up more than 1% of your staff you are screwed) and when you do no work management does nothing!

Management isn't doing the free things that other universities have done to turn things around. They could study best practices of this kind of turn around and start to apply them. A new football stadium should be on the list of to-do's, but not first.

The game becomes to start putting your finger on the problems at SIUC that are cheap to solve, but require real work and ask SIUC to do them. Only be raising the public awareness can this be done. I'm going to spend a little time and effort and see where it takes us. Hopefully, some good will come out of it.

This is the roll of the bloggers in American life today. The media is in just a few hands and where 40 years ago the reporters might have covered this story, now they would be fired for trying.