On May 4, 2008, Terry Donahue said:

Article IV Trouble at the Top? In the present controversy, the matter of the trustworthiness of President Brown has arisen at critical junctures. The Coalition of the Concerned met with the President on December 17. At that meeting I asked the President about the decision to fire the two professors (Hoffeditz and Mappes). He replied that the termination was for actions that happened after the contracts were offered. Then the account in the Dayton Daily News referenced Vice-President Milliman's talking with a student about the firing matter (this despite the school's regular claim that it doesn't discuss personnel matters because of required confidentiality) The newspaper account put the decision to fire (not the time to fire) much earlier in the year, before the North Central review panel appeared on campus. This was not as the President said: i.e., after the contracts were offered. Here was an apparent contradiction that seemed to have no readily plausible explanation. Subsequently the Chairman of the GIP (Grievance Investigation Panel) announced that the previously agreed upon rules were being breached by the Administration (including President Brown who had been a party to the agreed upon rules). The GIP was being required to turn over the transcript of their proceedings in direct violation of the rules which required that the transcript was to be retained solely by the GIP. The effect of this was that the Administration was in the superior position to discover information not available to it before. Again Brown's word about what was to be has turned out to be quite otherwise. Another part of the December 17 conversation assumes the same kind of troubling significance. I asked the President why the Truth and Certainty statement did not include "certainty" at the critical passage. He replied that the word "assurance" meant "100% certainty." The difficulty here is that there are faculty members who do not hold such a position and yet are retained in the faculty. Further the statement that "all faculty members are required to sign the statement" cannot be confirmed. None of the various presently employed faculty members that I have talked to has any knowledge of signing such a statement. The pattern of apparent variance from the truth lingers. In the Coalition's letter of concerns addressed to the administration, faculty and trustees (available here on this site), there is no "lack of information which they readily acknowledged in the letter." This latter assertion is in the University website at: Offices, President's Office, important information from the President, responding to recent media accounts. Here appears to be another Presidential pronouncement that does not represent reality. One is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts. The assertion is not factual. These seem to be quite inexplicable contradictions. And the school's statement on the website relative to signing the truth and certainty statement is not confirmed by people of principle. This is not an encouraging state of affairs. There are other unencouraging situations that are equally troubling. The campus newspaper reported in an issue (LVI, 5) that chapel attendance was at a new low. It indicated that chapel attendance in the spring semester was 68.1%. This was in keeping with a trend from 2002 which has been steadily downward. The attempts to explain this were quite novel, including the idea that kids today have more choices and their decision not to attend to chapel came under the heading of choices. But one points out the obvious contradiction to policy of chapel as mandatory. The choice to attend Cedarville involves the knowledge that chapel is required. And, it should be noted, that petitions were circulated last year that spoke of the lack of Biblical content in the chapel messages. Given the downward trend in the Christianity Today surveys of staff satisfaction, given the downward trend in chapel attendance, given the noticeable unease of many with the President's pronouncements, the future of Cedarville seems to me to be markedly grim. Given the clouds gathering on the national economic front, including the fact that some banks are no longer making student loans to two-year colleges (Citibank and JP Morgan Chase), one wonders whether the trustees have considered the liquidity crisis in the way ahead. From the catalogue entries, one cannot see a single trustee whose background is exclusively in finance. It would appear that Cedarville may be headed for, if not the perfect storm, something rather similar.

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