a X T A 1 1 ^ Brevard College, Brevard, NC I iN Volume 54 Number 5 LvJ Nov. 5, 1986 BC Trustees study four-year proposal A recent opinion and attitude survey shows that there is a broad college and community support for Brevard College converting to a four-year senior college. But Brevard College President Billy Greer says the decision whether or not to go four-year will take some time. “This is the most important thing this school has grappled with in 50 years,” he said. “We need to take a lot more time, step back. study all the data and discuss this idea at length.” The Brevard College Board of Trustees meeting at the college last week, began studying the results of the newly-released survey conducted this summer by Dave Skillen of Diversified Consultants, Inc., of Atlanta. Skillen, who polled about 100 trustees, community leaders and Brevard College faculty, staff and administration, turned over his findings and concluded: “There are too many positive signals to be ig nored. The prospects of converting to a four-year school should be pursued,” and that if the growth didn’t occur, Skillen warned, “five to ten years from now, it could be a dead-end street. Nationally, we are looking at a steady decline in private two-year college enrollment.” At last week’s Board of Trustees meeting, students Kim Nelson and Heather Chamberlain visit with trustee Marshall Houts of California. Big plans made for Parent s Weekend by April Woods Parent’s Weekend promises to be a full one for anyone planning to attend, and so far 75 reservations have been made. “Tell her how many stamps we licked,” said Mark Morre, student assistant to Will Dunstan. Dunstan, the chairman of the ceremonies committee, said he and Moore licked a total of 595 stamps and an equivalent number of address labels for the invitations sent out. Dunstan says Parent’s Weekend is “a way of letting parents see where their kids are going to school, and to familiarize them with school faculty and staff”. Dunstan added, “It’s comforting for the parents, I think.” A variety of activites have been planned starting at 7 a.m. on Friday, Nov. 7 and continuing until 9 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9, in cluding a tour of the campus, perfor mances by the Collegiate Singers and both the Concert and jazz bands, an athletic contest, and a student presentation of “Cabaret.” Another activity planned for the weekend is the student talent show. Parents are also encouraged to attend classes with their children in order to get a better sense of understanding of the school environment. More reservations are expected to come in before Nov. 7 rolls around since the pro gram “has always been very successful,” said Dunstan. Craft show scheduled by Cathy Haynie The “Patchwork Playgroup” is no or dinary craft show. On Saturday, November 8, a group of local homemakers are getting together for a craft show and sale at the Student Union from 10 a.m.4 p.m. This is the second annual craft show to be held at the Student Union on parent’s weekend. The women involved in the show get together every Monday morning and work on projects which will be on display and for sale this weekend. Some features include crafts and needlearts of heirloom quality, folk dolls, country items, miniatures, cross stitch, Christmas items, stained glass, and quilts. Of the people questioned this summer, Skillen reported that the respondents were 68 percent in favor of the four-year conver sion. The breakdown went as follows: on a scale of 1 to 10 on the question of conver sion, the faculty and staff registered 8; the community, 7; and the Board of Trustees, On general feelings about the college overall: 63 percent of the board felt “very good,” 52 percent the community felt “ex cellent” about the college, while another 37 percent felt “Very good.” “The faculty- staff was split evenly in thirds in degrees of “’excellent,” “very good” and “good.” All three segments said if Brevard con verted to a four-year school, the col lege they would like Brevard to do most like would be Davidson, with Furman, Wofford and Guilford also ranking high. Other observations from the Skillen report: That the school enjoys a reputation of having high academic standards and a good overall reputation, that the faculty sees itself as the key to the college, and that the college needs to be more involved with the community. Skillen also concluded that Brevard Col lege is in a good physical location to become “a Western North Carolina David son.” Reasons for going four-year mentioned the most often include: the advantages gained by continuing of educational pro grams, reduced recruiting pressure, a more stable college environment, the abili ty to attract and maintain higher quality faculty members, an improved student body because of the maturity factor, and advantages gained in fund-raising. Presi dent Greer said that “98 percent of founda tion money goes to four-year schools. Most of them won’t even look at you if you’re a junior college.” On the question of the college’s greatest strengths, the board said the school’s reputation was the most outstanding fac tor. The faculty-staff and community both pointed to the special attention students get through faculty accessibility. The Trustees emphasized that the strong link with the Methodist Church was important to maintain, and Trustees also voiced con cern that BC should stay relatively small without sacrificing Quality. President Greer said, “If we go to four- year, we would hold on to the essence of this place. We would stay small — from around 900 to 1000 students—and maintain our quality. We do not want to be like any other college. We want to be the flagship of colleges of Western North Carolina Methodism. There is no timetable for the Trustees to vote on this question, and ultimately the final decision will come before the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church meeting Though no target date or cost figures have been determined, college leaders in dicate that conversion to senior college status would be millions of dollars and at least four to five yef.rs away.

Page Text

This is the computer-generated OCR text representation of this newspaper page. It may be empty, if no text could be automatically recognized. This data is also available in Plain Text and XML formats.

Return to page view