All The News That Fits, We Print. The Back of Our Hand to The Rest

Several months ago the Democrat and Chronicle, on both its "news" and editorial sides, threw a monumental hissy fit that trustees of Monroe Community College added finalists to the college presidential search, in addition to finalists picked by a Search Committee.

The choices of the Search Committee -- apparently a rarefied collection of Olympian visionaries assembled in one room -- were sacrosanct, the paper insisted.   For the trustees to add finalists was an appalling affront to the integrity of   "the process."

Never mind that a SUNY officer was quoted as saying that the trustees had the right to do exactly as they did.

Never mind that the candidates added by the trustees, lawyer and former county legislator Bill Smith and businessman Dennis Kessler, had better educational credentials than either choice served up by the Search Committee.   Or than the current president of MCC.

But here's what caught our interest:   the first of the Search Committee's choices, a junior college president from New Jersey, pulled out, deciding to stay put in his current job.  So much for the acumen of the divine seers on the Search Committee in sizing up the genuineness of candidates' professed interest in the job.

What of the Search Committee's other choice, the president of Broome Community College in Binghamton?

His own college just threw him out.   Here's the story in the Binghamton Sun Mirror.

It happened two weeks ago.   You never saw a word about it in the D&C.   (Even though the Binghamton Sun-Mirror is another Gannett paper).   Because it wouldn't reflect well on the Search Committee -- in which the D&C told us to repose all trust -- that of the two people it selected, one couldn't be bothered and the other was sacked by his own college.   Way to go, Search Committee.   Zero for 2.  No coverage in McPaper.

---

This spring we paid a lot more attention to who's going to be the next President of the United States than who's going to head the local junior college.   (Shamefully inverted values, apparently, by Democrat and Chronicle standards).  

Thanks to our own Lucy's brother Dan, in Johnson City, for alerting us to the Binghamton news report.   It's made us more interested in the whole story.   Just who were the members of this hapless "Search Committee?"   Was its membership list ever published?

If you know, leave us a comment or send an e-mail.   We'd be interested to know just what cast of characters spent months of deliberation to come up with the two embarrassments they chose.