President Lefton has demonstrated that, despite his largely symbolic gestures to be in touch with the student body, he is the head of an administration that would prefer to see Kent State run as a for-profit business rather than a public university at the great expense of the students themselves. By asking state legislators to dissolve tuition caps, rather than seeking any other potentially self-deprecating administrative solutions or to appear at-odds politically with a destructive and narrow-minded new state government, Lefton has claimed instead to have exhausted all of his resources and must now call upon the students, the entire reason for his job, to clean up after his shyness/inability to run a public institution. The entire raison d’être of a public university is to provide higher education to whoever is willing to pursue it at absolute minimum expense. Lefton, with his false-started desire and willingness to raise tuition above and beyond an ad hoc agreed-upon rate, is forfeiting his commitment to that philosophy altogether.

If Lefton were really as student-centric as his weekly e-mails and tweets suggest he is, he would go to bat for us and speak out against a government whose knee-jerk fiscal agenda is at odds with public higher education. He is characteristic of an entire administration unwilling to seek solutions at their own expense and who seek capital at all costs, especially when the bill falls on the very students and faculty that keep the dream of public education running. You’re an administrator of a fine institution and one that could be an example of how to provide affordable higher education, not a businessman.

Eric Seemiller

Graduate student- Anthropology