If you spend much time listening to your car radio or glancing at buses, the slogan is likely lodged in your head: “Myers University: My life, my Myers.”
It’s equally likely you’ve thought to yourself, What the hell is Myers University?
For 150 years, this has been a valid question. The school has changed names more than Puff Daddy. It’s always served a small niche: mostly older, mid-career students hoping a business degree will help them climb the ladder. And it’s been hidden from anyone who wasn’t looking for it — in one small building just off Public Square, in addition to a few suburban campuses.
So in 2001, the school hired a president to put Myers on the map. He succeeded beyond its wildest nightmares.
Paul Feingold arrived with what seemed like a decent résumé: consultant for companies like AT&T and Motorola, dean at National University.
In his first gig at Myers — vice president of academic affairs — Feingold’s innovations were bold and promising. He started a criminology program and a one-year MBA, among the first in the country. “Dr. Feingold was a visionary,” says Mike Herzak, chairman of the school’s board of trustees.
Herzak was so impressed that in 2001, the board hired Feingold as its new president. They paid him $155,000 a year and, as boards do, let him run the show. They wanted more innovations. “We’ve always had a very entrepreneurial bent,” Herzak says.
But once in charge, Feingold began behaving like a kid riding shotgun in Mom’s grocery cart. If the box was shiny and the price high, the president wanted it.
The first change was the school’s name. Never mind that it had changed just five years before. “David N. Myers College” didn’t pop. Feingold changed the name to Myers University. “People just aren’t recognizing us,” he lamented.
Then Feingold tried to spread the Myers brand even farther. He hadn’t been president a year, but in early 2002, he left on a two-week recruiting trip.
To China.
Myers was in a dogfight for prospective students with Cleveland State, Tri-C, and national chain schools like the University of Phoenix. And it was losing. Enrollment — which accounts for 85 percent of the school’s revenue — had fallen during the ’90s. A few Chinese students, while good PR, wouldn’t reverse the trend.
Myers likely wouldn’t get them anyway. Feingold’s trip occurred just months after the September 11 attacks, when the U.S. government locked away student visas and promptly misplaced the key.
But Feingold hit five Chinese cities. When he came back, he said the trip was so successful, he wanted to recruit in Europe and Africa too. He also signed an agreement to host students from India. (Feingold, it seems, likes to travel. When Scene tried to reach him, his new employer, a recruiting firm called SearchPath, said he was in Russia. The phone at his most recent address was disconnected.)
In Myers’ classrooms, students were surely learning that building a business takes patience. Especially if that business is a small, niche college in a crumbling economy like Cleveland’s. But Feingold didn’t seem concerned about the bottom line.
In the summer of 2002, he announced that Myers had bought the University Club, a ritzy joint operated out of a Euclid Avenue mansion. The club was in the heart of Millionaire’s Row, a stretch of city long forgotten as an entertainment destination. But Feingold had big plans.
He wanted an upgraded pub, a conference room, and a grand ballroom. He wanted a gazebo, a promenade, and a fountain. Offices would be renovated and used by the school’s senior staff. Upstairs, he envisioned an apartment for himself. Downstairs, he saw a professional kitchen; that way, the school could open a catering business and a culinary institute.
Renovation came with a hefty price tag of $10 million. But the mansion would help raise the school’s visibility “by creating a true campus” that would attract more students and revenue, Feingold predicted.
In the past, Myers had built its business by bringing the school to its customers. Inner-city students could take public transportation to Public Square. Suburban students could find a satellite near their neighborhood. And many classes could be taken online.
But Feingold wanted to remake the school as a traditional university in the heart of Cleveland’s Midtown. Myers put its Prospect Avenue headquarters up for sale. It bought a shuttered bottled-water plant on Chester Avenue, right behind the mansion. And Feingold fixed his eyes on more property. Another Chester building could hold a new learning center. A vacant parking lot would be perfect for a $4 million field house and gym, with enough seating for 1,200 fans.
A year after buying the University Club, Myers announced it would start a full-blown athletic program, with nearly every sport but football. It didn’t matter that less than a third of Myers’ students were college-age at the time, that many were part-time, or that fielding a basketball team with 30-year-old students working full-time jobs would be next to impossible. Sports, officials said, were crucial to building a more vibrant student life.
“It’s going to be a smashing campus for us,” Feingold said at the time. “The whole area around there is going to be a renaissance, and we want to be part of it.”
On paper, it was a promising plan — as paper plans usually are. But at the rate Feingold was going, the only thing “smashing” would be the school’s bank account, after it plummeted well into the red.
Here’s the thing about the smiles on the sides of those buses: They’re real. Aisha Howard’s 100-watt smile was among them. An “A” student from Euclid, she was accepted at some prestigious universities. But without financial help, most private schools were out of her price range.
At around $10,000 a year, Myers costs more than Cleveland State, but class sizes rarely exceed 15. Howard landed a scholarship and five years later walked out with a bachelor’s in business administration. “At Myers,” she says, “I wasn’t invisible.”
“It’s really a quiet gem,” Lisa Spieth says of her alma mater. Spieth, 37, enrolled in 2001, after a divorce left her searching for a new career. She recalls a school employee once phoning to ask if she needed a textbook. When she showed up for the first day of class, the book was waiting on her desk. “If I were a philanthropist and I was able to give them lots of money, I would,” Spieth says. “I have nothing bad to say about it.”
But as Feingold’s tenure rolled on, no amount of personal attention could shield students from reality: The president of their business college was running the business into the ground.
Feingold’s boorish management style made employees bristle. He micromanaged, meddled, and yelled, say former employees. Twenty-nine administrators departed under Feingold, many not long after they arrived. “You either loved him or hated him,” says Don Luscher, Myers’ former student affairs director. Others are less forgiving, describing Feingold as a bully. “He let you know he was president and you weren’t,” says one former employee.
But he wasn’t only giving workers reason to flee. Students, too, felt the effect of his leadership.
When Devorah Kirksey-Frost graduated from Jane Addams High, she already had a young daughter. Myers won her over by offering the most aid — enough to let her enroll full-time and use grant money to cover living expenses.
This is common at Myers. About 60 percent of its students are first-generation college, a higher percentage than at almost every other Ohio college. Most need financial help and receive scholarships or grants. To cover the rest, they take out loans averaging $4,200 a year to pay for tuition, books, rent, and groceries.
But when it came time for Kirksey-Frost’s check to come, the school would often have nothing: no money and no answers. “You don’t even know if you’re going to be able to attend class the next week,” says Kirksey-Frost, now an accountant in Indianapolis. “You need gas. you need money to get down there. There’s no way.”
Once, she recalls, her check wasn’t released until the semester’s last week. Only the good graces of her landlord saved her from eviction.
She’s not the only one complaining. Roger Bryan, Class of 2005, was president of the honor society. He says his aid was held up every semester. “It was just a nightmare. Two semesters, I almost got kicked out of class because the funding wasn’t there.”
Spieth says her check was held up as long as eight weeks. She wonders if the school was “holding the money back so they could get the interest.” (Herzak denies the school had widespread problems distributing aid.)
The school’s career office was just as frustrating. Students don’t generally attend Myers to ruminate on great works of literature. It’s a professional school. They go because they want a job — or a job that’s better than the one they’ve got.
But under Feingold, the school failed miserably at this crucial task. Bryan once tried to plan a career day, but was shut down by the career services office. He got the impression that the office staff — consisting of one employee — thought he was interfering with her territory. Later, when he worked at a local auction house, Bryan tried to post job opportunities through the office. They told him not to bother. “It was basically nonexistent,” he says of Myers’ job outreach.
Eventually, students started to go to Myers for reasons other than job training. The school began offering partial sports scholarships, recruiting teenagers who still dreamed of playing at college. But when they arrived, they found the same disorganization as the rest of the students.
“You get there, and you’re like, ‘What is this?'” says baseball player Cory Leonard. “My high school was put together better than that.”
He says the athletic director/baseball coach, Chuck Cangelosi, told him about the field house and a budding sports program. (Cangelosi didn’t return Scene‘s calls.) Leonard started commuting from Akron, but found a program nothing like what Cangelosi advertised. “You get sold a dream,” he says. “They fill your head with a bunch of stuff.”
Monique Crowe came from Indiana to play softball. But the coach who recruited her left after just a few weeks. The team couldn’t even find enough girls to play. The replacement coach walked out midseason.
Myers is not exactly a dynasty-building environment, but this shouldn’t have been news to administrators. The school fielded a basketball team for decades, but by the 1980s, with the business of college sports booming, the school couldn’t compete. The team went 0-21 in 1981. In 1993, after a 1-19 season, basketball was suspended.
John Corfias — president at the time — had caught on to an emerging truth about college sports. An athletic department is hard enough to build at a traditional college, where athletes have nothing to do but study, party, and practice. Of the approximately 1,000 students at Myers, 84 percent are “nontraditional” — in their mid-20s and older — and long ago gave their lives over to Miller Lites and the couch. Many of them have jobs and families. A tennis scholarship might sound nice, but when little Johnny’s home sick, that match against the nubile kid from Notre Dame College takes a backseat.
Besides, the school has no facilities. Feingold’s field house was a pipe dream; the plan’s been all but scrapped. Instead, teams mostly practice at local parks.
“It was just a disaster,” says Bryan.
He’s another Myers success story: After five years fixing helicopters in the Marines, he went to Myers in hope of starting his own business. He graduated in 2005 and now owns his own Washington, D.C. car brokerage. At Myers, he learned from his teachers how to run a business. From the administration, he learned how not to.
“Everything that they did didn’t work,” Bryan says. “They tried to do everything, and did nothing well . . . It just baffles me that a business school could be so backwards at business.”
The business students may have seen it coming, but the rest of Cleveland didn’t. In 2001, Feingold earned an Innovation in Business Award from Smart Business Cleveland. Four years later, MidTown Cleveland bestowed on him its Historic Renovation Award for his work cleaning up the University Club mansion.
But in early 2005, two teams of educators descended on Myers. The Ohio Board of Regents oversees the state’s colleges. The North Central Association of Colleges accredits Midwest schools. Though they evaluated Myers separately, both came to the same conclusion: The school was crumbling.
The researchers’ findings reflected students’ hellish experiences trying to get financial aid and the “severe financial hardship” caused by the school’s disorganization. Myers’ job-placement rate was “exceptionally low,” they found. Only one or two students landed internships each year.
Academic advising was weak, the reports say, but that was to be expected: Professors were underpaid, teaching loads were “extremely heavy, bordering on unreasonable,” and only 17 of the school’s 140 professors were full-time. (The school claims that professors prefer to be overloaded so they can earn more money. Union President Darius Navran did not respond to interview requests.) And some of Feingold’s innovations — including the sports-management and international programs — had never been approved by the state.
There was, of course, a sweet new mansion and a tennis team. But those enticements weren’t attracting students like Feingold had predicted. The school was shrinking like a starlet who’s recently discovered the wonders of cocaine.
More than 1,220 students went to Myers in 2000, the year before Feingold became president. With him in charge, enrollment fell 18 percent. Graduate students — the more educated of the bunch — were quicker to check out: Their credit hours dropped by a third in Feingold’s final three years.
The school’s retention rate — the percentage of students who stick around for a second year — was just 48 percent in 2005, the worst in Ohio. The six-year graduation rate was 22 percent — the second-worst in the state. In 2003, 12 of its 19 programs had fewer than 10 graduates. Three had none at all.
Because most of the school’s revenue comes from tuition, the attrition rate sent Myers into the red. The school had taken on $11 million in debt to move to Midtown. If Myers raised any money under Feingold, it was spent just as fast. The mansion had served up $500,000 in losses, officials say. By the time the reports were delivered in 2005, the school was facing a $1.4 million deficit.
On paper, things looked even worse. The school had valued its former Prospect Avenue headquarters at $6 million. But when it moved to Midtown, a charter school purchased an option to buy the building for $2.5 million less. Myers’ books were suddenly $3.9 million lighter.
And there were still no Chinese students.
The Board of Regents published its report on April 29, 2005. The report urged Myers to make changes “to ensure the financial health of the university,” and it expressed “serious concerns about leadership at the highest executive level.”
Translation: Who the hell’s running this place?
Paul Feingold resigned six weeks later.
If he could get away with it, Mike Herzak would probably put his own smile on a “My Life, My Myers” ad. Herzak ditched Kent State for Dyke College, as Myers was called then, in the late 1960s. He’s stayed tightly bound to his alma mater ever since, and in 1995 he was elected board chairman.
Myers, in many ways, is Mike Herzak’s life. And he’s hell-bent on saving it.
When Herzak enrolled, the college attracted many white working professionals. Companies — at least ones that hadn’t yet shipped off to Japan and Mexico — often sent workers to the college and picked up the tab.
As companies skipped town and the makeup of Cleveland shifted, so did the school’s. Money “was tight,” Corfias, the former president, recalls. “There were moments when we would get through the year and say, ‘Did we make it or didn’t we?'”
To grow, Corfias followed a time-tested strategy: “You just go where the action is.” He believed the action was in inner-city Cleveland, so he began offering scholarships to low-income black students. It worried the school’s board and alumni, he recalls, but it kept the school in business.
He also opened campuses in Elyria, Rocky River, and Wickliffe, where students were becoming less eager to drive downtown for night classes.
But these days, there are no longer any uncultivated fields of students. There is no new action, especially in shrinking Cleveland. And more and more schools are competing for the old action. National chains like the University of Phoenix and DeVry have gained legitimacy. So has online learning. And while Cleveland’s population is sliding, the region remains chock-full of colleges just like Myers. Moreover, Myers’ biggest competition — the cheaper and more prestigious Cleveland State — is now just a few blocks away.
In such a competitive market, schools like Myers have little room for mistakes — especially mistakes with spending tendencies better fit for an episode of Fabulous Life. But while Herzak acknowledges that Feingold erred — “He took his eye off the ball” — the chairman is nowhere near giving up on Myers.
“I’m very passionate about it,” he says. “It’s my alma mater. Do I think we’re going to be here another 100 years? Yes.”
Last summer, Herzak’s board finally found someone to dig Myers out its hole. He’s a former investment banker, literature professor, and president of Hiram College. He is not, as he likes to point out, interested in reliving the past.
“I’m not paid to be an archivist,” President Richard Scaldini says, with an appropriate dash of impatience. The past “doesn’t much matter to me.”
Scaldini started by trying to win over the community. Because of the school’s financial problems, the U.S. Department of Education wasn’t sure it could survive. So last year, the department froze $1.8 million in federal funds. The school got a $500,000 loan from the county to stay open. But by winter, student loan checks were being delayed, and Cleveland State was forcing Myers students out of its dorm because Myers couldn’t pay the rent. “It caused a lot of trouble for our students,” Scaldini says.
The president met with The Plain Dealer‘s editorial board to make his case: Without help from the community, the feds wouldn’t release the money.
The paper urged the community to chip in. While the banks were slow, three wealthy businessmen — Forest City’s Albert Ratner and Sam Miller, and investor Carl Glickman — eventually offered a few hundred thousand dollars each to guarantee a $1.2 million letter of credit.
But Scaldini is hardly finished repairing the school’s finances. By slowly rebuilding enrollment, the school has cut its losses and managed to build an endowment of $600,000, he says. “We haven’t been standing still.” But it will take three years “to restore our balance sheet.”
Scaldini says Myers’ new Midtown location fits the school’s mission perfectly. He imagines the Euclid Corridor soon booming with small businesses. Myers’ small business courses are among its strongest, he says, and those students will be an asset to business owners.
Scaldini’s less sure about other parts of Feingold’s vision: He’s scrapped plans for a field house and is vague about whether he thinks sports should continue. “We’re reexamining everything.”
One thing he promises will change: job placement. He knows it’s the best way for Myers to compete with the University of Phoenix and other schools, and to attract local donors. Myers, he likes to say, can help reverse the brain drain. Although the career-services office still has just one staffer, Scaldini will add more. When he can. If he can.
“Everybody’s overworked and understaffed. It’s a fact of life,” he says. “Do I want to add people? Damn right I do. We’re not going to get ahead of ourselves.”
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2007.
I swear, is this where the tax payers money is going, to finance this spend thrift and his hair brained schemes? What burns me up is I have heard a lot about what this place does to students, especially the poor African-American students. They don’t really educate them, they take their financial aid and then they go to an African-American politician to bail their asses out of trouble with the U.S. Department of Education. It’s just sickening!
Honest to God! Why do people like this corrupt man get to make six figures? Also, didn’t he report to a Board of Trustees? Where were they when all of this was going on? It is obvious that they made if off of the small fellow. I don’t know about this university. Won’t enrollment be effected by all of this that has been going on? I sure in hell wouldn’t send a kid of mine there.
What the hell kind of place it this? A friend of mine used to work there. She was in charge of scheduling and advising. Do you know that Swinemold and that Don Luscher guy fired her because she wouldn’t come off her Christmas vacation to go to work? The woman was burned out! 29 employees left at that college? What kind of place runs away employees like that? Sounds like the place needs a good investigation. I doubt that the new prez will be able to make a difference. From what my friend told me the scheduling stuff had been going on to long, and its’ still going on. She kept challenging it. That’s really why they fired her. They just used Christmas vacation as an excuse.
The article shows the good and the bad of Myers. What this article doesn’t explore is the state’s part in how they distribute financial aid to colleges in Ohio. That system needs to be explored as well.
There is more to this aid issue than someone wants to admit somewhere. This isn’t the work of one man, it a chain of effects and someplace the state agency has a part to play. All colleges have financial aid issues and all colleges have lean budgets. This may have been case of promises not kept and deals that didn’t pan out. I think the ideas were good, the administration was trying, but the money wasn’t handled properly on some level. Were not given funding they were promised? Are policy makers not telling the other side of the story? There is more here than one man who is to blame here. Common sense says there is more to this part of the story. Wouldn’t you agree?
Hats off to Joe Tone and SCENE! Once again you have boldly gone where “Ohio’s Largest Daily newspaper dare not tread–the cold, hard truth.
To hear Mr. Scaldini tell it in the PD, Myers’ problems were the result of callous actions by the Department of Education and the equally callous refusal by two large, regional banks to pour money into the school. Given what SCENE has brought to light, who can fault the government and the banks? If Messers. Scaldini and Herzak honestly believe the school to be such an asset, let them pledge their personal fortunes to guarantee Myers’ viablity; and refrain from bullying the county and banks to make a commitment they themselves have yet to make.
Maybe Myers can better serve it’s students by using the federal money it receives to their facilitate enrollment, and subsidize their tuition, at other schools.
Thanks again, SCENE.
Great comments Paula, Judy, Ms. Sousa and Mr. Caldwell. No wonder the banks wouldn’t loan that place money! I know former students and a couple of employees that Feingold fired. They talked about how the students were getting ripped off with their grant money. The athletes were told that they were getting an athletic scholarship when in fact it was a loan! It doesn’t sound like things are different. It sounds like the excuses are what is different. There’s something strange going on with the money. I was told they have gone through several CFO’s when Feingold was there. He hired hinchmen to carry out his agenda. Eventually it’ll all come out. These fat cats kill me. They make these big salaries and they still have to do dirt and steal. A lot of these people steal to finance drug habits, like cocaine, heroine, crack and such. Don’t be surprised if that is some of what was going on and what’s still going on. It saddens me that poor students are trying to hang in there to get their education. They may feel like they have no other choices. I want to know what kind of placement rate they have. Where do these students work after they graduate, what 22% that do graduate? I have a feeling that there are still a bunch of thieves and thugs in there. They just got rid of the head rat, thief and thug. My question is, are they hiring new ones?
Myers University is the most disorganized and poorly managed establishment I have ever attended. I returned to Myers to try and achieve completing my degree in 2006. I was given financial aid for summer and fall. Now in the middle of the winter I find out the school denied my financial aid and they are blaming it on the department of education. Well with only 7 classes left to graduate they are trying to stick me with a close to $6000 bill and not allowing me financial aid to complete my degree, however all this happens after they conveniently added over an additional $11,000 to my federal student loans plus the $6000 that they are trying to hold me responsible for, but yet I cannot finish my last 7 classes to get my degree. I would love to sit down with the author of this article and give him my story.
If Dick Scaldini thinks he’s gonna do all these wonderful things he’s talking about in 3 years, then he’s either smoking something or snorting something. It takes time to repair all the damage that has been done by Feingold. Tsk, tsk, tsk.
I was hoping there would be a follow up story to this! What floors me is that our tax payers dollars goes toward financial aid for students. Then you get some wild man that is holding up the money and keeping the students from having a total collegiate experience. Instead their experience is filled with anxiety over their money so that can pay for their education and their basic necessities while they get their education! What a fraud!
I agree with Ms. Livingston about the financial aid. I too would like to see a follow up story. From my observation about Myers University I have seen over the years that the population has become more and more African-American, and poor African-American. I think that these poor students are vulnerable for scams like this that occurred from someone that needed to do all the stuff that was being done in terms of spending money on capital expansion and these students suffered because of it. Look at that student that could have gotten evicted and God knows what other suffering they went through that could not be put in this article for lack of space. Also look at the students in the article that couldn’t even get down there to her classes! What the HELL were they doing with the money? And what was up with the Athletic department? It sounds like they were lying to students also to get people in their program! I hate to see organizations like this that make it off of the backs of poor people and us, the tax payers. These people are going to school to try to better themselves and this is what happens to them. A lot of them I bet leave that university owing big loan money, some might not finish, or they may have to drop out because they need to work just for the bare necessities, like rent and food; which was the purpose of their pursuit of an education anyway, so that they could be more self sufficient; but that was taken away from them by Myers University. I’ve seen other non-profit organizations do that to poor people and it sucks! These people get these high paying jobs and they steal money and use it for purposes that are inappropriate and cause their clients or customers to suffer. That is outright wrong!
I think the article speaks clearly to what was happening to the students money, though I do agree with Ms. Hagan and Livingston. I think it is shameful that these practices are allowed. It is fraud to the highest degree. Aren’t people like this usually put in prison? How do people get away with this sort of thing?
With the athletic department, it sounds like they were using those athletes to recruit for enrollment and to get numbers for their program. My wife and I discussed this at length when this article first came out. We have four kids in college and we’ve seen and have been through it all. Two of our kids were being used in the athletic numbers game. At least my wife and I are educated and we can fight these systems that tried to use our kids and we both have good jobs (we are white) and can pay lawyers when we need to, and believe me we’ve needed to. What to say of kids who come from homes where they lack exposure, their parents aren’t educated, they don’t have good paying jobs and they are being used to fill athletic quotas or enrollment numbers for revenue? They are vulnerable because they are poor, Black or Hispanic and uneducated, vulnerable to have their lives ruined, through no fault of their own. I would imagine many show up there underprepared because of the schools they came from again through no fault of their own. I’d like to see a follow up story done to, to know if the money situation and capital situation was resolved. What dorm are those kids staying in? Is Myers University paying the rent or are they dodging the rent because of ‘other things’ they are doing with the money? What about the athletic program? Are the students happy? Are they getting their needs met? Or are they being used because they are athletes, like 2 of my kids were used? Are the students getting their disbursements on time? These are questions I’d like answers to.
I am writing in response to the article called “Mired University: Cleveland’s Oldest Business School Just Can’t Do Business”. I tell ya, this is one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in Scene Magazine in a long time when I do get it.
Very well put Mr. Tone! I know of people in my neighborhood that applied there and then decided against it and went to Cleveland State, Notre Dame or even Tri-C! It’s a good thing they did. They said they changed their mind because they heard things. They heard things about Feingold and the way he ran the place.
What I don’t get is that the University doesn’t offer the sciences or labs in other important courses. How can you have a School of Business and not offer foreign languages? In the Gen. Ed. curriculum at any college (even Tri-C) those courses are offered. Maybe they should have stayed Dyke College or Myers College. They used to be a proprietary school. I think the problem is internally maybe they still are that. Like that student that said his high school is run better than that, even Tri-C has a better curriculum. If that Richard Scaldini thinks he’s going to make all these wonderful changes in three years, then he’s crazy. He needs to re-read this article. Assuming everything here is true, these things are severe. You can’t repair this kind of damage in three years. Any idiot knows that. I bet there’s a lot he and the administration aren’t telling students and employees. If they told it all, they wouldn’t have any students or employees.
I disagree with L. Chevele’s comments, or most of them. They don’t seem to really hit on the topic. We’re talking about a man that went ape **** crazy with a lot of money at the expense of us all, especially the taxpayers and poor people trying to get an education. If the university closes down you’re talking about a lot of students being inconvenienced and a lot of employees looking for jobs. I’ve seen and have lived through this stuff before. When money is tight the administration gets crazy. They literally walk around the workplace pretending to see how things are going with the employees, when really they are looking at who else they can get rid of and make it look OK on their books and files especially if the people are minority or female. That racial and gender stuff they handle gingerly you better believe you me. I tell this to my kids and grandkids.
Also, I’ve heard that the minority students and employees get treated poorly there. They had some minority employees at the executive level at one time but they were gotten rid of by Feingold I hear and will never be replaced I bet. I became a friend with an African-American employee from the West Side of Cleveland who used to work there. Isn’t the University student body now mostly minority? I’m not sure, but Myers better get a grip, or as Malcolm X has said, “the chickens will come home to roost.”
The article is well written and true. As a student at Myers i am ashamed to have even gone. I went to play my sport at Myers rejecting 3 other well organized and STILL RUNNING colleges. Sports has been terminated at Myers, the school may close completely, or be sold, leaving me little time to find a play to go to school next fall. Thanks Myers… ” My Life, My Myers” should be changed to “My Life, Is OVER!!”
The article is well written and true. As a student at Myers i am ashamed to have even gone. I went to play my sport at Myers rejecting 3 other well organized and STILL RUNNING colleges. Sports has been terminated at Myers, the school may close completely, or be sold, leaving me little time to find a play to go to school next fall. Thanks Myers… ” My Life, My Myers” should be changed to “My Life, Is OVER!!”
Back in March I wrote this letter to the editor of Scene hoping it would be published to worn future students-While it was never published here it is:
Dear Mr. Tone:
I am a Myers University student and I have had the opportunity to not only read your article but also the response from Myers University President Scaldini. In Mr. Scaldini’s response to your article he tries to make numerous points that shift the focus of your article. He is using smoke and lights to create an illusion; an illusion that he wants the public to believe to be true. Let’s address the present and future of Myers University from a students’ perspective. I for one have not seen the changes Mr. Scaldini refers to. I see a university that is still mismanaged and unwilling to accept responsibility for its actions. Albert Einstein once quoted: “The solution to the problem cannot be found by using the same thinking that created the problem”. Remember like any good magician it only takes a slight of hand to create a false illusion. Is the same chairman of the board present, who allowed the university to end up in that situation? Has the university made any administration moves or are the same administrator’s still present? However, we do know that they have changed their president. Our next questions: Is the board responsible for the actions of the administration? Is the management of the university responsible for the actions of the departments? At least those are the concepts that are taught by the business professors at the university. But I guess there is a difference between reality and concept!
Let’s talk about his comment on the financial progress of the university to start. I was denied federal financial aid by the university. However, not until after they added almost $11,000 in tuition (for summer and fall of 2006) to my existing student loans. Then in the middle of the winter 2007 semester notify me that the university chooses to deny my loans for the winter 2007 semester. To graduate, I only need 7 (seven) courses. They were scheduled to be completed winter and summer of 2007, now without further federal financial aid (the only way I can pay for my education); I will not be able to graduate (which was scheduled for May 2007). In my eyes the university did not act very “Ethical”. I was neither advised academically nor through the financial aid department of this situation when they enrolled me. Yet, the university accepts no responsibility for it’s negligence in notifying me in advance that this was going to happen. I am not the only student to have issues with the financial aid department of the university. For some reason Myers University’s financial aid department feels that it is not their responsibility to notify students of these situations. The university cannot deliver on the services that we as students are paying for, does this sound as though they are rendering quality services to the people of Cleveland at the highest levels, as Mr. Scaldini is asking us to believe? I for one know I contacted Mr. Scaldini regarding this situation and he said he would get back to me and never did. He couldn’t even keep his word to a student of the university, so why should the public believe him.
In ending, let’s look at the current and the future of Myers University and let us ask the question; “Has anything really changed?” As a student I don’t see or believe anything has changed. The lack of willingness to accept responsibility for the university’s actions is still present, it hasn’t changed. Yet, there is one question that remains the same, who is responsible? If you believe Mr. Scaldini, it would be the fault of Joe Tone and students like me who choose to report the truth. Myers University “Wake Up” and listen to what the public and your students are saying, sometimes the truth hurts! Myers University put the responsibility where it belongs, and accept it! Sometimes the best advice you get is from the people on the outside looking in.
If you read my letter above from March and follow the news recently you can see that “Nothing” as Myers has changed as I had stated in my letter back in March and just more students getting hurt. Whose losing; the students!
I can’t believe all these comments I’ve been reading and how the students and the employees are getting hurt by this organization. If they can’t get it together (and it looks like they can’t), then the place needs to be shut down!
Last week, there was something outlandish in the newspapers about Myers EVERY DAY! Now, they claim to get a 2 million dollar donation from an ‘anonymous donor’ who is not from the area. Then Eric Fingerhut spills more beans. That pitiful administration and Board of Trustees needs to look at when the place started to go down and re-examine everything, including the current leadership and even the current Board. Some of them probably need to be unseated.
As some of the people commented, the students are the ones that suffer the most. What is really sad is that most of them are poor students, and many are minority. That ship looks like it is gonna sink unless some other entity takes them over. Maybe that is what is really happening with the University of Northern Virginia, but the powers that be aren’t telling the employees and of course the students the entire story. I hope Fingerhut keeps his hand on the pulse of everything and let’s us, the TAXPAYERS know all of the facts!
I have been reading stuff about Myers University every day! Whoever heard of canceling a graduation? The place should probably be shut down just for that! I’m glad they had it or that administration would have probably had their tires slashed and Lord knows what else.
I also saw the cartoon in the Sunday paper. That was a bit much to me, even though I think the school is shit from what I’ve heard about the curriculum and the interns that go out to the community. A friend of mine hired a Myers intern and the girl couldn’t even write. Her reading skills left some to be desired for a college student and she couldn’t even use correct English. It made me wonder what are they recruiting and what are they graduating?
Hi:
I wanna know WHEN Myers University got this way. Was it when this Paul Feinstein got hired? Back in the day it was a prestigious college. I’ve heard people say that it should have stayed Dyke College or Myers College. I disagree. I think they just should have been careful with who they hire, especially at the President’s level. They should have focused on education and building the majors at the undergraduate level and the graduate level instead of buying building after building. What was wrong with staying where they were on Carnegie or Prospect or where ever they were?
I am appaled by the below comment from one of the Scene Magazines on the state of Myers University. Just read it everyone who has not seen it.
“Scaldini must have since found some crumpled invoices in an old pair of slacks. At a meeting with students last week, the president announced that the school would cancel its sports program, leaving athletes to scramble for transfers. Scaldini also said that Myers is on the verge of either closing or being bought by another school.
After Scaldini’s optimistic response to Scene’s February article, his announcement caught students off guard. Fearing their credits may soon be as valuable as Duane Kuiper’s rookie card, they peppered Scaldini with angry questions. The president reacted just as loudly.
“I couldn’t believe it,” says Mike Forchione, a 21-year-old soccer player. “He was going crazy.”
Myers, which counts John D. Rockefeller among its alum, survived for years by offering business-related classes to first-generation and mid-career students.”
Now if you have alum like the Rockefellers and I hear Harvey Firestone why would you be having all of these problems? How could they be canceling athletic programs and looking at the possibility of canceling a commencement? Are the Rockefellers and the Harvey Firestones REALLY alum or is this false advertising? Why would they not want to be bothered with their alma mater if they were really graduates from there? I don’t think you can blame all of Myers shape on the former President Feingold. Yes, he did a lot of damage some maybe beyond repair, but there’s much more to this than we are being made aware of. I think there are a lot of lies being told to us (the taxpayers) and a lot of sins of omissions. I have a real problem with this anonymous $2,000,000 donation from someone out of the state and then we find out about this for profit university in Virginia. You mean to tell me that they aren’t going to get something from this? As a person who has lived in Orange Village, Moreland Hills, Hunting Valley and Gates Mills all her life I am very familiar withh these kinds of deals and how underhanded they can be. I’ve seen all kinds of things go on in the backroom. Well, let’s just watch the papers, the televised news and see how it all shakes out.