Letter: Spellings represents a failure of leadership

TO THE EDITOR:

The search committee has done their Friday afternoon dirty work, and in a procedural coup have foisted Margaret Spellings onto a vital set of institutions at their ever-increasing political peril. 

Voices from many corners call for “giving her a chance” to see how she performs. 

This ignores her entire record. 

She entered the policy stage in collaboration with the devoted partisan practitioner Karl Rove to serve the feeble-minded scion of a political family that also relied on the skills of character assassin and dirty trickster Lee Atwater. 

Spellings’ signature policy achievement has been the abject failure that is No Child Left Behind. Her time in the public sector has been followed by association with an online institution with low graduation and high student loan default rates now barred from educational programs of the Department of Defense. 

She has also served on the board of a student loan debt collection agency. 

For someone who claims that educational institutions should focus on “accountability” and “metrics,” Ms. Spellings’ career choices demonstrate that these are only cynical buzzwords employed to provide cover for political and commercial opportunism of the worst sort. 

Considering the collection of carnival barkers and flimflam artists that now hold sway in Raleigh, such a naked display of political brute force should come as no surprise. 

Your leaders and institutions have failed you. 

Of course, you can carry on as if none of this puts your future in peril. The crowd on Jones Street is counting on it.

Stuart Strum

Class of ’80

Geology