I just read your post and I felt compelled to respond. It is long, but hopefully you will see that I love my alma mater, and want only the best for it. My response had to be divided into two posts to address all of the points you made.
" Since I started at UA, it has steadily fallen in the rankings at a incredible pace. However, Temple, a near equal competitor to UA in terms of offered value, has risen."
Ok, we have been over this in detail. Not sure if you read the posts above yours. We have identified several key factors that easily explain the decline. Mainly, there has been a change in criteria for which UA was unprepared. Should they have been prepared? Well if rankings are important, perhaps, but on another level, perhaps not because maybe the new criteria is not really a good indicator of academic power. To summarize, despite having better qualified students than ever, despite having been ranked as one of the top schools for internships, despite the rapidly increasing research output of the school, despite the amazing new facilities that can compete with any other school in the nation, UA has been dropping precipitously in the USNWR ranking. Maybe the ranking is no longer a valid measure to rank schools.
“1. I do believe the seemingly consistent scandals and negative press is catching up with UA. Since I began considering UA (around 2014), we’ve consistently dealt with issues of racism, corruption, or ineptitude that further scar an already marked school. I have to remind myself, looking back and living in the Northeast, that it’s not typical for the average university to experience a national scandal related to racist comments by a sorority girl. Or, be lambasted in the media for the suicide of a former student due to an inept local police department. A Black administrator being pushed out for old tweets. that made Breitbart mad. isn’t normal.”
Well it is clear where you stand politically, for you seem to buy into certain assumptions. First, I can think of one real sorority scandal, and that was extremely embarrassing, but it happened in 2012, eight years ago. The university aggressively responded to it and now has an integrated Greek system. There are certain factors which will prevent the system from being as integrated as you might wish, namely, the longstanding and very proud tradition of predominantly Black Greek houses at UA. The other scandals involved one girl meaning to text in celebration, “NO more ninjas!!!” at the sorority selection day, to other sorority sisters, but the soft form of the n word appeared instead. Probably because she like most young women of her age, are fans of rap culture and she has used the term in her personal life. One thing is clear. No one who means to be hateful, calls a Back person the soft version of the word. They use the hard version.
So why did she mean to text “ninja”? Ninja is a term for a girl who swoops into a sorority even though she isn’t a first choice of the sorority. Furthermore, one of her new pledge sisters was Black, so it would not have made any sense for her to celebrate having no Black pledges in her class of sisters.
The other scandal I can think of was the NJ, not Alabama sorority girl, who posted a racist message. There is no way to explain that. She was being really nasty, but again, not from Alabama!
You are making assumptions about that girl’s suicide. Enough said.
The Black administrator agreed to leave, because he had made extremely offensive anti White tweets a couple of years before. If any White administrator had left anything close to the kind of racist tweet he had, then they would have been fired and likely, had their career destroyed. Again, you reveal your politics with your selective outrage. Personally, I don’t think UA should tolerate administrators with a history of racist tweets. It didn’t just make Breitbart mad, it made me, an alum mad. And I don’t appreciate how it was used to make UA look bad.
By the way, is this Amanda? The student who posted that viral video falsely accusing White UA students of attacking Blacks and kicking in doors when Obama won? I checked with the Tuscaloosa News, and they found that NEVER happened. The most they could find was that a Black prof’s Obama poster had been defaced. You better believe that had that happened, it would have made national news.
Oh yeah, I think someone found a racist message chalked on campus. Well it could very easily have been a hate hoax. Those have been epidemic over the last 20 years, like with the “poop swastika” found at Mizzou. Very often the Black or Jewish student who finds the hate message is found to have committed the hate hoax.