At one time, Maryland’s St. Mary’s College had more than 1500 undergraduates and was considered a place where students could get a quality liberal arts education at a great price.

Now the school is experiencing a crisis in leadership.  Dr. Robert Paquette, Ph.D., a prize-winning historian who co-founded the independent Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, shares his views on the outgoing leader, a Hamilton College émigré named Joseph Urgo.

Poor Joe, I knew him well. He and his superior Joan Hinde Stewart presided over the collapse of the signed agreement that would have established with four million dollars of fresh money the scholarly center that eventually became the independent Alexander Hamilton Institute.   A bald, diminutive fellow with a thick beard, Urgo spouted progressive platitudes and vapid metaphors like a gushing spigot.  He preached diversity at every turn, saying he wanted a faculty that looked like America.  But when confronted over and over again by me with overwhelming evidence of Hamilton’s gross lack of intellectual diversity, he went into a denial act worthy of Lois Lerner.  Students remember him most as the helmeted curiosity who liked to motor in and about the campus on a blue Vespa motor scooter. When stationary and sitting astride it, Urgo cast a visage that resembled that of Michael Dukakis’s helmeted head popping up from the hatch of an Abrams tank.

…In a revealing report to St. Mary’s board of trustees in May, when the crisis was peaking, Urgo painted himself as a “vigorous proponent of liberal arts education.”  Really?  In landing the St. Mary’s job, Urgo took credit for Hamilton’s most recent strategic plan.  Truth be told, it fully enshrines the boondoggle of the no curriculum, better known by the euphemism of the open curriculum. So analytically thin and poorly written is Hamilton’s most recent strategic plan that respected senior faculty refused to even call it one. Read it for yourself here: http://www.hamilton.edu/documents/strategicplanfinalsl.pdf

To say that many of Hamilton’s faculty regarded Urgo’s leadership as, shall we say, wanting is an understatement roughly equivalent to the one about the glitches that will accompany the federal government’s implementation of Obamacare. Nor was I alone in quickly learning that when entering Urgo’s office to extract an explanation for his and his superiors’ questionable behavior, the better part of valor demanded dragging a friend along to act as a third-party witness to vouch later for what he had said, which typically was neither straight nor informative.

Urgo’s critics at St. Mary’s College, like those at Hamilton, spoke of his lack of candor and secretiveness about what he and his lieutenants were doing. In fact, Urgo’s deanship at Hamilton raised so many red flags (several of which I waved in a variety of publications: see here http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/05/war_over_a_trojan_hors… and here http://www.nas.org/articles/Dictatorships_and_Double_Standards_Part_II, for example), that one yearns for the names of the geniuses on the executive search firm of Isaacson, Miller who dredged him up for St. Mary’s as a viable candidate in the first place. Did anyone at the firm make a concerted effort to interview anyone outside of administration on Hamilton’s faculty about Urgo’s job performance?

But, to be fair, Urgo’s shoulders should not bear the full burden of responsibility for St. Mary’s current mess. Trustees, faculty, alumni, and students need to own up to their contribution as well.