Professor Donald Parsons argues that the Knapp administration is more open to dialogue than his predecessor’s.

One need not love the Henry James novel Golden Bowl to appreciate that small events can carry great meaning. We have had such an event at GW. A distinguished group of 11 faculty members argue clearly and passionately against the main proposition of one of my recent opinion pieces in The Hatchet. Now the piece, in which I proposed we close the engineering school, could well have been written to stimulate a response, which would seem to make a reaction unremarkable. But that is not the case at GW. In the last few years, I have put forth a steady flow of opinions on University happenings without serious faculty response. Many pieces have touched on administration misadventures and almost no faculty member ever disagreed, but certainly not all. We now have scholars disagreeing on an important GW policy issue and laying out their reasons publicly.