WHEN THE FACULTY of Villa Julie College arrives for orientation this month, the talk will be M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.
That's because Kevin J. Manning, beginning his second year as president of the Green Spring Valley college, has taken five of his top administrators to the Disney Institute in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., for three days of instruction in the Walt Disney way.
What the group learned will now be spread to the college's faculty and staff.
Does this mean that professors and students will be greeted by Mickey and others in Disney costumes or that they'll be regaled by renditions of "It's a Small World"?
No, but it does mean, says Manning, that the principles of Disney hospitality can be transferred to a college campus, and that a reputation for excellent student and staff service can give the 54-year-old Villa Julie an advantage in the competitive world of Maryland higher education.
"We'll be trying to create an environment in which individuals feel they're something special," says Manning, 56, who came to Villa Julie 13 months ago from Immaculata College near Philadelphia. As he speaks, he fingers (but declines to don for a Sun photographer) a Mickey Mouse hat with a yellow tassel that was presented by Mickey himself to each member of the Villa Julie party upon "graduation."
I thought the idea was nonsense when I first heard of it, but the more I heard Manning talk, and the more I thought of the attitudes on some campuses with which I'm more familiar, the more sense the Villa Julie president started to make.
The Marylanders and representatives from seven other colleges around the country wore earphones and walked through Disney World as an instructor explained by radio what to look for in Disney's "service net." For one thing, every employee, on duty or off, is empowered to intervene in a service emergency.
For example, a 4-year-old does what 4-year-olds do: She drops her ice cream cone and has a fit. Her parents are about to buy her another when an off-duty employee who has witnessed the incident approaches the family, soothes the crying child and arranges on the spot for a replacement cone, courtesy of Disney.
Now, a four-year private liberal arts college isn't in the business of selling cones to 4-year-olds, but it is in the business of teaching French, computer science, business administration and English literature, of checking out books and serving cafeteria meals, of canceling classes on snow days and maintaining a secure and clean campus.
What if faculty members and staff instinctively picked up and disposed of the inevitable campus litter? What if a professor telephoned students to inform them of a class cancellation instead of relying on the radio or a hastily scrawled note on a classroom door? What if campus cops were actually helpful?
Manning says he learned a couple of necessities in Florida. "One is that unless service is an explicit part of what you do, it tends not to be widely disbursed." Another is that the need to serve "has to be part of your entire culture."
Manning was 22 when he taught his first college course in St. Louis. "I've been in the business for 35 years," he says, "and I never thought I'd be learning more about it at Disney World."
Not a single Maryland school is in the top 30 recipients of "earmarked" grants, and in an ordering of the 50 states and District of Columbia this year, Maryland finishes 50th.
The few grants directed to Maryland schools seem sensible: $659,000 to Morgan State University for a research-and-education center on transportation, $298,000 to the University of Maryland, Baltimore to prevent lead poisoning, $392,000 to the University System of Maryland to improve the aquaculture of striped bass.
Among the grants the Chronicle says "make you want to scratch your head": $590,000 to the University of Utah to predict weather during next year's Winter Olympics and $250,000 to the University of Georgia to study the taste and smell of Vidalia onions.
A York, Pa., reader said his two dailies often confuse "affect" and "effect," "pour" and "pore."
Finally, a reader in Baltimore submitted a brochure from Aberdeen Proving Ground that warns that "unexploded [dud] ammunition may be laying under water."
