Good luck, best wishes to our Temple friends in finding the best available president and maintaining the strong momentum in your athletics.

The BOT are pissed because he fired the provost without their blessing. With all the good Theobald has done for the university (academics, athletics and infrastructure) I don’t see how dismissing him helps the greater good for Temple. The BOT should slap his hand publically, assign a compliance officer to follow his every move for the next 2 years, and let him move on to continuing his work and vision.

As I said in a previous post, only at Temple a scandal that costs the presidents his job revolves around awarding deserving students too much money in merit based scholarships in an effort to raise the academic profile and ranking of the university.

We need to get our crap together and start doing things that won’t hurt the school like taking tests for athletes and paying off recruits’ parents.

The issue is that Temple went SAT optional, and has a very clear-cut merit aid scholarship awarding system. There are no extra essays or anything. You generally know how much you are getting because they spell out what you need for each award total. Because the cost of attending college is rising significantly, and many middle to upper middle class students' parents' income exceed the threshold for need based aid at Ivies and other top schools, Temple is an attractive school because of our honors program, internship and job opportunities between Philly and NYC, and the fact that many of them are actually getting paid to go to Temple (full scholarship+stipend). As good as Michigan, Penn, NYU, GWU, UVA, Carnegie Mellon, etc. are, there's a cost benefit analysis between paying (or taking out loans) $260,000 for a college education there and getting paid to go to Temple. Our academic profile is raising significantly thanks to that, and although the average student at Temple is improving, they're awarding too much to top students and not balancing that out with more full pay or lower merit aid awards.

What Temple needed to do was cap the honors college and full scholarship awards, and focus on attracting more students in the 1220 SAT range rather than the 1400 SAT range.

Theobald was apparently aware that they were significantly blowing by their available merit aid, and was blamed for the $22M shortfall rather than the provost.

It's a very weird situation, because essentially our president is being fired for doing too good of a job attracting top students.

Philadelphia Magazine initially reported that Theobald's defense is that the Board is trying to fire him because he would not cover up the sexual harassment scandal involving the provost. I don't know if he relayed this info himself to the reporter or if it came from his attorney. I also don't know if this info is still out at Philly Mag's website.

Also the tuition increase has nothing to do with the additional $250k to do the traffic study for the stadium. It was just another item that they discussed and approved at their meeting.

Tuition will once again increase 2.8% which is what the national average is. Base tuition will now be $15,384 per year for state residents $26,376 for out of state). The student fees have increased $100 to $890.

As you guys can see the cost of attending a state university in the northeast is really high. Rutgers, Penn State and Pitt are all about the same cost as Temple. Throw in another $14k per year for room and board and things get expensive fast.
Still at a total cost of $29k, Temple is still a bargain compared to crosstown rivals Drexel and UPenn which both charge more than $62k per year.

If the new president poo-poos on the OCS, is there anyway Temple could get a reasonable rent on Lincoln Financial? I mean, what they want to raise it to seems criminal for a stadium built half with taxpayer funds.

(07-14-2016 04:32 PM)Chappy Wrote:  If the new president poo-poos on the OCS, is there anyway Temple could get a reasonable rent on Lincoln Financial? I mean, what they want to raise it to seems criminal for a stadium built half with taxpayer funds.

No, they don't want us there, but I think the BOT will require the next prez to be on board.

Another member of the Philadelphia media chimes in:
http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/coll...dium_.html
How can a sports columnist in the fourth largest media market in the country be so ill-informed about the issues involving OCS at Temple University:
1) Temple is currently getting raped in fees by the owner of Lincoln Financial Field (Jeffrey Lurie, Eagles). The Linc was completely built with extorted public funds.
2) The Delaware Valley market (7.1 million), would be a feather in the cap of any conference looking to retain or improve it's tv market share. If Temple continues to progress athletically with successful football and men's basketball programs those 14.2 million eyeballs will wind up somewhere; either a P-6 AAC, or a 21 million dollar/per year small-market riddled ACC.
3) Penn State is still wallowing with a bad hire, James Franklin, and a continuing fall-out from the worst scandal in the history of collegiate athletics. Cosmic schadenfreude!

(07-16-2016 07:56 AM)wave97 Wrote:  Another member of the Philadelphia media chimes in:
http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/coll...dium_.html
How can a sports columnist in the fourth largest media market in the country be so ill-informed about the issues involving OCS at Temple University:
1) Temple is currently getting raped in fees by the owner of Lincoln Financial Field (Jeffrey Lurie, Eagles). The Linc was completely built with extorted public funds.
2) The Delaware Valley market (7.1 million), would be a feather in the cap of any conference looking to retain or improve it's tv market share. If Temple continues to progress athletically with successful football and men's basketball programs those 14.2 million eyeballs will wind up somewhere; either a P-6 AAC, or a 21 million dollar/per year small-market riddled ACC.
3) Penn State is still wallowing with a bad hire, James Franklin, and a continuing fall-out from the worst scandal in the history of collegiate athletics. Cosmic schadenfreude!

I don’t live in Philly but from what I understand he’s (Murphy) a LaSalle graduate who for some reason has an ax to grind with Temple. From what I’ve been told he rarely if ever has anything positive to say about Temple, but then again that’s all second hand info.

Murphy went to La Salle, which dropped football, and very likely will no longer be a university in 20 years thanks to massive declines in enrollment considering no one wants to pay $40K a year for a regional school no one has ever heard of.

http://articles.philly.com/2015-08-27/ne...hman-class

They also hired perhaps the most unqualified president in the history of American academia because no one wanted the job.

Saw the location of the proposed OCS. If the stadium ever becomes a reality Temple better come up with parking to handle the game day parking and tailgating experience. I have been at Temple for 2 spring graduation ceremonies and have been there 2 other times to check it out for my kids. The parking situation was horrendous every time I was there. Where are they going to put cars on game day for 20 to 30 thousand people if they get that many people to their games.

Personally I hope the Owls stay at the Linc and pressure is put on the Eagles owner from both the city and state officials to come up with a reasonable rent agreement since city and state funds were used to build that stadium. I enjoy the game day atmosphere there for tailgating and the stadium experience for both the Eagles and Temple, along with the summer atmosphere for the Phillies in that area too.

There won't be near that many cars because both the regional rail and Broad Street Line are on campus. I think the design of the stadium is supposed to be sort of sunken to allow parking lots and structures to be built around it. As far as tailgating goes, I think the plan is to create an atmosphere like The Grove at our new quad.

(07-16-2016 04:43 PM)PA-GAMECOCK Wrote:  Saw the location of the proposed OCS. If the stadium ever becomes a reality Temple better come up with parking to handle the game day parking and tailgating experience. I have been at Temple for 2 spring graduation ceremonies and have been there 2 other times to check it out for my kids. The parking situation was horrendous every time I was there. Where are they going to put cars on game day for 20 to 30 thousand people if they get that many people to their games.

Personally I hope the Owls stay at the Linc and pressure is put on the Eagles owner from both the city and state officials to come up with a reasonable rent agreement since city and state funds were used to build that stadium. I enjoy the game day atmosphere there for tailgating and the stadium experience for both the Eagles and Temple, along with the summer atmosphere for the Phillies in that area too.

I think the parking and tailgating challenges are all being overblown. We have a model for those challenges in our conference already with SMU. If anything their parking and tailgating issues may have been worse than what Temple faces. They don’t have the advantage of direct rail service to campus, being located basically in a residential area vs commercial, and at just over 6000 students their basic infrastructure isn’t designed to handle large crowds.

People will need to understand Temples stadium won’t have the traditional tailgating atmosphere where everyone parks in a few giant parking lots that are connected to each other, but like any stadium located in a major city with a little creativity those issues will be easily overcome.

My concern is the changes that will need to be made to the traffic patterns, but even that is very workable.

Some two way streets will be made temporarily into one way streets with cars using both lanes. Temple already has experience with large crowds at the basketball arena for games and concerts. football crowds will be three times larger so no doubt it will be crowded on game day.
We have been somewhat spoiled by the fact that in the past we played in a stadium area designed for 70k fans with us bringing less than half of that most of the time. This resulted in plenty of space in huge lots and easy traffic in and out.

I have been to Temple football games at Franklin Field which is very congested. Yet our fans managed to get there with no problem. Tailgating was in tight areas but that didn't stop us.