To the editor:

The Journal-World (Sept. 23) reports that the dean of the KU School of Business will step down at the end of the academic year. After 11 successful years in that position, Bill Fuerst has accomplished a great deal. Pointing to those accomplishments might have been a nice follow in the article.

Unfortunately by the second sentence, the article veers into innuendo and half truth, indicating “the resignation comes just a few months after students began questioning how the school was using funds raised through additional course fees.” The article next states that a breakdown of how differential tuition funds are spent is still not complete.

Here are the facts that I know: The questions regarding uses of differential funds came from a small number of students last spring, not a few months ago. The school and university responded carefully to their questions, also in the spring. That these students were not satisfied with the responses, in my opinion, does not lend merit to lingering claims about missing details. Having viewed both the initial proposal for fund uses and the documentation of how funds were used, I believe that the school has more than met the terms of that compact, and done so consistently over the years. The initial proposal and the school’s reported uses of these funds, 2005-2010, are available at http://www.business.ku.edu/undergrad/prospective/tuition/.

This paper’s reporting and editorial writing on this matter have been aggressively adversarial, spewing innuendoes without providing substance. We’d all like to see a fair, balanced perspective displayed by the media. That is certainly not what we have seen from this newspaper. I’d say it’s time to start.

Doug Houston, professor and area director of

finance, economics, and decision sciences,

KU School of Business