Simon Newman is President of Mount St. Mary's University. Simon was born in the United Kingdom, he is 51. He was educated at the University of Cambridge (BA/MA) and has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the former managing director of the private equity fund JP Capital Partners, as well as president and CEO of Cornerstone Management Group. Simon and his wife, Michelle, have two children. ^[1]

[Note to Editor, I deleted these sections because they are defamatory.

There was never a policy to dismiss students for struggling despite it being in many newspapers, or a plan to remove students to goose the retention statistics, but only a plan to refund students money if they wanted to leave and did so before 1/2 way through the first semester.

These two rediculous claims were investigated both by the University board and Middle States Commission on Higher Education and found to be untrue.

The quote you have attributed to me is something I did not say.

It has been manufactured from parsed sentences and non-sequiturs, taken out of context, and scandalized to support a toxic and false narrative.

Before you add to the defamation, here is a short list of defamatory claims about me in the media and in social media that are all false:

• Tried to kick out students for struggling

• Tried to goose the retention statistics by kicking out struggling students

• Used a survey to work out which students should be kicked out

• Said "you have to drown the bunnies... put a glock to their heads"

• Ordered the removal of crucifixes

• Tried to turn the univeristy into a non-catholic school

• Stole money from the seminary

• Encouraged students to watch pornography by offering HBO

• Attemtped to reduce the university's "catholic identity"

• Tried to close, or reduce, the departments of philosophy and history

• Attempted to eliminate the D1 sports program

• Any many, many more]

President Newman was hired to bring leadership and financial stewardship to a struggling university.

The week Newman took the reigns, Fox Business News listed Mount St. Mary's as one of the 18 most likely universities to next go out of business, due in part to its crippling debt load and junk bond status.

The univeisity had run out of cash shortly before his appointment and it had to make an emergency loan from its endowment to continue operating.

During his tenure, Mount St. Mary's made significant strides forward including adding new degree programs in high demand areas such as cybersecurity, data analytics, forensic accounting, entrepreneurship and PP&E (Philosophy, Politics and Economics).

Newman eliminated around $3 million in non-people expenses, and used the money to fund new programs and deliver a 6.5% increase in faculty base pay and a doubling of the academic support budget.

He reduced debts and long term obligations by $12 million, and he began the implementation of the university's first accounting system.

During his presidency the univeristy sports programs were expanded to attract over 170 news student athletes.

Internationally, he forged an agreement with Cambridge University to send students there as part of a summer program, along with an agreement to run courses offered by the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSI) in the US.

Newman was also responsible for attracting and negotiating what would be the largest pending donation in the University's history.

The CSI program and donation went away when Newman became the target of a defamation and character assassination campaign by members of the faculty and their agents, which ultimately led to his firing by the board which they wrote up as a resignation.

The scandal was orchestrated by a small group of faculty and their agents, who mainly came from the weakest rated departents in the university: philosophy, modern languages, history and mathematics.

These departments took the last four places in the academic satisfaction surveys conducted by the premier market research company Simpson Scarborough.^[9] In addition these departments labored under low productivity: modern languages had eight full time professors and several adjuncts, but graduated only one student; philosophy had around 9 full time professors and adjuct equivalents including two of the highest paid professors in the university, but they only graduated six people.^[10] A major factor in causing unrest was Newman's insistance in reducing the very unpopular, bloated core curriculum of 68 credits, upon which these weaker departments relied for teaching credits. Thane Naberhaus, the philosophy professor who was central to orchestrating the attacks on President Newman, taught only 1/2 of one class in the fall semester 2016 compared to 3 or 4 full time classes for his peers (his other duties as head of the honors program were transfered to another faculty member who had a full teaching load, and she agreed to undertake his duties for a small incremental stipend).

The controversy at Mount St. Mary's is a classic case of a character assassination, known within the higher education community as an academic mobbing^[11].

Unlike other character assassinations, the attackers in the Mount St. Mary's case went so far as to try and get the University's accreditation pulled with an appeal to Middle States, as well as to have the university investigated with a formal complaint to Brian Frosh the attorney general for the state of Maryland.

This burning-down-the-house strategy worked, even though all allegations made against Newman and the University have been proven false.

Once Newman was dismissed, most of the organizers of the mobbing got promoted, were offered tenure, or had their contracts extended.

According the Chairman John Coyne, board members representing around $350 million in net worth all quit the board after Newman was fired.