Reception
MUM has received both criticism and acclaim. Author Samuel Schuman reports that while many in the higher education community did not take the university seriously when it began in 1974, the college has "persisted cheerfully" for more than three decades and its achievements and results are "incontestably impressive". Some members of the local community were initially against the university with 540 residents signing a petition protesting the local school board for allowing four MIU students to visit the public schools as observers. However, author William Jefferson reports that by 1976, 200 local people had "taken up Transcendental Meditation themselves" and compared to the "wild and woolly" students of the prior college, "nearly all the residents now agree that they are nice people to have around".
A 1976 article in the New York Times described the campus as a "cheerful, optimistic place where people smile a lot and tend to be considerate and trusting". In 1992 the New York Times reported that the university was a place where all students and faculty meditate, and all the Maharishi's teachings are woven into mathematics, physics and every other subject, similar to colleges with strong religious affiliations. While noting it is "an accredited university with grant-winning faculty members and competitive students who mix transcendental meditation" and through "serious academics studies" hope to create "their own new world". The article goes on to say that even as the university gains research grants and subsequent credibility, it also faces controversy. For example, one critic, 1979 alumni Curtis Mailloux, called the campus a "coercive environment" with a "propensity for fraudulent research". Accreditation officials say they are aware of these accusations and "have been aggressive in checking Marahishi International's academic freedom". The deputy director of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCACS), Steven D. Crow, says "Every move the university's made has been monitored" and MIU's library, faculty, academic mission and classroom space have been deemed appropriate. At the same time John W. Patterson, a professor at Iowa State University has harshly criticized The North Central Association's evaluation, saying it "does nothing more than to lend credibility to these crackpots". The article also reports that many non-students have moved to the city of Fairfield "so they can meditate in the domes".
In 1986, seven "former devotees" filed a fraud suit against the Maharishi saying they paid thousands of dollars for lessons at Maharishi International University that were designed to reduce stress, improve memory, reverse aging, develop clairvoyance and levitation. One plaintiff said that after 10 years he had not acquired any of the special abilities that were promised. According to reviews of the 1992 book, Heaven on Earth – Dispatches from America’s Spiritual Frontier, author and reporter Michael D'Antonio wrote that the MIU physics department was teaching theories that he believed were "dead wrong" alleged that the university had taken Transcendental Meditation "into a grandiose narcissistic dream, a form of intellectual bondage, that they call enlightenment".
A 2008 ACT alumni survey showed a high level of alumni satisfaction. MUM is listed in Peterson's 440 Great Colleges for Top Students 2010. According to the National Survey of Student Engagement MUM scored in the top 3% for "active and collaborative learning", in the top 4% for "enriching educational experience", in the top 7% for "student/faculty interaction", in the top 8% for "supportive campus environment and in the top 26% for "level of academic challenge". MUM graduates also gave their college experience a "higher than average satisfaction" rating as recorded in the "annual ACT alumni survey". Specifically, 73% said they would choose MUM again, more than twice the national average of 32%.
Read more about this topic: Maharishi University Of Management
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
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“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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