The Christ Church Episcopal School (CCES) deal. The headmaster of CCES will select a few students to receive a $10,000 scholarship once those students have been accepted at Furman. In turn, Furman faculty will be able to send their children to CCES at reduced tuition.

This deal has been a controversial issue for two months. From where we sit,the issue at hand is the overall direction of Furman expansion.

Let’s start by doing what few people have done thus far and praise the good. We’re in favor of the new admissions policy being put into place. It foregrounds the applicant’s character, leadership, and drive. Submitting SAT or ACT scores is now optional, as the good folks over at Admissions understand that standardized test scores correlate highly with family income and parental education even more than they do grades. Interviews are optional as well, yet these are highly encouraged.

Face time and subjective evaluation are replacing Scantron, thank goodness. What’s happening with CCES is a part of that. Giving the headmaster the keys to scholarship money is probably the way of the future; talking with guidance counselors is going to be a way to learn about the student. We’re excited about the trend in Furman admissions; the CCES deal is the most visible marker of that thus far.

No, the real problem we have is that CCES got here first.

It might be suggested that the Furman administration didn’t intend for CCES to be in the spotlight. Let’s stop there for a second.

Note that the above sentence says “administration.” It does not say “administration and faculty.” Without even asking the faculty at large or the Admissions Committee (made up of a mixed group of faculty, administrators, and students) what they thought about it, the administration decided to go ahead and make this deal with CCES. Some faculty actually learned about the deal in the factually deficient article in The Greenville News.

We won’t belabor this point, but we’re concerned that the administration took such an important executive step without so much as sending an e-mail to the scores of smart people on the payroll. The faculty at Furman are a tremendous resource. Even if we don’t pay them to make executive decisions, wouldn’t it make sense to take their pulse on decisions like this one?

Getting back to the issue at hand: why did the administration pick CCES first?

The administration, which says hackneyed things about “diversity,” picked a school widely viewed as being full of wealthy Caucasian students. You may have noticed that Furman is lousy with wealthy Caucasians.

The administration claims to be interested in opening up to the Greenville community. They did that, sort of. CCES is in Greenville, after all.

So are Greenville High Academy and Wade Hampton High School. They could also have reached out to other Greenville County high schools in Taylors, Greer, or Simpsonville.

We’re willing to bet that the vast majority of those public school kids and their families would benefit more from those scholarships than the families sending kids to CCES.

It’s not that Financial Aid doesn’t give equivalent scholarships to kids from those high schools, because they certainly do. It’s that this scholarship, worth $10,000 yearly, is being very publicly given to kids whose parents felt fine footing a bill pushing $18,000 the year before.

For prospective students and the larger community viewing Furman, perception is reality. There’s a reason that we have sod, fountains, and brick here.

Furman could have made a bold statement and offered the principal of Berea High the opportunity to name students he thought deserving of a $10,000 scholarship once they were accepted to Furman. The South Carolina Department of Education estimates that about 83% of the students at Berea High are eligible for subsidized meal programs; that’s a key marker of depressed socio-economic status, and it’s ubiquitous at Berea. Berea High is mostly made up of minority students. Berea High is within the Greenville city limits.

We went with CCES instead.

Maybe a Berea deal will happen in the future, and it’ll be worth cheering about when it does. But sometimes, being first matters.

This is one of those times. That CCES is first in this field shows where our future priorities are. And the way we see it, our future priorities are uncomfortably similar to the unsustainable and outmoded ones we have at present.