TROUBLE IN THE IVORY TOWER

It's been a bad month for ASU Chancellor Ken Peacock.

Rushing to qualify the university for a big pot of money to build a new College of Education, he's tried to rush the Town of Boone into rezoning property along Hamby Alley so that he could evict dozens of students and little old ladies from their lodgings and build a high-rise that will not conform to any of Boone's development standards. The Town of Boone apparently doesn't want to be rushed. Nor gobbled up in quite this way.

Peacock is depicted in The Appalachian, the student newspaper, as woefully out of touch with environmental concerns and student-generated initiatives on his own campus ... by a student writer who confesses herself an otherwise adoring fan of the chancellor.

But worst of all, Peacock gets cussed out in absentia, and very publicly, by Chancellor Erskine Bowles, who told the entire Faculty Assembly in Chapel Hill that he doesn't appreciate being "gamed" by Peacock. The "gaming" in question apparently referred to a bit of bait-and-switch budgeting that Peacock was attempting to sneak past the chancellor. Bowles said in effect he doesn't trust Peacock and singled out ASU delegates to the Faculty Assembly to deliver that message.

The lack of trust appears to be catching. There was talk of mounting a "no-confidence" motion in the ASU Faculty Senate. So far, nothing that drastic has occurred, but that door has been opened a crack.

Then there's the matter of the killed-and-dispersed Appalachian Cultural Museum, but that happened a lot longer than a month ago.