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The past year has been one of the most tumultuous we have seen in the history of Vassar College and in the history of the modern world. It has been a year marked by awe-inspiring high points and crushing low points. We celebrated the renewed hope of our generation with the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and yet with the economic collapse we still fear for our futures. This year has been a great challenge for us all, and it is no doubt a year that will come to define the future of Vassar and the world beyond.
In this time of global economic recession, Vassar is facing its own dilemmas about how to adjust to new financial realities. These dilemmas are painful; for an institution that has the vast majority of its operating budget invested in people—either through compensation or through financial aid—every cut that is made has very real human implications. Vassar is faced with an endowment that is projected to lose 30 percent of its value by July. That translates to a loss of $300 million. And for an institution like Vassar—which uses about a third of its endowment annually to fund its entire operating budget—this is a detrimental loss.
To promote the sustainability and perpetuity of the institution, it is clear that the College must find some way to trim costs—lest we bankrupt the future members of the Vassar community. Our endowment is our future, and we must find a way to change course.
As we move forward with assessing changes, it is critically important that we come together as a community to address the task at hand. While the current situation might promote the partitioning of academic departments, offices and other groups across the College, now is the time for collective action to overcome the financial challenges we face. As a residential College, our experience is made whole not just by our interactions with our hall mates or our professors, but it is also a vibrant experience because of our interaction with members of the staff and the administration.
I have been a part of many of the discussions surrounding the future of the College, and have been repeatedly disappointed by the divisiveness of these discussions—by the battles between tenure caps and need-blind admissions, between retaining adjunct professors or staff members. I have been saddened—and also angered—by the flawed communication with the paid employees of the College; these discussions are not just about dollars and cents, they are about people’s futures and livelihoods.
The leaders of this College are good people who are striving to make changes in the best interests of the future of our institution, and we cannot demonize them for who they are. But in reacting to this crisis, we have clung to ideas that serve individual rather than collective good at Vassar; we have been afraid of collective action, and we have preferred to sacrifice some of the most important members of our community: adjunct and visiting professors, and staff members across the college.
As our new president reminded us on November 4, “Let us remember that if the financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers. In this country, we rise or fall as one people, one nation.” The same is true of Vassar. We cannot expect to make the College a better institution for the future if we assume that change can only come at the margins, at the expense of people.
Matthew Vassar, in his closing address to the Board of Trustees (he dropped dead mid-speech), shared his belief that “it is quite certain, that if we follow on in the old beaten paths, we will make no progress; if we do no more than others have done before us, we are only copyists, and not progressionists. My motto is progress.” In this time of crisis, we are obsessed with taking the pulse of our “peer institutions” to determine the way forward and have forgone the opportunity to look within to craft our own future. This does not seem like the progress that Matthew Vassar envisioned when he created an institution to educate women in a time when society believed this to be completely improper and inappropriate.
Now, more than ever, our institution is at a crossroads. We can watch the footsteps of our peers, or we can chart our own course. We can rely on the old ideas that got us into this mess, or we can move forward with new ones. We can follow, or we can lead.
To my fellow students: Raise your voices. Speak clearly. Demand that Vassar fulfill its mission on its own terms. Remember that while other members of our community are liable to lose their jobs for speaking up, your place at Vassar is not tied to a salary.
We trumpet values of shared governance—although our real governance says nothing of the sort—but the top decision-making spaces of this college systematically exclude certain voices. For example, the Priorities and Planning Committee, the penultimate finance committee of the College besides the Board of Trustees, is a space with no staff voice.
There is also no suffrage for students on the Board of Trustees. This year’s Executive Board had to fight tooth and nail to gain a spot on the Advisory Group for the Allocation of Faculty Resources—or, more appropriately, “the faculty cutting committee,” since its mission is to reduce the workforce by 10 to 15 percent. These things can change.
Finally, we must also work to ensure our meritocratic need blind admissions policy. The detriment to the College of revoking its need blind status would be far greater than the added cost of maintaining the policy in the short-term. Unless we arrive at a situation where funding need-blind fundamentally compromises the long-term stability of the institution, we must do everything without our power to protect it. We must leave no stone unturned; an appeal for gifts to cover the gaps in need-blind would be far more efficacious in protecting the mission of the institution than would be an appeal to renovate the Juliet Bookstore space. A diverse and dynamic student body is an investment in the College not dissimilar from the preservation of the margins of the endowment, even if the dollar value is not so tangible.
I do not mean to be an obstructionist. I have seen the numbers, I have read the graphs and I have asked many questions along the way. Three hundred million dollars is a lot of money to lose, and it will take a long time to recover. But money is not the universal solution to Vassar’s problems. People are the solutions. People make this place what it is.
What I seek is a principled pragmatism—a vision of a new Vassar which values every member of the community, which celebrates a diverse curriculum and which distinguishes itself from a vision solely dependent upon what we think is realistic. The best way to dream up the future of Vassar is to think of what seems unrealistic, and to go out and find a way to do it. There are other ways forward, and we must imagine them together.
—Jimmy Kelly ’09 is the outgoing Vassar Student Association President.
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