Last week the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Executive Board agreed with other members of the VSA to endorse a faculty letter on curriculum, which the Miscellany mistakenly attributed to me. This collaborative letter, circulated to members of the Vassar community, was intended for the Vassar Trustees. Over 700 people signed it, and the letter was sent on Thursday, Dec. 3. Our letter attempted to give a glimpse of what many faculty members see as specific damage to the curriculum at Vassar during this period of restructuring. Many faculty members have long institutional memories and the letter reflected some of our sense of what is being lost or damaged.
The VSA voted to endorse the faculty letter on curriculum, and then the VSA Executive Board seemed to rescind this vote in the public memorandum that claimed inaccuracy and hyperbole as patterns in the faculty letter. The VSA Executive Board sent the memorandum to the whole student body and all the senior officers. Unfortunately, this happened before there was dialogue with many of the faculty members who contributed their description of changes in the curriculum to the letter.
If community leaders try to take shortcuts in order to avoid engaging in difficult dialogue, discourse begins to break down. I’m not simply talking about the VSA anymore.
A new dynamic has begun emerging this year at Vassar. One place this dynamic is evident is in the way senior administrators are setting up obstacles and controlling official channels of discourse. A whole long article in itself could be devoted to this change. The kind of managerial practices we see emerging at Vassar probably emerge out of fear of engaging at a very deep level during times of change. It seems natural that VSA student leaders would pick up on patterns of attempting to contain messages by jumping out ahead of a faculty critique of the eroding curriculum.
I want to write about concerns many of us have about the loss of a different part of Vassar’s curriculum, one that underpins the institution. Vassar’s hidden curriculum, the way we have treated employees with some dignity for decades, has been under attack since last October. Layoffs and erosions of contracts have been undertaken in ways that clash with the social justice mission of the College and begin to unravel what we see as our core values.
Recent personnel decisions damage the integrity of our institution and suggest a cold, shortsighted approach. Requiring 5 a.m. start times for custodial staff, for example, even though this new scheduling compromises health, safety and family life for many, suggests a harsh obliviousness or indifference in our treatment of employees. Erosion of our intellectual life and curriculum at the College begins with the way we conduct ourselves in the work practices we enact.
Clearly this discussion of academic curriculum needs to be ongoing as well because the harsh choices seem opportunistic and without purpose—except a narrow, shortsighted economic one. Many of us believe we are seriously damaging the vital and flexible curriculum in ways that compromise the institution’s short and long-term standing.
I’m grateful to the Miscellany for asking me to write this follow-up editorial because it gives me the opportunity to speak to what has become a crisis in vision at Vassar. We see some of the most modestly paid employees at Vassar being sacrificed and cut loose at a time when jobs are scarce. Are we helpless to change what seems like a corporate purge? For two examples, are we going to let the College send Brian Denu and Josh Ciangiola, two carpenters to be laid-off in a couple weeks, out into the winter without jobs? For other examples, are we going to watch while the College erodes or terminates the contracts of long time contributing professors who are on non-tenure-track lines? We need the faculty, students, the VSA, the Miscellany staff, the Campus Solidarity Working Group, administrators, staff and alumnae/i all engaging in dialogue about how to move beyond demoralization toward a shared vision of a Vassar we will be proud to claim and expand. Democracy, when it works, has never been limited to the official or formal channels of representation. How many truly great leaders of suffrage or civil rights movements brought about important social change through narrowly defined channels? Community members do not abdicate their responsibilities as citizens simply because they are not in the upper echelons of representation. As the economic crisis ends, the decisions we each make will determine the kind of college Vassar will be.
—Judith Nichols, Adjunct Associate Professor of English.
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