 "Photo: N/A")
On Sept. 9, at 10:02 p.m.—four days before this month’s Board of Trustees open forum—Thomas Clarke ’11 updated his Facebook status with the following: “Thomas Clarke needs some self-identified, smart, activist-type people to meet on Saturday to discuss ways to be prepared for the Board of Trustees meeting. They’re coming to tell us what’s what. Don’t let them patronize and lie to us.”
“The status wasn’t entirely serious,” said Clarke, who explained that while he was mostly using a bit of sensationalism to “get Vassar students out of their chairs,” he was also addressing what he said was a strained relationship between the student body and the Vassar College Board of Trustees.
“The relationship right now between the students and the Board is tense,” said Clarke. “I think a lot of it is that the Board is only here a few times a year. Because of that distant relationship, there’s a natural tendency for students and other constituencies of the College to view them as these distant shadows that just move money and don’t see people.
“They are normal people, and they are human beings,” he continued. “It’s just difficult to see them that way when they don’t come to campus that often, and when we do talk to them, they just tell us what’s what, and then they leave.” Anastasia Hardin ’10 echoed Clarke’s sentiments, explaining that when she went to the first Board of Trustees open forum—held in May 2009—she was disappointed to find the format less of a discussion and more of an informational meeting. “They were telling us about the decisions they had already made. I think now students are pushing for more than just information,” said Hardin. “They want to be involved in the decision-making process. I know a lot of students that are somewhat disappointed with hearing lectures from the Trustees, rather than having a discussion with them.”
“There should not be a speaker-listener dynamic,” said Clarke of the forums. “I think ideas need to be exchanged, and we need to bring people together into a group that’s not a semi-circle, but a full circle. We need some sort of meeting where people are treated as equals.”
At the Sept. 13 open forum, the two attending trustees—Chair of the Board William Plapinger ’74 and Chair of the Academic Committee Sally Gordon ’82—began with brief opening statements before transitioning to questions from the audience, which was compiled of about 40 students, including the entire Vassar Student
Association (VSA) Executive Board. Freshman Aashim Usgaonkar said that he attended the meeting because he wanted to get informed about a school that was still new to him. “It was informative to me because I didn’t know anything yet, but I don’t know how informative it would be for older students. I got a sense that the Trustees are distant. They don’t meet with us that often, so, save these couple of meetings, it seems as if the general student body doesn’t meet with them at all.”
Typically, the Board comes to campus three times a year—in October, February and May—and the open forums to which Usgaonkar refers are an innovation only recently introduced to the student body. “These meetings were actually the Board’s idea,” explained Plapinger. “They were meant to reach out to the students—and to the broader campus community in May—and make sure that we were not perceived as being unavailable to the students if they wanted to speak to us.” Though Plapinger found the meeting worthwhile, he sympathized with the feeling of aloofness Usgaonkar observed. “When I was a student,” he said, “the Board certainly seemed distant to me as well. Although almost all the Board members are graduates of the College, Board members are older than students and spend a great deal of their time working off campus on behalf of the College. They are certainly not as familiar to students as the President or the other senior administrators who are charged by the Board with actually running the College day-to-day—nor would I expect them to be.”
Student Assistant to the Dean of the College Nate Silver ’10 attended the meeting and suggested that while it is important for conversations to occur between students and the Board, requests for the two groups to be involved in decision-making together are unnecessary and perhaps inappropriate. “I think for a relationship to be tense, there has to be a relationship to begin with. There is no relationship, and that’s fine,” said Silver. “I think what we learned from this month’s meeting between the Board and the students is that the Board and students don’t really have that much to say to one another. What those two groups are thinking about are very separate things. We have freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors who are thinking about the Classes of 2010 through 2013,” continued Silver, “and the Trustees are thinking about the Class of 2020, of 2025, of 2050, of what Vassar would be when we send our grandkids here. It’s important that they don’t lose touch with the issues that are on students’ minds, but when push comes to shove, they have very different priorities.”
Some questions posed at the meeting highlighted a discrepancy in priorities between students and the Board. Trustees, for example, were unable to answer questions specific to everyday student life. One member of the Class of 2010 asked about her specific financial aid package, while another student asked about how cutbacks in faculty were being handled.
Silver maintained that while these questions are certainly important to current students, they may not have been appropriate for or relevant to the forum, since the Trustees deal less with current specifics and more with the long-term.”
“I think it’s important that we don’t talk to the Board of Trustees about, you know, how we’re angry with Security doing rounds at 8 p.m. or the plumbing in Davison House. It puts the Trustees in an awkward place. It’s just not what they do,” said Silver. Clarke, however, disagreed, saying, in short, that if it’s not what they do, it should be. “One out of every three questions asked to a Board member,” said Clarke, “will probably receive an answer beginning with or including the phrase, ‘I don’t know the specifics of what you’re talking about,’ or ‘it’s not our job to know what’s going on.’ And I agree. It’s currently not their job to know what’s going on, but that’s a problem. They should have a sense of the student life and the student body.”
Plapinger, however, explained that while it is the primary mission of the Board to act in the long-term best interest of the institution, the Trustees also are constantly focused on the current state of the College. “While we are focused on things in the future, we are also very focused on the decisions that are being made with respect to current staff,
administrators and faculty—not necessarily on individuals, but on process generally and on the financial underpinnings of the decisions being made.”
“We’re also focused on the experiences of our students,” continued Plapinger, “as well as what is happening on the admissions front, on whether we can continue to maintain our financial aid policies and so on. So we’re not only looking at what Vassar will be like for members of future classes, but also students in the Classes of 2010, ’11, ’12 and ’13.”
For Plapinger and the 35 other Trustees, the primary connection to those students exists through the VSA Executive Board. “The main relationship between the Board and the students has existed through the VSA Executive Board,” said Plapinger, “and in my view that has been a productive and open relationship, in which there has been a good sharing of views. That’s an excellent avenue of communication that is very important to the Board, and it’s certainly important to me as Board Chair.”
During the Trustees’ three annual visits to campus, the VSA Executive Board has several opportunities to meet and talk with Board members. “There are three different events that have been more or less structured into the Board meetings that involve students,” said Assistant to the President John Feroe, who schedules and works closely with the Trustees when they visit campus. “There is a dinner on Thursday evening. Students get invited to that, and the VSA Executive Board attends, so that’s a kind of informal opportunity initiated by the Board.”
Feroe continued to explain that in addition to the Thursday night dinner, the Board Chair and the Chair of the Student Affairs Committee meet with the VSA Executive Board, and then the Executive Board is invited to attend the Student Affairs Committee meeting. “That is probably the most formal arrangement of structured contact with the Board,” said Feroe. “When I started six years ago,” Feroe continued, “the only structured contact with the students was when the VSA Executive Board would meet with the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees—which is composed of the chairs of the Board’s committees and the Board’s Chair—and frankly now there is much more of an opportunity to talk.”
“I hope that if you talk to the members of the VSA Executive Board,” said Plapinger, “they will say that over the years we have had a constructive relationship. That doesn’t mean that the Board has done everything that the students want, or that they have done everything we want, but it’s been an open and good dialogue. I also think that the innovation of having the Board Chair and the Chair of the Board’s Student Affairs Committee meet with the VSA Executive Board is a good one, and I hope all the participants gain a lot of insight from those meetings,” said Plapinger.
“I would say that we have a very strong relationship with the Board,” said VSA President Caitlin Ly ’10. “They’re focused on much more than just the current students, but they are always very receptive, and they welcome any focused feedback or criticism we have for them. It’s not often that you get trustees who are genuinely interested in hearing what students have to say,” said Ly, who also worked with the Trustees when she served on the 2008-2009 VSA Executive Board as Vice President for Operations. Ly said that in addition to sitting in on the Board’s Student Affairs Committee, she and the Executive Board will also try to attend the Academic Committee and Buildings and Grounds Committee meetings as well.
Though the Executive Board does have these opportunities to speak with the Board, some students believe that such structured meetings are not sufficient and that there should actually be a voting student representative on the Board.
“I definitely think students need a lot more involvement in decision-making on campus,” said Hardin. “The Board and the administration assume that students can’t and don’t want to participate in decision-making. I think it’s a false assumption. If we are interested in making this a more democratic school, students need to have more of a voice in decisions being made, and a student on the Board is a way to achieve that. It’s something that’s worth working for.”
The debate surrounding whether or not a student should be on the Board of Trustees has been a prevalent one amongst students throughout the past decade. Many students who have run for VSA President have promised to work for a spot on the Board, using the issue as a platform for their candidacy. Despite its continuously cropping up in candidate statements, the question of how involved a student should be with the College’s governing body has been a highly contentious one. “The Board should absolutely consult students in their decision-making processes,” noted Clarke, “but I have reservations about putting a specific student on the Board. One person can only represent one viewpoint, so I don’t think have a VSA-elected student on the Board would be appropriate.”
While some, like Clarke, think the issue is problematic because just one student would have trouble representing the entire student body, others believe that it’s not appropriate to have a student on the Board because trustees are thinking of Classes beyond the time of current students. Hardin responded to that argument, explaining that the two bodies are actually connected, “because the students here now do have to create the community for future classes.”
“Vassar students are very capable of making decisions,” added Sarah Muenzinger ’10, a member of the Student Activist Union. “There could very easily be a voting student on the Board. It would be valuable to have someone who could provide context about what it’s like for Vassar students on a day-to-day basis. They should put a face to the numbers they deal with and try to understand how their decisions really affect people,” said Muenzinger, who also explained that a student on the Board would make the Trustees more accessible to the rest of the student body. “I think it’s harder to see what’s going on inside the Board. I know there are committees, but it’s very confusing. I don’t really see the Board as accessible to students.” Muenzinger said.
Silver, however, argued against a voting student representative on the board and instead advocated for younger Board members. “It’s important that the Board remain a separate entity and that its constituency remain the College itself,” explained Silver. “Getting, say, the VSA President on the Board undermines the Trustees’ ability to speak for the College as a whole, because you have one person who is strictly speaking for the students.”
“So, the Board is not a representative body—it’s a separate one,” continued Silver. “I do think that efforts should be made to have a younger perspective—someone who has maybe graduated in the past five years. It’s important that the students and the Board remain separate, but that the Board doesn’t remain a body of people who went to Vassar in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s.”
“It’s a very complex question,” said Plapinger of the debate, “but the Board’s fiduciary obligation is, above all, to protect the College’s mission. The students tend to see things—completely naturally and properly—from their own perspective, but student representation on the Board would place on the Board a representative of a particular constituency with a particular point of view. Such representation would be problematic,” continued Plapinger, “because as trustees we’re supposed to be looking at matters from the perspective of the long-term interests of the College as a whole, and that includes, faculty, administrators, staff and students.”
Though the VSA has not named student-representation on the Board of Trustees as one of their goals for the academic year, the Executive Board has committed to continuing conversation with the Trustees.
“They’re incredible receptive,” said Silver, who served on the 2008-2009 VSA Executive Board. “I think what they want and what is useful to them—because they deal with so much information—is focused feedback. The Board in general is like a priority body, setting the long-term priorities for the College. So to hear from students about what the current priorities are is actually really important. It’s more important that the Board hear from us, rather than us wanting to change the Board’s thinking.”
Similarly, Plapinger explains that continuing conversations with the Executive Board is a priority for this year and for those to come. “We hope that there are open lines of communication through the VSA Executive Board, the College committees and through the faculty and student observers on the Board,” said Plapinger, who acknowledged that especially in such difficult economic times, students would not always have positive feedback. “It’s perfectly natural that when somebody doesn’t agree with something,” said Plapinger, “the persons that they point to may be the most senior responsible people, even though such blame is not always justified. When I was on campus and people got upset about a lot of things—as they did in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the Trustees were probably a target as well.”
“Students are angry and confused—they have every right to be—and I think they want someone to point fingers at,” added Silver. “And they can point away, but I sometimes wish that people thought more holistically about the history and future of the College. We’re in year 149, and the reason we got here is not by listening to students every step of the way,” said Silver. “Our life at the College is a short one. The fact that people have been thinking about beyond our time at Vassar is what has made us even have a time at Vassar.”
Be the first to comment on this article!