7:59 | A small crowd has gathered in Rocky 300 to discuss the economy with President Catharine Bond Hill, Dean of the College Christopher Roellke, Dean Planning and Academic Affairs Rachel Kitzinger, Vice President for Finance and Administration Elizabeth Eismeier and Dean of the Faculty Jonathan Chenette.
8:04 | Hill is giving an introduction to the meeting. “We tried very hard to do as much as we could to not fill any vacancies,” said Hill. She is expalining various ways that the College has tried to reduce staffing levels.
Roellke explains that this was originally goign to be Main House’s regularly schedule town hall meeting.
8:06 | A member of the audience asks if the recent changes, particularly layoffs, are in keeping with the College’s mission statement, and how they will affect both Vassar’s and Poughkeepsie’s communities.
According to Hill, Vassar’s main goal is to educate students. “It’s our obligation to protect what is going on on campus now, but also to protect what will go on in the future.”
According to Hill, “We are trying to balance the needs of today with our needs going foward.” Hill says that this has been the biggest shock since the Great Depression.
8:09 | A member of the audience asks about affects on the student body–how much the College will rely on tuition as it draws less from the endowment.
According to Eismeier, the net tuition paid by students is growing “hardly at all.” She asserts the College’s commitment to meeting demonstrated financial need.
“I guess it would be a mistake to take away from this meeting that we are relying more on tuition,” said Eismeier. According to Eismeier, more students in both returning classes and in the freshman class are receiving aid.
According to Kitzinger, the College spent $900,000 more on aid for returning students this year.
8:16 | Robyn Smigel ’12 asks if there might be an area of the College’s budget that might be less critical to providing a good education that might be cut.
According to Hill, administrators have looked at all aspects of the budget adn have asked departments to cut budgets other than their compensation budgets as well. In regards to compensation budgets, Hill explains that the College looks to pay competitively. One option is to pay less competitively across the spectrum to protect employees. The problem with this plan, according to Hill, is that in the long term, employees leave when pay is not competitive. According to Hill, these are not temporary changes.
Smigel also asks if the College has looked at reducing Deans and reducing higher-level administrative positions.
According to Kitzinger, “We looked at every job that is being done at the College…The work was done with extreme care.” She says that the College asked about the nature of the work that needed to be done. When employees left voluntarily, those areas were reorganized.
According to Eismeier, many changes had been discussed prior to the financial crisis. “It’s simply new in its intensity because of the risks long term.”
Smigel also asks about the extra work that people have been asked to do after layoffs and if high-level administrators might shoulder part of that load.
According to Eismeier, there are rules about how many hours employees can work and how they are paid for that work. They have been asked to shoulder the “burden of change.”
8:28 | In response to a question about the best and worst economic decisions that the College has made since the fall 2008, Hill says that the best decision has been to increase financial aid. The worst, she says, was the speed with which the College reacted. She wishes the College had responded more quickly to the crisis.
Roellke says that one of the best decisions was to do as much as possible through voluntary means. He regrets that students did not feel informed enough last year, particularly regarding the hunger strike that occured in May.
According to Chenette, the retirement incentive that were put together for employees was a “positive thing.” He says that he did not communicate as effectively as he would have liked to last fall about the staffing changes that occured.
Kitzinger says that the balance between focusing on the present and the future was well considered in the decision-making process. She worries about decisions that have been made about the physical plant because there have been dramatic cuts to the College’s plans in that area.
“I think the best and the worst things we’ve done are the same thing,” says Eismeier. She speaks about staffing changes, which she believes were the correct decisions but were also stressful on the staff.
8:42 | One student asks about the discussion that is happening between administrators across the country and the tenure process.
According to Hill, there has been a tendency in higher education for a significant portion of the teaching load to be taken on by adjuncts, which she views as a negative trend. According to Hill, tenure serves a variety of purposes at the College.
8:59 | “We are assuming that we will raise $400 million over a period of time,” Hill says of a campaign at the College. This assumption is incorporated into College spending.
8:59 | Anastasia Hardin ’10 asks how community members were incorporated in decision making processes, how the panelists’ positions might limit their perspectives on alternatives and if they imagined themselves in the positions of those the cuts were affecting.
In response to the last question, Kitzinger answers, “Yes.” She describes the process as extremely painful.
“I did personally, try to put myself in the shoes of someone else,” says Roellke.
“I think consultation occured in positions where attrition occured more naturally,” says Eismeier. “When something is leading to a layoff, it doesn’t feel very consultative. We minimized the number of situations where that occured.”
9:06 | In response to a comment about the small percentage of the operating budget that the layoffs covers and the ambiguity of the phrase “health of the College,” Hill says that the health of institution refers to how well the College maintains the mission statement. “I actually do think its very important across the board to pay competitive compensation.”
“We needed to adjust the compensation budget for the long run.” She says that if the cuts were only to be for two or three years, the situation might be different, but the changes that are occuring are more permanent.
“We’re trying to make it a process where people can determine their outcome a little bit,” says Eismeier.
9:21 | Ruth Sawyer ’10 comments asks about the amount of information provided to students, which she feels has been inadequate.
Kitzinger adds that there is a place on the financial website to ask questions. “I want to compare the information on the website and the information that I saw that Mr. Foster gave.” According to Kitzinger the website is designed to allow readers to make their own conclusions, while information such as the document put together by Professor of English Don Foster was put together to make a point.
9:38 | Royce Drake ’10 asks if there was a shift from a focus in recruiting from high income areas instead of low income areas and if the recent layoffs are the last the the College will face.
According to Hill, financial aid spending has increased from $28 million in ’05-’06 to $42 million this year. With the change to need-blind, the applicant pool grew to include many more lower-income students. She adds that recruitment of lower income students has grown because a need-blind policy means more to low-income students.
“There are a number of ways that we are recruiting heavily in areas that we have not recruited before,” says Kitzinger.
9:45 | Smigel asks how much the financial aid awarded per student has increased over time.
According to Hill, “The average grant has gone up significantly.”
9:52 | In response to a comment about financial aid for international students, Hill says that there is widespread support to extend the College’s need-blind policy to international students, though the College does not currently have the resources to do this. Hill adds that the College meets full need for all admitted students.
9:59 | The panelists are describing how their departments have scaled back.
10:01 | According to Hill, the College has finished making cuts for the 2010-2011 budget and is hopeful that all other changes will happen through natural or voluntary means.
According to Kitzinger, two factors are out of the control of the College for future budgets. “What happens in the global economy is going to matter to us. The other piece that is not in our control is the financial aid budget.”
10:06 | In response to a question about the importance of symbolic cuts, Hill says that the Annual Fund was the symbolic way that the Senior Officers chose to demonstrate their commitment to the College.
10:07 | One student expresses his disappointment in the turnout at the forum.
10:12 | The forum has concluded, though another will be planned, according to Hill, in the early weeks of November.
Tonight on Oct. 8, a group of students, staff and faculty gathered in the ALANA center to “get to know each other, create some points of unity and share thoughts and ideas on what is happening to our community and how we might like to change it,” wrote one the event’s organizers, Anastasia Hardin ’10, in an e-mail to various organization leaders on campus. Though members of different constituencies on campus were in attendance, the meeting was formally hosted by M.E.Ch.A., the Student Activists’ Union and the Vassar Association of Class Activists.