By KYLE PRATT
Executive Editor
Earlier this year, President Carolyn Stefanco appeared in an on-air interview with WAMC’s Capital Region Bureau Chief David Lucas.
In the interview, Stefanco addressed charges against her supposed commitment to transparency as President of Saint Rose.
“It is hard for me to see that I am not, or we have not been transparent,” she said in the May 9 interview.
At the time, the Administration building, 1000 Madison Ave., was not open to the public. The front door was locked and visitor had to ring a doorbell and wait to someone to come to the door.
This barrier was unique to the Stefanco Administration and was the antithesis of transparency. Numerous faculty members, who were used to being able to freely access the building, opposed the move
On the day of the interview, The Chronicle ran an article in the Opinion section on its website written by the Opinion Editor at the time, myself. The article was a direct response to the interview and Stefanco’s claim that lack of transparency was not one of her “faults.”
Impressively, the front door of the Administration building is now unlocked. Students and faculty are free to enter without pause.
This is a major step in the right direction. A locked door may seem trivial, but the message it sends is certainly not.
The locked building conveyed a feeling of separation, and reinforced the rifts in an already fractured community.
Protests and anger have been permeating the Saint Rose campus since December 2015, when the administration announced its intention to cut 23 faculty positions and dozens of programs. The cuts went into effect about a year later.
Charges of mismanagement and untrustworthiness have been aimed at Stefanco ever since. The fact that the building she worked in was closed to the community exacerbated these allegations.
While the college has a long way to go to repair a still broken community, an unlocked door could be the key to improvement.
