By VICTORIA ADDISON
Executive Editor
and
VANESSA LANGDON
News Editor
and
NICHOLAS NEGRON
Opinion Editor
Students and faculty at the College of Saint Rose were at a loss for words late last week as President Carolyn Stefanco announced that 23 faculty members and dozens of programs would be cut in an effort to dig the institution out of debt.
“My heart is broken over the carnage this new, inexperienced President has wrought on a once vibrant and caring community of scholars,” said psychology professor Kathleen Crowley. “It is unconscionable and wholly inconsistent with our mission, integrity statement, and with common decency.”
The Saint Rose community was informed about the cuts Friday afternoon in an email from Stefanco. The message contained a statement from the president as well as a list of the specific programs that will be discontinued. For the students currently enrolled in those programs, the news was heartbreaking.
“Essentially I feel like I’ve been hit by a tank,” said Sarita Farnelli, a student studying sociology at the College. “It’s not just about sociology and every other program being eliminated, it’s the fact that the administration has said they are doing this for us students, but hasn’t actually considered what we are saying or what we want.”
The cuts come in light of the planned academic program prioritization process, or the chosen method to tackle the school’s $9 million debt. Approved by the Deans of each academic school, the President’s Cabinet and the Board of Trustees, the notified faculty members will officially be terminated on Dec. 29, 2016. According to Stefanco’s email, they can continue to teach at full salary with benefits until that time. The College has also offered to provide assistance with career transition and encourages application to openings within the remaining programs.
As listed in the email, the following programs will be discontinued: American Studies BA, Art Education K-12 BFA, BS, MSED and Advanced Certificate, Communications MA, English MA and MFA, Women’s and Gender Studies BA and Certificate, History/Political Science MA, Music Education K-12 MSED and Music Education Advanced Certificate, Philosophy BA, Religious Studies BA, Spanish BA, Spanish Adolescence Education BA, International Spanish Undergraduate Certificate, Spanish Heritage Speakers Undergraduate Certificate, Studio Art MA, Economics BS, Entrepreneurship BS, Not-for-profit Management Advanced Certificate, Applied Technology Education BS, Educational Technology Specialist Initial MSED and Professional MSED, Educational Computing Advanced Certificate, Instructional Technology MSED and Advanced Certificate, Technology Education MSED and Advanced Certificate, Business/Marketing Adolescence Education MSED and Advanced Certificate, Bioinformatics BS, Chemistry Adolescent Education BS, Earth Science Education BS, Environmental Science BS, Geology BS and Sociology BA.
The program cuts, both undergraduate and graduate, will become effective in January of 2017. The administration claims that the slashed programs were targeted due to their low enrollment.
“On average, the eliminated programs have about four students each, including 12 programs with no students at all. About four percent of Saint Rose students are enrolled in the eliminated programs,” said Stefanco in her email to students on Friday.
Neither Stefanco nor the vice president of public relations responded to requests for additional comments.
Along with the faculty and program cuts, the College will also be eliminating $343,232 in full athletic scholarships for the incoming fall class. The administration believes these changes will benefit current and future students.
“We believe this plan will overwhelmingly benefit our 4,400 undergraduate and graduate students by investing in academic programs that are in high demand among students in every school in the institution,” she said in the email. “We expect to hire faculty with relevant qualifications to teach new courses and to maintain our average class size of 20.”
In response to the cuts, a funeral march will take place at 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday in front of Moran Hall to mourn the programs and faculty members that will be lost. Those who will attend have been asked to wear all black.
“These are professors’ lives, most with children they have to support, that the administration is destroying. These professors have dedicated themselves to the mission of Saint Rose and have built their lives here,” said student Christina Romeo. “You can’t just tell them to move forward, tighten their bootstraps, and it’ll be okay. It isn’t.”
Romeo, along with Farnelli and a team of students who have been active in protesting the academic program prioritization process, started an online petition on Friday in an effort to overturn the cuts. Initially started as a movement to have Stefanco fired, the petition has been since updated to fit the views of those who have signed it. Titled, “Carolyn Stefanco and the Administration: Rescind or Resign,” it will be handed directly to the Board of Trustees, Stefanco and the remainder of the administration.
Over 300 people have electronically signed in support.
In the meantime, faculty can challenge their termination before the Faculty Review Committee within the next two weeks. If a hearing is requested, the committee, comprised of faculty members, will determine if any procedures were violated in the challenger’s dismissal from the College.
“The committee determines if the terminations were justified and will then make recommendations to the President and Board regarding whether or not the dismissal should be overturned due to procedural violations,” said Crowley. “It seems unlikely that the President and Board will have any change of heart, however. Still, faculty members must follow this process if they wish to pursue legal action against the college since internal grievance processes must be completed first.”
While the names of all 23 fired faculty members are yet to be released, there have been a few that have spoken out. For tenured political science professor Scott Lemieux, the administration’s plan seems irrational.
“It is important to emphasize is that some eliminated programs and faculty positions (including mine) came in departments with stable or modestly increasing enrollments,” Lemieux said. “I certainly wasn’t fired because students in the capital of the third largest state in the country don’t want to take American government classes, or because they don’t want to take constitutional law classes which entail a dozen or so requests for overloads on the first day of enrollment whenever they’re offered.”
All terminated faculty members, tenured and tenure track, have a full year’s notice to find a new job.
“If tenured faculty teaching high-demand courses can be fired without cause, as they were at St. Rose, then tenure no longer exists,” Lemieux said. “The damage the de facto elimination of tenure will do to the school’s reputation, and the damage it will do to the college’s ability to attract and retain faculty and students, will almost certainly prove to be counterproductive.”
This issue is a horrendous, disgraceful excuse for “Journalism”. Why not just say you are in the pocket of Kathleen Crowley and her band of crisis mongers, and be done with it? Your faculty adviser must be asleep at the switch or too frightened of Crowley’s Gang to actually remind you “editors” and “news writers” that journalists do not pander or take sides. Ever.
All the attacks of a personal nature on the president and the outright lies about her are certainly not in keeping with the “St. Rose mission” or the “St. Rose experience” mentioned ad nauseum by Dr. Crowley and the student mouthpieces she has duped, nor do only a handful of strident students have the corner on the market of moral superiority. If you are supposed to be making the faculty look good by using critical thinking skills you allegedly learned at the college, you have failed miserably. Critical thinking starts with the supposition there are at least two sides to every story. How about you give that a shot?
So far, the only person I see trying to actually save this college IS the president and her VPs. For Dr. Crowley to call her inexperienced is laughable since Crowley has never ventured past the front porch of St Rose. News Flash: there is a big wide world of higher ed. out there. Research it. Don’t fear it.
Your biased, simple minded “reporting” is not helping St. Rose to succeed. You need to ask yourselves: Who do you serve? The faculty and only them? If so, and it’s the death of the college you seek, you’re on the right track.
Any resignations that happen around here ought to start at the Chronicle.
Oh, and get rid of that disrespectful, inflammatory photo of the president emblazoned with your propaganda slogan. Show some tiny bit of decorum if not integrity.
Wow, talk about sensationalism!!! Tried and true pie-in-the-sky arguments for why the college should continue to operate “business as usual” whilst absorbing massive debt. The comments are all but comical, “You can’t just tell them to move forward, tighten their bootstraps, and it’ll be okay. It isn’t.” Actually, you can; it happens everyday in the “REAL” world. People must recognize this fact, jobs are expendable and are not a guarantee, ever, or in any enviroment. This thinking that they are is probably at the root of the issue the college is facing now: spend, spend, spend with wanton abandon. Stefanco had to take the tough steps and will certainly bear the brunt of the frustration, however, time will vindicate her and will also prove that these cost-cutting measures were necessary. Also, this article does little to clarify why the decision to cut was made nor does it have any credibility with regards to telling the actual story of the Financial crisis the College is in. The author clearly needs more practice and guidance.