BY HANK REICHMAN

On May 15, Medaille University in Buffalo, New York (until last summer, Medaille College) announced that it will cease operations and close after 148 years on August 31. The announcement came less than a week after neighboring Trocaire College informed Medaille it would pull out of an agreement to purchase the school, citing concerns that Medaille had filed for pandemic-related federal tax credits it might not have been legally entitled to claim. Medaille was saddled with $22 million in debt and more than $1 million a year in interest payments, attributable in good measure to a lease agreement for a $7.5 million sports complex that faculty and staff had questioned. A 2021 report by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the school’s accrediting body, deemed that agreement “a significant factor of the institution’s financial downfall” and noted that its location adjacent to a chemical plant “that has continued to emit airborne toxins” resulted in health issues for students, staff, and faculty. Medaille’s small $2 million endowment shrank by 10 percent in 2022. Its cash reserves had dropped to around just $600,000, according to the Buffalo News.

In the wake of the announcement, some observers pointed out that Medaille was not alone. Many small institutions are struggling in an environment of declining enrollments and financial challenges. “This sector of higher education has had big challenges for the past seven to ten years,” one educational leadership professor and former Medaille trustee told the Buffalo News. But a staff member at the school put it differently: “The reality is,” he told the paper, “Medaille is not a victim of circumstance. Medaille is a victim of mismanagement.”

That’s true. And, sadly, the institution’s trustees should have known it. Indeed, the story of Medaille’s collapse is no tragic tale of a small but spunky college undone by circumstances. It is instead a cautionary tale of what can happen when an institution’s governing body and its administration brazenly abandon principles of shared governance and instead try to run a college “like a business.”

Medaille’s impending closure didn’t come as much of a surprise to me. In 2021, I participated in the AAUP’s special investigation of COVID-19 and Academic Governance, which surveyed eight institutions, including Medaille, where the pandemic had been employed as an excuse to engage in egregious violations of AAUP governance standards. Along with another committee member, I had interviewed Medaille faculty members and was the principal author of that section of the report. In the spring of 2020, Medaille’s president, Kenneth Macur, had “invoked a provision of the faculty handbook, over the vehement opposition of the Faculty Council, that permitted him to petition the chair of the board to suspend the handbook when faced with ‘natural disasters, acts of God, declared states of emergency or other emergency situations.’ The unilateral suspension of the faculty handbook facilitated the termination or nonrenewal of the appointments of seven tenured and tenure-track faculty members through an administratively appointed and administratively driven task force.” Under Macur’s leadership, Medaille quickly abandoned the tenure system, unilaterally imposing a new employment agreement that for all intents and purposes placed just about all employees on de facto 60-day contracts.

Macur and the Medaille trustees claimed that these “bold measures” were necessary to save the school from financial ruin. They scoffed at the AAUP’s stated concerns, declined to cooperate with our investigation, and dismissed the AAUP governing Council’s June 2021 vote to place Medaille’s administration on its list of institutions sanctioned for substantial non-compliance with standards of academic government. The reality, however, was that these measures had all but sealed the institution’s fate.

When I learned about Medaille’s closure I reached out to some of the faculty members we had interviewed in preparing our report. Unsurprisingly, they had already left the institution, although they were saddened, if hardly surprised, by its demise. They did, however, put me in contact with some remaining colleagues, who on condition of anonymity, told me about what had happened at Medaille in the two years since the AAUP report.

Even as the AAUP investigation was in progress, Medaille’s administration had issued a request for proposals to conduct a workplace climate assessment, ultimately engaging the firm of Sepler & Associates to conduct the study. The firm issued its 137-page report (including appendixes) on January 12, 2022. Its conclusions were devastating, if, once again, hardly a surprise to the college’s faculty and staff. A former member of the faculty shared the report with me. Here is some of what it said:

We heard from faculty, staff, and some administrators about work-related changes that had affected them adversely over the prior year and a half. We heard about what they feared for the future. The predominant tenor of these communications was loss. We heard from faculty, staff, and some administrators who had looked around to determine what gains elsewhere at the school might have resulted from their changed circumstances. As a whole, they identified no Medaille College “wins” to balance out their personal and departmental losses.

We were told that policies, priorities, and processes were being changed or abandoned without sufficient consideration of relevant factors, implications, and alternatives. We heard of a sense of instability, a feeling that what had been thought of as basic principles of the College were now in flux and unclear. . . .

Participants felt that many of the current problems faced by Medaille were the result of failures or mishandling of issues by leadership and administration. They felt that there was a lack of vision as well as a lack of commitment to students, faculty, and staff. For example, leadership’s attempts to “run the college as a business” demonstrates in the view of respondents: a lack of understanding for the College’s processes and the expertise of faculty and staff; a disconnect between leadership and the College’s programs; and an active discrediting of the impact this has on the well-being and success of students, faculty, and staff. . . .

Respondents generally reported a lower degree of feeling respected by college administration than they did by their colleagues. Greater than one-fourth of respondents reported “never” feeling respected by the college administration. This response was particularly pronounced among full time faculty.

That the majority of faculty feels disrespected by the administration is a theme that winds throughout this assessment. There is strong sentiment that President Macur views faculty as fungible, and that his treatment of faculty throughout all of the changes of the past year was done with little regard for faculty contributions, the role of faculty in an educational institution, and the value that faculty bring to students. Cited often as evidence that the administration, and particularly the President, does not understand the unique contributions or worth of faculty to a college was his characterization of faculty as “just employees,” and his scoffing and rolling his eyes in meetings when faculty spoke up. . . .

As a result of what they perceived to be the heavy-handed manner in which the handbook was revised and the employment agreement drafted, faculty told us that they had drawn two conclusions. One, that the replacement handbook and its provisions eliminating tenure, as well as the employment agreement’s terms, were President Macur’s way of taking a step he had long desired; that is, that the financial crisis was a pretext for eliminating tenure. Two, that the President and the Board of Trustees have a fundamental disregard for the worth and contributions of faculty and view them as fungible. This has brought about a state of crushingly low morale.

According to faculty members with whom I spoke, members of the board never read the Sepler report. It was, however, provided to a visiting team from Middle States in early 2022. That visit resulted in the issuance of a warning to the institution that it had provided insufficient evidence that it was in compliance with the accreditor’s Standard II on Ethics and Integrity.

In June 2022, Macur abruptly announced his retirement. In February he had come under renewed fire for his handling of a surprise dormitory room raid conducted by security guards from Vista Security Group of Amherst. According to the Buffalo News, “Medaille contracted with Vista for campus security services starting in mid-January without informing students of the change. The weekend of the raids, guards wearing hoodies instead of uniforms used keys to open dorm room doors late at night while some students were asleep or in the shower. Ostensibly, the guards were looking for alcohol. Students expressed anger, fear and trauma in the wake of the intrusion, which Macur admitted was a violation of the university’s privacy policies.” In March student demonstrators had called for his resignation and in May the faculty had voted “no confidence” in his leadership by a margin of 63-1.

Macur was replaced by interim president Lori Quigley, a former provost and faculty member. Her appointment, I am told, was welcomed by most faculty, staff, and students. Still, Macur continued to receive his $600,000 salary and 14 of the 20 current trustees had been recruited by him during his presidency from 2015 to 2022. The agreement by which Trocaire would purchase Medaille was announced in August 2022. The plan seemed to make sense as there was virtually no overlap in programs between the two institutions. In January 2023, Trocaire acquired six buildings owned by Medaille, thereby injecting desperately needed cash into Medaille’s acconts. There was hope that jobs at Medaille would be saved and that students could complete their educations seamlessly at Trocaire.

That was the expectation when Middle States returned to Medaille in April of this year. They found the university to have remedied its failures under the ethics and integrity standard, but also found that although “interim President Quigley has made significant improvements through her open, honest, and transparent communications,” “shared governance between the Board of Trustees and these campus constituent groups has only minimally improved and remains strained.” The Middle States report continued, “Despite its fiduciary responsibilities, the Board disclosed that it did not understand the comprehensive, near fatal nature of Medaille’s financial distress until it was ‘too late’. It ‘stayed out of operations’ until it became evident the institution’s survival was in jeopardy.” The report also took the board to task for its apparently irresponsible support for the calamitous sports complex lease.

When the Trocaire agreement collapsed in early May, the Student Government Association and the University Staff Council swiftly adopted resolutions of “no confidence” in the Board of Trustees. But it was too late.

Speaking with a local radio station, Xaneya Thomas, president of the Student Government Association and a player on the Medaille women’s basketball team, made it clear: “This wasn’t an outcome that occurred after one year of bad decisions. Not even two years of bad decisions. Most of the members of the Board of Trustees have sat through multiple presidents at Medaille University, so this is something that has progressed over a period of time.” When confronted with the opinion of the former board member quoted above that the pandemic, rising costs, and lack of population growth in the region contributed to the closure, Thomas responded that these factors might be real, but it’s something of “a cop-out” to attribute the closure to them. “If that was the case,” she noted, “every other higher education institution would close in western New York as well. There have been decisions made in the past that led us to this point.”

Indeed there have been. Medaille didn’t just die; it was murdered.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October 2021.