BY HANK REICHMAN

On Thursday, the Board of Trustees of the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., voted to close the school at the end of the current academic year.  Saint Rose President Marcia White confirmed the decision in a letter to the campus community.   Between 500 and 600 college employees will lose their jobs, including 118 full-time faculty and 107 part-time faculty (as of Fall 2022).  The more than century-old school was the latest in a growing parade of small, liberal arts colleges to announce their closure, widely attributed to declining enrollments stemming from long-term demographic trends and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.  (Many of the failed institutions have been religiously based.  I wonder whether the trend may also be explained in part by the growth of irreligion among many Americans, especially young people.)

At least some of these closures, however, have been products less of external factors beyond the institution’s control than of mismanagement and failures of governance by administrations and boards of trustees.  In a widely read (10,527 views as of today) post to this blog in July I discussed the closure of another upstate New York school, Medaille University (formerly Medaile College).  “Medaille’s collapse is no tragic tale of a small but spunky college undone by circumstances,” I wrote.  “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 was one of eight institutions investigated by the AAUP in 2021 for employing the pandemic as an excuse to abuse shared governance standards.  It was on the Association’s list of administrations sanctioned for governance violations.

Like Medaille, the College of Saint Rose was also investigated by the AAUP and has, since 2016, been on its list of institutions censured for violations of academic freedom.  Those actions came in response to a December 11, 2015 decision by the college to eliminate twenty-seven academic programs and terminate the appointments of fourteen tenured and nine tenure-track faculty members as the result of an “academic program prioritization” process that did not involve faculty.  This was defended by the college’s administration “as a necessary response to extraordinary financial challenges due in significant part to declining or continued low enrollment in certain programs.”  Among the discontinued programs were undergraduate degree and certificate programs in American studies, art education, economics, geology, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, Spanish, and women’s and gender studies, and graduate degree and advanced certificate programs in art education, communications, educational psychology, English, history/political science, music education, and studio art.

The program eliminations and layoffs culminated a period of growing tension between the Saint Rose faculty and the school’s board of trustees and then-President Carolyn J. Stefanco, which led to the AAUP investigation.  Here are the conclusions of that investigation:

1.     In terminating the appointments of twenty-three tenured and tenure-track faculty members absent a declaration of financial exigency or a demonstrably bona fide formal program discontinuance for educational reasons, the board of trustees and administration of the College of Saint Rose violated basic tenets of the joint 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and derivative procedural standards set forth in Regulation 4 of the Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure.  The “academic prioritization” process that led to the program cuts, moreover, was entirely inconsistent with relevant AAUP-recommended standards for program discontinuance set forth in Regula­tions 4d(1) through 4d(3) of the Recommended Institutional Regulations.

2.      In determining which academic programs were to be reduced or eliminated, the administration disregarded the shared governance document in the faculty manual.  More significantly, in this action and in at least two other recent actions— the unilateral implementation of a new transfer credit policy and the equally unilateral establishment of a restrictive e-mail policy—the administration and governing board acted in disregard of normative standards of academic governance, as set forth in the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities.  In short, under the current administration and governing board, the faculty has repeatedly been left out of deliberations or had its reasoned objections ignored, creating conditions for shared academic governance that can only be described as deplorable.

3.      The administration—in allowing the faculty only two months in which to make recommendations for eliminating programs and faculty positions, restricting access to information, and otherwise constraining the faculty’s participation—placed the faculty in an untenable position, justifying its withdrawal from the academic prioritization process.

4.      The administration and governing board, by terminating fourteen tenured faculty appointments through a program of “academic prioritization” that excluded the faculty, have rendered tenure virtually meaningless and thus severely undermined academic freedom at the College of Saint Rose.

5.      The program eliminations and faculty layoffs were ultimately the result of a lack of responsible stewardship at the board and presidential levels, leading to the faculty’s recent vote of no confidence (emphasis added).

In the 1980s and 1990s enrollment at Saint Rose grew by some 53 percent.  As at Medaille, where the trustees spent lavishly on a boondoggle athletics complex, the Saint Rose trustees responded to growth with an aggressive program of investment, apparently convinced that enrollment would continue to climb, perhaps endlessly.  According to the Albany Times-Union, “from 1996 to 2012, the college spent more than $100 million on new facilities, while also demolishing a number of buildings amid outcry from the neighborhood.”  Predictably, as enrollment plateaued, cuts soon followed.

In 2017, Michael DeCesare, a member of the investigating committee[1] and now a program officer in the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, reported the following on this blog:

Some of the same trustees are now blaming the president for the college’s continuing difficulties.  As reported today in Inside Higher Ed, several board members have resigned in recent weeks.  The excerpts from some of their resignation letters, appearing in an article in yesterday’s Albany Times-Union, are consistent not only with what the investigating committee found but with what Saint Rose faculty (and students) have been saying for a number of years.

Trustee Gregory Serio, for example, wrote that President Stefanco’s “secretive management style, closed-circle communication methods, obvious preoccupation with personal interests, and apparent disdain for the board and its critical role in the governance of this institution are serious and, probably, irreparable shortcomings for any executive, within or without higher education.”  The AAUP report described the president in similar terms–the only difference being that it highlighted her disregard of the faculty’s critical role in governance.

The report also concluded that the trustees had been asleep at the wheel for years.  Some have finally woken up, but only after crashing the college into a ditch of declining enrollment, administrative infighting, a ballooning deficit, and a failing strategic plan.

The cuts continued.  In 2021, under a new president, Marcia White, the school eliminated another 25 programs and 41 faculty positions.  Again, predictably, with offerings slashed and quality clearly deteriorating as a result, enrollment continued its decline.  Now, it appears the “treatment” will mercifully be ended because “the patient,” the College of Saint Rose, has died.

As I said of Medaille, the College of Saint Rose didn’t just die; it was murdered.

[1] The second member of the investigating committee was Irene Mulvey of Fairfield University, now President of the AAUP.  I was at the time the chair of Committee A, which approved their report.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair 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.