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BY DANTE FUOCO

In print | Published April 1, 2010 — Updated April 05, 2010 16:28

Correction appended

While some have criticized the administration for not soliciting students’ feedback before appointing acting dean of students Garikai Campbell ’90 to a temporary administrative position, administrators claim that the way they conducted this appointment was normal.

President Rebecca Chopp sent an e-mail to the official faculty-staff list last Wednesday announcing that Campbell — who served as associate dean for academic affairs from fall of 2007 to last summer and is a tenured professor of mathematics — will become Special Assistant to the President and Associate Vice President for Planning on July 1. While she did not solicit input from students about this decision or officially inform students about this decision, Chopp said that such measures “had not been in practice” at the college for this type of position.

“There’s nothing irregular or secret about this,” she said.

While “it’s very important for students to be included” in discussions, Chopp stressed that “it may not be feasible or practical” to solicit students’ opinions for every temporary position at the college. She added that students have been recently involved in major college decisions, such as three students’ inclusion on the dean of students selection committee and the inclusion of three others on the ad hoc Committee on Purchaser Responsibility.

Often, the college has appointed faculty members to temporary positions without soliciting feedback from students or even informing them about this decision, Chopp said.

Provost Constance Hungerford said, for example, that Professor of Economics Ellen Magenheim was appointed as chair to the Middle States Reaccreditation Steering Committee last academic year and Professor of Biology Rachel Merz, when appointed to the planning and building committee for the Science Center, was released of her courses at the time. Hungerford said that the administration did not solicit feedback from students before these appointments or officially inform them afterwards.

Eldridge said that Campbell’s new position “didn’t require” input from students, adding, “We make decisions every day, and we can’t consult everyone.”

After student press reported on Campbell’s new position last Thursday, many members of the community criticized the administration and Campbell on the Daily Gazette’s website. Administrators said that they were disappointed and surprised by the comments, many of which were anonymous.
In light of some of the negative comments, Eldridge said that “a little bit of remembering and humanizing might help this discourse.”

Given some students’ criticisms, Chopp said that she would inform students of similar appointments in the future.

In this new position, which could last up to two years, Campbell will “serve as a liaison from the president’s office to the community to help facilitate our direction setting process and preparations for our next capital campaign,” according to Chopp’s e-mail from last week.

Vice President for Development and Alumni Relations Stephen Bayer said that the college will be undergoing a “strategic planning process” as a way to prepare for this capital campaign. Chopp added that this planning process was a formal recommendation that the Ad Hoc Financial Planning Group made to the Board of Managers in December.

Bayer said that this strategic planning process aims to “assess the priorities” of the campaign and think of how the college can get donors to give money to the college for these priorities. In other words, Bayer said, the community asks itself, “What are we raising money for?” These priorities could be anything from new facilities to financial aid.

In his new role, then, Campbell will keep the college “focused when it comes to strategic planning,” Bayer said. “All members of the community will be engaged” in this process, he added.

“[My role] is really to understand what the community is really — what others are thinking about things, gather those up and synthesize them,” Campbell said. “I’m not setting the vision for the future, I’m trying to extract folks’ ideas about the vision of the future.”

The administration said that this position was not designed for Campbell.

“If [Campbell] had said ‘no,’ we would have looked elsewhere in the faculty,” Eldridge said.

In fact, Chopp said that she had “been thinking about this temporary position for months” but had to wait until the dean of students search process — in which Campbell was one of four final candidates — ended in February before she could make a decision. Bayer and Chopp said that Campbell’s salary will be provided by a gift that has been specifically designated for strategic planning purposes. This means, Eldridge said, that this salary will not come out of the college’s operational budget.

Given the financial downturn in the fall of 2008 and former President Al Bloom’s departure last spring, this capital campaign has actually been delayed over the past two years, Chopp said. Eldridge stressed that now “it’s time” to go through this planning process. “We can’t wait any longer,” he said.

Both Hungerford and Chopp said that this temporary position was created because it requires an immense amount of time that current administrators likely would not have enough time to devote to.

“Any kind of special project is crushing,” Hungerford said. “When we have a need, we tap people.”
Chopp announced in an e-mail to the campus yesterday that Acting Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Diane Anderson will take on the position for the 2010-2011 academic year. Campbell held this job before former Dean of Students Jim Larimore left at the end of last academic year.

Though some have said that the administration is lacking transparency, Urooj Khan ’10 and Dan Chung ’10 said that they felt like their voices were heard in their recent experiences with the administration. Khan and Chung were two of three student representatives on the dean of students search committee.

“There was full transparency [on the committee],” Chung said. “Our voice was definitely one-to-one … with administrators and faculty members.”

Khan agreed, adding that the committee, which was comprised of administrators, faculty members and students, “really appreciated having that [student] perspective, which would’ve been impossible had we not been there.”

Additional reporting by Jacqueline Small.

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