After more than two months, alumni concerns and questions about Alan Price’s tenure as Earlham’s president have gone unaddressed and unanswered. The Board’s near-silence on the subject culminated in a brief visit by a handful of trustees to a silent meeting held as part of the “Holding Earlham in the Light” event on campus Saturday, August 11th, details of which are recounted below.
After summarizing the questions and issues with the way the college has handled Alan’s tenure, in text drawn from the Response to Stump and Stewart of August 3, 2018 (embedded here: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/08/06/alumni-want-earlham-board-minutes-and-bylaws-changes this update recommends that signatories who are still not satisfied with the Board’s response consider a pivot to the broader concern with the erosion of shared governance on campus, of which the mishandling of Alan’s tenure is a significant, but not the only, symptom.
The last section of contains an updated series of helpful links for next steps.
I. Unanswered Questions about Alan Price’s tenure as president
In messages from David Stump, incoming Board Chair, and Avis Stewart, interim President, alumni were informed that the decision to terminate Alan’s tenure as president followed from discussions in two Executive Committee meetings, an in-person review of the relevant issues with Alan himself, a “mutual agreement” between the Executive Committee and Alan that it would be best if he would submit his resignation, Alan’s submission of his resignation, a “consensus recommendation of the Executive Committee . . . presented to the full Board,” a meeting of the full Board, and the acceptance by the full Board of the Executive Committee’s recommendation in this matter. Stump’s letter informed us, as we can see in the Board’s bylaws c. October 2013 (linked on the Board’s webpage), that the Executive Committee of the Board is composed of the Board’s officers and chairs of the many standing committees also created in the bylaws (minus in this case, we suppose, the President). The letter also informed us that the Executive Committee, under the bylaws, is empowered to act on behalf of the Board “under certain circumstances.”
These questions, however, remain unaddressed:
1. We do not know how many members of the Executive Committee participated in the two meetings you mention, but under the requirements for a quorum it may be as few as five, or, if executed under IV.2(c), with the Board Chair alone (in this case not including the President) making a judgment about prejudice to the interests of the college, as few as one.
2. We do not know how many members of the Executive Committee participated in the “consensus recommendation” presented to the full Board, but it may be as few as five, or, if executed under IV.2(c), with the Board Chair alone (in this case not including the President) making a judgment about prejudice to the interests of the college, as few as one.
3. We do not know what question that “consensus recommendation” in fact presented to the full Board: was the full Board asked to demand Alan’s resignation? Or was it asked to accept his already-proffered resignation? Stump’s letter seems to suggest the latter: you say that “the Board accepted the Executive Committee's recommendation” and in the next sentence refer to “[t]he Board's decision to accept Alan's resignation.” This suggests that the full Board did not get to consider the question of the termination of Alan’s tenure as president, indeed may not have been aware that there was any question, before he submitted his resignation, and that the decision was instead presented to them by the Executive Committee, however constituted, as a fait accompli.
These questions persist because we cannot rule out the possibility that the decision to terminate Alan’s presidency was taken by as few as five members of the Executive Committee or, in the case of an action under IV.2(c), with the Board Chair alone, as few as one, and only later communicated to the full Board. For any action under IV.2(a), a quorum of five trustees would be sufficient. Under IV.2(c) the “two Executive Committee meetings” that you refer to in your letter can, as a matter of law, under the Board’s current bylaws, have consisted solely of the Board Chair who “review[ed] the situation in detail with Alan, including each specific issue raised in the Executive Committee discussions.” The Executive Committee, in the person of the Board Chair, acting under IV.2(c), may have pursued the “mutual agreement . . . that the best course to follow was for [Alan] to submit his resignation,” where that resignation was subsequently presented to the full Board.
The petition demanding Alan’s reinstatement does not ask for private or confidential details of his departure from the college, and we do not request them here. We fully expect that the Board, having declined to share those details with members of the current faculty, is also holding them confidential in relation to other members of the broader college community. However, given the financial crisis the Board has publicly declared for the college in conjunction with the news of Alan’s departure, the larger institutional issues that precipitated this event should not be mysterious for faculty, students, or alumni. Stump’s letter assures us that “the reasons contributing to Alan's resignation did not call into question his love for and loyalty to Earlham, or his moral character.” We fully expect that the Board did not, after hiring Alan in a national search with open eyes and full knowledge of his credentials, qualifications, and experience, permit the vagaries of a learning curve during the first year to torpedo this relationship. We fully expect that when the Board hired Alan it took into consideration the existing administrative team and its strengths and weaknesses as they might, or might not, be a support to a new president during his first year. We fully expect that when the Board weighed the enormous costs of plunging the college into this kind of distress it did not permit ordinary minor issues incident to a new administration to cloud the question.
In addition to concerns about the way the Board has handled Alan’s dismissal from campus, many of us are deeply troubled by the way he was hired in the first place. We understand that it emerged in a meeting of the faculty in August of 2017 that as president of the college Alan received a one-year renewable contract, and that he was not appointed to a tenure-line position in an appropriate academic department. The “vast majority” of college presidents at peer institutions (however construed) are hired to three or five year contracts (Finkelstein & Wilde, 2017, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/05/18/presidential-contracts-are-becoming-more-complex-and-corporate-essay and regularly occupy a tenured position on the faculty as well. Earlham presidents before Alan were hired to initial multi-year contracts, the most recent only seven years ago. In the meeting the faculty expressed concern about the term of Alan’s appointment. Why was Alan treated differently? Departure from this norm required forethought and explicit arrangement otherwise. This means that when the Board hired Alan it expressly reserved to itself the option of dismissing him after only a year on the job without having to fire him from a multi-year contract. In other words, when the Board hired Alan, it contemplated well in advance that he, and the college community, might have to go through what they are going through right now, and it actually planned for it.
II. The Board’s Response to Alumni Concerns
A. Aftermath of the Board meeting of August 11th
As most of you know, the Board of Trustees met this past Saturday, August 11, 2018, and Ian Jipp and others organized a “Holding Earlham in the Light” event both on campus and off to coincide with that meeting. Organizers are grateful to Lynn Knight for working to make Stout Meetinghouse available and to the more than 100 Earlhamites who weighed in in response to Jennifer Dodson’s thoughtful post to declare where, across the globe, they were holding Earlham in the light.
Organizers also shared the schedule of events, visible elsewhere in this group as well, with college staff, including Lynn Knight. Twenty-four hours beforehand, the college sent out an invitation through social media—but not via email to the whole alumni list—to alumni to come to campus and meet with trustees and share concerns. This announcement made no mention of the time of day that trustees would be available for conversation.
Some time on the morning of the 11th, before 7am, the college provided flyers indicating that the four trustees sitting on the Board as alumni would be coming out for an hour, from 10:30-11:30am, overlapping with one of the two silent meetings, scheduled for 10-11am. In the end, seven trustees walked into Stout around 10:45am, well after the meeting had begun, and settled in a group apart from the rest of the gathering. Two trustees stood up and introduced themselves, and then offered opinions about the college and the board, treating the meeting as a threshing, or a meeting with an intent for business, rather than as silent worship. When one of the students present eldered the trustees, telling them what the convener had said at the start of the meeting, which they missed, and inviting them, as is appropriate, to join the others gathered there, four stood up and walked out, after being there perhaps seven or eight minutes. The other three stayed until the meeting had ended just before 11am, but did not stay after for informal conversation, even though they were supposed to be available until 11:30am. Later, in informal exchanges, three trustees made it very clear that they had felt “put off” by the student who eldered them, one saying that the student was “rude” and the “nastiest” person that trustee had ever been around.
This gathering to “Hold Earlham in the Light” was an opportunity for the Board to hear from alumni and others who took the trouble to come to campus on very short notice and with very little to go on concerning the intentions of the trustees. The Board never took the opportunity seriously and squandered it when it arrived. We have been given to understand that the trustees are “done talking” to us, and that we should not expect to hear anything more from them in response to our concerns about the college, although we of course remain hopeful that at least some members of the Board may change their minds. In the aftermath of the Board’s meeting Saturday, then, we are collecting here the set of things we know as well as the questions outstanding and as yet unanswered by the college. We then turn our attention and, we hope, the energies and focus of those of you here who do not share the Board’s complacency about its actions and its decisions, to those issues where we can make a difference.
B. What we know and what we don’t know now (August 20, 2018)
We have been informed that the Board did not discuss Alan Price’s tenure as president of the college and that the Board is satisfied with its actions with respect to that issue, since no trustee raised any concern about it during their meeting Saturday. Trustees appear to be united in the view that hiring Alan to an unprecedented one-year contract and then overseeing his departure in such a fashion a year later are good and proper decisions in the best interests of the college. At this point all we can do is wish them luck in their efforts to recruit and retain a new president, or presidents, who are able, during their tenures, to earn the respect of college constituencies, if in fact the Board has any ambition to engage the services of such a person, or persons, in the first place.
We do not believe that the Board discussed or that any trustee raised any concern about the Board’s bylaws, including Article IV, section 2, sub-sections (a) and (c), permitting action on behalf of the full board by as few as five and, in cases involving the tenure of the president, as few as one trustee.
We have received no more information about the college’s debt, or the endowment (especially as to its restricted portions). We have learned in informal conversation with individual trustees and with finance professionals who have reviewed the college’s records that the debt amounted to around $25M during the Bennett administration. We do not know if scheduled payments of $2M and $8M have been made this year, but the bond and loan debt together was recently more than $110M.
We do know that Avis Stewart, interim President, has confirmed that the faculty never approved the 2015 Strategic Plan, a significant admission, given that our primary concern going forward is governance. While he has publicly stated on more than one occasion that the 2015 Strategic Plan is “not prescriptive” precisely because it was never approved by faculty, he apparently believes that that document should nonetheless guide the college in reducing its operating budget, including cuts to academic faculty. However, without the formal support of the faculty, implementation of the strategic plan is entirely inappropriate, and it should be suspended immediately.
III. Pivot to a Concern with the Condition of Shared Governance on Campus
Given the Board’s indifference to alumni concerns about its own governance and that of the college, we have after much reflection decided to concentrate our own efforts on doing what we can to support academic faculty, current students, and, where appropriate, staff in their efforts to secure effective decision-making processes for themselves as essential constituencies in Earlham’s academic mission. Such processes would preserve, rather than erode, the self-determination and expression appropriate to a teaching and learning community.
While we maintain our concerns about the way the Board has handled Alan’s tenure at the college, we emphasize at this point that we see it as just one symptom of a pervasive breakdown in governance at every level and in every sphere over a period of many years that is now threatening the institutional integrity of the college and its mission. We encourage everyone concerned to consider moving on from our initial focus on Alan’s departure to this broader, and even more serious, problem.
This shift is especially urgent right now, since the Board and the interim President are continuing to push to make these cuts under the 2015 Strategic Plan, even though it has never been approved by the faculty and is being imposed on the college unilaterally by the Board. Given the severity of the cuts—$8M of the operating budget is to be slashed by this December (2018), which requires a 23% cut to the faculty—and the enormous shift in curricular priorities expressed in the 2015 Strategic Plan, execution of those severe reductions under that design will destroy the traditional academic mission and strength of the college. Why? Because the strategic plan’s explicit call to shift resources away from liberal arts disciplines to programs established under “Pillar 1,” better known as EPIC, supports an argument to cut tenure line faculty in humanities and other traditional disciplines. However, even cutting all of the humanities faculty isn’t enough to reduce the faculty by 23%, again, the figure required for reduction of the operating budget by $8M. The 2017 Financial Audit and Consolidated Financial Statements of the college show a 25% increase—about $600,000—in academic support staff costs from 2016 to 2017, most likely due to the implementation of EPIC.1 The college is already bleeding its traditional academic programs in order to support EPIC, the costs of which are only partly covered by the restricted gift that established it. Cuts carried out under the 2015 Strategic Plan will only accelerate the major shift in mission and emphasis in this direction. Even the insistence on relocating faculty lines from members who elect to retire from traditional academic programs to EPIC, called for in Pillar 2 of the 2015 Strategic Plan, will eventually erode those programs, and with them Earlham’s reputation for the quality of its liberal arts education.
Such a dramatic shift in the college’s mission and ethos should not be carried out unilaterally by the Board of Trustees or the President. Cuts to tenure line faculty and cuts to traditional academic programs should not be carried out either at the Board’s initiative or by the faculty itself under pressure from the Board to follow a strategic plan that has never been approved by the faculty. That the college is confronting all of this, right now, this fall, is a clear sign that faculty governance and self-determination are already seriously compromised and under threat of extinction at Earlham.
As a foundation of the Society of Friends, Earlham has always operated as an academic institution with elements and features that take it out of the mainstream of colleges and universities. Where these departures from general standards of governance and organization contribute to the quality of teaching and of undergraduate education, both social and academic, they are to be both prized as such and regularly reviewed to ensure that they continue to support, rather than undermine, the academic integrity of the college. For example, the traditional consensus decision-making characteristic of organizations affiliated with the Society of Friends as a model for all meetings and decisions of the college, whether faculty or hall meeting or Student Advisory Board or Board of Trustees, has in the past delivered decisions and initiatives that, for example, elevated tiny Earlham into one of the most rigorous undergraduate programs and one of the largest per capita producers of Ph.D.s in the country. The fruits of consensus on campus included an outstandingly robust Humanities education during the first year, a very high degree of integration between the social and academic lives of students, faculty, and staff, an ethos for living together that was discernibly continuous with an education in how to read texts, treat evidence, draw conclusions, pursue inquiries, solve problems, and a continuously renewed sense of the college’s mission that required the care and participation of every member of the community. One of the features of this model of governance is its inclusiveness—when inquiry through consensus is robust, it works best when everyone capable and concerned is in the room.
But the last thirty-odd years have seen a steady erosion of both the operation and the efficacy of consensus decision-making on campus. Among the many effects of this erosion is the near-elimination of faculty governance altogether, because where administrators have undercut or worked around or ignored the role of faculty consensus for academic decisions, the college has not developed anything to replace it. The imposition, without faculty approval, of the 2015 Strategic Plan is perhaps the most egregious, but certainly not the only, fact showing that we do not overstate the gravity of the breakdown in shared governance at the college. This breakdown takes what might otherwise be a desirable departure from the mainstream in academia and turns it into a serious breach of accepted professional and institutional norms and standards for faculty and academic programs. This is the condition of the college today. Recovery may indeed take the form of restoration of the robust inquiry of real consensus, with its powerful capacity to air and process inquiry, disagreement, criticism, conflict, and reflection, but it may instead require the adoption of more mainstream instruments of governance that, in some cases, require more functional specialization. Doing neither is not an option—leaving the college in what is effectively a governance vacuum will place it in even greater jeopardy than it is now.
We call now for all of us in the concerned alumni community and beyond who have been alarmed at the news of Alan’s departure, of the college’s financial situation, and of the cuts to tenure line faculty and academic programs essential to the college’s mission, to turn our marvelous reading and researching abilities—we all still have them!—to learning about the possible alternatives to what is now the nearly lost art of consensus on campus, and about ways to support the academic faculty as well as the students, and, where appropriate, the staff as they try to fend off cuts to essential programs and operations.
IV. Helpful Links
Board of Trustees members: https://earlham.edu/about/leadership-governance/board-of-trustees/
Board of Trustees Bylaws: https://earlham.edu/media/446140/bylaws.pdf
Faculty Handbook: http://earlham.edu/policies-and-handbooks/handbooks/faculty-handbook/
Faculty committees on curriculum and personnel, with membership: http://earlham.edu/policies-and-handbooks/handbooks/governance-manual/standing-committees/
AAUP statement on shared governance: https://www.aaup.org/report/statement-government-colleges-and-universities
AAUP report on the relation between shared governance and academic freedom: https://www.aaup.org/report/relationship-faculty-governance-academic-freedom
1940 Statement on tenure and academic freedom: https://www.aaup.org/report/1940-statement-principles-academic-freedom-and-tenure
Alumni Council: https://earlham.edu/alumni/volunteer-leaders/alumni-council/alumni-council-members/
Chronicle of Higher Education article on Alan's departure (includes Hull letter): https://www.chronicle.com/article/Questions-Swirl-as-Earlham/243821
Link to Alumni petition, with updates: https://www.change.org/p/board-of-trustees-of-earlham-college-earlham-alumni-demand-reinstatement-of-president-alan-price?recruiter=482784458&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=undefined
The 2015 strategic plan (summary): http://earlham.edu/strategic-plan/
Press:
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/08/06/alumni-want-earlham-board-minutes-and-bylaws-changes https://www.pal-item.com/story/news/local/2018/08/09/amid-financial-strains-earlham-banks-100-million-campus-updates/885145002/
Alumni who would like to receive email messages from the College via the alumni mailing list but who are not seeing those messages should check their spam folders (etc.) and confirm that they have a current email address on file with the college here: https://earlham.edu/alumni/contact/email-the-alumni-office/
Notes
1. We have been able to have the college’s 2017 Financial Audit and Consolidated Financial Statements document reviewed by a long-time finance person at a college very similar to Earlham, and have been given permission to share this person’s observations. We are not disclosing our source in order to protect this person’s professional status and contacts, but we are very grateful for the additional pair of eyes on this material.
“NTR [net tuition revenue] dropped by $1+ million from 2016 to 2017.
It appears that the majority of gifts were temporarily restricted or permanently restricted, which reduce the college's flexibility.
Spending on Academic Support increased by 25% (~$600,000) presumably due to EPIC support staff.
Bond debt principal decreased by $2 million, seemingly on normal repayment schedule
Investments: From year to year, there was a decrease in illiquid investments and increase in fixed income, probably due to the need to increase liquidity
p. 16: The draw on the Huntington loan increased by $8 million during 2016-17. Notable.
p 18: The bonds have $8 million in principal that is due in 2018.
p 20-21: There were increases in unendowed Academic Support and Student Services spending, likely due to restricted gifts.
p 26: The Board-designated endowment funds are probably the key to financing deficits. If deficits average $10 million per year, then there are about 3-5 years of reserves in assets without donor restrictions.
p 36: From FY2016 to 2017, there was a decrease in general expense and an increase in fund-raising expense.”