(This is a letter from William R. Perlik in response to questions from Oberlin College students This letter was sent before last weekend's meeting.)
Following the Board of Trustees' meeting in early December each of you presented a note or petition addressing some of your concerns about Oberlin. A number of your concerns are similar or related so I am responding in this single memorandum rather than writing each of you individually. I hope that you will receive this as my effort to bet back to you more coherently than If I wrote to you individually.
Let me start by saying some basic things about the Board of Trustees and its responsibilities. Our responsibilities are described principally in our by-laws, as they have been enriched and applied by a long history of understanding and use. These by-laws also establish large areas of responsibility for Oberlin's president and faculty. In general, the Board has the responsibility to select and review the effectiveness of the president, to guide the financial destinies of the college and to help keep the alumni body informed about and connected to the college. In the financial realm, for example, we approve the total budget, level of tuition and other fees, use of endowment funds to support current programs, salary pools for faculty and administrative and support staff (but with very few exceptions not individual salaries) and general scholarship policies and the gross amount of funds available for this program.
As in most institutions of higher education Oberlin's trustees do not hire, fire or evaluate the staff (except for the president) or faculty, determine what subjects are part of the curriculum or, in a more general way, how much emphasis is given to various areas of learning in the educational program. For the president, deans and faculty, these questions lie at the core of their responsibilities and competence.
We meet four times a year and do much of work through committees. Some of these committees, such as the committees on budget and finance, campus affairs and investments, are standing committees and report to the board at virtually every meeting. Other committees are established for the particular purpose of studying and reporting on particular problems. A good example of this is the ad hoc committee on retention that we established at our December meeting because we, like you, recognize that Oberlin's retention rate is too low, that raising it is an important issue for Oberlin and that we need to understand the issues here better than we do in order to be effective trustees.
I agree with the observation of some of you that better communication among the elements of the community that share aspirations and responsibility for this college is highly desirable. It may be that the board does a better job in communicating with the faculty than it does with the students. The principal reasons for this are that over the years we get to know a number of them personally and we work together in areas of joint responsibility, such as the strategic planning of last year and the planning for the new science facility last year and this.
Our contacts with individual students are less continuous and less structured. Our campus affairs committee regularly hears presentations from student groups, particularly the student senate and somewhat less frequently the Conservatory Counsel. The class trustees, one elected each year from the graduating class, have a special responsibility of keeping abreast of student concerns and informing the board about them. As I am sure you know, the class trustees sponsor an open forum several times a year as one way of meeting their responsibilities. In addition a number of trustees meet for dinner and conversation with students on Thursday night of our board weekends. Also, our Friday evening receptions and dinners often include groups of students involved in a particular activity. And, of course, we receive the Review and Observer and have just instructed the college Secretary to forward us copies of other student publications as they appear.
It may well be that these channels of communication can be enlarged and made more effective. I would welcome your suggestions in this respect. My own personal leaning would be toward greater opportunities for informal contracts. I usually attend other board responsibilities on Thursday evenings but when I did not find them effective mechanisms for the continuing serious and thoughtful exchange of views.
Some students have asked about the opportunity to address the board as a body. I believe that it is not a realistic expectation. As noted earlier, the board works largely through committee reports of the president, often supplemented by comments from members of the senior staff. We occasionally go beyond this group-for example, the president of the alumni association updates us once a year-but our limited time on campus and the need to deal with many matters require tight control of board meeting time. A portion of almost every board weekend is open to the public, however. These meetings are announced in advance and tickets for the available seatings space are available through the College Secretary. I invite you to join us as a ticketed observer at our meetings.
A fundamental characteristic of board-student communications at Oberlin is its intermittence and discontinuity. This makes effective discussion of complex issues of interest to a number of constituencies very difficult. The campus-wide polylogue that lead to last spring's "Broad Visions" document overcame communications problems by pulling together a number of constituencies who met frequently over time on focused subjects. I actively participated in one task group involved in that work and found it informative, productive and interesting. As you may know, President Dye has encouraged students to join in an initiative of student-faculty-administrative conversations of campus concerns. Outcomes of that process that point to the need for board action can be brought to the board in a timely and fully developed way. If you have not already done so, I strongly urge that you take up President Dye's suggestions and be in touch with her office concerning possible next steps.
A number of you have expressed your concerns about Oberlin's support for diversity. I am certain that many at Oberlin, including the board, President Dye, the senior staff and faculty, greatly value diversity as an essential Oberlin characteristic and as an enormously important part of higher education in America. But it is also my view that Oberlin as a community and college does not have a widely-shared, articulated concept of diversity. President Dye has identified a need for fundamental thinking in this area and the board will shortly begin a new and broader focus on this. As I am sure you also know that college recently received a significant grant from the Hewlett Foundation that, with its own resources, the college will devote to a three year program going directly to problems and concerns in the area of diversity. For the moment, I will offer some views on concerns bearing on diversity that you have raised.
To start with, I note that Oberlin's "Broad Perspectives" strategic plan proclaims diversifying the faculty and curriculum as major strategic goals. The board, I believe, fully supports this. Not surprising, views will differ as to the nature, timing and the structure for doing this. But the central idea has much support in action as well as rhetoric. Consider, for example,
From these few examples, and others that are not quite so far along, it seems to me that under the leadership of the president, deans and faculty-where it appropriately rests-concerns about diversity in the curriculum are being seriously addressed.
But what about diversity in the student body? The news is both good and bad. In 1997 the number of African-Americans entering arts and sciences as first year students was 60, second in the nation among leading liberal arts colleges. But the number varies within a wide range, having been as low as 41 as recently as 1996. The same swings show up with other minority groups. And, in retention our record is alarming, where we rank near the bottom among peer institutions, especially in the retention of African-American students.
Our failure to keep engaged students who first choose Oberlin is a discouraging failure. The trauma to the students in the most devastating part. But the damage to Oberlin is also unacceptable. These abnormal retention rates mean that we are failing in important ways that we must come to understand. These are the reasons why the board has established the retention study committee that I mentioned earlier.
Some of you have urged that the retention of administrators of color and LGBT administrators be improved. Social mores and legal considerations make the systematic collection of data concerning sexual orientation of staff members off-limits, so the college does not have such data. With respect to administrators of color, President Dye has asked the Director of Human Resources to prepare a retention report in this area. As many of you know, during the past months the departure of three African American women from important positions in the office of the Dean of Students has been much discussed on campus. However, that situation has now changed and two of the three will remain at Oberlin.
I also have a few thoughts on your wish to achieve greater participation in administrative decisions, including hiring, firing, and funding. Although this occurred before some of you came to Oberlin I want to stress that students were fully and ably represented in the most important hiring decisions made at Oberlin in recent years-the decision to hire Nancy Dye. The student member of the search committee was a full representative in every sense, attending all meetings and interviews, having access to all files, having the same vote as every other member. As I understand it, students also participate actively in the hiring of new faculty and will be invited to participate in the searches for the new vice president for development and dean of students. Although neither I not any other board member has the authority to fire any Oberlin employee (other than the president) I do have some thoughts about the firing process. Such decisions can be extraordinarily traumatic for the employee and the supervisor. Often they involve the discussion and evaluation of information of a highly personal and sensitive nature. Where possible it is usually desirable to carry out such decisions in a way that will protect not only the college but also the employee's prospects for future employment. Sometimes a decision whether to terminate requires input from persons who would be reluctant to share their views if they thought their views were going to be matters of more general circulation. Nor do I think that these difficulties can be overcome by a practice of soliciting the views of students without inviting their further participation. Such a general practice would soon be recognized as a signal that dismissal was under considerations with attendant avoidable harm to the employee.
Let me turn to my final point, your concern about scholarships. At Oberlin, as on any other campus that I know about, scholarships continue to be crucially important. They are especially so at Oberlin because we traditionally have placed and continue to place access to higher education near the top of our list of values. I personally could not have attended a college of Oberlin's excellence without substantial scholarships. Many other board members would say the same.
During the eighties and nineties converging trends made scholarships an even more important issues. On the cost side professional salaries out-paced general inflation to make up years of substantial lag. As well, in many cases curriculums expanded rapidly. And in some areas (and particularly at Oberlin) the cost of various kinds of support activities moved rapidly upward. On the revenue side government support of higher education fell off sharply relative to the escalating cost basis.
Because of our economic demographics, these cross-currents have hit the Oberlin campus harder than the campuses of most of our comparison schools. In 1996-97, for example, 20.9 percent of our students came from families with annual incomes of $39,999 or less, compared with 17.9 percent of our competitors. And 50.8 percent of our students came from families with annual incomes of $75,000 or more compared with 57.2 percent for our competitors. This means that Oberlin students generally have to struggle harder to finance college costs and that Oberlin must struggle harder to help them.
Oberlin has responded in several ways. First, Oberlin has moderated its rates of increases in tuition. For the current year the rate of increase is lower than it has been in several decades. Second, scholarships as a percentage of gross tuition have climbed steadily in recent years reaching 33.3 percent (compared with 32.3 percent for our comparison group) in the last full year. Similarly, the percentage of students awarded scholarships at Oberlin has reached 69 for first year students and 61.8 for the entire student body. This last point put another way is that an ever rising percentage of Oberlin students depends in substantial part on an ever lowering percentage of Oberlin students to pay part of the scholarship students' college costs.
Notwithstanding these facts I have no doubt that scholarship assistance is much better at Oberlin today that it was, say, five years ago. Further progress in the long term involves increasing returns on the endowment, increasing alumni giving and making our operations as productive and efficient as we possibly can. In the shorter term the College can try to make its scholarship "packages" more attractive, help others to understand that Oberlin has special needs in this area and be certain that our recent improvements in this area are accurately understood.
Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 126, Number 18, March 13, 1998
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