Hamilton Student Proposals to Institutionalize Student Voices are Denied
By Dorothy Poucher ’21, Long-form Investigative Reporter
In Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, members of Student Assembly (SA) attempted to increase formal mechanisms for student voice through a set of proposals to the Board of Trustees (the Board). Over the course of four meetings between SA representatives, trustees and College President David Wippman (the Fall 2020 presentation at the full Board meeting, the November 24 followup meeting, the Spring 2021 presentations at the full Board meeting, and the early March follow up meeting), students found that trustees accepted few of their demands for the increased institutionalization of student participation.
Hamilton College operates under a shared governance model which places significant decision-making power into the hands of three groups: the faculty, the administration and the Board. President Wippman explained that the College’s shared governance structure, which he stated is common throughout higher education, allocates certain types of decision-making powers to each group because each group has a certain type of “expertise” on various issues and this “places responsibility and accountability for decisions with those who must put those decisions into operation.” The faculty contributes primarily to tenure decisions like standards for selection, faculty tenure choices and the curriculum; the Board contributes primarily to decisions concerning the budget and long-term operation of the College; and the Administration focuses on the day-to-day running of the College.
However, when it comes to incorporating students into these decision-making processes and bodies, there are less opportunities. President Wippman acknowledged that “there are lots of issues where students have first hand experience and nobody else does,” because they “[live] on campus and have that experience.” However, instead of these reasons serving as merit for students to hold a Board position or have Board voting rights, Wippman believes that student input is a better way to involve students in Board activities. “If we are thinking about a mental health issue or staffing the Counseling Center, for example, we want to know what their preferences are…[and] how [students] feel. We want that input, but then we are also looking at…budgetary considerations, how [Hamilton] benchmarks against our peers [and] what is the long term set of issues facing the College. It is the responsibility of the College’s governance bodies to look at all relevant factors and consider the long-term best interests of the institution,” said President Wippman.
Some ways that administrators and the Board seek student opinions include informal mechanisms like lunches and invitations to speak at various committee and full Board meetings. After these meetings, administrators like President Wippman and Vice President and Dean of Students Terry Martinez are responsible for relaying the meeting points to groups such as the Board and its committees, including the Budget and Finance Committee, the Academic Affairs Committee and the Enrollment Committee. The Central Council, which is SA’s executive branch, is a more formal platform for students to share their voices, through various committees assigned to collaborative projects, weekly SA President and Vice President meetings with Dean Martinez and President Wippman, and resolutions. Resolutions are documents that can request action be taken by various groups and individuals on campus. However, there are few other formal spaces on campus dedicated to student input and choice.
None of the trustees except for Board of Trustees Chair Stephen I. Sadove ’73 agreed to comment. Instead of a verbal interview, Sadove responded in writing to a set of questions emailed to him by The Spectator. President Wippman later clarified that “the [Board of Trustees] Chair and [the College] President are generally the ones who can speak on behalf of the Board because they have a full overview…we don’t want fifty or sixty different viewpoints put out there as viewpoints of the board.”
In Fall 2020, SA members Cole Kuczek ’23 and Mariam Saied ’23, with the help of former SA Vice President Eric Kopp ’22, wrote Resolution 20–1, which the Central Council passed on Sept. 21, 2020. The resolution aimed to increase student representation on the Board. This resolution asked the Board to appoint the SA President and SA Vice President as voting members. It also asked the Board to release the minutes or a summary of them from Board meetings. This demand would allow SA to “follow up with questions to ensure accountability to the Board, and relay concerns from the student body to the Board of Trustees.” Additionally, Kuczek and Saied asked the Board to respond in writing to the resolution. After the Central Council passed Resolution 20–1, Kopp and Kuczek presented it on Oct. 2, 2020 to the entire Board at their regular quarterly meeting.
At the quarterly meeting, Kopp alleged that he was met with “five minutes of condescending questions’’ and comments from trustees after the presentation. According to Kopp, some trustees, who will remain anonymous, stated that “that students could not handle the information the Board has,” and asked “what if a professor comes up for tenure and you had them for a class and they gave you an F?” Kopp took issue with these statements. He was particularly concerned with the second statement because to him, it was being used as a justification for denying students decision-making roles. At the meeting, Kopp responded to the second statement by saying that a student would just abstain from that particular vote. He also felt that this question ignored the fact that “the Board has a lot of conflicts of interest, like parents of current students and students that graduated more recently. The same standard could be applied to them.”
There was not a conclusive decision shared with the SA representatives until the two follow-ups to this presentation. First, Sadove sent an email response to SA on Oct. 5. In this email, he shared that the Board had denied the SA proposal. He followed with some new ideas for student representatives’ inclusion on the Board, like “having the Board Chair meet annually with one or more officers of Student Assembly, asking the assembly President and Vice President to participate in the orientation for new board members so that they have a better understanding of what the board does and how it operates, and periodically inviting the assembly president or vice president to make remarks at board meetings.” Sadove also noted that the Board’s 2019 resolution added selected students to certain trustee committees but not to the Board.
Second, there was a meeting on Nov. 24 between SA and Board representatives. Kopp, Kuczek, Saied and Jackson Harris ’22 represented SA, and President Wippman, Sadove, Vice Chair Robert E. Delaney, Jr. ’79, Vice Chair Linda E. Johnson ’80, and Chief of Staff and Secretary to the Board of Trustees Gillian King represented the Board. The objective of this meeting was to discuss next steps for the proposal. During the followup meeting, President Wippman and the trustees offered four suggestions for revising the proposal. Harris and Saied reported that they aimed to incorporate these four ideas, which were “legal exposure, philanthropic and financial obligations of trustees, duration of term and effectiveness of time, and peer institutions not having student trustees” in the new proposal. Saied saw this meeting as hopeful because, “even though they said no, it sounded like they were interested in having a second proposal…like they wanted to make it happen.”
After this followup meeting, Saied, Kuzcek and Harris went back to the drawing board and worked on a new proposal. When rewriting it, the three examined and more thoroughly incorporated the Board’s bylaws, charter and structure into the proposal, and took into account the four suggestions provided by President Wippman and the trustees. The students also sought out and incorporated feedback from faculty members. This proposal advocated for a new branch of SA, which would be led by a Chief Student Delegate. This delegate would become a voting member of the Board for one year following a transition semester. The Chief Student Delegate would have regular meetings with their seven student Committee Delegates who “would become official, non-voting members of seven trustee committees. Each student will each sit on two trustee committees, and the students on Academic Affairs, Budget and Finance and Enrollment will also sit on the corresponding faculty committees.” They spent many hours working on this proposal, and their processes are outlined in this article.
They presented the new version to the Board at the quarterly General Board Zoom meeting on March 5. Saied and Harris reported being told by the Board via email to arrive at a certain time. After arriving at the waiting room on time, they allegedly waited an hour and a half before being let in. Saied said that in the March 5 Zoom meeting, “of the twenty to thirty cameras on there were about two people of color”, and alleged that many of the trustees who had their cameras on “were on their phones. Some people even visibly left the room and came back.”
The last slide of Saied, Harris, and Kuczek’s presentation asked for the Board’s questions, comments, critiques and ideas. Harris described the purpose of this slide being “that a large part of this is collaboration. We have to model the collaboration that we are trying to build and institutionalize.” However, Harris and Saied allege Sadove shut down the Q&A time before it could begin, even though there was no earlier indication that this period would not be allowed. According to Harris and Saied, Sadove then thanked them and asked them to leave the Zoom. While Sadove sees presentations as an important way that “the Board receives input from students formally,” and described direct contact with students, faculty and staff during board meetings as “a highlight of every Board meeting”, the SA representatives reported having a more negative experience with the Board during their presentations.
SA President Saphire Ruiz was told by the Board via email to arrive on Zoom at 3:40 p.m. for the same March 5 Spring meeting. Ruiz and former Vice President Kavya Crasta 21’ allegedly entered the Zoom waiting room on time and waited for an hour to give their SA President and Vice President report, “despite being told multiple times that [the Board was] about to let them in” during that hour period. When Ruiz entered the Zoom, they noticed the same sea of white men as Saied. When Ruiz finished their presentation, they found the Board’s response to be “very abrupt,” and Ruiz felt that “there was a level of disrespect. It didn’t feel like we were actually being heard or listened to or respected in the way that we were brushed off so quickly.” Ruiz was also disappointed that they were not allowed to stay for the following student trustee presentation by Saied, Harris and Kuczek.
The September 1, 2020 Middle States evaluation echoed this trend in trustee demographics. The Middle States evaluation is a report by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which is a reaccreditation entity that conducts an in-depth assessment of Hamilton once every 8–10 years to verify it is meeting an educational standard. Regarding the Hamilton Board of Trustees, the report states “at present, 32.5% of the voting members of the Board are women, and 12.5% are from diverse backgrounds. The diversity of the Board has increased from 10.0% to 12.5% over the past year (and includes 1 Latinx, 3 Asian-Americans, and 1 LGBTQIA)” (Middle States 103).
After the March 5 Board meeting, King scheduled a follow up meeting between President Wippman, Saied, Harris and Kuzcek. President Wippman’s role in this meeting was to serve as a line of communication between the Board and the SA representatives. When asked about accountability in his role as a line of communication, President Wippman said that “ultimately, I am accountable to the board, the Board ultimately hires and if necessary fires the President.” Saied reflected on President Wippman’s role throughout the process, saying “it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of meaningful communication through [him]” because she felt he was not as engaged or willing to pass along information as she thought he could have been.
There is no official transcript from the meeting, but Harris and Saied reported that President Wippman believed the Board’s general response to their new proposal was a no. According to President Wippman, he believed that the Board had denied the proposal because they felt little had changed since the last resolution, and that the list of concerns from the Fall follow up meeting between SA and select trustees had not been addressed. The students asked if they would hear from the trustees, since they gave out their email addresses to Board members in lieu of the Q&A session.They also asked if President Wippman could personally emphasize their desire to answer the Board’s questions on the new proposal.
Saied and Harris alleged that President Wippman responded to their requests saying “‘the trustees don’t typically engage in iterative dialogue…the Trustees are very intelligent people, they probably understand the proposal completely and don’t have any questions and if they do have questions, I’ll be the one to answer those.’”
During this meeting, President Wippman also mentioned that the new proposal still did not address the trustees’ philanthropic commitments. Harris reacted that “it was shocking to see the philanthropic commitment as a barrier to student involvement. I understand it as a business practice for the school, but to hear it used as a barrier?” Harris felt that this requirement seems to exclude alumni who aren’t wealthy from the Board and instead favors those with “generational wealth.”
The 2021 Middle States evaluation expressed a similar concern for the balance between philanthropic obligation and diversifying the Board’s membership. This report stated that “while trustees’ financial contributions clearly play a vital role in the development of the college, the diversification of the Board will be slowed if the Board requires significant wealth and disposable income for Board appointments. In order to promote diversity, the Board must strike an effective balance between wealth and wisdom in its selection of new members” (Middle States, 108).
One of the means through which student voices were recently institutionalized was in a resolution passed in 2019 by the Board. This amendment allowed for chosen students to attend committee meetings. According to Dean Martinez, this idea is helpful because “most decisions don’t happen at the [quarterly Board of Trustees meeting] level. Most decisions are happening at the trustee committee level.” However, Harris feels that the Board’s handpicking approach for selecting students is an example of “atomization.” According to Harris, these students are left “jumping into a meeting and having no idea what [they’re] doing.” Harris also was concerned by the student selection process. In an institution that prides itself on its democratic processes, he found it antithetical that “the student delegates are effectively representatives and [the trustees] refer to them as student representatives, so why would student representatives be selected by the administration [and not by students]?”
Dean Martinez and Senior Staff are two other administrators that can relay student feedback to the Administration and Board. Dean Martinez develops presentations and plans for the Board by speaking with “[faculty members like] David Walden and Ashley Place, [inviting] students to her house for dinners in non-COVID semesters, and [eating] with students in dining halls.” A small group of head administrators referred to as Senior Staff have also “started inviting student organizations like admissions interns and the EMTs to meetings to hear their experiences.”
The Board and the Administration use these interactions to inform their decisions. However, the Board and the Administration’s ability to share information on these decisions with the student body is bound in many ways by confidentiality. Additionally, President Wippman spoke about confidentiality as an important practice for Board meetings because it “allows a full and free and open exchange of views by trustees that if the meetings weren’t confidential, wouldn’t be as feasible.” He also explained that after every Board meeting, he provides a short summary of the issues the Board discussed via an email to the Hamilton community.
Dean Martinez offered her own perspective on confidentiality at Hamilton, explaining that when it comes to confidentiality, it is more “about timing in terms of when to release information after the decision is made and not so much about the information itself.” She cited the COVID-19 task-force as an example. She suggested to the students on the task-force that “when talking about these meetings to others, talk about what [the task-force has] definitively decided on,” and to ask Dean Martinez if they are unsure about sharing a certain piece of information.
Despite President Wippman and Dean Martinez’s perspectives on confidentiality’s role, Ruiz still feels that “Hamilton has a horrible transparency issue, even in basic things that in my opinion shouldn’t be confidential or things that aren’t confidential but aren’t shared. There is also a communication issue within that. It is one of the causes of the issues at Hamilton…Obviously, to some degree, you need confidentiality, especially with really big decisions that have a large impact, but you can’t have a democratic decision-making process if everything is confidential.”
Looking towards the future of the relationship between students and the Board, Sadove explained that the Spring proposal, “has been referred to the Governance Committee for further consideration. We will continue to invite students to meet with trustees, but it is unlikely that the Board will expand its membership to include student trustees for the reasons stated in my Oct. 5 note.” While Sadove predicts the new proposal will be denied by the Governance Committee, this set of proposals prompted feedback and generation of new ideas.
Sadove also suggested in his Oct. 5 email a list of new practices for SA-Board relations, such as “having the Board Chair meet annually with one or more officers of Student Assembly, asking the assembly president and vice president to participate in the orientation for new Board members so that they have a better understanding of what the Board does and how it operates, and periodically inviting the assembly president or vice president to make remarks at Board meetings.” In response to this email, Harris “liked the orientation idea a lot,” but ultimately felt these suggestions continued the pattern of reliance on informal and non-institutional forms of interaction.
Dean Martinez expanded on Sadove’s idea of SA participation in trustee orientation by suggesting a more collaborative student orientation for students on trustee committees. She explained “one thing we can do better is to prepare students for those committee meetings. Some kind of orientation that could be a joint training with SA and members of my team saying here are your responsibilities…let’s give you some background, contextualize it, help you understand who the players are.”
These additions may improve student preparation, but Saied explained that SA still “has little power in directly making changes to Hamilton’s function…we are a ‘bridge’ between students and administration but we can’t directly impact how the administration runs things.” Through the process of writing these resolutions and proposals, she learned that “writing a resolution doesn’t really do anything” and that “it is possible to see things change, but it is a lot of work.”
Ruiz stated that when it comes to changing these mechanisms, “the biggest thing is that it’s going to have to be specific and bound by writing. It can’t just be up to whoever is in charge of that department. It has to be institutionalized. It needs to be very democractic and that’s one of the issues at Hamilton is that these processes aren’t democratic.” The creation of those processes have “to be created with and approved by the folks that it is going to be impacting.” Both Dean Martinez and Ruiz shared that they intend to collaboratively plan ways that student voices can be formalized. Ruiz emphasized how helpful Dean Martinez has been on this issue. Although this collaborative project has not started yet, Ruiz believes it has potential to genuinely tackle some of the issues surrounding student involvement.
While SA’s current operations and the Ruiz-Martinez project demonstrates that work can be done at the student level to amplify student voices, the shared governance model still leaves a majority of decision-making power up to the Administration and the Board. Without any institutional shifts in student power, Kopp feels that “students won’t have any real say,” and Harris fears that it will cause trustees to see members of SA as “symbolic” representatives.
The Middle States report references Hamilton Connected, the 2018 strategic plan, which emphasizes the importance of “intellectual growth, flexibility, and collaboration” within the Hamilton community. This report calls into question who “collaboration” includes and how it is actually put into practice. Under the current Hamilton shared governance plan, collaboration with students looks like informal interactions and presentations without SA and Board dialogue. This form of collaboration leaves students and student leaders like Ruiz feeling that they have been “denied agency, power, and independence to make [their] own decisions.” After spending hours on proposals and in meetings with trustees and administrators, students’ lack of desired results left them feeling “unsurprised” but ultimately “very disappointed.”
