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Friday, January 30, 2004

Shaking things up, part I

Goshen, 30.01.2004

Dear Ms Stoltzfus,

My name is Sasha Dyck and I am a senior Molecular Biology major at Goshen College. While perhaps I am just emotional about finishing up my last months here, I feel now more than ever a deep love and respect for this college and all the opportunities it has given me. I love its diverse community, its academic rigor coupled with caring professors and its encouragement of mind-opening cross-cultural experiences. Coming from secular Montréal, Canada, I have also grown to respect and value the religious education that I have received at GC, not only in the classroom but also through many conversations with friends and faculty. And lastly, I have always appreciated the openness of GC administrators, who consistently make time to talk to students and answer their questions.

GC students, as I’m sure you know, are some of the most campus-conscious in the nation. I can think of no other institution where the hot topics, even at parties, are the college’s latest enrolment numbers, the decision-making process of a housing plan, the progress of an administrative search committee or the state of the endowment as compared to other benchmark schools. This is boring stuff! And yet we care. We care so much. We pour so much of our time and energy (if we had money, we’d give that too) into helping the college out in any way we can. Why? Because we know just how special it is. We know that we’ve come to a unique spot here among the cornfields of Northern Indiana, and that it needs all of our help to keep it great.

I’m not sure about the members of the board of directors (having never met them), but it seems likely that it is this same feeling that motivates you to do your job. I think we could probably agree on a lot of things—were board members and students ever to speak to one another—and most important would be our love of Goshen College. From that common ground we could have great conversations, I’m sure. Students have many ideas and opinions about the state and future of the institution, and while these are partly due to our youth and naivety, the majority are born out of deep feelings of love and commitment that we all share for Goshen College.

And yet, despite the fact that students have time to think about the state of the college, live in the state of the college, want to share their opinions about the state of the college and overall improve the state of the college, their voices are seldom heard. When I first came here, there was a Board of Overseers who approved plans, many of them proposed by the Strategic Planning Committee. My second year I was elected President of the Student Senate, and so got an honourary seat on the SPC. I enjoyed that year a lot. We made many good decisions, I felt, and always worked to refine the processes by which we included the on and off-campus “stakeholders” in those decisions. Our ultimate goal was always to achieve “buy-in,” and the more “buy-in” we got from “stakeholders,” the happier we were. Last year the SPC was reformed as a two-day meeting, taking place yearly, to which only a few students were invited. I helped approve that plan, in large part because it seemed that it would continue the listening and gaining of “buy-in” from the various “stakeholders.” Recently I heard that “moral owners” have replaced “stakeholders” as the people to whom the board (by now conveniently re-christened the Board of Directors) are responsible and will listen. “Fine,” I thought, “semantics. This isn’t a big change.” And yet it seems I was wrong, terribly wrong. Moral owners, it seems, are those members of the Goshen College community who either have graduated, have jobs and give the college their money, or decision-makers from the Mennonite Church who, for the most part, have never set foot on the hotbed of radical liberalism that they consider to be the GC campus.

Ms Stoltzfus, this is not Cornell. Students at GC care, and want to feel that their voices are being heard. Why else have I stayed up all night writing you this letter? We want to know about what topics you and the board will be discussing, we want to engage with you on these topics and exchange visions and ideas for the college. We want, if not a seat at the table, at least to know that you will have us partly in mind as you make the big decisions about Goshen College’s future. We want moral ownership in the institution where we study, work and live; the institution that takes all of our money and then some; the institution and community that we are all so proud to love and call our own.

Peace,

Sasha Dyck
posted by sasha @ 2:35 PM

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