Faculty, staff, and administrators crowded into DCC 337 last Wednesday for the general faculty meeting called by the Faculty Senate for the purpose of gathering opinions on six motions that had been brought before the Senate the previous week. In the end, three of the motions had passed, with a vote of 52-47-11 calling for a vote of no confidence in President Shirley Ann Jackson. The vote has been held over the course of several days, with the last poll site open from 2-3:30 pm today in Sage 3303. The results will be announced at the Faculty Senate meeting to be held today in the Alumni House at 4 pm.
“I felt it was a very unfortunate development,” President of the Faculty Senate Achille Messac said of the meeting and the vote. He said the vote is proceeding at a “brisk” pace, and predicted that if it continued in the same numbers through the end of voting, it will be the largest faculty turnout in recent memory.
The six motions under consideration at the meeting were: to ask the Board of Trustees to disband the Faculty Senate; to hold a vote of no confidence in President Jackson; to implement a visible form of protest by the faculty; to publicize nationally the potential upcoming changes to pension plans; to file an age discrimination complaint against RPI; and to ask the administration to bring its budgeting procedures in line with the Faculty Senate constitution and provide the Planning and Resources Committee with timely and detailed information.
The three motions that passed were holding a no-confidence vote, implementing a form of protest, and asking the Board to enforce the constitution. The first two passed with slim margins, while the last was approved 93-17-3.
Former acting Institute president and trustee Neil Barton said he was disappointed by the vote. He described how when Jackson was being hired by the Board of Trustees in the late 1990s, one of the main concerns they addressed was an upcoming dramatic shift in higher education predicted by many members of the Board. “Dr. Jackson will be able to do that, and she has,” he emphasized.
Barton called the vote “regrettable” and said that Jackson and her cabinet have been “working as hard as I’ve ever seen people work.” He referenced all the changes the campus has seen in the past few years, among them the Biotech Center, EMPAC, and the capital campaign, as proof of her good work.
“I wish the negativity and the nay-sayers would climb on the wagon and have a change of heart,” he concluded.
Most of the discussion at Wednesday’s meeting did not have to do with any specific motion, but rather centered around the potential changes RPI will be making to its defined-benefit pension plans. When first introduced in the early 1990s, there was concern among faculty members that the terms of the pension plan would change when budgets grew tight, but the President and Board of Trustees at the time said that they would “remain committed” to preserving the defined-benefit plan. In recent years, however, there have been efforts to change that plan, a move which has angered many professors.
At the meeting, Vice President for Human Resources Curtis Powell said that at this time, there are “no proposals or recommendations on the table” and gave a definitive “no” when asked if he would be bringing anything before the Board of Trustees at their meeting in May, though he admitted there was “no way for me to sit here and say our benefit plans” can remain at their current state.
Many professors seemed displeased with the course of the meeting by the time the hour-long discussion was over, and wanted to extend the discussion time before voting. One professor voiced her concern that, “I didn’t get a lot of information here, and as a scientist I like to base my decision on data.”
Many professors attributed the call for the meeting and the problems some saw in governance on campus as linked to communications. “One of the reasons we are in this room today is we are not being included. We’re not in the loop,” said one professor. He then cited the argument over the pension plan changes as “one of the issues on this campus that we don’t feel we are being listened to appropriately on.”
Messac agreed with these characterizations. “This development has been triggered primarily by discussion of changes of the pension plans of some faculty members, but this alone could not have brought about this tragic development,” he explained. “It is a culmination of issues that have come before us in the past year or two that some faculty feel the administration has not adequately dealt with.”
The no-confidence vote is being held by paper ballot over the first half of this week. Poll sites were open Sunday afternoon, Monday mid-day, and Tuesday early afternoon in the DCC, and will be open again this afternoon in Sage 3303 from 2-3:30 pm.
