More from the Colgate Fascistas

Ok, who signed me up for these missives?

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The non-elected, non-accountable group that controls Colgate University is attacking Students and Alumni for Colgate, Inc., the 1,000+ member-strong non-profit, non-partisan organization pushing for reform at Colgate University.

They say they want “to engage in dialogue” – but they don’t want anyone to disagree with their policies.

We’ve heard from hundreds of alumni who say they’ll never contribute to Colgate again. This isn’t good. The Board of Trustees’ “just trust us” attitude is not a strategy that’s working.

We offer a constructive solution! www.votecolgatetrustees.org

The Accountability to Alumni Initiative allows the Board of Trustees to recruit members who have made major gifts to the school and should be appropriately recognized or others who have specific skill sets or expertise desired by the Board. And, it provides a means for all alumni to once again be a part of the’ Gate and to help shepherd her future.

The basic concept is to change the By-laws to allow alumni to vote for 18 of the 35 Trustees in a free, fair and transparent election.

An estimated 49.5% of alumni contribute to Colgate University. Why shouldn’t the Trustees be accountable to alumni – and students and parents?

The only real power alumni have to influence Colgate’s future is in their willingness to donate. The Trustees are now asking Colgate alumni for $400 million.

Colgate University runs on an annual budget of approximately $124M. The cost of tuition, room and board, fees and books has increased steadily from 1999 to 2007 by an incredible 47.4% placing Colgate University in the top one percent of most expensive colleges in the nation.

Yet, incredibly, Colgate University fails to be included in the Top 50 Feeder Schools for graduate programs in business, law and medicine.

With the Accountability to Alumni Initiative, we’ve established a donor-advised fund such that contributions go to Colgate University when the By-laws change is made within five years. If the Board of Trustees insists they have no accountability to alumni for future generations of America’s scholars, contributions go instead to a secondary beneficiary named by the donor.

Colgate’s Board of Trustees is the most secret society at the University. By charter, it self-perpetuates with a three-member quorum Nominating Committee whose meetings are private – even from the other trustees. New York State law allows the charter to be changed with approval of the Legislature. This isn’t rocket science. The Board of Trustees can be more transparent – if they accept the fact that they owe some accountability to alumni, students and parents.

Our agenda is to offer balance! We believe students benefit from exposure to diversity – intellectual as well as Colgate’s focus on racial, ethnic and varying gender-preferences. Our mission is simple: we want to improve the educational experience of students at the ‘Gate.

We believe that includes protecting private property rights, freedom of assembly, encouraging intellectual diversity and offering a solid core curriculum that grounds students in a robust liberal arts education that includes science, math, economics, Western history, literature, writing and foreign language.

A scientific poll conducted by the non-partisan Public Opinion Strategies, revealed that a significant majority of members from the classes of 2004-2008 say that Colgate’s core curriculum in economics (66%), math (62%), foreign language (55%), and science (47%) are inadequate, and significant pluralities (between 45%-69%) recognize the political bias of their professors. (http://www.votecolgatetrustees.com/documents/POLL-04-08-survey.pdf (N.B. slides 10-11, 13, 15, 18, 20-23.)

More than 3,300 students and alumni from the Classes of 2004-2008 – those with recent experience with the curriculum and thus have a credible opinion - were invited in four e-mails to participate in the survey. Participants could only respond once and were blinded to the polling company, meaning particular responses cannot be linked to a specific person. The number of respondents and the margin of error show the survey to be quite robust. If the poll were repeated, the results would be the same by plus or minus 4.45%. People knowledgeable about statistics affirm that a 15% response rate is considered very good.

The fact that such a large number of participants self-identify as being liberal (50%) or moderate (31%) makes the results even more telling - even this group of left to middle-leaning thinkers believe the liberal arts curriculum is lacking in math, science and economics and even they see political bias in the classroom. Male respondents were under-represented by 8% and Greek-letter respondents were underrepresented by 33%, making the statistics even more interesting.

(Public Opinion Strategies is part of the polling team for NBC/Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio.)

We believe there are many good people working hard to make Colgate University one of the best liberal arts colleges in America. Although the administration casts our efforts as a partisan conspiracy, we don’t impugn their motivations or their reputations.

We want Colgate University to be everything she can be! We owe that to our children and to America’s future. There is a crisis in American higher education. The Accountability to Colgate Alumni Initiative is a step in the right direction.

Read more at www.votecolgatetrustees.com, sign the petition asking the Trustees to amend the By-laws to allow for transparency and accountability, and make a pledge to the Accountability to Colgate Alumni Fund.

The Accountability to Alumni Initiative is a program of Students & Alumni for Colgate, Inc. http://www.sa4c.com. Let’s “engage in dialogue.”