JOSH RANNEY
News Editor
It is perhaps the worst kept secret that Fredonia has been navigating difficult waters for some time.
Now, the confidence of the university faculty in President Virginia Horvath has been called into question.
On March 4, the University Senate discussed a potential vote of no-confidence in Horvath as president of the University, citing several key areas of concern.
The resolution of no confidence was brought before the Senate by professors Neil Feit, Ted Lee and Julie Newell.
“President Horvath has failed adequately to address these planning and budgeting challenges and has recently mismanaged the Procedures for Emergency Program Reduction/Elimination (PEPRE) by focusing on degree programs with inaccurate projections of cost-savings, while failing to identify any cost-saving measures associated with academic departments, non-instructional offices, or other units, thereby wasting campus time, lowering morale and risking bad publicity,” said the resolution.
Culminating with, “President Horvath has displayed a lack of transparency, poor communication, and poor judgement on planning and budgeting matters . . . Be it resolved that the University Senate has no confidence in President Horvath as president of the State University of New York at Fredonia.”
While this resolution did make onto the agenda for the University Senate, this is not the first time that the governing body of the faculty has questioned campus leadership. At the least, rumblings of dissatisfaction have been going on for a while.
“There has been talk about a motion of no-confidence in President Horvath for quite some time,” said Feit. “There is nothing terribly significant about the timing. But certainly the handling and the outcome of the PEPRE process were the immediate causes of our decision to take this sort of action now. A large group of faculty discussed various ways to proceed over the course of several months and the consensus was to petition for a motion of no-confidence.”
Included with the resolution for the Senate to consider was the Bill of Particulars, a list of five key circumstances that the authors claim are reasons to call Horvath’s leadership into question. First on the list is PEPRE.
“While her decision to initiate the PEPRE procedures were arguably legitimate, President Horvath seriously mishandled their implementation,” read the Bill.
It goes on to say that the PEPRE saga generated bad publicity in every corner of the Fredonia web. “Locally, among alumni, across the state and beyond.”
Furthermore, the process, as previously mentioned, was a time waster. A tunnel in which at the end was no light.
“[The PEPRE process] also squandered time and effort that could have been better expended on the learning process, advancing scholarship and research, and so on,” the Bill of Particulars read, “If the end result had been significant and demonstrable savings then these might have been costs well worth bearing, but the record shows this was not the end result.”
The Bill of Particulars goes on to claim Right Serving Right Sizing took two years to roll out and ended in a failure, an addition of a Vice President for Engagement and Economic Development to the president’s cabinet was unprecedented and irresponsible given the campus budget situation, the president’s administration has grown from 10 administrators to 15 and points out Fredonia’s poor results when it comes to faculty morale.
“A good indicator of poor management at the presidential level is the abysmal morale that has permeated the campus for the past several years, as shown in part by the number of tenured and other full-time faculty who have resigned or have taken early retirement. This includes multiple couples who have given up a coveted pair of tenured, tenure-track, or full-time positions after having sought and received offers elsewhere,” it said.
Before the resolution and the bill were brought to the Senate on the Monday prior to spring break, The Leader reached out to Horvath for a comment before the meeting. “My only statement before the Senate meeting is that governance groups can call for a vote of no-confidence in their leaders,” Horvath said. “Because the Senate is advisory to me, a vote is advisory, not binding — unlike corporate boards that determine contracts and employment status. The Bill of Particulars has several errors that I would have corrected had I been asked to respond.”
In the Senate meeting, discussion on a potential vote of no-confidence lasted over an hour. Some faculty voiced their support for the resolution saying that at the very least, a discussion was long overdue. Others questioned the appropriateness of bringing forth these claims in the manner in which they were.
“There seemed to be little discussion on the ‘meat’ of the Resolution or Bill,” said Chair of University Senate, Michael Scialdone. “Certainly some folks spoke strongly against it and some expressed support for it, but it felt to me like the focus was more the appropriateness of bringing the Resolution forward and other options to help mitigate some of the faculty discontent.”
The President of SUNY’s University Faculty Senate, Gwen Kay, attended the meeting in order to offer insight and other possibilities that could come out of a discussion of this sort.
Kay mentioned the process of “Visitation” in which a team, assembled by Kay, would “Come to campus, interview various stakeholders, and then they file a report of their findings to SUNY and campus leaders,” Scialdone said.
After a long series of back and forth discussion on this, and more than one attempt and finding the most logical next step, the Senate came to a vote.
“A motion was made in favor of bringing in a Visitation Team, and as such, a motion was made to postpone the Resolution on Leadership vote until after the Visitation has taken place and the report is made available,” Scialdone said.
Scialdone said last week, Horvath and the Senate Executive Board sent a letter to Kay, formally requesting the Visitation process to begin.
According to the SUNY University Faculty Governance Handbook, Visitation is a 13-step process.
“We are on step one of that process,” Scialdone said.
The full process, step-by-step as laid out in the Governance Handbook can be seen in the sidebar on page 3.
According to the timeline, the whole process could take up to but, “Should not exceed” three months.
If this is the case, a final report from a Visitation Committee may not come until sometime in June.
The Leader reached out to Horvath again after the Senate meeting for any additional comments or statements. Horvath only confirmed that she did draft a letter requesting Visitation along with the Senate Chair and Executive Committee.