Stony Brook Petition Voices No Confidence in President's Academic Leadership
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By George Agathos and Michael Kelly An online petition criticizing the leadership of Stony Brook President Shirley Strum Kenny has received 100 electronic signatures of tenured and tenure-track faculty at the university. While the petition features the names of faculty from many areas on campus, the majority are from departments within the College of Arts and Sciences. Those departments faced a large cut in teaching funds and classes that was restored before enrollment started over two weeks ago. Christopher Sellers, an associate professor of history whose signature is the twenty third on the petition, wrote in an email that he hoped it would cause President Shirley Strum Kenny to take into account the faculty’s opinion about what is in the best interest of the university and the education it offers to its undergraduate community. However, Sellers is not sure that the petition he signed will cause Kenny’s leadership philosophy to change. “Given what I've seen, I'm afraid she's just not interested in what we think, or for all her lip service, in the actual quality of education that SB undergraduates get,” Sellers wrote. Sellers also decried the amount of money on expanding the size of Stony Brook, both in terms of campus size and the amount of programs offered. “Seeing all those millions meanwhile being expended to build entire new programs and purchase and build up entire new campuses--at some point the message sinks in,” he wrote. “There is some money around; it's just being funneled away from our depts.” Sellers pointed to the expansion of the student body, while at the same time diminishing the amount of tenured and tenure-track faculty by 10%, as a key cog to the problem the College of Arts and Sciences faces. Sellers, who has been at Stony Brook since 1998, wrote that he has noticed a change in the size of his classes as the university has expanded. “We've watched as our classes have become ever more packed, to the point where upper level courses routinely have a hundred students in them, with more than that trying to get in,” he wrote. Sellers said that this problem will not be able to be rectified immediately. “It will take years to bring the ratio of tenured and tenure track faculty up to where it was before Shirley Kenny arrived,” he wrote. The petition, at least a week old, reads as follows: Statistics in bullet point 2 are since 1994 To: President Shirley Strum Kenny A Resolution of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Stony Brook University expressing loss of confidence in the academic leadership of President Kenny. We the undersigned would like to express our dismay and outrage over the chronic and damaging under-funding of the academic sector of the College of Arts and Sciences of the Stony Brook University. The recent forced closure of a quarter of the College’s fall 2008 courses, though rescinded, marks an ominous turn in what has been a long-term pattern of negligence. Over the past ten years (1997-2007), the size of the undergraduate student body has grown by 26\%, and the College of Arts and Sciences has been pressed into service for expanding or newly-created undergraduate programs including Journalism, Business, and Marine Sciences. Two satellite campuses have been purchased and developed, and other major initiatives undertaken, all at enormous expense. Meanwhile, the College’s core missions of teaching and scholarship have been seriously eroded. There has been: • a failure to add any undergraduate classroom space to the main campus Among the consequences of these conditions: • students find it harder to register for the courses they need, and difficult to graduate in a timely fashion For all these reasons, we demand an accounting of the priorities and decisions that have starved the College of Arts and Sciences of essential resources. We also wish to register our loss of confidence in the academic leadership of President Shirley Strum Kenny, whom we hold responsible for this egregious mismanagement. Sincerely, The Undersigned Read the Independent for more information as the story develops. Links |
