Stony Brook Petition Voices No Confidence in President's Academic Leadership

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 The recent forced closure of a quarter of the College’s fall 2008 courses, though rescinded, marks an ominous turn in what has been a long-term pattern of negligence.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
• an overall reduction of more than 10\% in the number of full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty, a sharp increase in the student-faculty ratio from 23:1 to an estimated 34:1, a nearly 50\% increase
• a rise in the percentage of courses taught by adjunct professors or teaching assistants
• a loss of faculty morale and a disturbing flight of top faculty to well-run universities
• repeated cut-backs of the Melville Library budget, leading to shrinking personnel and printed book holdings

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
• students find themselves in upper-level classes far larger than is appropriate for advanced levels of instruction
• professors are unable to accord students the kind of attention and directed feedback that characterizes best teaching practices
• professors and students meet in inadequate and inappropriate classrooms (including an un-refurbished cafeteria), which do not allow for the kind of group work and participatory learning that have been shown to constitute best teaching practices
• students closed out of required courses during regular academic-year terms are forced to take Winter or Summer Session classes, mostly taught by non-tenure-track faculty, which proceed at a pace many educators agree is not conducive to learning
• students and faculty alike are losing access to books and journals fundamental to teaching, learning, and research

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