The campus town hall meeting intended to address questions related to the Board of Trustees' decision to adopt the three-credit model left many in the audience unhappy with either the administration response or the behavior of campus community members.
More than one faculty member walked out after a question and another compared the issue to the 2016 presidential election.
The administration responded to pre-selected questions read aloud by students, faculty and staff. President Kathy Krendl directed the questions to administration members or answered them herself.
Many questions addressed the three-credit model, budgetary issues and concerns about part-time faculty. The first question asked when Otterbein could expect to stop drawing from the university’s financial reserves. Rebecca Vazquez-Skillings, vice president of business affairs, said that the earliest Otterbein could expect that was 2020.
Krendl also said that the Board of Trustees acted within the rules of the governance model when it adopted the three-credit model.
Krendl said that Senate exists in an advisory role to the Board of Trustees, as stated in its bylaws. She said that the board had asked for two years for a proposal to address the university’s budget shortfall.
Krendl said that the Board was compelled to pass the three-credit model because Senate was unable to pass a solution to the shortfall. Krendl said the vote in Senate showed that the community “did not want to change.”
One staff member read a question about a statement released after the board meeting announcing a $500 bonus to full-time faculty, who were stated to be part of the “model community.” The staff member asked whether part-time faculty were considered by Otterbein to be part of that community.
A question read by political science major Jeremy Paul, a student senator, asked how the governance structure would work toward making decisions in light of the board’s choice to overrule a vote made by Senate. Krendl responded by reiterating that Otterbein was a divided community on the issue and listed off the reasons for passage of the proposal during a budget shortfall.
Sophomore Brigid Aslin, a student senator and a music education major, said that she was “upset with the behavior exhibited by the people in attendance.”
Bella Majoros, a junior engineering physics major and a student senator, said after the meeting that the meeting did not change her viewpoints on the three-credit hour system and she instead said “if anything [the meeting] makes me more mad because it didn’t actually validate people’s concerns.”
Majoros said the town hall meeting “just shows that we need another forum to openly ask questions and get open answers instead of getting scripted, prepared and chosen questions.”
