Students and faculty deserve to know the APP final decisions, immediately
This is the Our View, prepared by the Editorial Board and should be considered the institutional voice of The Record.
*Editor’s Note: Emmett Adam is the Trustee Representative on the St. John’s Senate and will be present during the Common Boards of Trustees APP voting on Friday. Additionally, Landon Peterson wrote an article about the APP process in this week’s edition of The Record.*
Throughout the entire Academic Program Prioritization (APP) process, the CSB and SJU administration has been silent. In some ways, the silence makes sense. With the decisions not yet finalized, widely publicizing the process and potentially affected academic programs has the potential to create confusion, chaos or lead to false conclusions. (If you would like background information on the APP process, read the APP article in this week’s edition of The Record). Provost Richard Ice said as much in a Sept. 27 interview when responding to a question about administrative transparency:
“I haven’t been trying to hide anything, it’s just as I’ve been working with departments, I need them to have the opportunity to work with me. That’s why we did not publicly release the [APP Final Report], because I thought, ‘look, if an outside newspaper gets ahold of this and starts reporting on things that we’re still figuring out if that’s the right thing to do, I don’t want them to jump to a conclusion that that’s what we’re doing,’” he said.
However, the CSB and SJU Boards of Trustees will vote on the status of each academic program within the APP this Friday–making the official decisions that students and faculty have been waiting months for. If President Brian Bruess, Ice and the rest of the CSB+SJU administration value transparency as much as they claim, then they should release the president’s recommendations to the Boards and results of the vote to students and faculty after Friday’s deliberation. Anything less than this hinders essential information access, as Ice’s measures to prevent uninformed conclusions have had the opposite effect: rumors, widespread misinformation and low faculty morale. Fifteen minutes in a faculty lounge can reveal professors’ popular sentiment on the provost’s APP recommendations: strongly misled at best and deeply disillusioned at worst.
Releasing the president’s report and voting results would not only be a universally popular decision during a very unpopular situation, but it’s the right thing to do. Administrative transparency is essential to a flourishing CSB+SJU community–being open and honest is the least the president and provost can do in a situation like this, particularly since current students were overlooked greatly in the gathering and feedback portion of the APP process. After all, students have said they want greater transparency for months, including several opinion pieces submitted to The Record and interviews conducted with students in articles on APP. (See the quotes from this week’s APP article in the News section).
To accommodate the interests of current students, faculty and incoming students, the provost was intentional with the timeline he crafted to implement the APP. During that same Sept. 27 interview, Ice said that his preferred date to hold the Board of Trustees vote was Feb. 24.
“I think that’s what’s fair to students, that’s what’s fair to faculty, that’s what’s fair to incoming students, to know what to expect,” he said.
Provost Ice, you got your wish. The vote is set to happen on Friday, and now it’s time to hold up your end of the bargain – by releasing the results widely and publicly.