GVSU faculty, staff and students write to trustees expressing distrust in university’s ‘direction’

Faculty, students and staff at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids on Friday sent a letter to the university’s Board of Trustees expressing concerns about the financial decisions made at the university, writing that they see the university “drifting away from our decades-long tradition of student-centered stewardship.”

“We are all concerned because the university budget relies so heavily on tuition, and we do not expect state funding to increase,” the letter continues. “Every dollar spent on high-profile initiatives, no matter how desirable, is a dollar that comes from somewhere else whether that be from students in their tuition or from the faculty and staff who support them.”

Geology professor Figen Mekik, who has written commentaries for the Advance, said that the letter had garnered signatures from 232 members of the Grand Valley community including 151 faculty members, and 81 students and staff. 

University officials declined to comment on the letter when a copy was sent on Wednesday by Michigan Advance. Now that it has been officially sent, along with a list of the signers, a further request for comment has been made.

Mekik told the Advance that the letter was the culmination of efforts over several years by both faculty and students to engage with the university’s senior leadership team and the Board of Trustees which ultimately had little impact on decision making.

“So finally, a group of faculty are making a grassroots effort to engage with our Board using the most benign and time-honored tradition of democracy – the open letter. The strength of our approach lies in the number of signatures we earned and that we are not representing any particular organization or working group. Instead, the letter is signed by a very broad group from the GV community from students and staff to faculty,” Mekik said. “As grassroots as our effort is, it is important to note that it takes much courage to sign a public letter like this and most of the people signing it are tenured faculty. We received many private messages from faculty saying they want to sign but they are afraid of negative consequences for their career.”

Mekik said most people who wanted to sign the letter but were reluctant to do so were either untenured or affiliate and visiting faculty, staff, and students.

“So, the general climate at the University has become one in which faculty, staff, and students feel increasingly unable to speak freely; our chance to steward the University where we play a critical role is ignored, and we fear that academic freedom is slowly eroding. This is counterproductive to maintaining a high-quality institution of higher learning,” Mekik said.

One specific grievance in the letter is the increase in the number of “highly paid administrative positions,” as well as the increase in salaries of those administrators. 

And there has not been disclosure of those kinds of salaries, which the letter called “a disappointing development at an institution with a long-standing reputation in the community for conscientiousness, transparency, and accountability regarding its fiscal stewardship where every dollar used to be spent for the benefit of the students we serve.”

The letter specifically also cites concerns with the OMNI initiative, a program targeted to adult learners that combines digital and in-person instruction, which the letter says has had “much more modest” actual outcomes than were proposed, and says was designed without meaningful faculty engagement. 

Several other faculty members shared with the Advance their reasons for signing the letter.

“The university’s leadership has in recent years advanced several initiatives that depart from the university’s central teaching, research, and service mission without appropriate consultation with faculty. This departs from our institution’s tradition of shared governance that is codified in GVSU’s administrative manual,” Joel Stillerman, a sociology professor at the university said to the Advance. “The current moment is not the time to risk the university’s future and the bond issue for this program does not reflect careful stewardship of our limited resources. I am also concerned that these initiatives will shift resources away from our core activities of in-person undergraduate and professional education, compromising the quality of the education we are able to provide.”

Dr. Amy McFarland, an associate professor in the university’s School of Interdisciplinary Studies, told the Advance that senior leadership “has spent wildly on multiple initiatives with unclear impacts” and had provided no indication that the success of students in their existing academic programs would be given priority.

“It is critical that the GVSU Board of Trustees understand how the GV community is reeling from the downstream impacts of the exorbitant spending on vanity initiatives,” McFarland said. “Those of us who are working on the ground have already felt many downstream impacts which will cause harm to students and employees – from conversations about increasing course sizes, reducing faculty time allocated for research, slashing medical retirement benefits, and even reducing the number of full-time employees in order to pay for these initiatives.”

Renovation projects to the Blue Dot lab and Eberhard Center, which are slated to cost $166 million — significantly more than was initially estimated at $50 million — were also a concern of the authors, who wrote, “While we have been told that this initiative will not hurt our exceptionally high credit rating, we are concerned it will leave us less able to address potential fiscal shocks.”

The authors clarify that they are not opposed to these kinds of investments, but asked for broader and more robust inclusion of faculty, student and staff perspectives when making those decisions.

Michigan Advance Editor-in-Chief Jon King contributed to this story.