VCFA Stay Newsletter, March 14
The following newsletter was sent to the VCFA Stay subscribers on March 14, 2023. You may sign up to receive updates like these using the Subscribe form at the bottom of this page.
VCFA Community Update
Tuesday, March 14, 2023
On Monday, March 6, two students sent letters to Dr. Song Richardson, President of Colorado College, and the VCFA Board of Trustees. These letters were written in collaboration with VCFA Stay participants: Faculty, staff, students, and alumnx.
In the letter to Colorado College, the students asked Dr. Richardson to consider supporting our VCFA community of faculty, students, staff, and alumnx and be open to changes to the agreement she signed with President Ward and our Board of Trustees. In the letter to VCFA’s Board of Trustees, the students gave evidence to show no widespread support for senior leadership selling the entire campus or for relocating residencies outside of Vermont. Furthermore, they provided evidence showing widespread dismay, distrust, fear, grief, and outrage and asked them not to continue to ignore their constituents.
Perhaps VCFA leadership will take us seriously this time, as every time they ignore us is further evidence that they cannot work within a shared, collaborative governance model. However, this does not seem possible, given that at the March 9th meeting between VCFA, the buyers, and neighborhood members, President Ward stated, “We also know that there is a vocal minority of individuals in our VCFA community who do not…can't imagine us continuing without owning this campus, and they can't imagine the school could serve its students without gathering here in Vermont.” Once again, she has refused to acknowledge the presence of a majority group of 73% of 578 individuals who are strongly opposed to the direction VCFA leadership is taking our school. Full Transcript
VCFA Stay has continued efforts to seek transparency and accountability from our administration regarding the sale of our historic campus and subsequent moves to Colorado College and Susquehanna University from our administration. We want to pause the sale of our buildings in order to find a mutually beneficial solution that will allow us to stay on our historic campus.
There is a Student Leadership Council meeting March 20th. If you are a current student, or know a current student, please send in any questions you may want addressed to your program’s SLC reps.
Do you want to be more involved?
Here are three simple things you can do today to support #VCFAstay. All of these steps can be completed within 10 minutes.
1. We have over 500 responses so far to our community poll! If you haven’t yet, please take a few minutes to fill it out. The purpose? To publicly demonstrate that there is widespread dissent over the new direction of VCFA — it’s not just coming from a few disgruntled alums. You can take the poll anonymously! (4 mins)
2. Call and write! Go here for contact information and sample scripts to contact elected officials and write letters to the editor. (5 mins)
We especially want to emphasize the importance of making phone calls to the Vermont Attorney General asking her to expedite her investigation into our complaint. (You can wait until office hours to do this one if you want, but voicemails are effective too!) (4 mins)
3. If you haven’t yet subscribed to email updates on our new VCFA Stay website, scroll to the bottom of any page to sign up. (>1 min)
We encourage you to do these action steps, and to spread the word to others so they can also take action.
Sincerely,
VCFA Stay