Three of Binghamton University’s top officials turned out for a town hall-style meeting to address the questions and concerns of the student body — a body of students that numbered about 20 — and five or so faculty members. The panel included Vice President for Student Affairs Rodger Summers, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Mary Ann Swain and Vice President of Administration James VanVoorst.
With three weeks left in the academic year, the meeting was the first of Student Association President Mike Smyth’s term. Following through on one of his campaign promises from last year’s election, Smyth continued the town hall trend started by last year’s president Matthew Schneider.
The panel addressed a number of topics ranging from academics, facilities and funding, to the image and the future of BU. During the first half of the one-hour discussion, the panelists fielded questions that were pre-submitted by members of the SA. The audience was allowed to approach the administrators with impromptu questions in the later part of the meeting.
The first of the more controversial questions was addressed to Summers, regarding Alcohol.Edu, an online course that incoming freshmen were required to take for the first time this year. Some members of the audience responded with hostility to Summers’s characterization of the program as an overwhelming success, claiming that the company that owns Alcohol.Edu exaggerated its statistics and that BU students don’t really benefit from the program.
“We can only go on what students say,” Summers responded. “I don’t think they’d sell their product based on lies.”
Summers said he would be open to ideas about procedural changes in how the program is implemented, but assured the audience that the course will continue to be mandatory next year.
VanVoorst fielded a question about the future of the Newing and Dickinson communities, which are set to be completely rebuilt within the coming years. He said that he is currently working with a committee of students to come up with ideas for what the new buildings will look like. While VanVoorst expressed his hopes that a recommendation will be completed within the next three weeks, there is no set date for construction to begin.
“We probably won’t be breaking ground for another year,” VanVoorst said.
One of the pre-screened questions addressed the distribution of funds among BU’s five schools, suggesting that the University doles out more money to the professional schools at the expense of liberal arts and sciences.
SA Off-Campus College representative Alex Rosenthal, who was in the audience, asked why schools like Watson School of Engineering and the School of Management receive more funding than Harpur College of Arts and Sciences. Swain cut him off mid-sentence, asking for the source of his information, which Rosenthal could not produce.
“That’s the end of the discussion,” Swain said. “I’m not very sympathetic to suppositions.”
Swain followed up on the question by explaining the process by which funds are collected and allocated within the University.
“You advocate for BU as a school. You don’t advocate for each individual college,” she said. “If the University had more money, Harpur would have more money.”
Zach Rothman-Hicks, a comparative literature and theater major, followed up on the question by asking Swain about the possibility of replacing a professor who left the theatre department last semester, reducing the department’s faculty by a third.
“Without another professor it’s impossible for the department to grow at all or even survive,” he said.
Swain, who is responsible for hiring faculty for the whole University, said that she receives three times as many requests for hires each year than she can take on, and that a request from the dean of Harpur is required before she can even consider replacing the theater professor.
When Rothman-Hicks restated his concern about the theatre department at the end of the meeting, Swain told him that she had “heard the numbers the first time.”
“At this point I don’t have a recommendation from the dean,” Swain said.
Students at the meeting were also eager to confront rumors about block scheduling for incoming freshmen, an idea most seemed adamantly against.
Swain and VanVoorst assured the students that the idea of block scheduling is still in the preliminary stages, and will not be mandatory for all incoming freshmen. Swain said that there will be a test group that will be given a survey so that some of their courses could be chosen based on their interests. She also clarified that students would still be allowed to drop the courses if they didn’t want to stay in them.
“We’re not going to do it for all freshmen,” Swain said. “There’s a group working on it. I don’t know who is running it.”
When questions were opened to the audience members, students asked the panelists about vendors holding “monopolies” on campus, the relationship between students and the University Police Department, the variety of food options in the dining halls and cameras in the dorms.
When asked about the low turnout at the meeting, Smyth said that while he had hoped more students would come, he wasn’t surprised at the half-empty room.
“I knew from last year that the turnout wouldn’t necessarily be high,” he said. “I still found this to be very productive and useful.”