VTSU – Lyndon’s Student Government Association was the last to join other SGAs in the system in a unified vote of no confidence in the administration. This vote of no confidence originally started with Castleton’s SGA, who met to discuss it the night the Administrative Optimization document was released on Friday, October 27th.
This idea was brought to the Lyndon SGA on Wednesday, November 1st when Perry Ragouzis, the Student Trustee and Castleton SGA President, and Zack Durr, the Treasurer of Castleton’s SGA, came to our campus to inform us of why every other SGA had already voted yes on a vote of no confidence.
This topic was introduced by Lyndon SGA’s President Alberto Bustamante, who began the discussion by saying, “The Exec Board met, and we decided to have a different stance than what other people came to us with.”
He then said he drafted a letter to send to the student body, which can be read here. Ragouzis then gave more context on this issue. This information came from the recent board discussions and decisions that he had seen as the Student Trustee. It is important to note that Ragouzis was just keeping our SGA aware of this information, and Durr was the one bringing the opportunity to vote No Confidence in Administration as Ragouzis could not be a part of this discussion due to him being on the Board of Trustees.
At Castleton, a group of faculty investigated legislature and past records about administration in the system to create an organizational chart with names, positions, and pay of who they believe to be administration. This group of faculty also defined administration as the people in non-student facing individuals but they are tasked with managing and running operations from a top-down perspective. However, the Administration and Board of Trustees considers “anyone that administers over anything or any other individual” to be administration. This includes but is not limited to director positions, assistant director positions, and coordinators.
Optimization 2.0 included cutting faculty and closing 13 programs system wide. This caused faculty to request administrative optimization be presented. This Administrative Optimization included the cut of 33 staff within our system. A majority of these cuts were student-facing individuals. In the faculty’s eyes, these were not all administrators, but in the eyes of the Board of Trustees and Administration, these were all administrative cuts. The cuts include people in Career Services, all Associate Deans on every campus, Event Coordinators, and many more individuals.
These cuts saved the university 3 million dollars in total. Almost all of these cuts were made to people with a salary under $100,000.
Many people are calling for new administrative optimization, however former Interim President Mike Smith and current Vice President Sarah Truckle have stated that this is the administrative optimization plan and it will not be changing.
After giving this information, Student Trustee Ragouzis left the room and Zack Durr was able to take the floor in explaining what the Student Government Association could do with this information after SGA President Bustamante had a few words.
SGA President Bustamante shed a little more light on the drafted letter the SGA Executive Board made by saying it was drafted only with the Executive Board, meaning Jonathan Davis and Elizabeth Sousa were not a part of the draft. This was done to ensure there was no administrative bias in the letter. Furthermore, SGA President Bustamante said that the SGA Executive Board did not want to move towards a vote of no confidence because “every time the university makes a change, even if it is not exactly what we wanted, but it is in that sort of direction, we can’t use a vote of no confidence because then it loses its power.” This was in reference to the library and athletics response last year being complained about in a similar manner. SGA President Bustamante then said that the executive board believed that the, “staff cuts were not as drastic as they could’ve been.”
However, when Zack Durr was able to speak, he had printed out a draft of the vote of no confidence that the other three campuses had all voted on and approved. He then began to explain what a vote of no confidence will do and stressed that there has never been a unified vote of no confidence from every SGA across the VTSU system and this was the goal for the vote of no confidence. This makes the mention very strong.
Castleton SGA Treasurer Durr explained that the format of this letter was specifically written the way that the Board of Trustees will read it. This was a tip the Castleton SGA received when they originally drafted the letter.
Associate Deans were one of the most concerning cuts to many campuses. These individuals deal with cases of harassment, sexual assault, misconduct, and many other things. On the Lyndon campus, our Associate Dean Jonathan Davis also filling in for the Student Activities Director role while it is vacant. This is a very big driving focus of the vote, especially because these are the lowest people in the administrative chart provided by faculty that was mentioned previously. These are the most student-facing roles in that chart.
Another issue that was brought to the general board was the amount of Assistant Vice Presidents our university has. Currently, we have 14 total Assistant Vice Presidents, and one of these positions is expected to be removed with Administrative Optimization. Furthermore, it has been unclear what these positions do for our university. No one knows how to reach out to these people. We do, however, know how to reach out to the Associate Dean of Students on our campus, Jonathan Davis.
Zack Durr brought another handout to the SGA general board for the student body. This was a letter that the other campuses were using to send to the student body about the vote of no confidence.
The goal of this vote was to get a response from the Board of Trustees about how each campus does not feel confident in their decision making. No one seems to expect the entire decision to be rescinded, however there is an expectation that this decision could change.
After the Lyndon SGA voted on the issue, it became clear that the student body felt very little confidence in the administration. It is unclear what the exact vote numbers were, but the vote was passed. A unanimous vote was also made that we were to use the same letter Castleton proposed for their student body.
“The goal of this is a starting point and to show that we are not going to just lie down and let this happen. We are going to stand up and unite as a student body from all of Vermont State University.” – Zack Durr
Feature image courtesy of Vermont State University