Representatives of the KSC Senate, which include faculty, staff and students, voiced their own opinions on the concerns posed to the Senate.
College Senator senior Dominic Lynch said, “When I got to Keene State four years ago, it was a very different institution… The college has been through a lot… I think it’s time to have those conversations to remember that the students are here and we love to be here, and we need to remember that we can improve that.”
College Senator sophomore Jacob Favolise said that due to the changes in curriculum and course offerings, he believes that advertising a four-year plan to obtain a degree may no longer be a fair marketing tool.
“I have concerns about putting out four year plans when faculty aren’t able to be sure that those four-year plans can be followed… Something that we’ve got to think about when we’re talking about four-year plans is… we need to make sure that we’re not overpromising to our students, and I think that’s one of the dangers of the four-year plan.”
Accreditation and Assessment Officer Kim Schmidl-Gagne said, “I would like to respectfully disagree in regarding looking towards the future and not thinking about the past. There are students who are at Keene State right now, some of them for five years, who are about to graduate… And I don’t want to forget them… I also believe we need to move forward, but please remember these folks, and what they’re experiencing is not good.”
She continued, “They’ve been caught in the middle. They’re caught in the middle through Covid, and retrenchments, and huge change that means they aren’t getting what they thought they were going to get when they started at Keene State College. So please, all, know that that’s part of the picture too. There are 500 students so far who have signed up to graduate, some of whom are not feeling really good about what’s happening.”
History professor Nicholas Germana said, “What we’re seeing increasingly is departments saying… we don’t know what, from semester to semester, we’re going to be allowed to have. We don’t know where our resources are, we don’t know where our adjunct resources are going to be, we don’t know how many classes are going to be canceled if they don’t get enrollment number… That affects both the faculty side and the student side,”
He continued, “On the faculty side, few things affect [us] more than the loss of control of our curriculum. That for our curriculum to have integrity, we need to be able to offer a certain range of courses, but if we can’t offer those courses, because we can’t be guaranteed any level of stability regarding resources, that we lost control of our curriculum… We can’t do it if we cannot have a curriculum where students and faculty know that we’re going to be able to deliver it with the resources that we need, guaranteed.”
Mathematics professor Karen Stanish said, “The truth is that we are struggling to do the best thing for our students, and how do we offer a degree that has integrity and validity with drastically fewer resources? The math department not that long ago was a department of nine, now we’re a department of four.”
Looking Towards the Future
Del Sesto said, “I feel we’re losing the one thing that is absolutely necessary for our future: hope.”
He continued, “If our students are not at the heart of all of our decisions, then our hearts are in the wrong place,” he concluded.
Treadwell said, “Let’s try to recommit ourselves to the fact that this campus is strongest if we’re all here, together, and we’re remembering that the value of this institution is in the quality of our students and the quality of the experience that they have here, all of those experiences.”
Piper Pavelich can be contacted at
ppavelich@kscequinox.com
Click here to read about the concerns posed by the Senate:
https://kscequinox.com/2023/04/concerns-voiced-at-ksc-senate-meeting/
