Who Trusts the Trustees?

Nearly 150 students packed the auditorium where the Evergreen Board of Trustees would be deciding whether to raise the already exorbitant price of summer tuition. Students held the floor for almost an hour and a half on Mar. 9 as they explained, debated, screamed, cried, demanded, and even pleaded with the board to seek other options and to not raise tuition.

In that room, people’s stories, frustrations, fears, and souls were poured out and laid bare for a brief but powerful moment that left everyone who truly listened shaking from what was expressed. That is, of course, everyone but the board of trustees.

The entire board, without exception, sat there and looked individual after individual in the face with an expression that left a state of total indifference, only to momentarily rest upon what appeared to be boredom or mild annoyance.

At the end of the meeting, the board decided to postpone deciding whether or not summer tuition would be raised by an additional 14%, a move which many students there criticized. “The board realized there was over a hundred angry students sitting in the same room as them and that making this decision could easily have caused a riot,” one student told this reporter after the meeting. “They still want to raise the tuition, but they’re trying to wait us out.”

The tuition hike decision was postponed until May 12, when the Board will reconvene on the Olympia campus. As the CxPJ goes to press, the agenda of this meeting has not been set. This means that students are not yet aware of when the board will vote on the summer tuition increase. As soon as the agenda is set, the CxPJ will publish the details on its website community calendar at counterpointjournal.org

Many students were drawn to the public forum at the board of trustees meeting by a street performance that occurred on Red Square just prior. Students adopted the personas of the various trustees, clothing included, and held a mock board meeting. The self-proclaimed trustees sat at a table draped in the American flag and, after voting to increase tuition however much they damn well please, partook in a round of “champagne” and cigars while they discussed their various business ventures.

While the street theater was admittedly outlandish and over-the-top, it brought attention to just how out of touch the trustees are with Evergreen’s students and what students must overcome on a daily basis. This fact was made painfully clear when board member Irene Gonzales, after listening to dozens of students tell her how they can not or will not be able to afford tuition, pleaded with students to “just stay in school.” It is this glaring disconnect with the daily realities of the lives they affect that inspired me to take a closer look into who these “trustees” are and how much they can actually be trusted.

Yo! Hella undemocratic!

Before going into who these people are, it is important to understand how they come to power at Evergreen. The board of trustees is not an elected body and is not “recallable” by the Evergreen community if we deem them unfit for their roles as trustees. In a very real sense, this makes them absolutely unaccountable to the population they serve.

Trustees are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate for six year terms. They do not have any term limits. The single student trustee of the eight-member board is chosen by the governor from a list of three to five students recommended by the Geoduck Student Union and then appointed through the same process for a one year term. Washington law states that the student trustee must excuse themselves from “participation or voting on matters relating to the hiring, discipline, or tenure of faculty members and personnel.”

Consider the ramifications of having an unelected body in control of many of the major decisions at Evergreen. Since the governor is almost certainly going to be a Republican or a Democrat, both capitalist parties, it is highly unlikely that an anarchist or a socialist or an eco-feminist will ever be appointed despite the fact that these modes of political thought are very active in the Evergreen community. If federal and state legislatures don’t meet your needs, how likely is it that they will appoint someone who does?

Who are these people?

The histories of the current trustees puts them in almost direct conflict with the values of much of the Evergreen community and is certainly not in any way representative of who lives and works at the college, whether they be student, faculty, or staff.

What provides perhaps the clearest example of how the current board members are totally out of place at Evergreen is that they have more experience in corporate business, law, athletics, and the military than they do in education. Only two of the seven board members have ever worked as educators for a significant period of time.

The board members’ histories were outlined in Us & Them, a zine distributed before the Mar. 9 board meeting and available online at zinelibrary.info. This reporter exhaustively fact-checked the zine in preparation for this article and found that, while many of the claims made in Us & Them are unbelievable at first glance and lack citation, all of the claims are factually accurate. I will outline some of the must unbelievable truth-is-stranger- than-fiction claims here:

• Carver Gayton, the Chair of the Board, worked from 1963 to 1967 as a Special Agent for the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, from 1967–68 as a Special Security Representative for the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, and from 1979–1995 as a corporate level Boeing employee. Gayton describes “a highlight of his career” at Boeing in his online autobiography as being a keynote speaker at a conference in the Netherlands entitled “Schools and Industry: Partners for a Quality Education.”

• Irene Gonzales is the executive director of teaching and learning services for Spokane Public Schools. She will receive a yearly salary of $114,779 for 2009–2010, including a nearly 8% raise above her salary last year. The average salary for full time faculty at Evergreen is $58,074, and minimum wage earners in Washington will see no raise in 2010.

• Anne Proffitt worked for Microsoft from 1989–1998 and donated $2000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee for the 2000 elections.

• Paul Winters is the president of Winters & Associates, described as “a management-consulting firm that specializes in strategic, marketing and succession planning, as well as retreat facilitation and organizational restructuring,” and has written articles such as “Power, Power Everywhere!” and “Attack! ...Uhh! No, Circle the Wagons!! Military Strategy as Applied to Business Marketing.” Winters begins the latter article by congratulating corporations who have achieved a monopoly in their field.

This is where the future of Evergreen sits—at the feet of the board of trustees, an unelected institution composed of security representatives, corporate higher-ups, ex-military personnel, lawyers, capitalist marketing managers, administrators, business owners, and an ex-Fed.

The budget strikes back

That brings us up to the school’s newest budget. Evergreen President Les Purce, who puts the budget together with Vice President of Finance and Administration John Hurley, recently released a supplemental budget update to all staff and faculty stating that the total operating budget cut will be $1,859,000, which Purce described as “$259,000 more than our initial estimates.” The e-mail containing this information was forwarded to the Tesccrier list by John Carmichael and only sent to all students after a CxPJ member requested on Tesccrier that Purce do so.

Purce described the actions that will be taken to correct the nearly $2 million budget shortfall in rather opaque terms. Purce wrote that $475,000 of the cut will be accomplished by “shifting expenses out of the operating budget to other sources of revenue.” The nature of these source was left unanswered.

At the end of the e-mail, Purce mentioned an all-campus budget forum taking place on April 21 at 4:30 pm in the Recital Hall of the Communications Building. The Evergreen student community was made aware of the forum, which takes place on the day the CxPJ goes to print, only five days before it takes place and only in the bottom of an e-mail forwarded to Tesccrier, an e-mail list that not all students access. Why Purce did not initially send a campus-wide e-mail and whether or not there will be additional outreach for the event remains unclear.

On the other hand, Purce did find it prudent to e-mail all students, staff, and faculty his personal response to the public comments
that were made at the Mar. 9 board of trustees meeting. Purce’s e-mail, while keeping a friendly tone, criticized two alleged quotes from students: “Raise tuition and you’re dead,” and “I hate you.”

The first quote is strikingly inaccurate. The student shouted “Raise tuition and we raise hell,” a slogan used during the University of California system student uprising. There was not a single death threat made to any member of the board during the meeting.

The second quote requires context that was not provided in Purce’s e-mail. The context is restored in full here:

>I have been sitting here with everyone, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one shaking right now—shaking from anger and sadness and pain of hearing these stories—and some of you haven’t moved at all. Not your faces; you’ve been leaning back with your body, saying I’m relaxed right now, you guys can go ahead and yell at me. You’re kind of annoyed with us talking at you, and you’re kind of awkward, ’cause we’re sitting here staring at you. I fucking hate you! [applause]

Look, you guys can fall back and leave Evergreen. You’ll be fine. You can go back to these other jobs that you have. I don’t have anything else to do. I’m still paying off a brain surgery. I’m helping my fucking parents not lose their house. Six years now I’ve been on and off homeless.

Can you relate to me in any way about this? Having to pay for my own brain surgery? Anyone got that one down? Anyone had to help their mom pay for their water bill? Oh, Mom, don’t worry, I’ll bring candles. Don’t worry if the electricity gets cut off. Can anyone feel me here?! [Turns to the crowd:] Does anyone understand what this is like? [applause]

And now?
In mid-April, the president and the board offered “revised recommendation” that summer tuition be raised 12% for resident undergrads and 10% for non-resident undergrads. This offer is nothing short of a slap in the face to every student at Evergreen.
Between blank stares and presenting a 10% tuition hike as a gracious gift, the board shows that they not only don’t care about students but are apparently incapable of doing so.

The next board meeting is May 12. Be there to say not 12%, not 10%, not 5%, not 1%. No tuition hikes. You raise tuition, and we will raise hell!