2007-2008 Dean of Students Search

The 2007-2008 Dean of Students Search Committee has concluded. Dawn Ellinwood will become the new Dean of Students in fall 2008.

The Dean of Students should be the voice of the students in administrative affairs, bridging the gap between students and administrators.

Committee Members

 * Jaime Davila, Committee Chair and Dean of Multicultural Affairs
 * Will Ryan, IA Professor and Director of the Writing Center
 * Sue Darlington, SS Professor and former Dean of Advising
 * Bobbie Stuart, Director of Central Records
 * Zena Clift, Advising Office, former House Director, and Hampshire Alum
 * Marissa Baker-Wagner, Hampshire student
 * Ananda Valenzuela, Hampshire student

Notes from Open Student Sessions

 * Notes from Dawn Ellinwood's Visit
 * Notes from Linda Reimer's Visit
 * Notes from Michelle Green's Visit

Candidates' Resumes
Learn more about each one of the candidates and their past experiences.
 * Resumes.

Questions of Process
There was pronounced dissatisfaction with the process by which the Dean of Students was chosen. Ananda Valenzuela wrote a letter to the trustees midway through the process, communicating the issues concerning shared governance and sense of clear and equitable process. The letter reads:

"I am a student member of the Dean of Students Search Committee. This committee is comprised of 7 members—students, faculty and staff—and is designed to find the candidates who would best fit Hampshire College and facilitate its positive growth. These selected candidates are then to be invited to the campus, where the entire community will examine them before the President makes the final decision. The Dean’s responsibilities include but are not limited to “residential life, student government and activities, recreational athletics, career services, health services, public safety and discipline” (Dean of Student Services official job description), making him or her absolutely integral to daily student life.

After reviewing a large stack of resumes from people all over the nation, interviewing via phone the eight most promising candidates, and having a series of lengthy discussions, in December the committee decided upon four candidates that we felt would be the best fit for Hampshire. In late January we were requested to reconsider our decisions and we complied, revising our choices after further discussion and deliberation. We were then informed that the President wanted to meet with us. At the time the purpose of the meeting was not made clear and a number of us assumed that it was simply to share our opinions on the candidates and better understand his point of view.

A week later we met with the President over lunch and spent an hour giving him brief opinions on each of the eight candidates we interviewed via phone. At the end of our discussion, I asked, “When will we next be meeting in order to finalize the candidates?”

It was at this point that I was informed that he and the chair of our committee planned to meet and decide upon the final candidates alone. I petitioned to the chair of the committee to be allowed to be present when they made this decision, however I have recently been informed that they have already decided on three candidates without consulting the committee. I have also been informed that those candidates have already been contacted.

We as a committee ranked the candidates in terms of qualifications and suitability. [The specifics concerning the differences between the committee's choices and those of the president have been cut for confidentiality reasons; suffice to say, there was significant difference between the two.]

The committee was under the impression that there was a simple process: we would decide upon the final candidates, they would come to campus, the community as a whole would have a chance to interact with them, and then the President would make his final decision based on the results of that interaction. That process seemed to be satisfactory to everyone, yet we have now deviated from it significantly. I do not feel that I nor my committee have had any real representation or impact upon the final decision making process. My role was simply symbolic, which devalues all the time, effort and energy I devoted to the search process.

The position of the Dean of Student Services is a vital one at Hampshire. According to the Hampshire Constitution, the Dean “represent[s] students’ interests in administrative bodies” (Hampshire College Constitution, page 7). Where is the logic in giving students no voice in selecting the person who is supposed to be their voice?

Neither the authority nor limits on authority of either the committee or the President in the selection of the Dean was made clear, nor was it provided in any documented form. I relied completely upon the accounts of others in order to understand our role in the process. There is little to clarify the degree of influence the search committee has, and nor is there an objective way to assess the influence that the committee had on the President’s decision. To the best of my knowledge, the President has retained absolute power in the selection of the Dean. Given the events outlined above, I am left to wonder if what had originally been presented as an opportunity for student, faculty, and staff participation was actually only an attempt to appear as if the entire College was being properly represented, without giving these representatives any real influence.

I want the new Dean of Students to be someone that the students support and trust wholeheartedly. I want him or her to be well suited to Hampshire, to fit in among the faculty and staff as well as with the President’s cabinet. I want a Dean of Students who has all the qualities that the committee has identified, in long hours of discussion and debate. And I want to be reassured that Hampshire is still a place where my voice can be heard.

The current Dean of Students candidates do not reflect the choices of the committee, which must be remedied immediately. More importantly, the role of the President in the decision-making process must be discussed and clearly defined in writing. This documentation should be shared with all concerned parties. With the upcoming Dean of Faculty search process, it is essential that there is a strong understanding and consensus about how such key decisions are to be made.

I do not claim to have all the answers, but I am willing and eager to work towards solutions that better serve the entire College.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Ananda Valenzuela"

After the search was over, Ananda wrote an article published in the final Spring 2008 issue of the Omen, so that the entire Hampshire community would be aware of the problems with the DOS search. The article reads:

"I would like to start by thanking everyone who has put so much time and effort into the Dean of Students search process. I would like to thank the six committee members with whom I met regularly, who tirelessly worked to ensure that we chose the most impressive candidates: Bobbie Stuart, Will Ryan, Jaime Davila, Sue Darlingtion, Zena Clift, and Marissa Baker-Wagner. I would like to thank Jacob Lefton for the time and effort he put into being an awesome student representative to the Board of Trustees, ensuring that students’ voices are heard at the trustee level. I would like to thank President Ralph Hexter for the efforts he made to improve the search process at the request of the search committee, and for devoting so much time to making the final decisions. Finally, I would like to thank Dawn Ellinwood for accepting the invitation to become our new Dean of Students. She is a highly qualified professional who, I am confident, will work to represent the voice of the students in Hampshire administration. I am extremely impressed with her credentials and her enthusiasm, and am excited to see what she will bring to Hampshire.

That being said, the Dean of Students Search was flawed. I cannot directly speak for other members of the search committee, but I do speak with confidence, aware that some of my sentiments are shared by others with the same firsthand experience.

I am writing this retrospective piece for you. For Hampshire. For transparency. For idealism. In hopes that this search does not set the wrong precedent for future searches. I speak in regard to the upcoming Dean of Faculty search process, as well in regard to ongoing conversations concerning transparency and shared governance at Hampshire. In some ways, I see this situation as encapsulating some of the core issues and frustrations I have with Hampshire. As a result of the occurrences described below, I found myself at various points cynical, disheartened, furious, and depressed.

In hopes of you actually reading this through to the end, I am providing an extremely abbreviated version of the events. If you want to read a longer description, please visit the Hampedia page (https://hampedia.org/wiki/2007-2008_Dean_of_Students_Search).

The seven-member Dean of Students (DOS) Search Committee met more-or-less weekly from October 2007 to March 2008. We read and reviewed a huge stack of resumes, conducted phone interviews with eight top candidates, and spent many hours discussing and deliberating who should be invited to campus. It was at this crucial point – the decision concerning who should be invited to campus – that the process went awry.

It was the understanding of the committee that this decision was in their hands. The committee was supposed to choose the final candidates, and then the President was to make the final hiring decision. However, within an extremely short space of time it was suddenly apparent that deciding who came to campus was completely in the hands of the President. His decision differed significantly from that of the committee.

Which makes me wonder, what was the point of having a search committee? Were we nothing more than glorified resume-readers?

I appealed to the only higher body of authority – the Board of Trustees. I wrote them a letter describing in precise detail the situation to date, and asked for greater transparency and a clear delineation between the powers of the committee and the powers of the President.

My appeal, read, in part:

“Neither the authority nor limits on authority of either the committee or the President in the selection of the Dean was made clear, nor was it provided in any documented form. I relied completely upon the accounts of others in order to understand our role in the process. There is little to clarify the degree of influence the search committee has, and nor is there an objective way to assess the influence that the committee had on the President’s decision. To the best of my knowledge, the President has retained absolute power in the selection of the Dean. Given the events outlined above, I am left to wonder if what had originally been presented as an opportunity for student, faculty, and staff participation was actually only an attempt to appear as if the entire College was being properly represented, without giving these representatives any real influence.

The position of the Dean of Student Services is a vital one at Hampshire. According to the Hampshire Constitution, the Dean ‘represent[s] students’ interests in administrative bodies’ (Hampshire College Constitution, page 7). Where is the logic in giving students no voice in selecting the person who is supposed to be their voice?”

The response? I spoke with Florence Ladd, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, via phone about a week after the Board of Trustees met. She was very kind and considerate, but she said that it was a policy issue and that it was not the place of the Board to intervene.

Meanwhile, the Chair of the DOS committee communicated to the President the dissatisfaction of some of the committee members, which resulted in us receiving an impressive multiple-paged “confidential memorandum” concerning the search process.

But did anything actually change? Yes and no. We were able to convince the President to invite an additional candidate, but there was no real effort to ensure that the process was more fair and transparent, and no sense of an effort being made to improve future search processes.

When the DOS Search started going awry, I went to the Hampshire archivist’s office and asked her whether she had any documentation of how past search processes had occurred. She did not. Here is my hope that next time, and the time after that, and the time after that, this article (and its concurrent lengthier and fact-filled version on Hampedia) will help set some precedent for how search processes at Hampshire SHOULD occur, and serve as an opportunity to learn from past mistakes.

We need to keep on pushing for transparency, keep on strengthening shared governance, and keep on improving the way things work here. Being an experimental, alternative college means not assuming that the best practices for other colleges are the best practices for Hampshire.

Reading the recent memorandum from President Hexter about the upcoming Dean of Faculty search made me shudder, as it made me remember exactly why the Dean of Students search was so extremely flawed. The memo reads, in part:

“At a final meeting of the committee, I will be pleased to receive the committee's recommendation. I expect an unranked list of three viable candidates. I will, following best practice (and the practice of our two last searches), ask each member of the committee to summarize what in his/her opinion are the strongest and weakest points of each finalist.”

I recall attending a similar meeting with the President (although ours was a step further back, when we were supposed to decide who would come to campus). I recall walking out of that meeting feeling disempowered, frustrated, and angry. Feeling as if I had no voice.

Faculty members had put forward a proposal about how they would like the Dean of Faculty search to occur, which was seemingly ignored. By sending out this Presidential Memorandum, the President effectively left no room for discussion and shared decision-making concerning the makeup of the search committee or the process by which the search will occur.

By operating in this heavy-handed top-down fashion, not only is the President losing my respect, but more importantly, he is alienating faculty, staff, and students who truly care about Hampshire and who are willing to devote so much of their time and energy to making it a better place. Playing lip service (e.g. MC2.0) is not the same as effective positive, constructive change, which should occur in tandem with encouraging constructive conversations and sharing important decision-making with the entire Hampshire community.

Maybe the lesson is to just stop caring so you don’t just get angry and stressed and expend huge amounts of time and emotional energy on situations like the one described above. But hopefully the lesson is something a little more filled with sunshine and ponies and starry-eyed children.

Hopefully.

Oh, and by the way, the DOS Search committee is awesome. I love them all. I highly enjoyed the ridiculous number of hours I devoted to search committee meetings, and it was all thanks to them. <3"