Students deserve to communicate with Board of Trustees


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If you’ve been on campus last week, you’ve seen a lot of strangers in formal attire walking to and from meetings in the Warch Campus Center, meeting with President Laurie Carter and the Vice Presidents. For those who don’t know, those strangers are the Board of Trustees, the governing body that makes most of the decisions at Lawrence: the ones with the power to approve funds, create new positions and dismiss administrators. This begs the question, why are the people who make the decisions for our school unknown to the vast majority of the student body?  

Unlike meetings of the Lawrence University Common Council (LUCC) and the Appleton Common Council, which are open to the public, students and most staff are barred from attending Board of Trustees meetings. We can hold Carter, Vice President for Student Life Chris Clarke and other staff on campus accountable for their decisions because we know them, we interact with them and we can tell them what our needs are and how they aren’t being met. Why isn’t there a list of trustees? When the Lawrentian brings up an important issue, administrators are the ones to respond. We can’t even reach out to board members because they don’t have Lawrence emails.  

I am calling on the Board of Trustees to make themselves more known and transparent to students, staff and faculty. There should be a website with board members’ names, background and contact information. Board meetings should be opened to the student body, as LUCC meetings are already. There should also be town hall meetings where students, staff and faculty can bring concerns directly to the board.  

I am also calling on the Board of Trustees to respond to issues brought up in recent Lawrentian articles, such as the treatment of Campus Safety officers, wages, accessibility concerns and a variety of unaddressed issues that we haven’t heard from them on. With the power to govern our school and dismiss our administrators should come the responsibility of commenting on important issues that they have influence over.  

I am also calling on the Board of Trustees to appoint more members who do not come from the world of banking and finance. Lawrence should not be all about money.  

Finally, I am calling on President Carter and Vice President Clarke, as well as Christyn Abaray, who is not only Carter’s Chief of Staff but is also the Secretary to the Board of Trustees, to make Board Chair Cory Nettles and the rest of the board aware of this article, as well as previous articles they should be aware of, if they are not already.