Christine Plunkett on the Burlington College campus. (file: Matthew Thorsen)
Budget cuts resulting in the loss of four faculty and staff members at financially shaky Burlington College are sparking protests by students who say they’re worried about their school’s viability.
Two department chairs at the 41-year-old college — Anna Blackmer (humanities) and Emily Schmidt (fine arts) — recently resigned after being offered contracts that would have made them half-time employees and terminated their health benefits. Blackmer, 63, has been working full-time at the college for 25 years.
Web administrator and veterans’ liaison Erin Elliott, who is eight months pregnant, saw her position eliminated.
A third academic program head, Gordon Glover (film), was not offered a new contract. And Mary Arbuckle, a professor in the film department, had her hours cut in half and her benefits terminated. That scale-back sharply constricts the one department for which Burlington College has achieved a degree of recognition beyond its North Avenue campus.
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Exactly what constitutes a “career administrator”? Is it the number of years they serve? Should there be administrator term limits? Or is it because they didn’t start out as professors? If a professor goes into administration, do they become a “career administrator” after a set number of months?
My feelings are dumb? Gee, thanks.
I was proud of Burlington College because of its people, the best of Vermont’s progressives.
I was naive to think that the purchase of the Catholic property was a miracle and that a long struggling arts college would be reborn on one of the few open, beautiful parcels left in town.
I should have known that the developers and money “managers” would not go away.
Burlington College has been sold!
I’m a tree huger… that’s dumb too, eh?
While I agree Mrs Plunkett does not seem to be qualified for her position I would be careful in making generalized statments. I think you are going to find many college presidents and dean’s in fact have spent significant time in the class room, hold doctorates in their fields and mostly definitely have the academic credentials.
I think Burlington College is somewhat unique in their hiring for this position, as opposed to the norm.
whether your opinion is right or wrong, at least you offered an explanation. the previous “bumper sticker” did not, and added nothing to the dialogue.
Actually, it’s not a dumb statement at all, though your response to it rather is, especially your false equivalency with politicians, who are really not relevant to this discussion. Career politicians are a problem, but they are also a different conversation.
College and university administrators used not to be “career” administrators. They were most always professors of long-standing at their institutions, people with ties to the academic community, people with an institutional memory, people who had done the teaching and the research of a professor and thus knew that life, and they were people who knew and understood the student constituency of their schools. They often did not make much money, compared to their counterparts in the non-academic world. They sometimes lived in what might be described as genteel poverty.
All that has changed. College administrators are now “career.” They now often have no long-standing relationship with their institutions, often have never been in a classroom, often have no academic credentials. They are now the equivalent of corporate CEO’s, and their pay is astronomically high, relative to what it once was or to what those that work under them make. All of these things are true of Christine Plunkett at Burlington College. Dana’s comment was too emotional to be of much use, other than to attract your attention, but it was not necessarily dumb, as you called it.
That’s kind of a dumb statement to make without explaining the basis for it. Can someone not have a good career as an administrator? Why not?
And I’m wondering: do career politicians make you sick also? Or is it only administrators who shouldn’t have a career. Why not? Do Pat and Bernie make you sick? If not, why not?