SUNY-ESF student leader Ben Taylor says conflict, tensions must end

SUNY-ESF’s administration has faced scrutiny throughout the semester following the abrupt dismissal of three academic chairs, as tensions continue to rise between faculty and college leadership.  

The college’s faculty union last week overwhelmingly voted to recommend President Quentin Wheeler’s contract not be renewed, the union’s president said in an email obtained by The Daily Orange.  

Academic Governance, the college’s faculty governing body, last week also voted to remove chair Klaus Döelle. The move came after it received complaints about whether Döelle was properly appointed to his position as chair, among other things, according to an email obtained by The D.O.

The D.O. recently spoke with Ben Taylor, president of the college’s Undergraduate Student Association, about the ongoing conflict at SUNY-ESF.

The Daily Orange: Earlier this semester, three department chairs were removed from their positions. How did you feel about this decision and the way it was communicated to students and faculty?

Ben Taylor: I can’t comment on how it was communicated to faculty, but the decision’s timing I was a little bit disappointed in. It really threw us, the whole campus, for a loop right at the beginning of the semester.  

It was communicated to students a few days after it was communicated to faculty and staff, which was then difficult for students to get the correct information quickly. So we basically went to social media and found out about all this.  

It was frustrating because students had the wrong information. The information that was out there was generally true, the timeline of events no one was disagreeing with, but the biases and everything that goes through these different articles and different people and Facebook made it challenging to communicate with students.  

The D.O.: More recently, Executive Chair Klaus Döelle was voted to be removed from his position. What are your thoughts on this removal?  

B.T.: Well, the vote was certainly telling. A significant amount of people voted, including myself. I’m not really sure what the next steps on that will be. I mean, we voted to remove, but I’m not sure if our bylaws say that it’s instantly binding. The executive committee is going to look at (the) next steps, so I’m guessing those next steps have to do with who, then, will be appointed or how we’re going to undertake an election.  

The D.O.: How will the administrative problems of this semester impact incoming students?

B.T.: (Incoming students) should be insulated. The tensions that (have been) experienced this semester I don’t think will really cause an impact on the students of the future. The decisions that have been made within this time period, and before this time period of tensions, will have an impact on students.  

Enrollment’s the big one … they’re going to have more students in classes, they’re going to have more people at events. Because we’re increasing the amount of students we have here, so that’s going to affect them.  

My optimistic hope is that next semester, whatever happens with college leadership, we will … move on from this. We have to be. We have to move on from this, or we just won’t be financially stable and nobody will be able to get along. We won’t be able to get things done. So we really need to move along this semester and be done with it.  

The D.O.: Not too long ago, the “Campus Concerns” form became available to students on the ESFgo app. Do you feel as though you and your fellow USA members have been able to better address campus issues with this format?  

B.T.: Yeah, we get things done there occasionally, once or twice a week. If there’s a concern on there we can identify, then we will go for it. The struggle with that form is that we don’t have a place for people to put their name or anything so we have no way to get more information from people. So we work on those and we do take those to heart and address them if we deem it necessary.  

USA right now has no problem communicating to students and receiving feedback from students. We’re doing well at that and we’ve positioned ourself as the organization on campus who does address student concerns, so I think that people feel that we are trustworthy.  

The D.O.: How confident are you in President Wheeler’s ability to follow up with the requests made in the “Resolution 03.1718, A Call for Campus-Wide Reconciliation,” such as increasing his presence and informal interactions on campus?

B.T.: He has. For three weeks now it has been really good. We’ve seen President Wheeler at Trailhead, they did the small science discussion, the provost has been at events. We’ve been pleased with the administrative presence on campus in the past couple weeks and we look forward to that continuing — for them to continue to reach out to not only students but the faculty and staff as well, because the faculty and staff are hurting.  

The D.O.: With a little over half of the semester left, what does USA hope to accomplish as far as addressing the campus climate?

B.T.: So this week, Thursday night, I will be releasing our follow-up statement to our resolution. Last week we reevaluated campus climate and we will have a response coming out on Thursday, once we vote on it. After that, we are done. We’re done. We have to move on. This needs to transition from the students’ burden to the administration’s burden.  

Everything rises and falls on leadership, and the leadership of this college needs to make some critical decisions on how to re-engage the distraught faculty and staff on this campus. And there’s clearly a lot of them. So this is in their court, we have provided our thoughts and students are doing OK, still. So we’re going to move on to other things that we care about, great programming that we like doing, following back up on advising and summer courses.