By Jackson Hare, Campus News Editor

On Jan. 29, Xavier University administration hosted a town hall inviting university faculty and staff to introduce the consultant, McKinsey & Company, they hired to evaluate the university’s performance in an effort to build a financially sustainable future.

The language and discussions around this process have sparked fear and anxiety for faculty, as they understand words like “transformation” as code for cost cutting or minimizing programs, departments or jobs. 

The administration’s failure to sufficiently inform and address these fears has been inadequate, and this is not accidental.

The town hall was an hour long., and 45 minutes of it was spent with vague, redundant summaries detailing the timeline of the transformation. This impeded how much time was apportioned to the Q&A, where faculty could ask questions or raise concerns. 

In talking with the administration leading this effort, they have told me that right now there is a lot of uncertainty about what will happen, which I think is totally natural and unavoidable. However, that should not be an excuse to allow faculty and students to go without answers and be burdened with fear and anxiety. I think allotting minimal time for faculty to bring forth questions is intentional in the fact that they demand answers that the administration is not prepared to answer and admittedly so.

When one professor said faculty are afraid and anxious about losing their jobs and you could not say with certainty whether or not they should have that fear, I see a serious problem. While there is uncertainty, the university is able to say that faculty losing their jobs is or isn’t a possibility. How the university responds to the diagnostic is up to them. They can commit to not reduce faculty salaries, to not cut programs, or to not cut jobs. So, you have to ask why won’t they make this commitment?

Moreover, the effort to engage and inform students has been non-existent. It was by mere happenstance that a select few members of Newswire were informed about the town hall in order to attend. I see no reason why a student organization whose mission is to inform students about important campus news and events was not explicitly invited.

As the campus news editor, my goal is to help facilitate transparency and inform students and faculty throughout this process. I want to believe this is a shared goal, but this requires that student media be invited to events of this nature and administrators be accessible for information.

This transformation is expected to have significant implications on the student experience, so I think students ought to be informed and offered the opportunity to engage with this process.

With that in mind, the only mention of engaging students, I suspect, refers primarily to students who are part of the Student Government Association (SGA).

Now, by no means do I seek to discredit SGA and its members as student leaders. In fact, it is because of the commitment, time and effort required to be a part of SGA that I feel some student perspectives will not be heard. Not every student has the capacity to take on that responsibility, but that should not preclude their qualification as student leaders and their value in this conversation.

Although, while I believe student engagement is important, and as a student, I appreciate the student-focused rhetoric of “radical care” for students with this transformation, I feel it is the wrong approach.

A student-focused rhetoric with such an anxiety producing process is an easy path to take because it relates to a unifying goal of a university. However, in attending this meeting, I was shocked and ashamed to learn for the first time about faculty pay freezes that have lasted for several years, the growing burdens on faculty to pick up additional work as the university cuts costs, and for them to still be asked to prioritize the needs of their students.

I credit Dr. Chrastil for explicitly addressing these issues, as I believe it was the only time during the town hall that the faculty’s concerns were truly heard without a rhetorical performance of non-committal, idealistic and ambiguous nonsense.

Not to mention, realistically the results of this transformation will likely be inconsequential to me. So, I can resist and fight changes I don’t want, but the university does not have to treat it with as much dignity because I will be gone after next year.

With this in mind, as a student, the professors and other faculty at Xavier have made me feel incredibly welcomed and cared for. It has been my experience that the faculty at Xavier is what constitutes the heart of Xavier, and the administration has explicitly agreed. The engagement and focus of this transformation should reflect that.

I think it’s time that students and faculty treat their professors with radical care and hold ourselves accountable for treating faculty right. They have gone too long bearing the burden of the university’s budget deficit. The university should not be allowed to thrive without its faculty thriving with it.