Chair, Department of Educational Studies
At (yesterday’s) September 8 faculty meeting we heard from
President Herbst that although there had been no calculation of health benefits
wrongfully paid out to employees of Colgate University to date, the new policy
that requires us to send our marriage licenses and the first page of our income
tax returns to the Bonadio Group in order to claim our contractually mandated dependent
benefits would save Colgate $48,000. If
the insult to our intelligence of this ghostly calculation were not enough, the
President also repeatedly denied any connection between suspicion of fraud and
the motivation of the policy. Yet at the
end of the July 30 meeting with the planning board about the equally troubling
Fairmount Properties issue, Vice President for Finance and Administration Brian
Hutzley, author of the letter demanding our compliance, repeatedly described to
me the motivation for the new verification policy, (about which I confronted
him) as “the necessity to prevent fraud.”
I believe at this point I share with many faculty the
feeling that I am tired of being distracted from the work I love and do well by
the need to defend the values of this potentially great institution from the many
assaults of rapid corporatization and its attendant dishonesties. They erode the social contract that binds us,
and it is that very (informal) social contract which explains the historic
success of Colgate.
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