I urge readers to look at the comments of a Sweet Briar alumna–added to Stephen Trachtenberg’s March 9 post criticizing the Sweet Briar board for its secretive tactics. This alumna is fighting the closure. She asks some key questions:
President Jo Ellen Parker left in August of 2014 with a press statement saying Sweet Briar is in great hands and has a bright future . . . . That statement is just 6 months before the Sweet Briar college Board decided they need to close the college. What happened in just 6 months? Or was something happening long before then which the Board and President deliberately chose to not communicate to its stakeholders?
In other words, the college’s secretiveness preceded the recent decision by the board of trustees to close the college. For how long was the board keeping the facts from the public?
But perhaps the board and even President Jo Ellen Parker did not know the financial condition of the college! After all, the school had a decent endowment and the Department of Education did not have the school on its watch list. It did, however, receive a “negative” rating from Standard & Poor’s in November 2014. Indeed, that might have instigated the discussions leading to the decision.
While I personally feel that the board has the right to make decisions in private, I worry that they, too, may have been in the dark–not just the public.