The College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) faculty will hold a confidence vote regarding Robin Schulze, the dean of the college, President Satish Tripathi, and Provost A. Scott Weber in a CAS faculty meeting at 4:30 p.m. on April 16 in 190 Norton Hall.
The meeting follows weekly protests held by students and faculty against “cuts” to CAS departments, specifically the Department of Classics. At a protest on March 29, doctoral student Tina Bekkali-Poio said she wants CAS faculty to vote no confidence in Schulze. Her hope for this vote came after she demanded that Schulze resign.
“We will not stop until your resignation is delivered to us in our email inboxes. This is a threat,” she said, referring to Schulze.
In a letter to the editor sent to The Spectrum, Bekkali-Poio wrote on behalf of the students in the Department of Classics. Bekkali-Poio begged the department for transparency and to fight alongside the students.
Although the undergraduate and graduate students within the Classics Department are demanding for Schulze to resign, a few faculty members indicated that they do not agree.
In response, Classics Department faculty members wrote a letter to the editor to The Spectrum in support of Schulze. The faculty members wrote that Schulze is making her best efforts to address the challenges post-COVID regarding humanities programs across the nation declining in enrollment.
“A subset of Classics graduate students has chosen publicly to assign a different interpretation to these actions, one that holds Dean Schulze to be complicit in any realization of these national trends in the College,” their letter reads.
In Bekkali-Polio's letter, she wrote that the protest that occurred on March 13 was a result of the university’s lack of transparency.
The demand for transparency extended to the Student Association’s senate meeting on April 10. At that meeting, senators unanimously passed a resolution calling for CAS and UB to provide "greater transparency regarding ongoing decision-making processes."
The resolution's passage came after Jack Walsh, a freshman computer science major, accused the college of using of evasive language, discontinuing classes and setting strict deadlines for students to finish their Ph.D. programs.
CORRECTION: Earlier versions of this article incorrectly stated the time and place of the CAS faculty meeting and Jack Walsh's affiliation. We regret these errors.
Alisha Allison is an assistant news editor and can be reached at alisha.allison@ubspectrum.com
