Accoauntability to Colgate Univ Alumni Initiative

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The Accountability to Colgate Alumni Initiative allows the Board of Trustees to recruit members who have made major gifts to the school and should be appropriately recognized or others who have specific skill sets or expertise desired by the Board. And, it provides a means for all alumni to once again be a part of the 'Gate and to help shepherd her future.

The basic concept is to change the By-laws to allow alumni to vote for 18 of the 35 Trustees in a free, fair and transparent election.

An estimated 49.5% of alumni contribute to Colgate University. Why shouldn’t the Trustees be accountable to alumni – and students and parents?

The only real power alumni have to influence Colgate’s future is in their willingness to donate. The Trustees are now asking Colgate alumni for $400 million.

Colgate University runs on an annual budget of approximately $124M. The cost of tuition, room and board, fees and books has increased steadily from 1999 to 2007 by an incredible 47.4% placing Colgate University in the top one percent of most expensive colleges in the nation.

Yet, incredibly, Colgate University fails to be included in the Wall Street Journal's Top 50 Feeder Schools for graduate programs in business, law and medicine. This is significant because 11 of the 22 colleges that Colgate identifies as its peers are on the list.

With the Accountability to Alumni Initiative, we’ve established a donor-advised fund such that contributions go to Colgate University when the By-laws change is made within five years. If the Board of Trustees insists they have no accountability to alumni for future generations of America’s scholars, contributions go instead to a secondary beneficiary named by the donor.

Colgate’s Board of Trustees is the most secret society at the University. By charter, it self-perpetuates with a three-member quorum Nominating Committee whose meetings are private – even from the other trustees. New York State law allows the charter to be changed with approval of the Legislature. This isn’t rocket science. The Board of Trustees can be more transparent – if they accept the fact that they owe some accountability to alumni, students and parents.

Our agenda is to offer balance! We believe students benefit from exposure to diversity – intellectual as well as Colgate’s focus on racial, ethnic and varying gender-preferences. Our mission is simple: we want to improve the educational experience of students at the ‘Gate.

We believe that includes protecting private property rights, freedom of assembly, encouraging intellectual diversity and offering a solid core curriculum that grounds students in a robust liberal arts education that includes science, math, economics, Western history, literature, writing and foreign language.

See the forum at [URL=http://www.votecolgatetrustees.org]