Green River College faculty issue vote of no confidence in Board of Trustees

The Green River College faculty union on Wednesday sent a vote of no confidence in the college’s Board of Trustees to Gov. Jay Inslee’s office.

“The faculty after quite a lot of deliberation — deliberation that began many, many months ago — have taken an action that we very much hoped to avoid when months ago we began to pursue it, ” United Faculty president Jaeney Hoene told the board about the no confidence vote during its meeting Wednesday.

Tensions between faculty and administrators and the board have been high on campus for the past several months after the college announced the possible elimination of several programs in a cost-savings effort. Ultimately two programs — auto body and geographic information systems — were cut resulting in the contract termination of auto body instructor Mark Millbauer, who also served as union president.

The faculty union has presented the board with two votes of no confidence in college president Eileen Ely — one in 2013 and the second earlier this year.

Faculty members have packed recent board meetings calling on the board to improve low morale on campus. Green River’s main campus is in Auburn with branch campuses in Kent and Enumclaw.

The faculty’s message at Wednesday’s meeting was the same.

“We the faculty come here tonight with hearts full of wrath and compassion,” Hoene told the board during the faculty report.”It is not our desire to be your adversary, we would rather call you our partners, leaders, even mentors, but we cannot. Much as we may desire peace and feel loath to sit and stand before you today delivering a message that we know will be received with anger, disdain and, quite rightfully, discomfort, we have an obligation to speak this truth to you.”

Hoene told the board it appears to have lost sight of the college’s mission.

“A community college is not a corporation or a branch of government,” she said. “It does not, and should not, work the way those kinds of entities work. … If you do not see that, you do not belong here in the first place. You appear to have lost your way and forgotten what a community college is as well as the sacred trust vested in you to protect it. We are here to remind you, out of our commitment, with grief in our hearts but also with hope that our confidence in you might still be restored. We hope you can hear us not as your adversary but as the allies of this beautiful college on a hill.”

Hoene said in an interview the vote of no confidence in the board doesn’t target a particular board member or call for removal and replacement of any board member.

“Part of what we are trying to accomplish is to reach outside the college to the governor’s office specifically to say we need some kind of intervention,” she said. “It is not for us to tell him what that should be.”

A spokesperson for Inslee’s office said on Thursday afternoon the office had received the vote of no confidence but would review it before commenting.

Limitations

Board of Trustees president Pete Lewis said the board is limited in how it can interact with faculty due to ongoing contract negotiations.

“We most certainly individually, and I think I can say collectively, wish to do so,” Lewis told faculty following the public comment portion of the meeting. “We can’t do so. When that (negotiations) is done we certainly want to.”

Hoene said the board is using contract negotiations as an excuse for not communicating with faculty. “He knows we have tried to communicate with them about our concerns before contract negotiations began,” she said. “The Board of Trustees was no more willing to talk to us then than they are now.”

Hoene said the vote of no confidence was signed by 82 percent of the college’s 112 tenured faculty.

Many faculty members attended the board meeting holding signs expressing their concerns, and several faculty spoke.

Allison Jansen, a political science instructor at the college, talked about the atmosphere when she started teaching at Green River more than 15 years ago.

“The relationships we had across faculty, across staff, across administrators, it was great,” she recalled. “You would run into administrators across campus and you would talk. You would have real conversation about family, about your work.”

Jansen said the climate has since changed on campus. “Morale has flipped,” she said. “It is totally low. We don’t feel respected. We don’t feel we are part of the team any more. I ask you the board, is this what you want? Is this really, really what you want? Because that’s what you have right now.

Jansen said although she respects Ely as a person she is not pleased with her leadership.

“As a leader of this campus, what we have right now is we have a boss, and we need a leader,” she said. “A boss is at the top of hierarchy. A leader inspires. We don’t have that inspiration now. We really don’t. We need a leader. Again, I ask you is this what you want? When Dr. Ely first came to campus she used to refer to the board as my board regularly. I always found that jarring. It had always been our board. It implies that you report to her.”