The following was posted by Westminster Faculty member Thomas Faracco in our group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/1820836201505158/
Below is a transcript of a recording made during a meeting President Dell'Omo had with a department on the Lawrenceville campus. I do not know who made the recording or which department. It is only part of the meeting, but it centers on Westminster and the reasons for studying the plan to consolidate the campuses. It will give you some insight into the thinking of this president as well as some of the board members concerning this issue. The legacy of Westminster Choir College, world renown for the excellence of it's programs and contributions to society through the success of alumni in schools, churches, universities, concert stages and opera companies, has been reduced to a financial bargaining chip.
Transcript – DellomoandWCCMar9
We have some real structural problems at this University that we have to address. And to do that we’ve really got to look at how we operate, one of which—a big one of which is we’ve got to reevaluate whether or not Westminster—the two campus model of Westminster Choir College—still makes sense for Rider given its current finances and where it needs to go in the future. And so they approved us to do that study and to examine that issue. And so what happened was we put together a task force that’s made up of 11 board members, three of whom are Westminster board members, and that includes obviously senior management, includes the management of Westminster—Matthew, the Dean, Marshall, the Associate Dean, and some others in terms of data collection—and we’ve just been spending since November up ‘til today I mean doing a lot of analysis. And basically what we did was we said we’re going to look at every possible scenario that you can think of—everything from, ‘do you keep the two campus model? And if you were, how do you make that work?’ to ‘consolidate and onto the Lawrenceville campus and sell the Westminster campus and if so what does that mean in terms of what you’re going to do? What kind of price do you have to get for the sale which would then generate proceeds that you can invest on this campus which go to facilities and other things you need to run that and what programs would you bring over? <1’25”> to, ‘do you look at partnering with another University to take over the College itself—Westminster—and keep it in Princeton, pay for the land of course?’ or do you move it to another University and then sell the property to a third party? Or, all the way up to closure. <1’40”> I mean we’re looking at every scenario including there are some land use arrangements and different kind of possibilities. No decision has been made yet. And that, I’ll give you time to <inaudible> in one second. The only thing we knew early on is that the two-campus model just is not feasible, even with some cost-savings. Because a lot of people, when they heard we were doing this, put it in the context of “Well what’s it going to take to make Westminster profitable?” Well that’s just one of the issues—that’s not the whole issue. It’s all about Rider University. And even though Westminster does lose money every year and you could try to do some things to make it a little bit, lose less money, that’s really not the big problem. It’s overall how does it fit into the overall financial structure of Rider. <2’25”> So where are we now? We’ve gone through the exercise and we have a special board meeting scheduled for March 28th so a couple, about three weeks. And at that meeting our plan is to be able to make a recommendation to the full board on one of those scenarios:
So we are looking at all the different options in that case. And the important point is, it’s all part of, even though this ties into the strategic planning process, we’ve sort of slowed the strategic planning process down for the University even though a lot of work had been done over the last year and a half on the strategic plan, the reason why we slowed it down a little bit was the Westminster piece is such a critical component of that because the thinking is, if you sell Westminster, that generates a certain amount of net proceeds for the University that then can be used to address some of the other issues at the University, particularly in the areas of deficit reduction but not only deficit reduction, it would also allow us
to invest in things that have . . . new program development, bond issues—float another bond to get more bond money to allow us to do more academic facility upgrades, residence hall upgrades and also begin to do a comprehensive capital campaign primarily directed to finance scholarship moneys. So it has to be part of an overall strategy on how we’re going to reallocate the resources and make the investment, ‘cause when we started the task force, as you can imagine—and this was by design—it was a very diverse group of people, <inaudible> people coming into it with very different backgrounds and perspectives and agendas. That’s why we wanted to have a large Westminster focus on the task force. <4’08”> But knowing that, people are going to come at this from all different angles. And if we’re going to have any chance of getting any sort of consensus on a recommendation one of the first things we have to do is decide what’s the criteria we’re going to use to hopefully make a decision? And that took a lot of discussion but we eventually came up with a two-pronged set of criteria: First, whatever decision we made regarding Westminster and how it fits into the overall strategy for Rider, it has to first help with deficit reduction. It won’t solve all of our deficit problems but it’s gotta really make a contribution. <4’41> There’s gotta be enough net proceeds to get us into a, closer to a balanced budget situation that allows us to do some other things financially—to float a bond and other things—but also it’s got to allow us to have some resources to allow us to begin to quickly pivot to make some investments in the growth of Rider University . . . particularly as I said, program development, facility improvements, academic, residence life, and other areas. And so it had to satisfy those two components and that’s how we’ve been driving the decision process. So, once we have the Westminster piece sort of done, then we’ll be able to plug it all in to the overall strategic plan and continue that conversation with the University community and share those discussions. The one last thing I’ll mention—and I’ll ask DonnaJean to talk in a moment or two about it—is program prioritization, how that fits into all this. <End Recording 5’32”>
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