Following controversy over a new governance structure he’d proposed, the president of the College of Staten Island announced on Wednesday that he’d retire in December.
William J. Fritz, who has led the City University of New York campus for nearly a decade, wrote in a resignation letter obtained by The Chronicle that he’d been planning to retire but had delayed the decision “several times over the past two years at the request of the chancellor in order to work on issues that I believe are critical to the future and long-term success of our institution.”
“My greatest concern remains the need for a new governance plan to guide more inclusive campus discussions and recommendations as well as to align with the standards” of the college’s accreditor, Fritz wrote in the letter. “A new team will need to decide if my proposals have merit and to make recommendations to the board that they deem appropriate.”
The revisions Fritz proposed in Staten Island’s governance plan earlier this year drew harsh criticism from faculty members, who said the plan would erode shared governance; one professor likened Fritz’s actions to a coup d'état. A referendum on those revisions, voted on in September by the instructional staff, overwhelmingly failed.
Fritz had said he’d consider that result in conjunction with other factors in deciding whether to forward his plan to the City University of New York’s Board of Trustees, which has ultimate jurisdiction over campus-governance issues. Faculty leaders protested that provisions in the college’s bylaws barred Fritz from sending the plan to the system’s board after it had been voted down in a referendum.
In a statement, the system chancellor, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, congratulated Fritz on his retirement. “I thank President Fritz for his steady leadership through this extremely challenging period, and for his 13 years of service to CSI and CUNY. I wish him nothing but happiness and success in retirement and in his future endeavors,” Matos Rodríguez said.
Fundamental Disagreement
Fritz, who became interim president of Staten Island in 2012 and was named to the post permanently in 2014, has endured turmoil in his last year on the job. Last December, faculty members voted no confidence in Fritz and in the provost, J. Michael Parrish, saying the two had mismanaged the college’s finances and undermined faculty governance. Faculty leaders told The Chronicle they saw the new governance plan, which Fritz announced in March and which went through several rounds of revisions before the referendum, as retaliation for the no-confidence vote.
The governance plan Fritz proposed would replace Staten Island’s Faculty Senate and College Council with a “College Senate” headed by the president. That sort of body, Neal Hutchens, a professor of higher education at the University of Mississippi, said in a Zoom meeting with Staten Island’s faculty leaders, “obviates the notion, in some ways, of how shared governance is supposed to function.”
But Fritz stressed the need for change in a video interview posted in September. His plan “encourages participation from those who might not have had the opportunity to participate before, allows for inclusion of staff that were historically excluded from campus governance, ensures more voices are heard, and most importantly, creates a supportive environment for our students,” David Pizzuto, the college’s interim director of communications and marketing, told The Chronicle this month. The proposal would also “conform to best practices in higher education” and ensure the college complied with accreditation standards, Pizzuto said.
Several faculty members contested Fritz’s claim that the college’s current governance structure violated accreditor standards. John Verzani, a professor of mathematics and chair of the College Council and of the bylaws committee, said on Wednesday that he’d asked weeks ago for a copy of any correspondence from the accreditor that indicated noncompliance, so that the bylaws committee could propose solutions. He said that he had not received a response, and that a faculty colleague involved in the college’s last accreditation review had told him the issue had never come up.
Jason Bishop, a linguistics professor and member of the Faculty Senate, wrote in an email to The Chronicle that the accreditation-related claim “is one of the most chilling developments of this whole crisis, as it demonstrates that this president doesn’t feel himself bound by facts or truth when promoting his failed attempt to circumvent our campus’s bylaws and governance procedures. Of course we hope that our next president pursues a different ‘leadership style.’”
