Hudson and Holland Scholars Program affected by staff vacancies, budget woes

The budget of the Hudson and Holland Scholars Program, considered to be the premier diversity scholarship program at IU, has been in fluctuation for a number of years.

In the last four years, however, these changes have meant a $159,659 reduction, decreasing the budget from $558,705 in 2008-09 to $399,046 this academic year. This cut in funding played a role in the departure of professional staff members at Hudson and Holland, whose numbers have fallen from seven full-time staff members in 2006-07 to just two current full-time members.

As these cuts in funding and the departure of staff members hit Hudson and Holland, the number of students in the program jumped from about 600 students in 2008 to the approximately 700 this year, putting strain on the nearly empty staff lineup and financially stressed program.

During this time, graduation rates in the program have also fallen. Hudson and Holland graduated 88 percent of its 2002 group , more than the University’s 73 percent in the same year. With its most recent group, that number decreased to 72 percent, about the same as the University as a whole.

Initiatives and requirements within the program have also been downsized or cut, with no staff left to maintain and monitor them. These figures illustrate the ongoing financial struggles of the Hudson and Holland program.

But students and staff of Hudson and Holland said there’s more to the story than just numbers can tell.

What is now the Hudson and Holland Scholars Program first enrolled students in 1988. Throughout the years, the name of the program has changed, but the mission has remained largely the same: to recruit the best and brightest underrepresented minority students and provide them with the tools they need to succeed throughout their years at IU and beyond.

As recently as four years ago, the program was graduating nearly 90 percent of its students, providing them with monetary scholarships, supplementary advising sessions, conferences, workshops, internships and
mentoring.

While scholarship money has actually increased, junior and Hudson and Holland Scholar Titilayo Rasaki said other program features have decreased.
“I know, personally, lots of the growth I’ve had at IU has been through this program,” Rasaki said. “That’s what upsets me so much, that the freshmen don’t see what they’re missing. They just get the money and go.”

Staffing issues in recent years have hindered the program’s ability to aid the students. With the departure of the program’s previous director, Virginia LeBlanc, last summer, only two full-time employees and one part-time employee remain.

“She was kind of a mother figure to me, and I don’t know about your mom, but she didn’t let me know when the ship was going under,” Rasaki said of her relationship with LeBlanc.

Rasaki is also part of the Hudson and Holland Advisory Council, a student group led by senior Christina Robinson. A recent objective of the group has been for students in the program to come together to work toward better understanding the current woes of the program. The group also aims to establish a better sense of transparency between students, faculty and staff all across the plate, including the student scholars, Hudson and Holland staff members, IU officials and the Office of the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs, which oversees the Hudson and Holland program.

Current program staff members have had to pick up the weight of their non-existent colleagues, and in that process, additional programs have had to be downsized, if not eliminated all together. 

Interim Director Anthony Scott assumed his current role this past summer while still filling his old role of associate director in charge of marketing and recruitment. He said his staff is working to still provide the same essential services, while acknowledging that endeavor has been both frustrating and stressful.

“We have a lot more students and lot less staff, but we are required to do more with what we have,” Scott said. “And I understand that a lot of units are asked to do more with less, but what we’re being asked to do is ... we don’t have the opportunity now to do the things that we used to do.”

Scott said the lack of personnel has caused the program to reduce the number of mandatory student advising meetings. A mandatory volunteer hour requirement, in which Hudson and Holland students would engage in the community through service, has fallen by the wayside, simply because there weren’t the hours or staff to enforce this requirement or to keep track of those records.

Law Professor Kevin Brown, former director of the Hudson and Holland program, said for a program like Hudson and Holland, for which relationships are key to student development, the loss of staff is a huge hit.

“That’s a disaster for that program,” Brown said. “With that few of people, you can’t really understand the stress of the students, the desires of the students or match them up with opportunities that would benefit them. So you start to see this in so many ways. The most important way you see it is the reduction in the graduation rate.”

Indeed, graduation rates have fallen by nearly 20 percentage points since Brown left in 2008.

“Hudson and Holland is the crown jewel in the diversity department,” Brown said. “I met with (DEMA Vice President Edwin Marshall) one time for 10 minutes, and that’s it. So in his first year, the head of his crown jewel program meets with him one time for 10 minutes. To me, that was unconsciousable.”

More recently, the departure of Dan Woodside, former academic coordinator of science and math, in January 2012 left a gap in the program’s life science initiative. Woodside, through his relationships with employers such as Cook Medical, was able to secure internship opportunities for the students. He was directly responsible for advising 250 students in the program.

Woodside said he left the program in 2008 when the program made a move toward becoming more of a scholarship program than a scholar program.

“It’s never a good sign to see (money) for funding diversity to be cut,” Woodside said. “Especially at IU.”

Rasaki compared Woodside’s leaving the Hudson and Holland program to a hypothetical scenario of Herman B Wells leaving IU in the midst of serving as president.

“I’m really disappointed things couldn’t have been better that would’ve been more enticing to stay,” Woodside said. “There were opportunities to work in the athletic department with people to work with student success. It was something I just couldn’t turn down.”

Woodside now serves as the director of academic services for Olympic sports within IU Athletics.

Brown, who hired Woodside in 2005, said the academic coordinator’s absence in the program was another great loss.

“They could have fired the vice president of DEMA, and it would have done less damage than Dan Woodside going,” Brown said.

The cutbacks and internal stress have not gone unreported or unnoticed by Marshall, both Brown and Scott said.

Marshall said he first learned of student discontent after a regularly scheduled town hall meeting with Hudson and Holland students in attendance in January.

What does seem to be lacking, however, is a sense of urgency, Scott said.

Since LeBlanc resigned as director last summer, Scott has filled in as interim director. Yet, Marshall said a search committee was assembled only recently and it has not yet met to begin the search process, nor is there a provided time frame as to when a full-time director will be in place. 
 
“We had some other issues that we were trying to address, as well,” Marshall said in response to the promptness of the director search. “We probably could have pushed this search process up a little earlier, and we probably should have. (Anthony’s) doing a good job as an interim. The urgency may not have been as great, but nevertheless, we don’t want to draw this out.”

Additionally, positions that have been vacant, some for more than two years, still remain empty. Scott does not know when, or if, these positions will be filled.
“I would like there to be a sense of urgency,” Scott said. “I can’t tell that there is, and I don’t know why there is not. We’ve had meetings, and we’ve talked about it, but there’s just no movement at this point.”

Marshall attributes the lessening of Hudson and Holland’s budget and the lack of filled positions to budgetary problems within DEMA. He said not only has the University tightened budgets across the board, but a 2010 loss of a crucial five-year, approximately $400,000-a-year grant sent DEMA further into “crisis mode.”

“We’re trying to address these very, very significant issues, and we’re basically patching together funds to operate at the current level,” Marshall said. “So it’s hard to think about adding to that until we can fix the current situation. Now, that’s not to say we can’t look at the people we have currently and see if there’s a better way to utilize people to provide the services that we need to provide.”

Marshall said he and his office are currently in the process of reevaluating how the similarly minded programs in DEMA can more effectively share resources.

“We’re still looking at ways that that may play out,” Marshall said. “It may result in a different way of doing things. Trying to maintain old structures may not be the best way of going forward.”

Marshall said he values each of his programs and envisions a possible internal program restructuring, not an absolute scrapping of any program, he said.

“There’s no intent to do away with any of the programs,” he said. “How we function within those programs, that may change.”

The Hudson and Holland staff members who currently serve the program said they feel as though they are being spread too thin.

“I think that is certainly the case,” said Jennifer Poe, a Hudson and Holland program mentor. “There are positions that remain unfilled. I don’t know the reasoning behind that. (It’s about) not just the quantity, but the quality. It’s hard to make things mandatory. There’s the issue of the budget, in order to make something mandatory, you have to have the staff, (and) it’s gone to the wayside.”

Poe said she was aware of the budget cuts and faculty vacancies to some extent when she came to Hudson and Holland in fall 2011.

“(I was) more aware of things going on in other parts of DEMA,” she said. “Part of it stems from budget cuts, economy, decreases in funding, (but) at the same time, it seems like there is money there somewhere, we just don’t know why we’re not getting it,”

The University asked many programs in 2008, including Hudson and Holland, to slow or freeze hiring in an effort to cut expenses from University operations, DEMA Associate Vice President Vicki Roberts said. But the freeze has long since ended.
Even with the budget cuts and hiring freezes, Brown said he thinks the value of the program to the University is called into question.

“Even if that was the case, the question becomes is it worth it to the University, a billion-dollar-a-year University, to deprive its premier program dealing with underrepresented minority students?” he said.