Olivia Barnes Interviews Kent Devereaux, followed by reports on Special Interest Housing and the SGA Textbook Assistance Program.
This show was originally broadcast April 6th, 2026. You can listen to Q Radio on Mondays at 8pm EST, at https://goucher-radio.org.
[TRANSCRIPT]
OLIVIA BARNES ‘27, HOST: This show was originally broadcast on April 6th, 2026.
Before we start, our last show had inaccurate reporting that dr. Moreno-López’s duties as Associate Provost included representing Goucher College faculty, and that this created a ‘conflict of interest’ This is not accurate to her responsibilities as Associate Provost. The Quindecim apologizes for any harm or confusion caused by this misconstruction.
Tonight on Quindecim Radio, we are going to start the night off with an interview of Kent Devereaux to talk about the new budget changes and the Goucher strategic plan. We’re also going to be talking about changes to special interest housing, and we’re going to finish off with a report on the textbook assistance program.
OLIVIA: Kent Devereaux has served as Goucher’s president since 2019. Before that, he was the president of New Hampshire Institute of Art. He was also the chair of the music department at the Cornish College of the Arts, which was also where he received a bachelor’s in music composition. Last month, President Devereaux announced changes to Goucher College’s spending in a meeting with faculty. The president stated that these changes would reduce the college’s deficit by over 50%. He’s with us in the studio. President Devereaux, thank you for being here.
KENT DEVEREAUX: Yeah, glad to be here.
OLIVIA: The Quindecim has already covered the changes that are coming to Goucher’s expenses, but maybe you can illuminate us. What changes can the Goucher community expect to come from this?
KENT: Well, hopefully very, very little, because I think what we’re trying to do is, more and more, get everyone across the college, faculty and staff, thinking about how we can really tighten our expenses in those areas that don’t impact the student experience, so we’re preserving the student experience as much as possible. And that’s really kind of the central theme. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last five years in terms of reducing expenses and increasing financial aid and scholarship support, but it gets tougher every single year. So that’s basically it.
OLIVIA: All right. Are these cuts, is there a way that they fit into the new three-year plan?
KENT: In some ways, yes. In other ways, the three-year strategic plan, we’re just wrapping up our five-year strategic plan. And it had a lot of very ambitious things in it. And by and large, we’ve, y’know, accomplished 90% of those things. I mean, getting the Lewent Science Center built, doing the partnership with Edenwald, launching eight new undergraduate programs, three new graduate programs, launching- We didn’t have J-terms before. All this stuff, really kind of putting it in place, has been major. But in the next three years, we’ve got more work to do.
And so the three-year strategic plan is much more aspirational. Where do we need to go next? Well, then obviously the budget question comes up. We’re like, well, that’s great, but where are you going to get the money from? So that forces us right now to say, OK, let’s get really, really focused on how we’re focusing on using our money so we can actually achieve those goals down the road.
OLIVIA: All right. One of the changes that you announced was a pause in hiring new staff and faculty. If a department that has only one faculty member, such as the Peace Studies department or the Philosophy department, what happens to that department if the faculty leaves or retires?
KENT: Well, those are clearly cases where if we have a department that only has one faculty member, that’s going to be an area where we’re going to have to make an exception to that. But I think more importantly, just to clarify, that policy is as-of-right-now. That does not mean that in the fall, we will not want to launch searches for new faculty members. It just means from now to the end of this fiscal year, no faculty or staff hiring, and so we put that in place to give us that time to understand where we’re going to be in the fall. This year looks like to be an incredibly good year for us in terms of applications way up, admits way up. If all that bears out in the fall, we should be able to proceed as normal with searches for a number of other faculty members. We’ve done that every single year. I’ve been here for seven years.
OLIVIA: Okay, great. One of the–in the strategic plan, like on the website, one of the things listed is to recruit, retain, and invest in, I’m quoting here, in high quality faculty and staff to drive student success. However, it was also announced that there would be a pause, at least temporarily, for professional development. Is this a similar situation or are those two contrasting with each other?
KENT: Yeah, that’s a good point. So yes, over the last five years, we’ve increased enormously faculty pay, professional development, a number of initiatives. But also quite frankly, in the last five years, remember this plan was put together in the midst of the pandemic. And so in the year since, obviously inflation has outpaced that. And so we’re kind of caught in a bind. We’ve lowered our expenses. We’ve increased faculty pay, staff pay, but inflation has actually gone at a greater rate. That puts everything in a bind. So what we’ve done is we’ve basically said, okay, let’s take a pause short term. Let’s figure this thing out, and then where do we go next?
But I mean, we remain committed that we’re going to continue to look at how we benchmark our salaries, both staff and faculty. And I would also say, we’re part of these larger associations, the American Association of University Professors, where we’re actually to benchmark our faculty salaries against others, and we’re exactly at median. Now I could argue that America does not think much of its educators at large, and that people who teach in higher education and teachers in K through 12 are not paid as well as they would be. But at the same time, I’m like, well, at least we’re at median. And so we’re going to continue to keep pushing at that and trying to do everything we can to kind of increase pay for faculty and staff going forward. But right now we just had to say, listen, we are being hit by so many things that we would not have imagined were even possible five years ago because of the current change in the administration.
OLIVIA: Right, right, right. Okay, so this is a conversation that I’ve had, at least in my career as a student and as my career as a student reporter, I’ve had this conversation at least 20 times where it goes along the lines of: students are seeing the Goucher’s identity and they think that there is a conflict there in that the school seems to be investing in athletics, it seems to be investing in STEM, while it is a small liberal arts school, which traditionally would be investing more so in the humanities and the arts and we’ve been seeing less investments in that. Is this a change in identity for the college? Is there something I’m missing? Is there, how is this difference factoring in?
KENT: Yeah, that’s interesting because, you know, I mean, first and foremost, there’s not any increase in athletic fundraising. I think our athletic director could tell you that. But it’s also recognition that 35% of our students are now student athletes.
OLIVIA: I’m an athlete.
KENT: So that’s, you know, that’s a part of it. We’d love to do more in that area and we’re simply just not able to. Some things are due to philanthropy. Evelyn Dyke Schroedl donated $1.5 million that made our tennis courts. Because Evelyn Dyke Schrotel played tennis until she was 103. She was an amazing woman and she did that. We upgraded our swimming lockers, because we had an alum who donated a half a million to make that possible. So a lot of it is kind of dependent upon where our alums donate money. But then when we look at the sciences, the Lewent Science Center, this has been on the planning for 10 years. And the current Hofburger Science Building is built in 1953. It is the oldest building on campus that has not yet been renovated. So we looked at this and said, it’s simply embarrassing. We can’t be competitive in the larger landscape of liberal arts colleges until we update our science boat.
We’ve updated arts, we’ve updated social science, humanities in the past. You know, it’s one of those things that’s almost like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time you get done at one end, you’ve got to turn around and keep painting it and go back the other way. It just takes- so we’re going to have to do that with all of our facilities, with all of our programs. But when we looked at it at large, science was where we had the greatest need. And it’s also where we’re seeing the greatest number of growing students.
And I would also caution, we’re not a professional focused institution. So I think the way that we teach sciences, the way that we, going forward, will continue to teach sciences is with a much more humanistic bent. That having a global view, having a much broader perspective, our students do very well with that broader perspective. And they get into all the top PhD programs in the nation because of that, because they bring more of themselves to those programs.
OLIVIA: Because of the liberal arts model?
KENT: Because of the liberal arts model. Because they don’t have blinders on. That they see that, you know, sciences are, yeah, some things are objective, other things are quite frankly subjective. And the whole issue of public health is very much about that. That, you know, resources are not equally distributed in this society. And I think anybody who’s going into the sciences needs to be aware of that. And that’s kind of critical to our orientation to teaching science.
OLIVIA: Okay, great. In the strategic plan, for among the sort of solutions to the fiscal challenges that we’re facing, is to “leverage Goucher’s campus to generate new revenue.” If we see that in the future, is it going to be a similar situation that we’ve seen with Peabody preparatory- I pronounced that right,- to Whiting Turner or with Edenwald? Where are we going to see any more, for example, like deforesting on the edges of Goucher’s campus to build?
KENT: Yeah, I think in the next three years, no. I think that’s one thing we’ve said, we’re not going to be focused on that in the next three years. These two major partnerships in the last five years. Number one, right when we started the strategic plan five years ago, we named specifically Edenwald because it would be absolutely ridiculous for us, with an aging America, with a 145 year old partner right next door that we sold, y’know, land to, back in 1985 for us not to take advantage of that. To say, oh, this is an area of growth in the future. There’s going to be more Americans over 65 than there are under 20 by the year 2034.
So we’re becoming an aging society, not dissimilar to Japan and Europe, you know, as people have fewer kids in society, we live longer. So that’s, you know, that’s just the nature of it. So Edenwald was very specific because we knew them. Whiting-Turner came about quite frankly because we knew that Peabody, that lease was coming up. And what most people know is Peabody was an independent institution and it was acquired by Johns Hopkins in 1977, but that lease goes all the way back to 1957, so bad on us.
OLIVIA: Right.
KENT: Peabody was paying the same lease as 1957. So we’re looking at that and saying we have a rundown building on the front of the campus. I really respect the Peabody Institute and what they do there, but we can’t be having a rundown building at the front of our campus not doing us any good. And so we were able to work out a deal with: Peabody moved off and Whiting-Turner moved in. And I think what they’re going to be bringing to us is some pretty amazing stuff in terms of how we can expand opportunities and engineering, construction management, environmental, sustainability technologies and everything that are going to be part of that long term.
KENT: But I don’t expect any other big new real estate deals in the next three years. That was a focus of the five-year plan was to help us generate that revenue. Now we’re really focusing on that. That’s great. We have the new programs. We have the new revenue. Where do we go next with that? That’s going to be the big thing for us.
OLIVIA: Your previous position was being the president of the New Hampshire Institute of Art. Which, also under your tenure, went under dramatic changes, including some budget cuts. To put it bluntly, are you experiencing deja vu?
KENT: [laughs] No, it’s funny because I thought coming out to Goucher, it would be fairly easy. And I was transitioned, and I always thought of it and I said to people when I arrived here, I said this is my fifth and final college. And I meant that, and I’ve been here seven years, and I’ll be here several years more. And that will be it. I will retire. And I said that because I also wanted to make sure people here knew that I was not thinking of Goucher as a stepping-stone. Because that’s the worst possible thing for people to be thinking. No, I’m absolutely 100% committed. But quite frankly, pre-pandemic, I thought, oh, this is going to be a lot of fun. Great, we’ve got a growing program, study abroad. This is great. Yeah, that was pre-Trump. That was pre-pandemic. That was pre-George Floyd. That was pre-Israel/Gaza. That’s pre-FAFSA debacle. It’s like every year it’s something.
And so we’ve kind of moved into a rhythm now where it’s basically, yeah, we’ll roll with the punches and we’ll move on. That’s very, very different than the New Hampshire Institute of Art, which was, they were looking for a president and they knew that they had to merge because of New England. The years I was in New England, I think I saw five colleges go under because New England, especially Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and [an] even more extreme case of declining birth rates and aging populations. And so a lot of colleges were just going out of business. And so I was hired to basically find a suitable merger partner and then merge that college so it could survive.
And so it has survived. Nobody, no faculty were laid off. No staff were laid off. The students continued their educations in their current programs. No programs were cut. But it’s now part of a merged college instead of being independent. But no, very, very different with Goucher, which has a much stronger, much healthier future. And we’re kind of in the top 15% financially of colleges and universities nationwide.
OLIVIA:Well, you sort of alluded to this in your last question, But I know that your tenure here at Goucher has been extended for the Middle States reaccreditation, or at least one of the reasons, correct me if I’m wrong. But where are you going next? What’s life for Kent Devereaux after Goucher?
KENT: Well, one of the things, and the board finally has to approve this next month. But yes, hopefully I will be extended through the accreditation and the strategic plans. We get through this and we kind of get on to the next step. So we’re still working that out. But for me, I’m really looking forward to getting back to music.
In my original background, undergraduate music, graduate was in art and technology. And then because of that technology, I ended up working in the high tech.
OLIVIA: At Encyclopedia Britannica.
KENT: Encyclopedia Britannica, and much more before that, the early internet companies. I literally, it’s so funny how far things have come. But in those early days of the internet, I was asked to basically show the board of trade and the CTO of AT&T how to use a browser. That was how new these technologies were. And so I happened to be at the right place at the right time and did that for 14 years. And so I have a good awareness of how corporate America works. But I was also very clear that that’s not what I wanted to do long term. It was very good. It allowed me to buy a house, allowed me to raise my son. allowed me to do all that, send him to college, all that kind of stuff. But as soon as I got an opportunity to go back to small liberal arts colleges and arts colleges, I did that.
And along the way, I said, well, chief, if I want to be a president of a college, there’s only so many hours in the day. So one thing’s going to have to be put on the side. And that’s my music. And so I put that on the side. I’m not a, I was a pianist, I like to say. I don’t practice anymore. But I’m a composer by training. So like an author, like a writer, I can come back to composing when I retire. And I’m incredibly excited about that possibility because now I can actually see that in two or three years in the future. So it’s exciting.
OLIVIA: Well, that actually leads to my fun question. I have some text. I would like you to take a look at it. I want to hear your reaction.
[pause.]
KENT: Oh. [laughs]
Yes. So yeah, the text is from the Mahābhārata, which is one of the two great Indian epics. Yeah,
“Father, I did not rescue the Bhasin, nor did I defeat the enemy. This was done by the son of a god. I fled in fear. God’s son, who had held the thunderbolt, stopped me. Then he climbed into my chariot, defeated the Kurawas, and recovered the Bison. He is the hero of those, fear me not. His arrows wrought havoc in the wrecks of the Kurus. When they broke formation and fled like elephants, he said to Duryodana, royal Kurus, it seems to me, you will not be safe, even on Astina. No, stand here and fight. How will running away make you free? Steal your mind and fight, conquer and get the earth, die and get heaven.”
So this is directly from the Bhagavad Gita, which is in book 6 of the 19 books in the Mahābhārata. And so I came across the Mahābhārata when I was in high school and was fascinated by this. And for a lot of my life in music and theater, studying in India and Indonesia, was kind of attracted by this, partially the same way that people are attracted to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Greek epics, because it is something that has survived through time. And there are a million stories and a million stories in this oral tradition that have been passed on down. And so I’ve always been fascinated with this and worked with different artists to interpret these stories for our times in the theater.
And so I’m fascinated by that as well as just what it did for me and what I think I know why I decided to come to Goucher was because it allowed me the opportunity to travel to other countries, work with artists who we had completely different backgrounds, but we had a common theme that we were working on. And that’s what tied this together. And I think that was that common humanity. And so that’s what attracted me to come to Goucher because I said, I knew how much that meant to me when I was 22 or 25. Gee, how much that could mean to so many students if we could promote more of that in this world.
OLIVIA: All right. Well, we’re gonna finish off there. That was Kent Devereaux, the president of Goucher College in Towson, Maryland. President Devereaux, thank you for being here.
KENT: Thank you very much.
[Transition sound]
OLIVIA: This week, we’re also covering the pause in special interest housing that was announced last month. In a post-script for an email announcing the housing selection timeline, the Office of Residential Life announced the language house would be the only special interest house to continue operations while gaming house and arts and media house would pause so that the office could quote, “‘evaluate the structure, expectations, and support model for these communities,” unquote. The email was sent out the same day as an SGA meeting on March 12th. That night, members of the arts and media house and gaming house gathered to make public comments at said SGA meeting. Opal Monaghan, who is the student leader for arts and media house, commented that the decision would quote, “‘unconditionally mean the death of our community,” unquote. She added the arts and media house quote, “‘cost zero money,” unquote, and that the administration had been disinterested in managing special interest housing. To get a comment on this, we asked Sergey Shapiro for his experience in special interest housing.
SERGEY: I’m Sergey. I think gaming house was a big decision maker in my choice to come to Goucher. I heard a lot of really wonderful things about it on my tour. And then my freshman year, I spent a decent amount of time there. I was friends with some former, with some members who have now graduated. Junior, sorry. Sophomore year, I was in gaming house. It was pretty nice. And then this year, I wanted to be in gaming house, but was unable to because I was coming back from studying abroad and all the space was full.
I think definitely it feels a lot, I think just a big part, it feels a lot less homely. There was, I think just in general, Tuttle is a more homely place to live than the First Year Village. I think more importantly, there was like a decade of decorations put up there by previous members of gaming house that just aren’t in Trustees and are now completely gone from Tuttle, which is very frustrating.
I think dynamic, I think that’s the main part. A lot of other parts of it are people. There is, I know there are some students who chose not to live in trustees when we were moved there. However, I do kind of feel the move to Trustees was understandable because they didn’t want to have Frolicker open and there are a lot to do that if they if they have a reason to. I think it was a lot more frustrating that when they did later open Frolicker, they decided to destroy our decorations and put random students there instead of moving us back there and letting other people go to trustees. And it’s also frustrating because we were told it was temporary and at first everybody kind of still got the set-up they had. Like if they weren’t [in] a single, they were allowed to have a “dingle” in the first year village because there are no singles.
But this year, instead of, kind of, continuing that, they said nobody’s allowed to have a single, which means that there were many people who were previous gaming house members who chose not to live there because they wanted to be in a single and there were many people who would have lived there but chose not to because they wanted to be in a single. That email was sent out to my knowledge. There was no prior communication.
I guess the only person who would have received prior communication would be Luca, but I figure he would have posted something in the Discord server if he had. If I were to give one word, it would be unempathetic. They have been very unwilling to kind of hear how I feel. I think my bigger feeling on those things is I was mostly just kind of asking them why and they were never really able to give me a good reason. At first they were giving me some kind of buzzword reasons, I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was like “not consistent leadership,” “not consistent ways in how new members are chosen.” and that we don’t have any data that people are participating in events or insufficient data for that. And all of those things are kind of untrue and especially they don’t collect any data and we don’t provide any data, so I don’t really know what data they could have used for it.
Oh, sorry, I wanna mention one specific thing, which is they have explicitly told me they did not use student feedback for this decision, which I don’t think is acceptable. Where we are at now is I became frustrated with Dr. Turner. I went to Dr. Aarika Camp up with the same kind of feelings and she gave me the same response and then told me she didn’t wanna talk about it more.
And so I guess where I’m at now is I’ll see where this leads and then maybe in a few days after that I will start emailing Kent or the Board of Trustees.
OLIVIA: In a subsequent SGA meeting on April 2nd, SGA President Christian Houck spoke to the assembly about a meeting he and SGA leadership had with Dr. Turner of the Office of Student Housing. President Houck cited staffing issues, specifically special interest coordinators, which wouldn’t be obtainable until the next year due to the hiring phase.
The Quindecim attempted to ask Dr. Turner for comment, but we were unable to reach him before broadcast as he was out of office.
[transition]
OLIVIA: On Thursday, the Student Government Association announced the results of their Textbook Assistance Program, also known as TAP. This year, the Textbook Assistance Program was spearheaded by Chief of Staff Elizabeth Hannaford.
ELIZABETH HANNAFORD: My name is Elizabeth Hannaford. I am the Chief of Staff for SGA this year. I was in charge of the textbook assistance program and I felt that it went very well. It was obviously very overwhelming having to deal with a lot of people applying, but it made me feel very excited that people felt that they could turn to SGA to ask for support regarding these things. Obviously textbooks are ridiculously expensive and the college is looking to hopefully reduce that cost in the future. But yeah, I thought the textbook assistance program was very successful and it’s gotten better every year, so hopefully next year it will be great again.
OLIVIA: Thank you.
ELIZABETH: You’re welcome.
OLIVIA: According to the SGA, 70 students were accepted in seven hours after the application for assistance open, giving just $7,000, well, under $7,000, in studying materials to students. The program allowed students to access course materials, mostly textbooks. The majority of the funds went to an introductory Spanish textbook, Vistas. We reached out to the chair of the Spanish department to get a comment on the Vistas textbook, but we were unable to reach them in time for broadcast after multiple attempts.
That’s all for our show tonight. I hope you all have a lovely night and I will see you next week.
