If you have not already, please read part one of this op-ed. It outlines some of Steve Zimmer’s incredible 1991 piece and ideas that might apply to our current situation. This second part is focused on examples of where I believe we as a community should perhaps be skeptical of the administration and focus our energies on making sure they deliver on their promises. Below are some of my thoughts, which do not necessarily represent SGA, ECO, Quindecim, or any other organization for which I am an officer or member.
After much discussion about the issues relating to missing third spaces (places outside of home and work) especially Alice’s (the removed café in the Athenaeum) and the Gopher Hole (a closed non-alcoholic student bar underneath Mary Fisher), President Devereaux and many senior administrators have made promises to create new spaces and to look into reopening the Gopher Hole. The Gopher Hole has been a forever promised project, but has recently made progress due to long hours of advocacy and planning by SGA, specifically Attorney General Elowyn Ingler and President Christian Houck.
While I give some credit to the administration for installing tables, benches, and hammocks across campus, I know it happened due to SGA and student pressure. This has been a huge boon to the current husk that is our student culture.
I am also appreciative of Associate Vice President for the Library & Learning Commons, Beatriz Hardy, for supporting the move to 24/7 hours and Director of Public Safety, Tiffany Justice, for implementing the change so quickly. While this is a nice start, there is so much more to be done.
I have no doubt the administration intends to put in more student spaces, but their timelines are too long. The ambitious 2022 Goucher College Campus Master Plan outlines a new student center attached to the Alumni House, to be constructed between 2028 and 2033. However, given financial constraints, I doubt the plan is going to be implemented in a timely manner. Goucher’s administration and Board of Trustees tend to think in terms of years and decades, yet the need for “third spaces” for students is immediate. This shortcoming could be impacting retention and graduation rates, and our ability to attract new students, all of which hurts the college’s financial position. Having a café and a student center are now requirements for a quality college experience in the eyes of many prospective students. We need good student centered spaces to remain competitive.
The SGA Executive and Legislative Branches are continuing to engage the administration on this issue. All students should be involved in creating such spaces for our community, as it will take all of us working together to revive campus spirit in places new and old.
To proceed to my academic concerns, I fear the potential for a series of quickly implemented large scale changes at Goucher. We have gone through many such overhauls of how Goucher academia is structured and what is taught. Some major program changes happened as Zimmer was SGA president in 1991-1992. The last major program shift in 2016-2019 ended with the firing and retirement of many key staff and faculty, and its ramifications still haunt the community.
Last week, I was dismayed reading old Q articles about the 2018 Program Prioritization Process (PPP), and thinking back on the numerous conversations I have had with different faculty, administrators, and staff. Olivia Baud’s September 2018 Quindecim piece about a meeting on the then-upcoming PPP lists the people in that meeting, none of whom are still at Goucher. Professor Michael Curry, who is later quoted in the article, is the only one mentioned who remains. Numerous programs of the time were lost and about 50 faculty left within the first two years of this change.
The 2019 Administrative Services Review involved outsourcing Campus Safety (which failed after only a few years) and firing several key administrators/staff. This included ACE staff (Kay Beard and Peejo Sehr) who were beloved enough by the community to have a large scale student movement form around trying to keep them at Goucher. Please find the Q’s coverage of this on its website here and here.
PPP in combination with the 2019 Administrative Services Review were in my opinion probably a series of hastily-made, stupid mistakes. But due to Covid overshadowing the effects of these changes and the fact that almost every administrator joined Goucher after this, the full negative impact is not understood by the current leadership of Goucher.
With some of the changes already starting, planned, or considered at Goucher and the upcoming search for a new president, I fear that such an ill-thought out upheaval might happen at Goucher in the next few years. We are a bird heading for a glass window without realizing it. I am not sure anyone at Goucher, save maybe a few faculty who have been at Goucher for decades, understand what is ahead.
Another issue of concern for the student body, especially in these troubled times, is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Goucher has continuously promised investment and prioritization of DEI, but often failed to fully live up to its promises.
As Goucher admits a more diverse student body every year, but the nation and the world becomes more hostile to DEI programs, the students that such programs support, and international students, what needs to be done?
I am not sure, but a good place to start would be beginning the search to hire more full time professional staff such as a new Chaplin, a full-time VP of the Office of Equity, Inclusion, and Excellence (EIE), and several new Center for Race, Equity, and Inclusion (CREI) staff. Currently Dr. Isabel Moreno-López serves simultaneously as Undergraduate Associate Provost and temporary VP for EIE, but her contract for the latter role is soon to expire.
We should heed the advice of Zimmer and be skeptical of the rhetoric of the administration as we push Goucher to being closer to its ideals.
This naturally brings me to sustainability at Goucher. According to the Goucher commitment to sustainability webpage, “In May 2011 Goucher completed its first Climate Action Plan (CAP), which set a goal to reduce the college’s greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions 20% by 2020.” My understanding is that Goucher has not measured its GHG emissions since at least 2018. On the reporting platform Second Nature, the last data is from 2017 which shows an approximate halving of our yearly GHG emissions. But I have to assume with more buildings and no further public reporting, our emissions have made negative progress since then. Our neighbor (Towson University) has kept up public reporting from 2007 to the present with continual GHG emissions cuts.
This is merely the tip of this iceberg of several ambitious goals and programs started at Goucher that have halted the last 40 odd years. This happens even as environmentalism has become a long-running theme of the Goucher community with ECO starting in spring of 1990 and Ralph Nader visiting the campus shortly after in spring of 1992. And of course, fascination with the natural world can be traced back to the founding of our institution and to John Goucher. This kind of environmental focus by the Goucher community pops up from the 90s until Covid, when it died. The environmental ideals hold strong in the form of multiple programs and our unique environmental general education requirement. The latest revival of ECO is an attempt to help bring back this culture of environmentalism into the forefront of discussion and action.
When Kent Devereaux became president, in his first interview with the Q (by Editor-in-Chief Neve Levinson ‘20 and News Editor Jibril Howard ’22), he talked about the need for a sustainability plan and coordination of our sustainability efforts. Current sustainability efforts are not coordinated. Since Goucher’s last Sustainability Coordinator (Daniela Beall) left in 2021, there has been no replacement. I am aware of many public and private promises and efforts related to sustainability that give me significant hope, but I remain skeptical.
As ECO president, I am trying to make this campus more environmentally conscious and active through education, environmental conversations, direct action, and advocacy. I hope more of the community can join ECO. Or you can follow the ideals of Steve Zimmer and take direct individual action to solve environmental problems on campus.
Another idea that the student body has long complained about is that Goucher focuses more on recruitment and not enough on student quality of life and student retention. We see this in Zimmer’s own article. The administration has recognized and acknowledged this concern and taken some actions either directly or through the Student Success Taskforce (which I now find myself as one of its members).
With retention from the first year at Goucher to the sophomore year fluctuating between 70% (during covid) and 86% (in 2013) according to its common datasets, the latest publicly reported retention rate of 79% is not bad, but could be significantly better. Our graduation rates within 6 years is poor at 57.17% for the last reported cohort of the entering class of 2018. Although this number was affected by Covid, it is the best publicly available data and it is still about 12% worse than Towson University for the same period of time. Retaining students helps Goucher meet its financial objectives, and the increase in quality of life that is necessary to achieve this is good for students.
The administration, particularly Associate Vice President for Student Success, Dr. Emily Perl, met with SGA to discuss the issue of retention, what they are doing to address it, and to invite some students to join a couple of committees to work on those issues. This was last academic year (April 2nd, 2025). Since then, I have joined the Student Success Taskforce, appointed Shaun Chaney ’27 to the Board of Trustees Student Success Committee as a non-voting member, and had significantly more conversations with Dr. Perl and other administrators in my new role as Director of Academics. While I cannot talk about confidential conversations, some progress is being made, even if it is not enough.
President Devereaux spoke at the December 3rd, 2025 SGA General Assembly about the future of Goucher. Graduation rates, retention rates, and student satisfaction were mentioned as the focus for the next three years especially as part of the next strategic plan. He talked about including student voices in many key committees and decisions in the shared governance (of students, faculty, administrators, and trustees) structure that is central to liberal arts institutions. President Devereaux specifically brought up how the next presidential search to replace him will have multiple student representatives on it. We need to be skeptical and make sure the actions taken by his administration match these words and promises.
I hope the Office of Institutional Effectiveness gets enough data from its student satisfaction survey for the administration to understand that serious investment into the school and its community needs to happen now.
Obviously, student retention directly relates to a sense of community which is directly connected to the aforementioned need for quality third spaces, and other issues that are beyond the scope of this op-ed. While this common interest and communication from the administration showing a desire to work with SGA on this issue is great, I remain skeptical until I see significant action involving large-scale funding. I believe with further advocacy Goucher can become a place students can and want to stay for the full duration of their undergraduate education.
There are many other examples where comparison and discussion of issues from the early 90s and the problems facing current Goucher students would be of value, but there is insufficient room to discuss them in this piece. I hope that the student body can join my calls to help make sure that the administration lives up to its many promises, and we don’t just crash into the glass window Steve Zimmer described.
My thoughts are best concluded with a quote from President Jimmy Carter when he spoke at Goucher College on September 26, 1991: “I advocate a strong and deep commitment for college students for a better world …. Let your voice be heard.”
By Max Ravnitzky ‘28
Featured Image Source: The Quindecim via JSTOR
