Let’s start with some facts: the college is cutting Wellness Center Peer Educators, is moving the Office of Equity, Inclusion, and Excellence under a new Dean of “Belonging,” is cutting budgets across the board, is instituting a hiring freeze, is putting a pause on the commuter vouchers offered by the Office of Student Engagement, and too many other changes to count.
I began writing a piece responding to Birds and Words (a 1991 Quindecim Op-ed by Steve Zimmer) around October 2024, but only had it completed and published as a two parter on December 12, 2025. Steve Zimmer was the first male SGA president during a time of great change, helped create the controversial Ms. Goucher, wrote for the Q, and was involved with Habitat for Humanity. Alongside many of his peers, he pushed the college to move forward.
Despite it only being a few months after publication, a lot has happened and the bird (representational of the Goucher community) has started hitting the window.
In my previous exhaustive op-ed, I feared and predicted this kind of sudden earth sea shift, especially in terms of DEI.
The college needs to get its head on straight and have some institutional memory. I received an interesting email from Steve Zimmer in response to my previous email. Part of what he said is that during this “moment of intentional and vicious erasure, the act of intentional remembering has almost revolutionary significance.” I believe that we as a community, especially now, need to follow thisidea of understanding our cultural history in order to make informed choices.
Is Goucher becoming a right wing administration? Unequi- vocally, no. But the fact that this is a reasonable question to ask is shameful.
Goucher is shutting down programs, cutting budgets, and restructuring, especially around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, without careful thought and consideration after a panic over deficits that has existed for decades. Again, there needs to be institutional memory, we have tried cutting back essential programs in the past with poor long term results. And we have had debt and deficits on and off for our whole 140 year existence as a college. I believe we need to focus on revenue generation, retention of current students, and retention of faculty and staff, not short term budget cuts that will further hurt our already poor retention. Even before any of this, most offices at Goucher have expressed feeling under- staffed. For a formerly Methodist College and a now very religiously diverse school, it is crazy to keep the Chaplain position unfilled and have no announcement of a planned search.
I believe the latest set of cuts are, in my mind, a presentation of a narrow view of what Goucher is and what it can be. I came to Goucher because it has a diverse, welcoming, and well educated faculty and staff that can guide us to be greater. Any loss to that ideal due to the administration’s short sighted cuts, will be a loss for the whole community. We can become a global leader, but we have shrunk our own ambitions.
“But our organizing distilled down to this: in order to build the Goucher of the future, Goucher needed to invest in the students of today. And rather than run from its history, we demanded the administration embrace it. Feminism, The tenants of Single-Gender Education, Relationship-Based Instruction, Empowerment, Equity (then called diversity), and experiential learning.” This is the argument that Zimmer made in his email. While some of the terms are outdated, the core ideals should be fought for.
I came to Goucher, hoping to join the student body in our efforts moving the college to evolve even further. Student leadership is a key part of what makes Goucher great. The Garden was created by and for students, same with the Radio, the Quindecim, and Humans Versus Zombies. Even as we find allies and friends in the administration and with Faculty and staff, the culture of the campus is ultimately ours.
The biggest student events of the semester have included an African Wedding, a Hillel Drag Show for the ocean, and several IMC shows, all organized by and for students.
Steve Zimmer shared his thoughts of his time at Goucher, “What the administration didn’t understand was that there was a core group of us who came to Goucher to redefine it. The future of Goucher was our why and we actually thought we could do something. It was pathetically arrogant and naive. But it was also exciting and sometimes beautiful.” I agree, and think the current student body needs to take on the same mindset of living up to the branding of “inspiring global changemakers” which at least to me must start in our own communities. We can and will redefine Goucher.
We care about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and I am not afraid to say it. This is part of why I am part of a group that is organizing a protest asking the college to actually uphold its values of Equity, Inclusion, and Excellence. This will be on Thursday, March 26th at 12pm, starting in front of Mary Fisher. We want the whole community to join us.
By Max Ravnitzky ’28
Featured Image Source: The Quindecim via JSTOR
