LTE: Changes to Bylaws Un dermine College Values

OPINIONSOPINIONS

September 30, 2022 Established 1874 Volume 152, Number 4

LETTER TO THE EDITORS

Changes to Bylaws Undermine College Values College Should Terminate Contract With Harness Health

To the Oberlin College Board of Trustees:

I am writing to try to understand the strategic long-term vision of the trustees of Oberlin College. I learned recently that the Board is planning to revise the College’s bylaws to make clear the faculty’s subsidiary role in the governance of the institution, undoing a value that has long made Oberlin unique.

How is it that the leadership of the institution is still in place after spending millions of dollars in defense of losing a legal action resulting in a judgment of tens of millions of dollars; a case, which, in my view, might have been settled for the cost of a cup of coffee and a doughnut? In my book, when a misjudgment of that order of magnitude is made by management, best practice is that management should change. Making matters worse, that final judgment resulted in a front-page story in The New York Times, often considered to be the national newspaper of record, that was personally embarrassing to many alumni. That alone should have caused the chair and president to resign. The failure to settle the case is seen at best as a matter of considerable hubris on the part of the board.

What does it say about the values to which we all subscribe when the incomes of many community members have been destroyed or devastatingly reduced by the outsourcing of services? As a former administrator of an elite institution of higher education (with many years in property management), it is my experience that service quality always decreases after such a move — with minimal cost savings. Layer on top of that the recent violation of college norms with respect to reproductive health services that also landed the College in the newspapers (again as a result of outsourcing) at the same time the College’s president is at the White House discussing reproductive rights. How can this be honestly explained?

Finally, the trustees’ unwillingness to be forthcoming about how the endowment is managed is concerning. For a period of about a decade after the turbulence in the financial markets of the late aughts, the endowment seriously underperformed the broad market indices, as far as I could tell. And now the College’s investment strategy has wildly swung in the opposite direction with a majority of the corpus invested in alternative products — which are by definition volatile, opaque, and expensive — in addition to the institution adding the cost of an inhouse investment management function. The expenses of this strategy must considerably outweigh any benefit that might have been gained from the staff outsourcing. The trustees have been unwilling to share basic information with the community about the endowment’s return or its costs of management, which is not at all in the spirit of the institution I attended.

It is my sense that since the dismissal from the board of Peter Kirsch and Roberta Manaker, the board has lacked a diversity of views and lost its way. It is heartbreaking to me, with so many friends and acquaintances on the board, that the College has forfeited its identity as being unique — a place that cherishes (rather than pays lip service to) outstanding intellectual and artistic achievement — and has chosen to become conventional, risk-averse, and undistinguished. Going along to get along is not fulfilling the obligations of a fiduciary.

With all best wishes, Andy Manshel, OC ’78

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Sam Beesley

Let’s get a few facts straight regarding the outsourcing of Student Health to Harness Health. Harness is a division of Bon Secours Mercy Health, a Catholic healthcare network that follows the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, developed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. These directives prohibit Catholic health care networks from providing a wide range of reproductive health services, including all birth control, abortion, and emergency contraceptives, except in cases of sexual assault, where emergency birth control may be used but abortions are still prohibited. Catholic health care providers have also faced multiple lawsuits alleging discrimination against LGBTQ patients (See Minton v. Dignity Health, Hammons v. UMMS).

While there are workarounds that allow providers working in Catholic health care systems to provide certain prohibited services, the accessibility of these services depends on how the parent organization follows the directives. Patients must contend with providers requiring them to go through numerous steps to receive essential services, as well as individual providers’ choices to work around the policies of the health care system. In short, the mission of Catholic health networks to follow Catholic moral directives makes reproductive, sexual, and gender-affirming care less accessible to patients.

The solution that the College quickly put into place after it came to light that HHP would not provide reproductive health care is severely limited. Despite claims in an email from President Ambar that Family Planning Services of Lorain County would be on campus three days a week, with transportation provided on other days, FPSLC is only advertised as being on campus one day per week on the Student Health website. The details of the transportation system are not clear at all and should not be necessary in the first place. In the past, the services students might seek from FPSLC were available on campus, often at little to no cost. Clearly, reproductive care is now less accessible to students than before the College’s deliberate decision to partner with HHP.

Student tuition dollars are being sent to a religiously restrictive health care provider that makes reproductive health care inaccessible to patients in Oberlin, in Ohio, and across the country. Not only that, but according to the Campus Digest sent out June 8, student health records were sent to, and are apparently still in the possession of, this potentially hostile health care provider.

There was a shocking series of administrative failures that led us to this point. When the College announced that Student Health would be provided by HHP, it failed to acknowledge that the provider’s parent company was Catholic, and the College did not make any statement regarding how that fact might affect the care provided at Oberlin. If the College had been deliberate in choosing HHP, it may have also been deliberate in keeping that important information from the Oberlin community.

According to President Carmen Twillie Ambar’s own statements, the administration held conversations with HHP before partnering with them. In these conversations, they discussed access to reproductive and gender-affirming care, leading to assurances from HHP that they would provide such services. Did the administration simply take this company at its word? Did the College get these “assurances” in writing, perhaps in the contract it signed with HHP? If not, I question not only the administration’s commitment to the well-being of the Oberlin student community but also its professional competence as a group of higher education administrators. The Oberlin community deserves to know the specifics of what was discussed and, if such services were included in the contract, to know why HHP is still employed on campus after breaching that agreement.

Ignorance is no excuse. The College’s administration is responsible for the well-being of nearly 3,000 students; it is its job to not let this happen. If not ignorance, then might naïveté be the answer? The picture that the administration is trying to paint is that, by no fault of their own, it was misled by HHP. However, HHP and BSMH are still providing student health care despite the administration’s dissatisfaction, and HHP still has our student health records. It appears as though the administration’s initial motivation was to save money and shed employees — that is what HHP plainly advertises and why an institution like Oberlin would partner with it. This is not new, but part of a trend during President Ambar’s term that has resulted in worse outcomes for Oberlin’s student body and in beloved members of the Oberlin community losing their jobs despite widespread disapproval and protest. At best, the College was grossly cavalier in doing its due diligence about the new health care providers as they pursued the cheaper option. At worst, it knowingly put the well-being of the student body in harm’s way in the name of its financial bottom line.

Now the administration is trying to pass the blame off to others — expressing that it felt disappointed that BSMH and HHP were “no longer comfortable” with providing care that Catholic health care networks do not make accessible in the first place. We do not need disappointment or excuses. We need answers, and we need results.

The College should release the contract it signed with HHP and the assurances it received regarding how HHP would provide reproductive and gender-affirming care on campus. The College should also end its partnership with BSMH and HHP, retrieve our student health records from these hostile organizations, and go back to employing its own health center staff.