Good evening. Tonight we wish congratulations to the 2019 COD graduates. We are proud of them and we enjoy witnessing their success at commencement. And we are happy to celebrate our outstanding faculty colleagues as well as the professors who are promoted tonight.

It’s been a busy and chaotic year at our school, and teachers and students at COD continue to absorb significant and sometimes questionable choices made by the Board of Trustees and the administration—decisions that impact teaching and learning in the short term and in the long term, too often with the potential for undesirable headlines and undesirable outcomes (including the impact of multiple internal reorganizations, at least one inadvisable appointee to the presidential search committee, and the perpetual increase to the fund balance well beyond what is required by board policy).

Despite the chaos, as COD Faculty, we put our students first, and we are focused on providing high-quality education to the wide variety of students we work with every day. For COD faculty, teaching matters—above all else.

COD faculty also do more than teach classes. We helped COD retain its accreditation, and we are working to prepare for this fall’s HLC site visit. We are on the frontlines helping students with all sorts of issues so they can finish a class, or a program, or transfer to a four year university, enter the workforce, and ultimately succeed. It’s our faculty who keep our students coming back year after year. We are the face of COD.

As we move into the next academic year, we face an uncertain summer and fall. The faculty contract expires in 89 days, and the process behind the search for the next president has raised serious questions. The message this BOT sends to our students and the community is that we still have a long way to go before we’ve healed from the past. COD Faculty watch this BOT from the sidelines, and we think, it doesn’t have to be this way.