Paul Watson, Campus Carrier Editor-in-Chief
On April 10, the Academic Council approved a recommendation to eliminate fall graduation, effective this year.
Berry College President Stephen R. Briggs approved the motion on April 10. This action has caused uproar within the student body, many of whom say they were caught off-guard by the sudden change.
Provost Kathy Richardson, member of the Academic Council, said the discussion of eliminating fall graduation began in January 2013 when dean of students Debbie Heida met with SGA and class officers.
Junior and SGA President Ben Riggs was present at that meeting. He said the topic of fall graduation was a minor point.
“The conversation with Heida mainly focused on changes to the baccalaureate service,” Riggs said. “Fall graduation was talked about at the beginning, but once the baccalaureate service came up, [graduation] wasn’t brought up again.”
Riggs said he went back and checked his executive notes and his minutes for the meeting to confirm his statement.
The topic was not officially discussed again until the March 13 meeting of the Academic Council, when the Council gave the proposed change a first reading. Junior and SGA Vice President of Administration Paton Roden, student representative on the Academic Council, said this is where the confusion started. She said she knew that the Council was discussing the elimination, but she was unaware that there would be a vote on the matter until the day of the vote.
Roden said that SGA did not deliberately ignore the topic in the month between the first reading and the Council’s vote.
“If SGA would’ve known that this [meeting was] when it would have been voted on, it would have been brought up at SGA meetings,” Roden said.
Riggs said he is not sure if discussions at SGA would have made a difference.
“It seems like this was a collegiate decision that was going to happen whether or not there was student input,” Riggs said. “They probably knew it would garner some sort of backlash. They probably didn’t want it to turn out like the football meeting,” he said, referencing the SGA meeting after the administration announced that a football team would be added to the athletic program; a few hundred students attended that meeting to show their opposition to the new program.
Riggs said that if the college does not want student input, they should clearly say so. He said it seems like they do not want to make that definitive decision.
“The college needs to stop playing this game of saying ‘we want to work with students’ and then not take student input into account,” Riggs said. “The administration [as a whole] seems to want their cake and eat it too.”
Richardson said this decision was not one that necessarily required any student input. Because this is a change to the academic calendar, SGA does not have an official vote in the matter. She said that this does not mean student input would not have been appreciated, however. She said SGA never discussed the issue, which is why it took students by surprise.
Richardson said that, though she cannot speak for other council members, she would have valued and considered student input, even if it may not have changed the outcome. As of now, however, Richardson said the decision made by the council was a good one.
“The decision to not have a December ceremony has been made,” she said. “There’s been a steady decline in December graduates. Most schools like us only have one ceremony for this reason.”
Richardson said she has been made aware of the concerns of students who are set to graduate this fall; she was made aware on Wednesday of a petition that is circulating Facebook to reinstate fall graduation, which she said will not have any effect on the decision of the Council. In order to help make the transition to eliminating the ceremony, she said that there will probably be a scaled-back version of the traditional fall graduation; that is, the ceremony will essentially remain the same, but it will probably not be held in the Cage Athletic Center like it has been in the past, but rather in a smaller venue.
Senior Katie Minor, who will be graduating in December due to being on medical withdraw this semester, said she was furious with the decision to eliminate fall graduation. She said it was not the cancelling of the ceremony itself that angered her as much as the way the school handled the situation.
“I have been upset about the abruptness of the situation,” she said. “I would be happy with a transitional graduation ceremony that lets me walk across the stage with my cap and gown.”
At press time there are no plans for a transitional fall graduation ceremony.