By Rachel Konieczny
Assistant News Editor
St. Bonaventure University and Hilbert College boards of trustees decided to terminate discussions and plans of integration last week.
Sr. Margaret Carney, O.S.F, and St. Bonaventure president, and Dr. Cynthia Zane, Hilbert president, announced on March 20 the culmination of talks, which began in October 2013, to the Bonaventure community in a video news release. The decision was made sometime last week. Both institutions’ boards of trustees disagreed on how integration would be implemented and governed. In the news release, Carney said the process allowed the university to learn a variety of lessons.
“As we move forward from here, we are also reflecting on lessons learned,” Carney said. “We have learned something about the conditions and processed steps that are needed to guide these kinds of considerations. It gave us an evaluative criteria should we discover other strategic alliance opportunities.”
Michael Fischer, provost and vice president for academic affairs, hosted an open forum Monday for faculty and students, alongside Emily Morris, vice president for university relations, and Brenda McGee, senior vice president for finance and administration.
“The [board of trustees] decided that we would conclude those conversations but that we would continue to uncover ways that the schools could collaborate,” Morris said.
The two schools began a relationship more than 20 years ago when St. Bonaventure opened a graduate studies center on the Hilbert campus in Hamburg. St. Bonaventure will continue to offer weekend graduate courses at Hilbert.
The John R. Oishei Foundation initially funded the strategic alliance study with a $250,000 grant in December 2013, and gave an additional $175,000 in May 2014.
Fischer said Bonaventure is in the process of looking at opportunities for joint degree programs. A joint task force was formed last year that included 10 faculty from both Bonaventure and Hilbert. This group, according to Fischer, works together to determine if joint programs are possible.
“We’re working and have been for some time with our colleagues at Hilbert on the possibility of doing a joint degree program in cybersecurity, combining some of our strengths in computer science with some of their strengths in areas like economic climate investigation; that’s actively underway at this point,” Fischer said.
Funding for a joint degree program is available through The Teagle Foundation for collaboration with Hilbert, Erie Community College and Jamestown Community College to examine general education curriculum.
Carole McNall, professor of journalism and mass communication at St. Bonaventure, said she was surprised with the decision to end integration discussion.
“I’ve been running around telling people that unless there was a smoking gun disclosed someplace—some huge big thing—I thought it was going to happen,” McNall said.
Although the alliance is not happening, Morris said Bonaventure learned from the talks.
“We knew going into this that as similar as we may think we are in the higher education community, higher education organizations have complexities that you uncover and discover through the course of an experience like this,” Morris said. “We now would [better] understand what it would take in order to try to integrate with another institution and we would [better] understand the conditions that would need to exist in order for that to be a successful enterprise.”
According to Morris, there are categories of conditions, including financial, location, academic program, legal ramifications, government issues and athletics considerations.
Fischer commented on the lack of models that aim to accomplish something such as this strategic alliance.
“Looking in the nonprofit world and in higher education in particular, there’s not a lot of game plans out there for how to do this,” Fischer said.
