The first stage of grief is shock.

It was shock that Kristin Schweizer felt when she received her letter from Vice Chancellor Deborah Freund detailing a proposal to phase out the School of Nursing, the same school she will graduate from in May.

‘I think a lot of us were surprised,’ she said, ‘because it came out of the blue.’

When talking about the situation, she rattles off the numbers like she has been repeating them since kindergarten. July 27, the day that she received the letter. $500,000 is the amount that Nursing says it has made last year, compared to the $2.7 million that Syracuse University has said Nursing lost. But most recently it was 73-68, the November vote that gave the University Senate’s blessing to the proposal and sent it for a final decision by the Board of Trustees where Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw will make his recommendation today at their meeting in New York City.

The second stage is denial, but that did not last long. It only took until August for a coalition of Nursing students to begin talking with Director of the Office of Budget and Planning John Hogan, whose office authored some of the figures that many still dispute as too harsh. Not surprising, since the third stage is bargaining.

Starting with the 1999-2000 school year, Nursing lost over a million dollars per year, and over two million per year in the school years between 2000 and 2003, according to financial documentation that accompanied Freund’s proposal. Some of the Nursing faculty and staff have said the figures are exaggerated and point to their own estimation that shows positive gains of $500,000. Hogan said the other figures conflict because Nursing counted revenue derived from the full tuition of all students enrolled in the program as part of their bottom line, while the official figure reflected only the money made from Nursing courses, as the rest of the money is counted toward the other schools in which the courses are administered.

Hogan used the example of a Nursing student taking several courses in The College of Arts and Sciences.

‘What is not appropriate is that they don’t understand that Arts and Sciences incurs the instructional expenses,’ he said.

Another point of contention is enrollment. In mid-March the school suspended graduate admissions because only six people had submitted applications, said David Smith, the vice president of enrollment management.

But according to Smith’s office this is not a new problem. Since 1997 the school has not made its undergraduate enrollment quotas that are negotiated between his office and the deans of each individual school. Not surprisingly, this was also contested by Nursing, which countered that the data presented does not account for inter-school transfers, something that Smith acknowledges is true. Nursing maintains that if the transfers were counted they would have made their quotas. The concept of inter-school transfer is something that Schweizer, who used to be a photography major at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications before moving to Nursing, knows well.

‘If 22 people transfer from another school to Nursing they should count,’ she said. ‘That is 22 people who would otherwise not be at SU.’

But it is discrepancies like these that some Nursing administrators hoped would be cleared up, specifically before the USen vote. As Senators filed into the auditorium, Nursing professor Dr. Katherine Anselmi helped distribute a leaflet that briefly detailed many of their arguments.

‘I am fearful that the Senators have not read the answers the School of Nursing has to (Freund’s) proposal,’ she said.

If the vote that would soon follow was any indication, she had a right to be fearful, and not just because it is the fourth stage of grief.

In fact, it has been the process itself, and more specifically Freund has drawn the most fire from some of those involved. Many involved in the nursing school have criticized not only the way things were handled, which has been characterized as everything from callus to incompetent, but also the message being sent.

‘They talk about this academic plan and bringing the university to a higher level and that is fine,’ Schweizer said. ‘They are making a reputation for themselves but it is not the one they are hoping for.’

The anger, however, which is the fifth stage, has not fazed Freund. In an e-mail she offered a one-word answer of ‘no’ to the question of if she would do anything different now that she is done with her phase of the proposal.

Although the only people who now have any say in the fate of the school are Shaw and the Board, it seems as if Schweizer, one of those who fought the hardest for the cause through writing petitions and attending meetings, has seemed to lose faith and fall victim to the sixth stage, despair.

‘I used to be proud of this university,’ she said.

When asked what she thought would become of her home school after Friday, she remained no more optimistic.

‘It’s gone,’ she said. ‘I would have said it was gone when I got the letter.’

The final phase of grief is acceptance.

Published on December 5, 2002 at 12:00 pm