PEC Update, December 28, 2006

We hope that you are all enjoying the splendor of the holiday season, and that you are keeping your spirits up with respect to the fight to preserve Randolph-Macon Woman's College.

Legal update:

Hearings will be held in both the student contract suit and the charitable trust suit on January 23, 2007, at 3:00 p.m. in the Lynchburg Circuit Court. As we explained in our last update, the college has filed a "Demurrer" (motion to dismiss) in the charitable trust case. The College also has filed a Demurrer in the student contract case, and DurretteBradshaw is preparing the brief in opposition to that motion. In the meantime, PEC will endeavor over the holidays to scan and post all of the documents that have been filed in these cases to date on our website. The initial Complaints already are available, but we hope to reorganize the website so that you can find all of the legal documents in one location. This is no small task. For example, the documents that were attached to the students' "Bill of Particulars" are four inches thick, so this will take some time, but we want you all to see these documents to help you understand the issues in the case.

PEC organizational update:

PEC has recently undergone some organizational changes that we want to make you aware of. We've officially added two new members to PEC's Board: Gail Ballou (R-MWC '64) and Carol Curcio Lang (R-MWC '68, Fordham MBA '77). Both bring a wealth of business and life experience to the Board and were nominated by Ellen Reid Smith to serve on the Board in November. (A full list of PEC Board members can be found at http://www.preserveeducationalchoice.org/leadership.htm). Gail in particular was added to the Board to give Ellen a "back-up" in case her business commitments became such that she needed to step away from the organization for awhile. Ellen's foresight is commendable - for in fact her Cowgirl Smarts business (http://www.cowgirlsmarts.com) has unexpectedly taken off just in time for holiday buying and Ellen needs to take some time to focus on her other professional and personal commitments. When Diane Montgomery, PEC's founder, invited Ellen to join PEC as its president in late September, Ellen hit the ground running, immediately masterminding the "Carrot or Stick" campaign and bringing her infectious energy to PEC's activities. PEC is grateful for all that Ellen brought to the fight to preserve Randolph-Macon Woman's College and what she was able to accomplish during her tenure as president of PEC. We wish her all the best and will continue to build on her great work.

Fundraising update:

Our fundraising efforts are at a critical juncture. With the accelerating momentum of the litigation, the impending January 23rd court date, and the filing of supporting legal briefs, we are more than ever in need of contributions from PEC members and new gifts from the greater alumnae community to continue to fund this legal challenge.

We are extremely grateful for the generosity of donors that enabled us to pursue our efforts thus far (we have more than $160,000 in pledges, and have collected in excess of $140,000 thus far), but our expenses are running at around $50,000 per month to keep two litigation cases going, and we are now moving into the most critical phase of litigation. Please give generously now to ensure that we can continue to pursue these lawsuits. If you believe in this cause, we urge you to include PEC in your year-end giving and make a holiday donation to help us secure the benefits of a single-sex education for future generations of young women. One of our members recently wrote, "All I want for Christmas is my college back." A donation to PEC is a gift of resounding importance. Please give as generously as you can.

Donations may be made using PayPal on-line here or mailed to:

Preserve Educational Choice, Inc.
P.O. Box 29612
Richmond, VA 23242

College Update:

The college is currently on winter break, but that doesn't mean that there isn't any news from campus. You may have seen the December 21 Richmond Times-Dispatch article about R-MWC receiving a warning from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), the college's accrediting agency (please see PEC's Press page for a link to the article). The college has a press release about the warning posted on the R-MWC website at http://www.rmwc.edu/newsevents/pressreleases/news_detail.asp?id=583. The Times-Dispatch article quotes the college as stating that the "college's operating deficit, deferred maintenance, and high tuition-discount rate" are the areas of concern for SACS.

Some may see this warning about finances as supporting the assertion of the trustees that the college is in financial trouble. However, if you look more closely at the actual areas of concern some questions naturally arise. The issue is not whether the college has experienced these problems. We all agree that the college has deferred maintenance, that its tuition discounting has been too high, and that it has been using some endowment monies to meet current operational expenses, perhaps at too high a rate (though that is not clear - see below).

However, even assuming that all of those things are true, the Board of Trustees still has failed to show how going coed is going to solve any of those problems. In fact, we believe that going coed will likely make all of these issues worse.

Tuition discounting: Why did the college not fix the tuition discounting problem as a woman's college? Sweet Briar and Hollins both have much lower tuition discount rates (in the low 40 percent range as opposed to R-MWC's 62-63 percent range). Women's colleges can have a lower tuition discount rate - why didn't the trustees and R-MWC's administrators address this long-standing problem? Although many coeducational institutions have lower tuition discounting rates, by 2015 R-MWC's coed financial model still reflects tuition discount rates greater than Hollins, Sweet Briar, and industry averages for private coeducational liberal arts colleges. Thus simply going coed does not solve the tuition discounting problem.

Deferred maintenance: Why haven't the problems on campus been fixed? Alumnae have been reading about problems with the library roof and other maintenance issues throughout the Vita Abundantior capital campaign. Why have these maintenance issues been allowed to only become worse (and likely more expensive to fix)? Where is the money going to come from to address the deferred maintenance? Going coed and taking on new costs for additional sports fields, full-time coaches for new male athletic teams, and other projects will not solve this problem with the current facilities either.

Operating deficit: Is there an operating deficit? From an alumnae communications perspective, it appears that there is not. On page 10 of the 2005 President's Report it states that "The 2004-05 fiscal year of Randolph-Macon Woman's College ended with a slight surplus, marking our second consecutive balanced budget, and only the fifth balanced budget in the past 25 years. This surplus was achieved through aggressive general expense reductions totaling $450,000 and the use of one-time revenue sources totaling $640,000." On page 16 of the 2005 R-MWC President's Report the college reports an "operating surplus" of $26,743. On page 21 of the 2004 R-MWC President's Report it states "We increased our net tuition revenue, reduced our reliance on endowment income, and carefully managed our expenses to produce an operating surplus of $5,745. During the same period our endowment return exceeded 21%!" There is no reference made to an "operating deficit" - perhaps this will be explained in the 2006 R-MWC President's Report. If there is such a deficit, why haven't alumnae been made aware of it in the past? If tuition discounting stays abnormally high, alumnae contributions to the Annual Fund are significantly reduced, and new costs are shouldered to add male sports teams, how will the operating deficit be reduced under the coed model?

The SACS warning is a serious issue that deserves a serious response from the college. Instead of simply pointing to coeducation as the solution to these financial problems, the administration and the Board of Trustees should be accountable for and explain the decisions that have let these problems persist. They should explain why alumnae communications were virtually devoid of any discussion of these issues. Finally, they should outline for alumnae how the same trustees and administrators that have shepherded the college into this deplorable state will successfully take on the additional challenges of coeducation while attempting to find and implement solutions to institutional problems that have, so far, eluded them.

As always, PEC welcomes the opportunity to meet with the trustees to discuss the future of Randolph-Macon Woman's College and how concerned alumnae can secure R-MWC's future as a woman's college.

Vita abundantior,

PEC Board

Gail Ballou (R-MWC '64)
Carol Curcio Lang (R-MWC '68)
Diane U. Montgomery (R-MWC '85)
Anne Yastremski (R-MWC '05)
Martha McClerkin Durnett (R-MWC '85)

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