Dear President Patterson:
Your recent e-mail is appreciated, but comes too little, too late. My decision to withhold any and all future financial donations (after giving faithfully for 25 years) remains unchanged. Only a renewed pledge to maintain the downtown colleges will change my stance.
I believe that you, personally, have seriously mishandled this whole affair. If, as you say in your letter, you have alumni e-mail addresses on file, a communication should have been sent to us as soon as these discussions were taking place. Instead, many of us found out by chance after the fact, creating a climate of shock, distrust and opposition.
What should have been an open and honest communication process -- with the president playing 'honest broker' -- has deteriorated into an exercise in damage control.
Particularly rankling was the fact that, during all of this, alumni were being contacted to make their annual contributions without any indication being made that the university was embroiled in a bitter dispute about the future of the downtown colleges. This was at best incompetent, at worst deceitful.
Were I the government, rendering a decision regarding Trent's application for SuperBuild funding, I would have serious misgivings about handing over money to an institution rife with internal dissent and conflicting visions. The blame for this atmosphere can only be laid at one person's doorstep -- yours.
Fraser Duff, B.A., B.Ed.