Shirley Collado Leaves Ithaca College for College Track

Shirley M. Collado, president of Ithaca College, announced Thursday that she will step down early next year after four years in the post. The news of his departure comes amid major budget cuts and a significant reduction in faculty at the private liberal arts college.

Collado is leaving Ithaca to become President and CEO of College Track, an organization dedicated to helping low-income, first-generation students complete their college education.

“This move is not something I was looking for,” Collado said. “I was very, very focused on Ithaca.”

College Provost Jerne Terry Cornish will assume the role of Interim President from August 30, 2021. Collado will remain in Ithaca until January 10 and serve as a senior advisor to Cornish and the Ithaca College Board of Trustees.

The board will use the next six months to determine what qualities and experience it wants for the next president and how best to approach a search process, according to a statement from David Lissy, chairman of the board, and Jim Nolan, vice-chairman of the board. They did not provide a timeline for the next presidential search.

Collado’s presidency was celebrated when she was announced in February 2017. She made history as the first university president to attend university thanks to a program funded by the Posse Foundation, an organization that sends groups of disadvantaged students enroll together in various colleges.

She said leaving the private liberal arts college in upstate New York four years after arriving was bittersweet.

“The timing is never good,” she said. “It is a difficult thing to go from a place where you have been truly invested and loved to something which is just as extraordinary.”

Collado has received broad support from the Board of Directors throughout his tenure.

“On behalf of the Board of Trustees, we extend our sincere congratulations to President Collado on her appointment to College Track and express our deep gratitude for her service to Ithaca College over the past four years,” wrote Lissy and Nolan in the press release. “While we are saddened that she is leaving college, we are pleased that she is given this extraordinary opportunity to help support college access for deserving students – a personal and professional passion that she has brought to the table. to all his work at IC. “

The reaction among core faculty members has been more mixed. Collado, Cornish and the Ithaca administration came under fire last year after announcing the dismissal of more than 100 of the college’s 547 faculty members, with the cuts focusing on part-time adjunct faculty members and not permanent.

Rachel Fomalhaut, a lecturer in writing and women and gender studies at the college and president of the Ithaca College Teachers Union, said some faculty members were upset by Collado’s announcement of her departure. and said she was dropping out of college just after wreaking havoc on the faculty ranks. . Fomalhaut was one of the licensees. She teaches summer classes but will not return to Ithaca in the fall.

“Like a lot of people, I predicted that was what was going to happen,” Fomalhaut said. “Because what we see in higher education is that administrators come in, they write huge paychecks, they gut the programs, they fire a bunch of professors like President Collado did, then they set off for their bright future and they leave a mess in their wake. “

Other faculty members were taken aback by Collado’s announcement.

“Most of the e-mails I have received today from faculty express surprise,” wrote Dan Breen, associate professor of English and chairman of the American Association of University Professors’ section. college, in an email.

Breen said he hopes the Ithaca community will use the transition to think about ways to include all campus constituencies in college decision making.

“The important thing for the faculty and staff here is to remember that many of the issues we encountered over the past year have a lot to do with the governance structure of Ithaca College,” said Breen. “It’s something that’s pretty deeply rooted and has less to do with an administrator’s tenure and more to do with long-term changes in the culture of higher education in the United States.”

Collado’s departure from academia is not unusual, said L. Jay Lemons, president and senior consultant at Academic Search.

“For most people, being a college or university presidency is the cornerstone of their career,” he said. “Yet there are countless examples of people who have had secondary acts that have taken them into the world of adjacent organizations such as foundations, think tanks, and organizations that could serve higher education more broadly. “

Yet Collado’s tenure is relatively short – the average college president spends 6.5 years at an institution, according to a 2016 study by the American Council on Education.

Lemons said he wouldn’t be surprised if the stress of the pandemic caused the average president’s tenure to fall further.

“I am very concerned about the high cost of living during this pandemic, in terms of the wear and tear of presidents who already have important and difficult jobs,” he said.

Collado said she made the decision to leave Ithaca on her own and that no one pressured him to resign.

“If everyone loves you and there’s no tension around decisions, you can’t run an organization in a great way,” she said. “Regardless of opinions on campus, I really feel confident that I have done what I need to do and that I am thinking about this long term vision of putting students first. “