The Board of Trustees agreed at its meeting last weekend to vote in early January on whether or not to uphold Macalester’s current need-blind admissions policy, President Brian Rosenberg said.

At a public session on Saturday, Rosenberg gave students who support the current policy the opportunity to address the Trustees during time allotted for his own remarks.

The 32 trustees were on campus last Friday and Saturday for their annual fall meeting. The Board met on Saturday morning to deliver reports on the activities of trustee committees, which met during the day on Friday.

Natalia Espejo ’07 spoke at the beginning of the meeting on behalf of a group of nearly 30 students present to support need-blind. She presented a petition that she said 402 Macalester students signed to express their support for retaining the current admissions policy. According to Espejo, the petition drive was a last-minute effort that garnered the signatures of an overwhelming majority of students who passed by the petition table set up in the basement of the Campus Center last Friday.

Speaking before the trustees, Espejo characterized need-blind admissions in terms of quality and access.

“Excellence is embodied by access,” she said. “I want you to know that if only 20 students cannot be here because of need-aware admissions, it is unacceptable to sacrifice their potential contribution to our campus for the sake of economic advancement. Rejecting students based on wealth runs contrary to Macalester’s tradition of excellence,” she said.

The Board of Trustees is the primary administrative decision-making body at Macalester and is composed of 28 alumni, President Brian Rosenberg and three non-alumni members.

Originally, the meeting agenda allowed no time for public addresses from students or alumni to the Board on the admissions policy debate.

Rosenberg ceded the floor to Espejo during the time he was scheduled to deliver his presidential report.

William Sentell ’02, an alumnus who maintains the blog www.needblind.com, wrote in a Sept. 30 entry that Mark Vander Ploeg, the chairman of the Board of Trustees, turned down his request to speak for ten minutes before the Trustees.

“It suggests that the board isn’t really serious about discussing this issue or hearing from alums, despite Rosenberg’s call for discussion,” Sentell wrote in the entry. “For an issue like this one, the Board of Trustees needs to bend over backwards to accommodate students and alums and anyone else who has a stake in this matter.”

Vander Ploeg did not respond to The Mac Weekly’s requests for comment.

Trustee John Law ’72, in an interview on Wednesday, indicated that discussion needs to be a major part of the decision-making process.

“I think this is a new enough issue that I think that everyone not only has to talk but do some listening [about] the issue as well,” he said.

Law spoke about the final report issued by the Resource Planning Committee, which outlines the current alternative to our admissions policy that is being discussed.

“It is my understanding that this finding was a unanimous finding of the committee,” he said. “I hope the student members of the committee also express their view on what I think was support for…the committee’s findings and recommendations.”

Law said that he appreciated Espejo’s speech before the Board. “[It was] a useful point of view for the trustees to hear,” he said.

He added, however, that she only addressed one side of the issue.

“I think there are a lot of different dimensions to this issue that were not covered in her presentation and that need to be understood by anyone interested in the situation,” he said. “I got the feeling that this has hit the campus this fall and people are thinking of this in relatively narrow ways at this point.”

Law described two primary elements of Macalester’s financial situation that must be understood: first, that financial aid is the college’s only operating expense without a spending cap, and second, that the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center and Field House are in desperate need of updating. President Rosenberg has said that fundraising is already underway for these building projects.

Following Espejo’s speech, committee representatives delivered updates on the status of the various trustee committees, including the Admissions, Trustees and Finance Committees. Each of these committees met last Friday.

The Board also unanimously approved the Finance Committee’s proposal to refinance two bonds taken out in 1994 and 1997 in an attempt to generate additional revenue on those bonds.

Investment Committee chair Timothy Hultquist ’72 announced that, as of June 30 of this year, Macalester’s endowment had a value of $487 million. The endowment grew in the previous year due in part to profitable real estate trust investments.

Hultquist also talked about the committee’s new focus on socially responsible investment, an idea that he said students introduced at last year’s fall Board meeting. According to Hultquist, the Board of Trustees formed a Social Responsibility Subcommittee after meeting last fall to advise the Investment Committee on making appropriate investments.

A private executive session followed the public portion of the Board’s Saturday meeting.

Espejo said that a trustee approached her after she spoke and indicated interest in talking with students about possible solutions to the need-blind issue.

“Hopefully there’ll be room for dialogue,” Espejo said. “It won’t be decided without us making very clear what our position is.”