Westfield State University has spent years in leadership crises.
One president, Evan Dobelle, retired after being suspended for misusing funds.
The most recent president, Ramon Torrecilha, lost a vote of no confidence by faculty. They criticized what they called his top-down approach and failure to listen to faculty and staff.
So when Claudia Ciano-Boyce, president of the faculty union, got a call from the new, interim president, Roy Saigo, the first week he started, she was pleasantly surprised.
“That was a very big sign that we were significant and that he wanted to listen,” Ciano-Boyce said.
Even during my interview, Saigo wanted to ask questions about my childhood, family and upbringing.
“I often find interesting things about reporters and how you got to where you are from where you were,” he explained.
This is not a hypothetical question for him.
Saigo and his family spent three years in a Japanese internment camp during World War II and got bullied for their ethnicity after the war.
“And nobody spoke for us,” he said. “So when I became university president, I coined the phrase saying, ‘I'm the voice of those who have no voice.’”
To Saigo, that translates to a solicitous style of leadership. He spent his first month at Westfield State living in a dorm along with a few early-arriving students.
“I walk around in shorts and T-shirts, nobody knows who I am,” he said. “And so I get to know students. I get to know custodians, I get to know the cooks. We get to know each other and I make the best friends. I learn about the institution.”
Saigo, 80, is technically retired. He was a biology professor and administrator before spending seven years as president of St Cloud University in Minnesota. He’s since been hired as a short-term fixer for universities in crisis.
His $240,000 contract at Westfield State — about the same salary as his predecessors — is for one year, while the university searches for a permanent president.
“When I came, we had all this stuff — history, issues, no confidence,” he said, “and people were kind of angry, upset, maybe even defeated.”
To break the ice, he asked a lot of personal questions about people’s families, their health, their interests.
“If you don't take time to care about the essence of people, why are we here?” Saigo said.
One English instructor, Rebecca Olander, said Saigo attended her Zoom poetry reading and sent a handwritten note of congratulations.
“We’ve never been more physically distant from each other as members of our WSU community, yet the warmth coming from our interim president helps us feel closer,” Olander wrote in an email.
But even more than his attentiveness, union president Ciano-Boyce, a psychology professor, said she’s impressed by his collaborative style of governance.
“It's not turning over the whole thing and saying we (the faculty) get to make decisions. He has decisions to make,” Ciano-Boyce said. “But there's this mutual respect that I've never experienced, ever.”
And Saigo has had tough decisions to make, right off the bat. Unlike some colleges this fall, he did not cancel in-person classes or dorm living because of COVID. But he did delay their start dates, and — this past week —went back to remote classes after a cluster of positive tests.
Saigo also had to tackle a $7.5 million deficit. So he created a committee with 25 campus stakeholders and asked them to find cost-savings without furloughs or layoffs.
“Twenty-five brains are better than my one brain,” Saigo said.
He’s also started on some long-term goals, including recruiting more students across the state and reaching out to students of color, especially in Springfield and Holyoke. He wants to more than double the current Latino population on campus, to at least 25%.
Saigo said he wants to make it easier for community college students to transfer into Westfield State.
“We are the ones that are available for a reasonably priced quality education for social mobility,” he said. “If we don't take care of the folks that I'm talking about … this institution is going to implode.”
With the pandemic, Saigo has not met many people in person. But the student government president, Samuel Tsongalis, said Saigo is easy to reach during his Zoom office hours, and he’s been willing to reverse unpopular decisions, like the disbanding of a student ambassador program.
“His message is always just to treat Westfield State students as one of his own children,” Tsongalis said.
However, for many students, the university president is just not on their radar. I asked students waiting at a campus building if they had a sense about who Saigo is or what he’s about.
“Not really,” said freshman Jack Kelly.
“I just know his name from, like, the emails that we've gotten from about the safe opening,” said Kaylea Cornwell, a junior.
“I just vaguely see the emails that come through,” said senior Matthew Giebel. “I don't really know who he is or what he's about. I just know he's the president of the university.”
There’s not much time to get to know Saigo before a new president arrives next year.
The Board of Trustees will make the hire, though faculty and community members are on the search committee.
Union members say they’re hoping the more transparent climate on campus will translate to a collaborative search process — and lead to a university president much like the current one.
