Photo by Samuel Jackson for The Lafayette

The no-confidence vote against college President Nicole Hurd was passed at the Jan. 28 faculty meeting.

The successful no-confidence vote against college President Nicole Hurd came together in a matter of weeks, but the tensions that led to it were brewing for years, according to members of the faculty. The Lafayette compiled a rough timeline of events cited as motivators of the motion.

The strain surfaced in 2023 with a proposal for a new dean structure and the sudden resignation of the faculty governance committee chair. Faculty members at the time said the Hurd administration did not adequately involve them in creating the structure, and shared governance concerns were linked to the chair’s “resignation-in-protest.”

After an impromptu meeting of faculty leaders, a small group penned a letter to Hurd criticizing poor communication and the “top-down approaches and bureaucracy” of her administration, as well as “the hollowing out of administrative and professional staff.”

Two of the letter’s authors, then-religious studies department head Eric Ziolkowski and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies department head Mary Armstrong, were signatories of the no-confidence motion.

At the time, four senior administrators had departed under Hurd, including two who collected severance pay. Four more senior administrators have left since.

“We have the continuity,” Robin Rinehart, a religious studies professor, said of the faculty. “We’re so used to seeing those things functioning reasonably smoothly when things start to go off the rails, we notice.”

According to history professor Joshua Sanborn, who was present at the meeting of faculty leaders, a sense that faculty concerns were “not reaching the people that it needs to reach” led to the letter.

Hurd addressed some, but not all, of the concerns in a letter of her own, leaving some faculty dissatisfied.

“Since then, the serious concerns communicated by the faculty in good faith have gone for the most part unheeded—not only by this president, but also by the board of trustees,” Ziolkowski wrote in an email.

Hurd and Board of Trustees Chairman Bob Sell ‘84 declined to comment.

In February of 2024, faculty again complained that they were being excluded from Hurd’s vision for the college. A proposed draft of the college’s mission and values statement equated faculty with staff in cultivating an “undergraduate learning environment” and labeled athletics as a “co-curricular pursuit” equal to academics, equivalencies that received fierce pushback at a faculty meeting.

Sanborn, who spoke against the statement at the meeting, said he hoped the Hurd administration would offer “a clear sense that academic excellence was what we needed to prioritize in terms of investment.”

Hurd withdrew the statement from consideration after 45 minutes of debate, and the faculty approved a revised version the next month.

In April, changes made to an annual award ceremony by the Division of Student Life met firm opposition from faculty members concerned with the removal of Aaron O. Hoff — the college’s first Black student — from the ceremony’s title, as well as the deletion of all teaching awards. Hurd was not directly implicated in the changes, but they underscored some faculty members’ belief that her administration was cutting them out of decision-making, according to several faculty members.

Rinehart, one of 29 signatories on a faculty letter objecting to the changes, said she believed that the division staff “genuinely didn’t know” the implications of the decision but that this was “symptomatic of what now seems to be a kind of chronic dysfunction.”

The changes were quickly reversed, but tensions remained. Caroline Lee, the Anthropology & Sociology department head and a leader of the no-confidence movement, said she warned the Board of Trustees over the summer that a no-confidence vote was imminent “if we continued in this direction.”

Tensions came to a head in the fall during the strategic planning process. Hurd’s alleged failure to adequately integrate the faculty into strategic planning ultimately led to the no-confidence vote, according to faculty members who pushed for it.

In a November meeting, the faculty passed a motion asserting that faculty members ought to have a formal vote on the strategic plan, which Hurd did not arrange herself. The so-called “vote on a vote” passed by a lopsided margin.

The faculty narrowly rejected the strategic plan at its next meeting, but the Board of Trustees unanimously approved it anyway.

“This is what we do, this is what shared governance is,” Rinehart said. “The faculty have a particular role. When something addresses the academic future and vision of the college, then the faculty should have a say in it.”

The faculty’s rejection was not explicitly mentioned in a community-wide email from Hurd and Sell touting the plan’s large approval margins by other constituencies, an omission that frustrated some faculty members. By acting unilaterally, Lee said, the board was “forcing” the faculty into a no-confidence vote.

Rinehart said she could not point to one specific event as the reason for the vote, citing a repeated lack of opportunities for faculty to voice their opinions.

“Death by a thousand cuts,” she said. “It’s not even that you’re not being heard, but you don’t necessarily have an opportunity to say something that’s important. And then on those rare occasions when you do, there’s no particular follow-up.”

While the no-confidence vote passed by an 8-point margin, faculty opinions are still split as to whether voting at all was the right move.

“I think that events get cast to fit the narrative,” said biology professor Nancy Waters, who said she voted against the no-confidence motion. Waters said she interpreted the events leading up to the vote with forbearance, while she believed others may have had a perspective of “skepticism.”

“The faculty itself as a body is really what’s broken,” Waters said. “I’d like to see us get the hell out of the president’s way and out of one another’s way, and get to the work that we’re supposed to do.”