12. Save Mills Coalition Steps Up, Hillman Administration Gets Vote...

We Have Only Just Begun To Fight

The battle for Mills College is now underway.

In many ways this is a classic story of Good vs Evil. Wealthy, greedy white people plotting in secret to shut down a beloved icon of BIPOC people. Instead of raising minority students up with a world class education and lucrative career opportunities; pander to them, lie to them, trick them into following a path that leads to gentrification and shuts them out of the community they created. Shroud it all in a smokescreen of social justice, and assume they won't be smart enough to figure out what is really going on.

The Baddies

Trying to terminate the College: a small clique of old white people, none below the age of 50, most of them in their 70's. The President, some employees in her management team, and some long-term members of the Board of Trustees. Let's call them The Cabal.

The Goodies

Trying to save the College: students, alums, faculty (current and former), staff, the East Bay community, and the global academic community who have reached out in the thousands to lend support for keeping Mills open. This network is growing week by week, becoming organized and informed, gathering resources and supporters. People who love the College, know first hand the mistakes it has been making in the Hillman era, and care passionately about fixing it. Let's call them The Resistance.

There are about a thousand current students, over 26,000 alumnae (in 64 countries), and a few hundred faculty and staff. Not to mention all the friends, family, colleagues, and social media audiences of this group. A big army, and one that is just starting to get riled up. Educated, talented, resourceful, determined.

The Board of Trustees has 33 members, including President Hillman. 11 out of the 33, a full third of the Board, list "University of California" in their bios. 21 of them are alumnae of Mills College. 7 of them are men. 8 of them live outside of California. 25 of them are white. The sole Latinx is Cabal member Ophelia Basgal, who happens to be from UC Berkeley's Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Hispanic students are the largest racial group attending the College, yet she is the only one on the Board of Trustees. This is the "leadership in diversity and social justice" underpinning their Institute?

The Stakes Are High:

Cabal objective: close the College forever, take over the $200+ million endowment for a "Mills Institute" which they design and control, and give the billions of dollars of assets to some Third Party. We don't quite know whom; for all we know UC Berkeley is just a smokescreen for the real transaction.

Resistance Objective: preserve Mills College as a private, top-ranking degree-granting university on its own land, serving predominantly women and non-binary students. Retain everything Mills College owns and stop the degradation of its brand and assets. Replace the failed Cabal with a new team who drive the College to greater success. Fix the structural problems caused by years of mismanagement.

Do The Baddies Think They're Goodies?

It's hard to imagine how anyone could make the argument that closing the College forever is in the best interests of the College. So far all we've heard is "muh COVID" and "muh liberal arts Colleges are struggling". Unfortunately for The Cabal, Mills College prides itself on teaching critical thinking. Your endowment was $180 million last year and now it's above $200 million, but you're broke. Uh-huh.

HBCU's have had a record-breaking year with both the government and philanthropic foundations s throwing money at them, yet somehow the majority minority Mills couldn't figure out how to capitalize on that. Uh-huh.

History is on the side of the resistance. The diverse population of Mills College has fought off similar outrageous moves from a majority-white Board of Trustees in the past. It's also survived previous pandemics, world wars, depressions and recessions, even the social revolutions of the 60's where Mills College gained world fame for addressing racial justice issues.

The numbers are on the side of the resistance. Tens of thousands of direct connections to the College; add in family, workmates and social media audiences and we're talking about a potentially huge force. Against, what? 9 people who want to close the College for an Institute? The Cabal may hold the reins of power and control the flow of information, but so far they have not been able to articulate any vision that a reasonable person could get behind. It's a vision with no supporters. The public town hall meetings have highlighted how much they lack transparency, consistency and a handle on financial details. Social media is awash with observations of the disingenuousness of saying they are "listening to concerns" while their actions tell a different story.

Actions Have Consequences

Have The Cabal really thought this through? They are surrounded and outnumbered, and they are not living in castles behind moats and fortifications. They're all easy to find and they're making a lot of people very angry. For what? Ego? Why is the death of this history-making university so important to them? Did they think they could just close down Mills College then continue on with their daily lives as if nothing ever happened, oblivious to any repercussions? This is Oakland, not Tiburon. Things get handled differently on the East side of the Bay and people have looooooooong memories. Lives are already being destroyed by this attempted hit on our beloved centuries-old College - at a time when all around the world people are struggling with heightened mental health issues.

Perhaps the small and determined group behind this plan are not worried about spending the rest of their own lives looking over their shoulders because they are already so advanced in years. Still, we wonder how they can live with themselves and have their families be proud of their actions.

Nobody's Buying It

The reputation destruction has only just begun with a vote of No Confidence from Mills faculty against President Hillman and the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees.

They included Provost Julia Sudbury, aka "Chinyere Oparah", another one who came to Mills College from the University of California. Last February she accepted a job at USF. Despite this she stayed on for months at Mills to help advance the administration's plans to shut it down.

The stigma of what these people have tried to do to Mills College will remain with them wherever they go, perhaps even remain on their family names for generations. Is that why "Oparah" uses an alias?

Kicking The Political Football Into The Arena

Both the AAMC and the Save Mills Coalition have retained attorneys. Save Mills have raised more than $50,000 from their GoFundMe. At the time of writing, we can find no evidence of Court Documents being filed. If this does happen we will discuss it here. A fight in Court is a fight in public, and we hope that the discovery process brings transparency.

The Save Mills Coalition's legal team at Altshuler Berzon have already written to California's Attorney-General Rob Bonta to ask him to stop the harm The Cabal are doing to Mills College before it really is too late. The organization's Articles of Incorporation state explicitly "to maintain an institution of learning of the College or university grade". Bonta literally came from Mills College, but so far neither he, nor local Congresswoman and famous Mills alum Barbara Lee, nor Oakland local Vice President Kamala Harris have done anything to stop this train.

Inside Job?

Governor Gavin Newsom seems to have taken a particular personal interest in Mills College, sending his Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis to the UC Board of Regents Finance Committee meeting specifically to ask about Mills. You can see that here, as well as calls from founding members of the Save Mills Coalition who called into the Public Comments session of the Regents meeting.

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WATCH: UC Board of Regents Discuss Mills College; Save Mills Coalition Call In (May 2021)

Perhaps the Governor sent his Lt to check if Mills needed to be mentioned in the announcement he made the next day: the largest state investment in UC's history, $806 million including $300 million for deferred maintenance, upgrades and energy efficiency. Berkeley has to compete with the other 9 universities in the system for their share of that. So far it doesn't look like UC has any intention of applying that money to Mills. So how are they proposing to take on Mills College's alleged financial distress? UC Berkeley's expected deficit for this year is $340 million.

Although we have been informed by President Hillman that Mills College is in dire straits and has to close down urgently, there's no time to even discuss it...UC Berkeley seems to be in no great rush. They signed a deal to formalize their partnership with Mills College in 2017, they started merger discussions in early 2020, now here they are still talking about things they might be able to do together in mid-2021. This is not the pace of decision-making that solves financial emergencies: it is the pace that creates and accelerates them.

UC Berkeley have a Long Range Development Plan (LRDP) but this does not include Mills College. Any future collaboration with Mills would require a separate LRDP to be developed. The current one has been underway since early 2019 and has still not been approved. This suggests a new Mills College LRDP is unlikely to be approved by the UC Board of Regents any time soon. How does President Hillman plan to keep Mills College afloat while UC Berkeley develops their plans and gets them signed off by their Board and the State, if that process takes multiple years? What happens if Newsom loses the recall?

UC Berkeley's Long Range Development Plan Doesn't Include Mills College:

[Source]

See The Spell, Man

As stakeholders and interested citizens start to see the disconnect between President Hillman's words and actions, the spell is being broken and many are waking up from the trance. The vagueness of her grasp on financial matters is of grave concern. This offers some explanation as to how such a wealthy and historically successful organization could find itself in this position. According to Hillman, Mills needs $3 million, or $500 million, or a billion. She's not quite sure, but she's certain that an Institute is the answer. She's not certain what an Institute is or does, but she is confident that a $200+ million endowment and billion dollar campus will be more than enough assets to get it going. Would it be sustainable over the long term? Not sure.

What benefit this "Mills Institute" has for students, if it will even be on the Mills College campus or using the Mills name in any way, remains unclear more than 2 months after the announcement. Why? Is it that they figured they have to close the College for an Institute, but they just haven't spent any time thinking about what that would be and how it would operate? Or have they been designing this for years - and the reality of their plan is so bad that they know if details of it got out they would never get away with it?

An Alternative Choice: Excellence and Success

The Save Mills coalition are offering a more positive approach. Why fight? It seems unnecessary, another poor decision that only compounds the administration's previous failures. Why waste the treasure of the $200 million+ endowment on lawyers and other transaction advisers, just to push through something that nobody outside the President's Office and Executive Committee is expressing any support for?

WATCH: Save Mills Coalition Message to the Board of Trustees

We are not part of the Save Mills Coalition but we support these ideas. The Save Mills plan seems very sound, particularly given that it has been developed despite an environment of secrecy and disinformation. They're bringing at least $10 million to cover the College's short term debts, which as far as we know are $8 million. We know at least $2 million of that is a loan from the Alumnae Association, which presumably can be re-negotiated if the College is to stay open. This leaves the College free of short-term debt AND with a $4 million cash buffer - on top of whatever they might already have. Save Mills are also offering hundreds of volunteers to help bolster enrollment and new programs that seem likely to attract students and commercial partners.

The Save Mills plan would pivot the College away from its current path over the cliff of self-destruction back to one of academic leadership. America has many cities with social justice issues but only one Silicon Valley - and only one Mills College. It seems remarkably stupid to ignore the unique geographical advantage of the nearby massively wealthy tech companies - many of them with Mills alums in senior positions. Tapping into this seems a no-brainer that would be of great benefit to students. Students who leave the College for successful careers become alums who donate to support it in the future.

President Hillman chose to take the College in the opposite direction. Lower tuition, lower academic standards, less tenured professors, fewer courses, less enrollment outreach, fewer future career paths. It seems she and her small handful of supporters are now faced with two choices:

a) accept that their strategy failed and resign; or
b) insist that their strategy and execution was brilliant, it was just bad luck because of COVID that it didn't work, so the only thing left to do is close the College down and become an Institute.

In any corporation, shareholders would force outcome a). Instead, this is a non-profit organization. So far it looks like the Board of Trustees is happy to just roll over and accept b) - because a) also implicates them in voting for these decisions that turned out to be mistakes. Better to shut it all down forever before anyone finds out, than acknowledge they made an error and step aside for competent replacements - whose future success would only further highlight their own failures.

It seems the height of racism to assume that Mills College should lower academic standards and tuition levels in order to attract more students from marginalized communities. Spelman, "America's oldest private historically black liberal arts college for women" charges about what Mills College used to before President Hillman's term: $43,244 per year. Spelman just broke a new record on applications by focusing on career paths in tech:

[Source]

Want Mills College to keep going the way it did for 170 years? Just restore tuition and academic standards back to where they have always been. Revenues, enrollments, prestige will all come back.

WATCH: Mills College 2017 Tuition Reset Advertisement

REFERENCES

$8m debt - FY2020 Audited Financial Statements https://inside.mills.edu/about-mills/financial-reports.php

$806m for UC from Governor Newsom - https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-statement-governor-newsom-s-2021-22-revised-budget

Spelman record admissions - https://universitybusiness.com/wild-ride-for-admissions-what-2020-21-may-mean-for-fall/

Global Academic community expresses outrage and support:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

UC Berkeley Long Range Development Plan 2021:
https://lrdp.berkeley.edu/documents

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12. Save Mills Coalition Steps Up, Hillman Administration Gets Voted Down