By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Joel Phillips has been teaching at Westminster Choir College for 32 years, long enough to be around the last time the future of the renowned music school was in doubt.
Now, he, his fellow faculty members and students find them at another crossroads in Westminster’s history.
“The main thing is it does not seem like a good course of action to sell Westminster, there’s no reason for it,” said Westminster faculty member Elizabeth Scheiber during a rally that drew around 80 Rider and Westminster faculty and students to the music school campus on Monday afternoon.
Her comments come in response to Rider University pursuing that option — a move that would end a 25-year relationship between the two sides.
“Our number one goal is to keep Westminster in Princeton on this campus,” said 1990 alumna Laurie Bischof, a member of the Westminster Alumni Council, to those at the rally. “We have serious concerns about our campus being uprooted and moved elsewhere.”
Rider has raised the possibility that if a future buyer only wants the choir college, the university would be left to sell the more than 20-acre campus to a third party.
Phillips used some of his remarks to recall when Westminster nearly had to close. “Some of us were there in those days, they seem ancient and away,” he said. “But when you live through something like that, it scars you for life.”
The decision on Westminster comes with the Rider administration having to reach a new contract with its faculty union, as the current deal expires at the end of August.
Rider professor Dave Dewberry, attending the rally with his 18-month-old son Robbie sitting on his shoulders, said faculty are looking for “just a fair, honest contract, fair, honest negotiations where we can keep Rider and Westminster as one where everybody’s working together doing what they need.”
“We’re not trying to get rich, we’re not trying to ruin the institution,” he said. “We just want a good place to work.”
The faculty union recently passed a no confidence vote in Rider President Gregory G. Dell’Omo and his financial team. The leader of the union said the Rider board of trustees should rescind the “morally bankrupt” decision to part ways with Westminster.
“We think that it’s not necessary to sell this institution,” said Art Taylor, president of the Rider chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the faculty union. “So you can’t just uproot these programs and take them to another institution, unless they have the facilities.”
“They envision a strip mall here or something along those lines,” Taylor said of the Rider administration. “I don’t know if the town of Princeton envisions that.”
