New College Independent Alumni/ae Association

As noted in July, there were three individuals who had to know the details of the financial frauds that led to the present financial crisis. They were Renee Stonework, Carol Small, and Sienna SK Man. In order for these crimes to take place, though, school president Martin Hamilton and board of trustees finance chair Kristin Faust had to be involved.

Why did they all resign? Why haven’t they been subpoenaed?

With the trustees continuing to perpetuate misperceptions in order to avoid 

being held personally accountable, it is not surprising to find students 

(and faculty) bewildered and confused. But if you go back to the July 31 

meeting with the trustees, where faculty and alumni made specific demands for 

accountability, I think you will find what needs to be demanded now. Perhaps a 

formal request to the Office of the Inspector General, copied to the U.S. 

Attorney's office in San Francisco, as well as the Department of Education, 

would prompt some assistance in uncovering the cover-up. 

Demanding the full accounting we all supported last summer is the only path to 

restitution. Anything else is just eyewash.

I couldn’t mentally bear to deal with how deceptive and coercive everything was at New College. It basically mirrors the situation I was in growing up with my verbally and emotionally abusive father.

At New College, I was just eating up the school’s rhetoric and I was thinking someone was going to help me and validate me and I was so glad I came to New College and was feeling like my life was going to change and I was going to heal.

I decided to go to New College because it would be quick and accredited and because I believed in the mission and wanted this great healing magical experience. Looking back at that I still get so mad, because it feels like some there really wanted to tell me not to waste my time with this crumbling farce but had to protect the school instead.  Why would they respond that way?  The only thing I can tell myself in order to make any sense of it is that they really believe in the mission of NC but that they see themselves as some sort of martyrs to the cause and they had to maintain their silence to protect the school, even if it means basically lying to a kid like me who’s desperately looking for answers.

The ways that I learned to cope and survive during my childhood leave me an excellent target for these same kind of strategies from an ill-intentioned institution like New College, and I really feel like New College actively victimized me because they knew the kind of person I was and the kind of problems I had and they knew they could get money from me.

But additionally, they figured, if I did want to say  something, I wouldn’t have a good enough grasp of the situation to say anything- I’d be an emotional wreck and no one would take me seriously. And if a few people did take me seriously or agree with me or have the same experience and desire to articulate and rectify their situations, they’d be overwhelmed, as was the case, by all the people loyal to the college and the Cause and the people who would intimidate them and outnumber them and more or less shield the people responsible for the harm. So that nothing could be done, and the college would go on operating as usual and seeking out more damaged souls like me with our idealism, despair, and broken college records, thus perpetuating this cycle.

And this seems criminal to me, at least in spirit, in addition to being really debilitating and a major catalyst of the explosive increase in depression that caused me to lose a job while in school and precipitated the increasingly unbearable levels of daily anxiety.

Not that I’m saying New College gave me these problems, but they fed them knowingly and exacerbated them while pretending to be an institution that offers belonging and caring and help and hope and understanding and whatever other empty rhetoric.

Because of this an opportunity to heal and learn has been turned into a major setback for me mentally, financially, socially, and scholastically.  I’ve been maliciously abandoned by this school. I’m in debt, I still wrestle with the events emotionally and mentally, and still there’s no one to answer for it.

—Anonymous