Lori Chadbourne sat crying in the parking lot of the Dudley Coe Health Center in late September. After six years sitting at the front desk working as the administrative coordinator for the Dudley Coe Health Center?a job she loved so much she hoped to work at Bowdoin for decades, until her retirement?she had decided to quit.
"It was a Friday afternoon and it was a horrendous day at the Health Center, and I just sat in my car in the parking lot and cried. I thought, 'I can't do this anymore,'" Chadbourne said. "I just felt like nobody was listening, nobody was listening anymore. There were so many problems at the health center. We would bitch and moan and complain and then we would try to present it in a more upbeat way. And, you know, the powers that be seemed to be receptive but then nothing would ever get done. I just felt like no one was listening, or the people who were listening didn't care enough about what I was saying to do anything about it," she said. After exactly six years working at Bowdoin, Chadbourne's last day at Dudley Coe was October 12.
At the health center, "There's transition on the staff, you have a change in model, you have shuffling of some people and it's going to take some time" to adjust to that, Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster said.
In the last year, the most startling change at the health center was the sudden departure of Former Director of Health Services and College Physician Dr. Jeffrey Benson, who left his position suddenly in January of 2007 under a veil of secrecy.
Benson's abrupt exit midway through the school year under mysterious circumstances was not related to quality-of-care issues, according to senior administrators.
"The quality of care that Jeff and the team provided?most of the team still being here?was very good," Dean of Students Tim Foster said.
"Jeff Benson's departure was a personnel issue and I'm not going to comment on it," President Barry Mills said. "I do want to say however that my impression of Jeff Benson's treatment of patients was at the highest caliber," Mills added.
An Internet search of the State of Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine database revealed a clean record with no board actions taken against Benson. He has been licensed to practice medicine in Maine since 1997.
Statewide and nationwide criminal background checks on Benson going back to the 1980s returned a clean record.
In January, during Winter Break, Senior Associate Dean of Students Margaret Hazlett and Student Health Program Administrator Caitlin Gutheil, who co-supervise the Health Center, called a staff meeting for the employees of Dudley Coe. Hazlett and Gutheil informed them that Dr. Benson was not returning to his position.
"Caitlin [Gutheil] was there and Margaret [Hazlett] was there and they said that Dr. Benson wasn't coming back," said Lori Chadbourne.
"The staff asked, 'Why isn't he? What happened to him?' and they answered 'personal reasons, he chose to leave?oh, and by the way, don't try to contact him,'" Chadbourne said.
Gutheil confirmed that she asked the staff not to contact Benson after his departure, but said she did so at the behest of the Human Resources (HR) department.
Director of Human Resources Tama Spoerri declined comment on any personnel issue, which she said is standard practice. "Anybody who is in HR will tell you confidentiality is the most sacred aspect of what we do," she said.
When asked whether it was standard practice for Health Center employees to be told not to talk to their former colleagues, Gutheil said "no, no."
In a January 20, 2007 e-mail to the College announcing Benson's departure, Foster wrote that Benson was "leaving the College to pursue other professional opportunities."
However in an interview with the Orient a month earlier, in December 2006, Benson emphasized how much he enjoyed his job at Bowdoin and the significant professional opportunities afforded to him at the College.
During his time at Bowdoin, Benson served on the Executive Board of both the Maine College Health Association (MCHA) and the New England College Health Association (NECHA). He served as president of the MCHA from 2004-2006 and served as president of the NECHA from 2006-2007. Benson was also involved in a number of community partnerships with the town of Brunswick, according to a copy of his curriculum vitae (CV) obtained by the Orient.
When reached for comment, Benson declined to cite specifics, only saying that "the arrangement under which I left required me and the College refrain from discussing the specific circumstances" of the departure. Benson now runs a private family practice in Freeport.
Benson, who began working at the College in 2000, was best-known to students for his weekly "Ask Dr. Jeff" column in the Orient, where he addressed various health and wellness issues of interest to Bowdoin community.
He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and got his M.D. at Harvard Medical School. Benson received a Master's in Public Health from Johns Hopkins.
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Benson was not the first director of Dudley Coe Health Center to depart from the position under unusual circumstances. Robin Beltramini, who was in charge of the health center for almost a decade, spoke with the Orient about her version of the events leading up to her departure from the College. She shared numerous documents with the Orient which she said corroborate significant portions of her narrative.
Administration officials declined repeated requests to discuss Beltramini's story, citing legal and ethical prohibitions against divulging information on personnel.
Beltramini, a nurse practitioner, was appointed as co-director of the health center in 1991 and became the sole director of Dudley Coe in 1996.
In 1998, Tim Foster, then the senior associate dean of student affairs, took over the supervision of Dudley Coe. With Foster at the helm of healthcare policy, Beltramini said she felt even more excluded from decision-making processes regarding healthcare policy.
"I found that my involvement was minimized in staff meetings and my opinions weren't sought out and my phone calls weren't answered," she said. "You got the feeling that you weren't part of the inner circle. There were department heads that were on the periphery?the Women's Resource Center and me," Beltramini explained in one of two interviews with the Orient.
The growing strain between Beltramini and the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs gave her the feeling that the College was biding its time until it could push her out, she said.
"I got the feeling that they didn't want to help me do a better job, they just wanted to start over," Beltramini said.
She said that by 1999, it seemed like the Dean's Office had decided Beltramini could never be reformed to fit it with their management style and attempted to come up with a reason to replace her.
"I think they thought I was incorrigible," Beltramini said. "They met with staff separately to try to dig up dirt on me." But, according to her, the Dean's Office could not find anything that would warrant her dismissal. She said that many students were fond of her and her quality of care was good. (Foster and former Dean of Students Craig Bradley confirmed that Beltramini's quality of care was not an issue.)
But Beltramini said she still felt that the Dean's Office wanted her gone.
"The hoops kept getting bigger and bigger, and I jumped through them," she said. And then they set them on fire and I made it through them too."
According to her, the metaphorical hoop on fire that Beltramini was forced to jump through was Dean Tim Foster's idea: a human resources (HR) expert in Portland would conduct a battery of psychological, verbal, mathematical, and professional tests and interviews to see if Beltramini was a good fit for Bowdoin and whether she was capable director of the Dudley Coe.
As Beltramini tells it, Foster gathered the staff of Dudley Coe together with Bowdoin's director of HR to hear the results of the analysis of Beltramini's performance?he had the HR specialist on speakerphone. The specialist explained that Beltramini was a good fit for the role.
An alleged copy of the confidential testing report given to the Orient by Beltramini appeared to confirm that portion of Beltramini's story. The report, conducted by Drake Inglesi Milardo, Inc., concluded, among other things, that "in general, Robin's personal profile does suggest that she can be effective as the Director of the healthcare center."
"The extensive testing?psychological, verbal, everything?proved I was capable of doing the job I was doing," Beltramini said. "But it was demeaning. I went into [it] determined to prove they were wrong and I was right," she said.
"But it wasn't a matter of right and wrong, it was a matter of I just didn't fit in with them," Beltramini said.
She said she was fired a few weeks later, on the last official day of the school year.
Beltramini was angry. "I went back to my office and was really upset and just started e-mailing students and staff I felt close to," she said.
Foster heard about her actions and called her telling her to stop. He then sent her an e-mail, a copy of which Beltramini provided to the Orient. Its authenticity could not be independently verified.
"Robin, I just wanted to confirm the conversation that we just had," Foster allegedly wrote on May 19, 2000. "I have received a number of calls and e-mails from students and staff of the College indicating that you are telling them you have been fired. As I told you Robin, what you are doing is short sighted and also arguably very inappropriate especially with respect to your involving students in this matter. Please stop doing this," the e-mail read.
Citing confidentiality regarding personnel issues, Foster declined repeated requests to comment on Beltramini's story.
"Again, I won't and can't comment on personnel matters," he said in an e-mail.
Beltramini felt strongly that Foster was wrong?the termination of health care providers has a big impact on students, she explained. "That's the bottom line, damn it," she insisted, "it does involve students."
She was shocked that Foster would think the sudden dismissal of healthcare providers would not have an effect on students. "I had unfinished medical business, unreported labs," she explained.
She now works at Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick, Maine.
In response to general questions about openness in the Office of the Dean of Student Affairs, President Mills said, "Tim Foster is the sweetest man on the face of the earth. And the idea that someone would feel that they can't speak their mind?I just find it hard to believe."
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Andree Appel, a physician assistant, began working at Bowdoin in early 2000. "It was my dream job," she said.
Appel began working per diem at Dudley Coe and later took a part time job there.
"I loved working with young adults," said Appel, who had recently completed three years working for the Peace Corps.
"I loved the interaction and I loved that people were at a point in their lives where they really needed a lot of education," Appel said. "There were a lot of opportunities to do a lot of health education...[with] contraception, women's health issues, and substance use issues."
In 2006 Appel resigned, thinking she would move to Washington D.C., but later changed her mind.
"Initially I had resigned because my husband worked in the D.C. and I was going to move down there but for a number a reasons I retracted that. They had already hired my replacement so I was just working per diem," Appel said.
From her position at the health center, Appel had watched the administration handle Benson's departure in a way she thought lacked tact and transparency. But she held her tongue.
It was the process of hiring his replacement, however, Appel said, that prompted her to act.
"Bowdoin has the right to hire whomever they like," she said in an interview with the Orient. "It's just that the process wasn't inclusive or participatory and was not transparent."
"The way most department heads are chosen at Bowdoin is by a search process," Appel said. "It's a good process when they implement it the way you would like it to be implemented, which is to bring in a broad range of people from different departments on campus and assemble a panel of highly qualified people, and then you arrive at a decision by consensus, really."
"And you also include the input from the people that are going to be working with this person...even though they might not be participants in the search per se, on the panel because they have a sense of what's needed," she said.
But, according to Appel, the search committee looking for a replacement for Benson was superseded by an administration decision.
"At some point they felt like it wasn't working; they really wanted to get somebody in there and they just... they short-circuited the process to put somebody in the director's position," she said.
"Having gone through the pool, it didn't seem like we had a high-quality pool of applicants," said Hazlett, who co-supervises the health center.
"We had hoped someone internal would apply...and we posted the position in the spring and we had maybe five or six responses at the point that Sandra stepped forward and said that she would be interested in doing the position on an interim basis," Gutheil, the student health program administrator, said.
Sandra Hayes is a nurse practitioner who was working at Bowdoin.
Although a search committee had been formed, it did not interview anyone because it had "just posted the position" when Hayes expressed her interest, Gutheil said.
"The administration told us they were going to do a search for a new medical director," Chadbourne, the former administrative assistant, said. "They said they were going to make sure this search was not going to end until we found the right person, and we were all going to have input on who the person was," she said.
"In the middle of the summer, Caitlin [Gutheil] called a meeting...and she announced at the meeting that Sandra Hayes had been appointed as the interim director," Chadbourne continued. "We were all kind of blindsided?what had happened to the massive search? They also mentioned that the position wasn't going to be full time. And we were just kind of like, once again, 'what the hell?'"
Hayes officially began in July, 2007.
"I want to be really clear, it's not about the person they chose, it's about the process," Appel said.
Over the summer, after Appel had time to mull over what had occurred, Appel wrote an e-mail to Gutheil and Hazlett. Gutheil confirmed receiving a letter airing concerns from Appel, but declined to comment on what it said. Appel provided a portion of the letter to Orient, the content of which could not be independently verified.
"I find it so unfortunate that there have been, even in my relatively short tenure at Bowdoin, a series of personnel actions that have been anything but transparent," it read. "It's not that I think that employees are entitled to know the why and wherefores of all employee comings and goings, but when Jeff left without any explanation (and Robin and Brenda before him), in the middle of break, and when we were asked not to talk to him, it created an uncomfortable sense of secrecy and lack of closure. It is, as a non-health center Bowdoin employee remarked, as though health center staff are periodically abducted by aliens?here one day, gone without explanation the next."
Appel, who was working for the College on a per-diem basis, said she has not been asked to work for Bowdoin since she sent the letter.
The hours Appel would have worked have been filled by other people, Gutheil said.
Responding to a general question about openness at the College, President Mills said, "Will people always feel that sometimes they aren't listened to? Sure, they will say that. I'll say that. Sometimes people don't listen to me. But if you try to look on balance...I think, by an objective standard, this is an incredibly open place; on a subjective standard, we work very hard to create avenues to say what's on their minds."
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Three months after breaking down in the Dudley Coe parking lot, Chadbourne now works with Jeff Benson at his practice in Freeport. She said she did not leave to work with him, but that, among the job offers she had, the package his practice offered was the most generous.
"It broke my heart [to leave Bowdoin]," Chadbourne said. "I thought I was going to be a lifer at Bowdoin...I thought I would be there for a long time, I thought I would retire from Bowdoin. And I really miss it, not just the people at the health center, but a lot of people I met through the years at Bowdoin?it's a great campus. But I just couldn't take it any more."
"I saw the health center going backwards," she said. "They'd take a step forward and then two steps backward."