Westfield Faculty Urges Trustees to Resign

The head of the faculty union at Westfield State College this week described its "no confidence" vote in three college trustees as "an expression of the faculty's anger."

The three trustees, who have said they won't quit, approved a $10,000 state payment to a student who claimed he was sexually assaulted by former college president Francis J. Pilecki, and then claimed that the payment had been for "academic deficiencies."

After alumni and professors raised a ruckus, the lawyers, who reached the settlement, acknowledged it had stemmed from the sexual allegations. Pilecki, 52, was indicted in June on charges of sexually assaulting two male students. A pre-trial conference in his case was postponed yesterday because Pilecki remains hospitalized for severe depression at McLean Hospital in Cambridge.

The union can't force the trustees out, said Michael Engle, president of the Westfield chapter of the Massachusetts State College Association, although the "no confidence" vote, adopted by the 90 professors who attended the Tuesday afternoon meeting, urged trustees Chairman Jane Berry, past chairman Charles Hapcook and trustee Sophie Chmura to resign. The union has 160 members.

"It was more an expression of protest," he said. "And an attempt to have these people held accountable. That is one of the pieces of unfinished business in this whole matter."

Engle said the claim that poor teaching was responsible for the payment put the college's academic reputation in jeapordy and was "the thing that really got the faculty angry."

Pilecki, who had headed the college for six years, took a semester's leave in January and announced his resignation, effective at the end of August, in March.