To the editor:

The Paul Smith’s College Board of Trustees’ approval of what is hopefully an ill-fated money/naming grab shows they lack appropriate oversight and transparency. While I hope the state’s attorney general’s office will utilize its vast powers in overseeing charitable trusts to investigate, I have little assurance that will occur. My lack of confidence in the state’s chief law officer stems from the sudden and dramatic “Letter of No Object” the office attached to the Paul Smith’s College name change petition just days after their receipt of the document.

How could a board so profoundly misjudge a situation and afflict such harm on an entity they are supposed to support? Had they set out deliberately to chart a course of action which would not only hurt, but ignore, the feelings of loyal alumni, of friends and of students; had they hired a top-notch PR firm to advise them how to make a textbook example of failure in human relations, a paradigm case, they could not have achieved more than they did on their own.

Thomas A. Benoit Sr.

Class of 1993

Enosburg Falls, Vermont