News Photo by Reagan Voetberg Alpena Community College Trustees Theresa Duncan, Joe Gentry, Lisa Hilberg, and Secretary Jay Walterreit are pictured Tuesday morning at the ACC Board of Trustees visioning session.

ALPENA — Currently, the Alpena Community College Board of Trustees has no code of ethics policy, but they are on the road to creating one.

The ACC Board of Trustees discussed creating a trustee code of ethics at their visioning session on Tuesday morning.

Trustee Lisa Hilberg and Trustee Joe Gentry both serve on other boards in the community and explained how those boards each have a code of ethics that the trustees review regularly.

“I think it’s time that we probably include an ethics policy and perhaps visit it every other year, and have everyone sign off on it,” Gentry said.

The board will base a code of ethics off the model from the Association of Community College Trustees. The model provides standards of service, collaboration, authority, roles, and teamwork for trustees to follow. ACC Trustees agreed to propose a code of ethics at the next regular meeting for a first reading.

Trustee Florence Stibitz suggested adding a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the code of ethics. ACC President Don MacMaster cautioned against it.

“Any reference to that is inviting a lot of blowback,” he said.

The trustees discussed other challenges with the current crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, including whether it could affect scholarships meant for specific groups, like women.

“Donors who set up scholarships, historically, they can be very specific in the qualifications or the requirements of the scholarship recipient,” Trustee Teresa Duncan said. “Scholarships that donors have said ‘I want this to go to a female,’ that doesn’t fly anymore and they have to purge those words from the scholarship requirements…That was a little surprising to me that even if a private donor says this is their wish, it can’t — the college becomes vulnerable, or the Foundation becomes vulnerable.”

MacMaster added that there was a person not connected to the college that reviewed scholarships offered to students and complained that six of them discriminated against men.

“That is the environment that all this is in,” MacMaster said. “And the leverage behind that complaint is the office of civil rights concurs with that view, whereas nine months ago — or 10 months ago they had the opposite take on it.”

“I think people in the community kind of expect that we’re going to work with whoever comes,” Chairman John Briggs said.

The trustees also looked over the Conflict of Interest Policy 5027, and discussed making changes to it, like how often the policy should be reviewed. The policy outlines how members of the board should conduct themselves when they have a conflict of interest with a board matter.

“Our board is very good at being ethical and doing things appropriately,” Briggs said. “Which is the reason why our board meetings usually are civil. People are thoughtful. And you hear that at other places it’s not quite that way.”

The trustees started the discussion about rebranding, showing the history of ACC’s logos and what they would like the brand to look like in the future.

Reagan Voetberg can be reached at 989-358-5683 or rvoetberg@TheAlpenaNews.com.