2 Illinois Professors Were Laid Off. Then They Got Tenure. Now What?

Ted Schurter for The Chronicle

On May 6, 2016, Holly A. Stovall received the news she’d spent much of her life working toward.

Jack Thomas, president of Western Illinois University, told the women’s studies scholar that, after more than a decade on the faculty, she was one step away from receiving tenure. Once the institution’s Board of Trustees signed off, it would be official.

“Tenure is a major step in your academic career,” Mr. Thomas wrote in a letter to Ms. Stovall, “and I look forward to your continuing contributions to Western Illinois University.”

To Ms. Stovall, however, his congratulatory words rang hollow.

Western Illinois had announced six months earlier that about 50 faculty positions, including hers, would be eliminated as campus officials looked for $20 million in cuts across the university over the following two years. Years of declining enrollment and reduced state support had been compounded by an intractable budget standoff in 2015 and 2016 that left public colleges in Illinois without a dime of state money for nearly 10 months.

Initially, a dozen scholars with tenure and 10 assistant professors, including Ms. Stovall, were slated to lose their jobs after the 2016-17 academic year. The cutbacks — particularly of tenured faculty members — sparked outrage on the campus, and Mr. Thomas decided in January 2016 that no professors with tenure would be laid off for the time being.

That left Ms. Stovall and Sherry Lindquist, then an assistant professor of art history, in a strange situation. Days before the layoff announcement, they had submitted their tenure portfolios. In June, both women received tenure, the pinnacle of an academic career and often an assurance of job security. Yet their jobs were not secure.

Now they are on the verge of unemployment.

“The sense of betrayal is really traumatic for me,” said Ms. Stovall, a graduate of Western Illinois who has taught there since 2005.

As far as Ms. Stovall and Ms. Lindquist know, the university has never before laid off a tenured faculty member. When asked to confirm that, Kathleen Neumann, interim provost, said the two professors were not tenured when they received layoff notices. To the best of her knowledge, she said in a written statement this week, the university has not laid off faculty members since the early 1980s.

The fact that Ms. Stovall and Ms. Lindquist received tenure “was wholly unrelated to the university layoffs, which occurred some months prior,” Ms. Neumann said in the statement. The two professors remained on track for tenure review despite being laid off, she said, because officials hoped “to assist them in future endeavors.”

Both women say they see their layoffs as a sign that Western Illinois, an institution of about 11,000 students, in Macomb, is shifting its academic priorities away from the liberal arts and toward vocational programs and job training. More broadly, the professors believe that the very idea of a comprehensive public university education is under attack, in Illinois and nationwide.

Early next week, Ms. Stovall and Ms. Lindquist will go through an arbitration, in which lawyers for Western Illinois’s employee union will try to make the case that both women should keep their jobs.

Get ‘Our Staffing Levels in Line’

When Ms. Stovall opened an email from her dean in late 2015, she knew immediately that something was wrong. “Dear Dr. Stovall,” the message, sent on a Thursday afternoon, began.

Western Illinois U.

She had a good relationship with Susan A. Martinelli-Fernandez, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and they were on a first-name basis. Ms. Martinelli-Fernandez would never address her as “Dr. Stovall.” Unless it was serious.

Ms. Stovall remembers the dean calling her into a meeting and reading straight from a formal script. “You are being laid off,” Ms. Martinelli-Fernandez told her. Ms. Martinelli-Fernandez did not respond to a request from The Chronicle for comment.

That meeting marked the first time, but not the last, Ms. Stovall said, that she asked administrators to explain their rationale for laying her off, and got an unsatisfactory answer.

Some faculty members told The Chronicle last year that the layoffs seemed arbitrary, especially the initial ones. Full professors with many years of service to the institution were laid off, while relatively new assistant professors in the same department were spared.

Ms. Neumann said in her written statement this week that “individuals who received layoff notices were provided numerous opportunities to discuss concerns and have questions answered.”

In an interview with The Chronicle last year, Ms. Neumann said that enrollment at Western Illinois had dropped by one-fourth between 2011 and 2016. Meanwhile, the number of faculty members declined by just 12 percent. During the budget stalemate, Ms. Neumann said at the time, “it became obvious that we really needed to work more aggressively to get our staffing levels in line.”

Campus officials divided up each college into “programs” — some departments, like art, included multiple programs — and flagged the ones with few majors and graduates, Ms. Neumann said. They determined which positions to cut based on seniority within the programs.

Still, Ms. Stovall and Ms. Lindquist note that most of the professors affected by this round of layoffs — including both of them — are in the humanities. Other faculty members agree that the staff cuts reflect a broader shift on the campus.

Darcie Shinberger, a university spokeswoman, said in an email that Western Illinois “remains a comprehensive university” and added that “there are several academic programs across disciplines, including the liberal arts, which did not have a reduction in faculty due to the demand for courses in their respective areas.”

As a public regional institution, Western Illinois is more reliant on state money than is a flagship campus like the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. So when the budget impasse dragged on for nearly a year, and future state funding cuts seemed likely, Western Illinois officials said they needed to react quickly.

But according to some professors administrators’ actions suggest they are trying to shore up institutional finances by singling out the liberal arts for cuts.

In addition to layoffs, the university also decided last year to eliminate four majors: philosophy, women’s studies, African-American studies, and religious studies. Discussions about additional program cuts and consolidations are continuing, Ms. Neumann said this week.

Western Illinois leaders are under pressure from the university’s board; from Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican bullish on job training; and from parents who are increasingly concerned about their children’s postgraduation employment prospects, said William Thompson, a professor in the libraries division and president of the Western Illinois employees’ union.

But moving resources toward vocationally focused programs at the expense of the humanities is not the way to think about a university education, he said. “You begin to create a university that is driven by supply and demand: What the customer wants is what the university wants.”

When making the layoff decisions, Mr. Thompson added, officials were “often trying to quantify things that are not quantifiable.”

In all, 24 faculty members received layoff notices in February 2016, Ms. Neumann said. Nine have since been reinstated because of resignations and retirements in their colleges, she said, while 15 remain on the chopping block, including Ms. Stovall and Ms. Lindquist. The layoffs will save the university about $800,000, she said.

Ms. Shinberger declined to make any senior administrators available for interviews, writing in an email that “due to the continuing nature of the grievance, we will not discuss specific details.”

No Signals

Ms. Stovall has spent much of her life at Western Illinois. As an undergraduate she met her husband, Thomas R. Sadler, who joined the economics faculty in 2005.

As she wrapped up her Ph.D. in Spanish, she also started teaching there, but on a one-year appointment. An assistant-professor position opened up not long after she came to the campus, but she wanted to have a second child and did not apply. She holds a graduate degree in women’s studies and eventually secured a tenure-track job in that department.

Ms. Lindquist has been at the university since 2012. Denied tenure at St. Louis University in 2002 — which she attributes in part to juggling academic duties while raising two small children — she taught briefly at a few campuses and then came to Western Illinois.

Both professors said they never received any indication that they weren’t on track for tenure. Recommendation letters from their department chairs and deans last year described them as strong teachers and researchers who were popular with students.

Their dismissal is a direct threat to tenure, said Merrill Cole, a professor of English. It’s among the recent developments that have hurt faculty morale considerably and “caused a lot of people to leave,” he said.

Ms. Lindquist, a scholar of Medieval art, is one of Western Illinois’s two full-time art historians; the other Keith Holz, specializes in modern and contemporary art. In an interview, Mr. Holz said that Ms. Lindquist teaches all of the courses that cover pre-19th century and non-Western art history, and the latter is a requirement for art majors. Those aren’t courses he would feel comfortable teaching.

The art department has struggled with enrollment in recent years, Mr. Holz said, noting that it was recently as high as 175 students and is now about 100. That said, “she’s a rock-solid scholar in her field and widely respected,” he said of Ms. Lindquist. “I don’t know if the university recognizes that kind of achievement to the degree that they should.”

Ms. Stovall’s departure would mean losing general-education courses in women’s studies that enroll students from a variety of majors, said Aimee D. Shouse, former chair of the women’s studies department and now director of the Liberal Arts and Sciences program.

Western Illinois has recently made a concerted effort to improve the diversity of its student body, Ms. Shouse said, and Ms. Stovall responded by creating a course called “Hispanic Women,” combining her expertise in Spanish and women’s studies. It was popular, she said, but she doubts it will be offered again if Ms. Stovall loses her job.

With cuts in disciplines like women’s studies, Ms. Shouse added, “I worry that students in public higher education are going to lose access to programs and courses that speak to issues of social justice and give them ways of seeing and understanding difference.”

Random Offers

Ms. Stovall and Ms. Lindquist would rather not take other job offers , but they wonder whether they should. It’s not clear when the outcome of next week’s arbitration hearing, which has been delayed several times, will be determined.

Western Illinois’s employee contract requires university officials to try to find equivalent work for faculty members before laying them off. For the past few months, Ms. Stovall and Ms. Lindquist said, they have been receiving emails inviting them to apply for open positions on the campus that, per the university, might fit their skills.

But many of the jobs have seemed random, said Ms. Stovall. In one case, they both got an alert about an opening for a defensive coordinator on the football team. “I almost applied for it,” Ms. Lindquist said with a laugh.

She has been applying for other academic positions, as well as a gallery-director opening at Western Illinois. She said she’s looking nationally and internationally.

Ms. Stovall, on the other hand, said she doubts she’ll leave the Macomb area even if she loses her job, given that her husband continues to work at Western Illinois, her two children are still in school, and her parents, who live nearby, are aging. Her backup plan is to pursue a Master of Fine Arts through distance learning.

One particularly difficult result of being laid off has been the social isolation, she said. Many of her colleagues want to move on from last year’s financial chaos and focus on the future.

“People want to put it behind them,” she said. “I can’t put it behind me.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.