A College on Long Island Abruptly Closed. The Faculty’s Fraught Job Searches Followed.

Bryan Thomas for The Chronicle

For about 18 months, the bad omens about Dowling College’s future grew increasingly dire.

Enrollment at the private college in Long Island was shrinking fast, followed by faculty pay cuts, buyouts, and layoffs. It was enough to push Christopher B. Boyko to start searching for a new job. But looking for work beyond the Long Island area, where he and his family live, wasn’t an option, so when faculty positions didn’t turn up nearby, he decided to “stick it out and see what happens.”

What happened was this: On the last day of May 2016, Dowling gave three days’ notice that it was shutting down. Boyko, an associate professor of biology, was shocked by the timing. He remembers packing his things “really, really quickly, because that’s all I could do.”

Boyko was one of nearly 600 full- and part-time faculty members at Dowling who had to seek out new livelihoods while also working through their feelings of disbelief, anger, and sadness. They were left in the lurch at a particularly inopportune time: the end of the academic year, when the prospects of finding a faculty job for the forthcoming academic year are slim.

“In June there isn’t anything you can do,” said Boyko, who was chair of the biology department. “Anywhere you look, there really are no positions.”

Some 2,400 faculty members have been laid off by the more than 20 private, not-for-profit, four-year colleges that have closed since 2016, when Dowling shut its doors. (See chart at bottom.) The situation is similar to the one professors faced by professors at Green Mountain College, Southern Vermont College, and the College of New Rochelle, whose colleges are slated to close at the end of the current academic year. They might look to professors at Dowling to see what lies ahead.

While there’s no official census of Dowling’s former faculty members, The Chronicle tracked down some of them, and their paths give a hint of the possibilities. Some of them retired, others accepted lower-rank academic positions, some pursued jobs outside academe, and still others found ways to work on a campus in non-faculty roles. Those who found new posts often had to compete against their former colleagues or relocate to other parts of the country. Here is where several of them landed.

Still on the Market

Christopher Boyko’s effort to rejoin the professoriate has been paved with perseverance.

When Dowling laid off its faculty, he bought himself some time by collecting unemployment for six to eight weeks. In August 2016, he interviewed for a laboratory-course-coordinator position in the biology department at Hofstra University, on Long Island. He got the job, which is full-time and comes with benefits but pays less than his former position did. So he also teaches as an adjunct in the evenings there and at local colleges; his contract at Hofstra allows him to teach one class per semester there when one is available. This semester he’s teaching three classes in total; last semester he taught four.

“I’m out four nights a week until 8 or 9 or 10,” said Boyko. “I’m not doing it because I want to keep my fingers in the pool, as they say, with teaching. Without it, I wouldn’t be making enough money.”

Boyko declined to cite his salary at Dowling. But what he makes at Hofstra and in adjunct teaching amounts to a 30-percent pay cut, he said. He needs to teach at least three or four classes per semester to break even he said, but usually doesn’t get that many. Meanwhile he’s come to know one of the frustrations of part-time teaching, like his students’ asking to meet with him during office hours when he doesn’t have an office.

Boyko’s chances of finding a full-time faculty job are better now that he’s looking beyond nearby institutions, to which he had limited his search to keep from disrupting his daughter’s high-school education. She is graduating this year, so he has widened his search this hiring cycle. He has applied to institutions in Indiana and the West Coast. Earlier this month, he had the last of six interviews he landed this year.

Adapting to Life as an Adjunct

For some Dowling faculty members, the desire to pursue an academic life like the one they had wasn’t as strong.

As the college’s demise grew increasingly likely, Christian Perring taught as many overloads as possible, which put his teaching load at 36-39 credits a year, including summer and winter terms. The plan was to save money in case a regular paycheck wouldn’t be in the offing.

“Even though the writing was on the wall, I stayed just because moving to a new place once you’ve settled into a nice place is difficult,” said Perring, a professor of philosophy, who had been at Dowling for 18 years. “I was chair of the department for a long time and, in some ways, once I got a promotion to full, it was a little bit like golden handcuffs.”

When Dowling closed, Perring collected unemployment and thought seriously about nonacademic careers that might appeal to him. Getting a master’s degree in counseling and psychotherapy to become a therapist seemed like a possibility. So did breaking into publishing, since the top houses were in New York City, not that far away.

“For about 30 seconds, I thought about getting a law degree,” Perring said, laughing.

Instead he turned to teaching philosophy as an adjunct and is currently teaching multiple online and in-person classes for three colleges, including St. John’s University and Suffolk County Community College. “I don’t have lots of financial responsibilities,” he said, “and so it’s feasible for me to do this without having to move.”

Even though he is without health insurance (which made him think about returning to his native Britain), Perring said his enthusiasm for applying for full-time jobs has gone down. He’s on campus only two days a week to teach, and he’s able to do some research, he said.

He’s still adjusting to his change in status. “You tell the chair you’re interested in teaching,” Perring said, “and hope they like you and will keep on employing you.”

At the same time, he doesn’t miss some aspects of his old faculty job. He doesn’t miss committees, for example. “When I think about sitting in a faculty meeting, I break out into a cold sweat,” Perring said. “I’m happy to avoid that.”

Starting Over

Kimberly Poppiti was already familiar with life as an adjunct. She had come to Dowling to teach part time in the late ’90s, and eventually rose to the rank of associate professor of dramatic arts and dance. When Dowling closed, she returned to adjunct work to pay the bills.

But the forced hiatus from her full-time job had a silver lining. It gave Poppiti time to finish a book she had been working on for a while: A History of Equestrian Drama in the United States, which was published by Routledge in 2018. Even as she made her living driving from one college to another to teach classes each semester, she was no longer doing the administrative work of a department chair, directing plays, and overseeing the theater club. “I looked at this free time as an opportunity,” she said.

Poppiti also kept applying for local full-time positions that came up in her field. In the fall of 2018, she applied for a faculty position at St. Joseph’s College, on Long Island and, in an instance of good timing, was able to start in January.

Yet re-employment had a cost. Poppiti, although grateful for the opportunity, is starting over on the tenure track, as an assistant professor, after a faculty career of almost two decades.

Joining the Administration

Elsa-Sofia Morote, a full professor in the department of educational administration, leadership, and technology at Dowling, found that her background led to a switch to full-time administrator. In 2012, while at Dowling, she created the International Studies and Diversity Institute which held events to motivate diverse high-school or transfer students to attend college. The work was viewed as “my little hobby” by some at Dowling, she said, but it’s paid off: Now that kind of outreach is at the core of her new job.

Since November 2016, Morote has been executive director of the Long Island Educational Opportunity Center, a unit of Farmingdale State College that offers free academic, vocational, and counseling services to underserved adult learners.

“I thought, I have been at Dowling a long time, let me try something different,” said Morote, who started at Dowling in 2003.

The connections she had made in various communities over the years helped her succeed in her new job right away, she said. “We needed to be reaching more students,” said Morote, who initially taught as an adjunct at St. John’s University after Dowling closed. “You have to go out in the community and you have to explain the options. I know how to do that.”

This month, for example, Morote went to the state capital, in Albany, with some of the students the center has helped so they could share their stories with legislators and lobby them to keep its programming free.

Some of the people in her former department are still looking for full-time faculty jobs, Morote said, but are hampered in part by geographical restrictions, as she was, as well as by the scarcity of education schools in the area.

Boyko, the biologist who came to Dowling in 2009 as an assistant professor, is still looking, too. His current position at Hofstra has helped him stay positive about his job search, he said, because he still has ties to academe and “a little space to do my research.”

And he remains hopeful that a faculty job will materialize. “I haven’t given up yet,” he said.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.