As they submit grades for the fall semester, some tenured faculty members at Manhattan College are wondering if they’ll still have jobs come the end of the academic year. Administrators have earmarked at least 34 faculty positions — the majority of which are tenured — for elimination as part of a planned restructuring that would see the college’s six schools merge into three, according to several faculty members who spoke to The Chronicle.
While a buyout program could reduce that number, professors say layoffs would violate the private college’s faculty handbook and well-established norms around tenure and job security. Some professors added that concern for their and their colleagues’ economic and job security made them feel pressure to sign a voluntary-separation agreement, which they received in October, and under which they’d receive “incentive payments” based on how soon their resignation took effect — the earliest would be January 12, 2024.
Opposition to the planned layoffs, first announced in late October, has mounted in recent weeks. About 100 faculty members signed off on a letter sent to administrators last week, decrying the plan they say “undermines tenure at the college, the foundation of academic freedom.” The letter asks for a guarantee that professors who lose their jobs will receive the minimum notice or severance provided under the faculty handbook; for the college to “adhere to written policies and procedures that uphold tenure and faculty oversight of curricular changes"; and to provide financial justification for the layoffs and restructuring. A Change.org petition started by a Manhattan alumna to object to the layoffs has nearly 2,500 signatures.
A college representative said in a statement to The Chronicle that “amid the rapidly shifting higher education landscape, the college’s leadership recently conducted a comprehensive strategic review to ensure that we are providing an affordable, high-quality education to both current and future students.” That review prompted the college to announce the consolidation of its schools and take “additional steps to focus our resources in areas where we can deliver the greatest value for the college community over the long term. This will eventually lead to the elimination of certain programs to more closely reflect the size and academic pursuits of our student body.”
At Manhattan, a Lasallian Catholic institution in the Bronx, total enrollment increased from more than 3,900 in 2013 to a high of almost 4,600 in 2019 before dropping back to about 3,900 in 2022, according to federal data. Its president, Milo E. Riverso, is an alumnus and former member of Manhattan’s board who earned a doctorate in civil engineering from Purdue University. He has taught at Manhattan as an adjunct and served as a member of its curriculum and facilities committees. His background is chiefly in leading construction-management firms, and he took office at the college in July.
No Job Security
The full scope of the layoffs remains unclear. Administrators have said that, to curb financial deficits (the size of which the college didn’t specify when asked), Manhattan needs to reduce the size of its full-time faculty from 225 to 175, according to a letter sent to the faculty that was obtained by The Chronicle. To help reach that number, Manhattan this spring informed 16 instructors, including tenure-track and non-tenure-track employees, that they were being laid off. That leaves 34 professors whose fate hangs in the balance. Another 10 could lose their jobs if the administration and faculty do not agree on a set of cost-cutting measures that would include suspending promotions and tenure, sabbaticals, summer grants, and faculty travel for at least three years.
A document explaining the voluntary-separation package, which was shared with The Chronicle, said the program’s existence didn’t ensure job security for faculty members who chose not to participate, and that similar programs weren’t guaranteed in the event of further layoffs. “Nothing in this program should be deemed to constitute a promise of continued employment for any particular duration,” the document reads, going on to list 21 academic programs and departments that could be “impacted in the future.”
Manhattan administrators are hoping that 34 professors will agree to take the buyouts by the mid-January deadline. While buyout plans are typically aimed at employees who are nearing retirement age, “the way that this buyout was rolled out was under a threat that they were going to lay us off imminently if we don’t sign up,” creating a “context of coercion,” said one faculty member, who asked to speak anonymously for fear of professional retaliation. Administrators have said they plan to use a “last-in, first-out” policy — meaning new employees would be the first to go — when deciding on potential layoffs, which the professor noted would disproportionately affect women and people of color. And while faculty members who applied for the buyout were initially offered three separation dates from which to choose — in January 2024, June 2024, and December 2024, with the amount of separation pay decreasing with each later date — some told The Chronicle that several requests for the December 2024 option had been denied.
We don’t think that it’s right that the administration appears to want to treat tenured faculty as at-will employees.
Under standards popularized in 1940 by a joint statement between the American Association of University Professors and the American Association of Colleges and Universities, tenured faculty members can only be terminated for cause or in the case of bona fide financial exigency. Those guidelines dictate “that faculty be meaningfully involved in the determination that those conditions exist, that the crisis is that bad, and that other means of alleviating it that are less drastic have been exhausted,” said Mark Criley, a senior program officer in the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. Criley detailed those policies in an advisory sent to faculty leaders at Manhattan at their request.
Manhattan has not declared financial exigency, a lawyer retained by the college’s Council for Faculty Affairs wrote in a November letter to administrators. Nor has it made “every effort” to find other positions for tenured faculty members, as both the AAUP principles and the college’s faculty handbook provide. The handbook also dictates that tenured faculty members, and tenure-track faculty members who have been at the college for at least two years, be given at least one academic year’s notice of termination; in this case, the earliest date those employees could be laid off is August 31, 2025, wrote the council’s lawyer, Katherine H. Hansen.
Jennifer A. McLaughlin, a lawyer for the college, disputed those assertions, saying that Manhattan “has never expressly, by contract or otherwise, agreed to provide the faculty continuous employment during a time of financial exigency.” McLaughlin added that while Manhattan has adopted the 1940 statement on tenure, it has not adopted AAUP’s more-specific “Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” revised in 2018 and referenced in Hansen’s letter. “Even if the handbook creates a contractual agreement between the faculty and the college as outlined in your letter, a point which the college does not concede,” McLaughlin wrote, Manhattan is not obliged to follow the AAUP regulations.
That the faculty handbook wouldn’t be considered a contract came as a surprise to one professor, who asked to remain anonymous because of concerns about retaliation and future job prospects. “We are being told that the faculty handbook is not a binding document,” the professor said. “We sign a contract every year that we put a signature on. Our contracts essentially say that when we sign it, we are agreeing to teach our classes and we are also faithfully agreeing to follow the faculty handbook. Unfortunately, we are finding out that that only means that we are agreeing to do that, that the college is not necessarily agreeing to do that.” On Monday, faculty members started a GoFundMe “for legal services to defend tenure rights at Manhattan College.”
In the weeks since the buyout plan was announced, some have taken issue with how leaders of the elected Council for Faculty Affairs has responded, two faculty members told The Chronicle. “I think there are a large, diverse faculty who are at risk of being laid off, who feel the CFA has not adequately represented them,” one faculty member told The Chronicle. “I think CFA believes that the school is at risk of closing and that they need to be as cooperative as possible with the president and administration.”
Zahra Shahbazi, chair of the CFA, and Margaret Groarke, a CFA member, disputed those characterizations; Shahbazi, a professor of mechancial engineering, said that the council has shared all information it received from administrators with faculty members and reported professors’ demands back to leadership. “The fact that we have not been successful on getting those things that people want doesn’t mean that we didn’t represent them or we didn’t share them with the administration,” Shahbazi said.
“Our highest priority from the beginning,” added Groarke, a professor of political science, “has been seeing that if people are laid off, it’s under the conditions laid out in our handbook. We don’t think that it’s right that the administration appears to want to treat tenured faculty as at-will employees.” She said that two Manhattan administrators had in conversation referred to faculty members as “at-will,” and that “we’ve been pushing back hard against that since the beginning.”
While the CFA hasn’t gotten commitments from the administration that terminated faculty members will receive the appropriate notice or severance, Groarke said the council is “willing to work with” the college on “a way out” of its financial stress.
‘They Owe Me More Than That’
The AAUP considers buyouts a “feasible alternative” to terminating faculty appointments, Criley told The Chronicle. “It’s the kind of step that we think has a place during deliberations about financial exigency, but it shouldn’t just be handed down from the administration.” But Manhattan faculty members who spoke to The Chronicle said that despite administrators’ assertions that the buyout was the best the college could offer, they didn’t consider it a good deal because it offered less severance pay than they are due under the faculty handbook.
Among those who applied for a buyout is Meg Toth, a professor of English and the director of the film studies program, who has been at Manhattan since 2008. Toth said her seniority means she wouldn’t be in danger of being laid off, but she applied regardless, having become “very disenchanted with the college’s tactics.” Leadership turnover and the Covid-19 pandemic have led to an erosion of shared governance at Manhattan, she said, but now, “I don’t even feel like there’s a pretense of shared governance any longer. It’s just administration making decisions and then maybe communicating those decisions to us, or maybe not.”
Toth’s buyout application, to take effect in June, was approved. But she doesn’t yet know whether she’ll take it. She’s been hoping a recent wave of faculty advocacy — including a pair of meetings in the past week, at which a no-confidence vote in the president was discussed — will shift the tide.
Michael Plugh, an associate professor of communication, said he too made his decision on the buyout as a matter of principle — but he came to the opposite conclusion, opting not to apply. “I feel like if I take” the buyout, “then I’m falling on the sword for them,” he said, “and I think they owe me more than that.”
Plugh knows the same last-in, first-out policy that keeps Toth’s job secure endangers his. “I’ve heard that my name was raised in meetings with administrators as one of the people from my department that would be in line to be cut. The question now is whether that’s going to be in a way that adheres to our handbook and the sanctity of tenure, or whether they’re just going to let me hang during the holiday season and then drop the bomb on me in January.”
Though he and his colleagues are unclear on the precise timing, Plugh said it’s possible he will not have a job when the spring semester begins. That’s an especially scary prospect, given that his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer in May. After surgery this month, he said, she is technically cancer free, but she will need to undergo radiation and other preventative treatments throughout 2024. The thought of being without an income and insurance during that time adds to Plugh’s “extraordinary stress.”
