Most were midcareer or senior professors. Some had spent dozens of years crafting a legacy in their departments. And then, with little warning, the professional life they had built came to an end.
Washington State University, like many other cash-strapped institutions in recent years, decided to cut back. In 2009 the university eliminated two departments and one of its foreign-language majors. Professors were stunned. Some felt intense pressure to chart a new career. Others simply felt lost.
Now, several years later, some remain bitter, lamenting careers cut short. Others say a feeling of job security eludes them now that their trajectory has been involuntarily altered. A few, who have landed in better jobs, are thankful.
Of the 11 tenured and tenure-track professors in the closed programs at Washington State, five have retired, some before they had planned. Five still work at the university, a few with mixed feelings. Among those who remain, some have advanced in new departments while others have had to step backward, even off the tenure track. One found a new job elsewhere.
“I was very, very fortunate,” said Raymond A. Jussaume Jr., who was chair of the department of community and rural sociology at Washington State when it became clear that administrators were going to shut the department down.
Mr. Jussaume, who had been at Washington State for more than two decades, bought himself some transition time. He accepted appointments at Washington State that gave him three different titles: a professor in the department of natural resources, program coordinator, and university ombudsman. Meanwhile, he was also navigating the job market. In August of 2011, one year after his department officially closed, Mr. Jussaume joined the sociology department at Michigan State University as a professor and department chair.
Universities across the country have shuttered departments and academic programs in the wake of the recession. Foreign-language departments and other programs that institutions say don’t attract, or graduate, enough majors have often been the first to go.
When a university phases out entire departments, administrators often say they will work with tenured faculty to find them new homes in other departments or help ease them into retirement. That, for example, is the pitch Emory University gave this month when it announced that over the next few years it would close three departments, one program, and turn another department into an institute with no permanent faculty appointments. In Emory’s case, the motivation is strategic, not financial, officials say.
“Some faculty may choose to pursue retirement, or begin to phase down their activities over time,” read a statement released by university officials, “and in those cases, the Emory College is prepared to work with them to honor their careers and meet their personal goals.”
But for professors who choose retirement when a department closes, the choice is often a difficult one. And for some, the result is an unsatisfying closure to their careers.
That’s what happened to Laurilyn J. Harris. She planned to teach part time as a way to wind down her long career at Washington State. But that became impossible when the theater and dance department, which she once chaired, lost its battle to stay open.
Ms. Harris, a 37-year veteran of Washington State, says she oversaw her program’s transition to a full-fledged department in 2007. The closing of the department in the middle of last year makes her feel like “everything I ever did is just gone.”
Ms. Harris retired at the end of the 2010-11 academic year, but she didn’t stick around in Pullman, Wash., where the university’s main campus is located. She moved more than 2,000 miles away, to her hometown of Cincinnati.
“I’m pretty bitter about the whole thing and the way they went about it,” Ms. Harris says. “I decided that I would rather not spend time thinking about the loss of basically my entire legacy and that I would go and try to recreate a life somewhere that I was familiar with. I wanted to sever my connection with WSU.”
One of Ms. Harris’s colleagues, Terry J. Converse, retired, too. He is in India, as a Fulbright-Nehru fellow, conducting a series of workshops at a theater that will be followed by a production Mr. Converse will direct. He was a member of Washington State’s theater department for more than 20 years, and he hadn’t been planning to retire just yet.
The department’s closure, though, had an unexpected silver lining, he said. “It inspired me to apply for the Fulbright, and I couldn’t be happier with what I’m doing,” Mr. Converse said. “It’s a dream come true in all respects.”
Lost in Retirement
Adjusting to retirement, however, is difficult for many academics. And emotions often run even higher when a program’s closing cuts a career short.
At Southeastern Louisiana University, administrators shut down the institution’s French and French-education programs at the end of the 2010-11 academic year and terminated three tenured professors with a year’s notice. Margaret Marshall, a professor of French, was one of them.
“I was three years away from retirement, and I think when someone else makes that choice for you, it’s much more of an adjustment,” says Ms. Marshall, who was at Southeastern for 37 years. “I wasn’t ready, and I’m not coping very well with it.”
She says the treatment she received from other professors on campus didn’t help. “Everybody wanted to distance themselves,” she says, “because they thought it might happen to them.”
Ms. Marshall’s job search yielded nothing other than a few interviews. She also tried to break into the publishing business by offering to translate novels. No steady employment materialized from that either. “Out of everybody, I’m the one that’s really lost,” Ms. Marshall says. “I haven’t really found what I want to do.”
For now, Ms. Marshall is spending time in France. She has earned some money by occasionally setting up tours of France for individuals and families. “I’m surrounded by my friends here in France, and it helps me forget what happened.”
Katherine Kolb, a French professor at Southeastern, had a coping tactic of her own. She retired after 13 years in 2010, rather than work during the program’s last year.
“I did that out of self-protection,” says Ms. Kolb, who lost a long-awaited sabbatical because of the French program’s closure. “I didn’t have to live through that very demeaning last year on campus because I simply left.”
Last summer and fall, Ms. Kolb was a research associate in romance languages at Harvard University, where she did research and gave lectures on Balzac, the French novelist. Now she is working on an anthology with a fellow scholar and hopes to go to France next fall for four or five months to kick-start research for a book she plans to write, tentatively titled “Music After the Guillotine: Reconstructing Masculine Identity in 19th-Century France.”
“I have a very small pension, so I’m just relying on the private means that I’m just lucky to have,” says Ms. Kolb, who along with her former colleagues has sued the university, which the American Association of University Professors added to its censure list in June for violating the rights of tenured faculty by terminating their appointments as part of budget cuts. “I’m also able to continue living in Louisiana where the cost of living is low. I guess I just have to count my blessings.”
Sometimes, even with new positions, displaced faculty members can feel like they’re starting over. Evelyne Bornier, who was also part of Southeastern’s trio of tenured French professors, started a new job last month as an assistant professor at Auburn University.
Landing the new job, however, was bittersweet. After a 10-year career at Southeastern, where Ms. Bornier had earned the rank of associate professor, she is retracing a lot of old ground at Auburn, where her previous experience will allow her to apply for tenure in three and a half years, sooner than is typical. She ended up as an assistant professor, in part, because of how she worked to make ends meet in the year after her program closed and her tenured position disappeared. Ms. Bornier worked as an instructor at Southeastern, teaching five classes each semester and taking a steep pay cut.
“The first time I was on the market I was an associate professor, but I was applying for assistant-professor jobs, and I was told twice I was too expensive,” says Ms. Bornier, who had five on-campus interviews but no offers. “The second time around I was applying for assistant-professor jobs as instructor. This time I had four on-campus interviews and three offers.”
Ms. Bornier says that she is settling into life at Auburn, but that the path she took to get there is fraught with bad memories. “Honestly, I feel scarred,” Ms. Bornier says.
‘Academic Purgatory’
Sometimes, the faculty left behind when departments close find a way to stay at the university. But that can be a mixed blessing.
Michael Kalish, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, found out in the middle of last year that his institution planned to shut down the cognitive-science program, saying it graduated too few Ph.D. students each year. Mr. Kalish says he began job hunting immediately. With his tenure revoked as part of the closure, and a two-year contract the only thing standing between him and unemployment in 2013, Mr. Kalish was under pressure.
“It was a shock at first, not having tenure anymore,” says Mr. Kalish, who left behind a tenured position at a university in Australia to move to Louisiana in 2002. “I kept thinking, What if I don’t get a job because the market is so terrible? But I couldn’t spend a year being mad about it. About six months in, I was pretty much over the emotional trauma.”
Over the summer, the university gave Mr. Kalish some good news. The psychology department at Lafayette offered him a position, with tenure, that will begin at the end of the current academic year.
But his new job and the old one aren’t the same. Mr. Kalish can still do his research, but he will have to do his work without graduate students, since his new department doesn’t have a Ph.D. program. Mr. Kalish will also have to switch gears in the classroom and teach undergraduate courses in psychology, rather than the graduate-level courses he’s used to.
For some professors, the effects of professional upheaval have been lasting. Washington State announced three years ago that it would eliminate the German major, yet Rachel J. Halverson, an associate professor of German, says, “I’m just now beginning to come out of the funk” brought on by the cut.
Ms. Halverson, who came to Washington State in 1990, remains in the department of foreign languages and cultures and teaches largely the same courses she did when German was a major. She was recently named associate department chair and was awarded a distinguished professorship. That allowed her to bring an author from Germany to Washington State for about a month this fall to work with students on an interactive video project that will examine how closely people’s lives are connected to their cars.
“Good things have happened this fall,” Ms. Halverson says. “Even in these horrible times you have some bright spots. This is really the first time in three years that I’m feeling like a valued member of the department.”
Yet, even as she is thankful to be employed, Ms. Halverson can’t shake the feeling that job security as she once knew it has disappeared.
“I’ve been on the market every year since this went down,” says Ms. Halverson, who continues to publish and go to conferences and present papers. “It’s been very hard to believe that anything I do here means anything. If I could get a job at another university, I would, because for me, this is academic purgatory.”
The Fate of Junior Faculty
Unlike their more-seasoned colleagues, junior faculty members can’t typically expect to dodge a departmental or program shutdown by getting their appointments shifted to a new academic home. However, what played out for the newest arrivals at Washington State’s department of community and rural sociology following the announcement it would close shows that relying on the mercy of administrators can pay off. Mr. Jussaume, the department’s final chair, said protecting junior faculty was his “first concern” as more senior professors in the department brokered retirement deals.
Jessica Goldberger is still at Washington State where she was hired as an assistant professor in community and rural sociology 2006. A year before her old department closed, she moved to the department of crop and soil sciences, where she is now an associate professor. Ms. Goldberger says she met with her dean to “brainstorm where I could go.”
“I never got the impression that he would willingly let me lose my job even though I wasn’t tenured,” she says. Ms. Goldberger teaches the same two courses she did before, with research slated to take up the remaining 75 percent of her time.
One of her colleagues, José García-Pabón, still has largely the same duties he had when he was an assistant professor in the department. He works statewide, teaching Latino agricultural workers about sustainable farming and providing training to Latino business owners and would-be entrepreneurs. He also teaches nonprofit groups and others how to best interact with and serve the state’s burgeoning Latino community.
Mr. García-Pabón’s new workplace is based at a Washington State extension center just outside Seattle. But his position is no longer on the tenure track, a change in career trajectory that has been a particular disappointment.
“Things didn’t turn out like I was hoping,” he says, “but at least I will get to continue doing my work.”