The top brass’s message was clear: When talking about the instructors who won’t be reappointed, at least for now, department chairs at the University of Massachusetts at Boston should stick to the script.
“Never slip and call this a layoff,” reads a Monday talking-points memo from the provost’s office, obtained by The Chronicle. Similarly, “do not speak of this notice as a kind of ‘pink slip.’”
Faculty members are not going to “sit on our hands while the sky falls down.”
This week, letters were sent to an unknown number of instructors, telling them that they won’t be reappointed for the fall, with the caveat that things could change over the summer. “I am very sorry for the consternation I know this will cause you,” Emily A. McDermott, the interim provost, says in the form letter.
When the Covid-19 pandemic threatened to deplete projected budgets, college leaders, like those at UMass-Boston, looked to minimize expenses and make difficult choices about priorities. While decisions were still up in the air, faculty members, especially those off the tenure track, feared that their ranks would be thinned. Now, those cuts are starting to be made across academe. (The Chronicle is tracking them here.)
Thirty-one faculty members were laid off at Missouri Western State University, while 20 others will receive terminal one-year contracts, Inside Higher Ed reported. St. Edward’s University, in Texas, eliminated an unknown number of employee positions, including some faculty members on and off the tenure track, the Austin American-Statesman reported. City University of New York colleges have begun announcing plans to remove hundreds of adjunct positions, according to the CUNY faculty and staff union; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood in solidarity with the union, saying in a statement that “austerity is not the answer.”
And rumors have swirled at Ohio University that instructor positions will be eliminated, speculation that was confirmed in a Friday-evening message to the campus from the president.
At UMass-Boston, the university is preparing to appoint “somewhere between ‘zero’ and ‘drastically fewer than normal’ associate lecturers, clinical associate lecturers, and noncontinuing lecturers” who work on semester-by-semester contracts, the provost’s message says.
Faculty leaders on various campuses are scrutinizing those decisions. They say they appreciate the need to be frugal but don’t understand why contingent faculty members, who are often the lowest paid and do the bulk of the teaching, are on the chopping block.
Decisions Delayed
DeWayne Lehman, director of communications at UMass-Boston, said in an email that non-tenure-track faculty members who are on semester-to-semester contracts have been told that they “may not be needed” in the fall. The university hopes to reappoint some of them in the future, but “that is not a decision we can make until our financial outlook for FY 2021 becomes clearer,” Lehman said.
To Steve Striffler, that decision feels premature. Striffler, the incoming president of the Faculty Staff Union, said he and other professors understand that the university wants to save wherever it can. He understands there are unknowns, like fall enrollment and state funding, and that can produce some “nervousness,” he said. But that nervousness “translates into going after the folks that are the most vulnerable.”
Right now, it’s not clear how many instructors are affected. When asked by The Chronicle, Lehman did not provide an answer. But 487 non-tenure-track faculty members are in the bargaining unit, Jeffrey Melnick, an American-studies professor on the union’s executive committee, said in an email. About 240 of them aren’t on continuing appointments, he said, and therefore could have received the nonrenewal letters. The union is trying to tally a total.
It’s lecturers who performed the “Herculean task” of converting large general courses to a virtual medium, and who supported students through that process, Striffler said. To treat them in this way feels, to some, like “a slap in the face.”
Maria Mellone said she feels as if she’s losing the institution she had wanted to make her new home. Mellone, an associate lecturer in the mathematics department, was hired in 2017 when she was looking for her “forever” job. She taught a 4:4 load, sometimes skipping lunch to help students and holding office hours twice as often as was required.
Now, after receiving a non-reappointment letter, Mellone worries about her son, who just finished his freshman year at UMass-Boston. She was counting on an employee discount to help lower the tuition cost for the rest of his degree.
She also worries about her career, and will now start searching for another job. There’s a chance she would be reappointed at the end of the summer, Mellone said, but she has three kids whose schooling must be paid for.
“I can’t afford to wait,” she said.
‘People Need to Go’
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, Ohio University faced budget woes due to declining enrollment, The Columbus Dispatch reported, and the institution was offering early-retirement deals to faculty members and administrators. In late March, with the pandemic in full swing, the president told the campus that cuts in personnel were on pause, the Dispatch reported.
But on May 1 the university announced that 140 custodial staff members were being laid off. And according to the local American Association of University Professors chapter, several non-tenure-track instructors, and at least one faculty member on the tenure track, have been told their contracts will not be renewed. Patricia Stokes and Kim Little, two longtime instructors who teach courses in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, both told The Chronicle that they’d been informed their positions were slated for elimination.
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Stokes started teaching at Ohio in the winter of 2002 and eventually became an outspoken campus voice on sexual violence. Little arrived at Ohio as a graduate student, in 1997, and stayed for the next two decades. Both said they’re skeptical of their chances of finding another job in academe, considering their ages and the job market.
Little said on Saturday that, to her surprise, she had not received a non-renewal notice. “I am beyond relieved,” she said in an email, “but sad for my colleagues who were not as fortunate.”
On Friday evening, M. Duane Nellis, the university’s president, announced that 53 instructional faculty members had been sent nonrenewal notices. In accordance with the faculty handbook, they will still have appointments for the coming academic year. And 149 administrators were told that their positions were being “abolished” as part of a reorganization effort, Nellis said. The university expects to rehire 55 of the administrators into new positions.
The university will also impose a tiered furlough in the next fiscal year, which Nellis estimates will save around $13 million. “Today’s actions were far-reaching,” he said, “but I want to be upfront they will not be our final steps as we move toward the beginning of FY21.”
Before Nellis’s Friday announcement, what faculty members had been hearing from their deans was that “people need to go,” said Jennifer Fredette, an associate professor of political science who is active in the local AAUP chapter. They’d also been hearing that “no decisions are final,” she said. But, she said, in the meantime, faculty members were not going to “sit on our hands while the sky falls down.”
So last week concerned faculty members staged a socially distant protest via motorcade. People drove cars in circles around an inflated rat, Scabby, said Olivia Gemarro, an Ohio student who started a #SaveOurProfs social-media campaign. Gemarro said her professors are the reason her goals for the future are so well defined, and she “can’t stand to think the administration doesn’t see how valuable they are.”
In addition, Ohio’s Faculty Senate voted no confidence in Nellis. At a recent board meeting, Nellis, who took a 15-percent pay cut as part of pandemic-related cost-saving measures, said that he was disappointed by the vote but that it wouldn’t preclude him from communicating with the faculty in the future.
Meanwhile, the AAUP chapter has circulated an alternative “open source” budget, which it calls a collaborative project in which everyone on the campus can participate. According to the current version of the document, the alternative model would carry out $45.2 million in permanent administrative cuts but would not lay off anyone this year.
It’s not clear how much weight a crowdsourced budget, or faculty pushback, will hold with university leaders. At the board meeting, Ohio trustees passed a resolution that ratified and affirmed “all staffing, operational, and financial decisions” made by Nellis during the Covid-19 pandemic.
What is clear is that colleges will continue to ride the wave of budget unpredictability. Fall-enrollment and state-appropriations numbers loom in the distance, as unknown variables that could spell more non-reappointment form letters and potentially more furloughs and layoffs.
The financial outlook for UMass-Boston is “much less clear” than the current picture, Katherine S. Newman, interim chancellor, wrote in a Friday message to the campus that did not mention the non-reappointment notices. But that outlook is likely to be “far more problematic.”
Clarissa Eaton was on the receiving end of that email, which she found ironic. It was addressed to “colleagues,” but Eaton no longer fits that description. On Tuesday she got her non-reappointment letter.
This semester, as an associate lecturer in the English department, Eaton said she put in extra hours to make her courses remote. She taught a full load. She regularly took on nonrequired service because, she said, she thought of her position as more than just a job.
Every semester, she makes sure to tell her students, who struggle to show their abilities and potential, that they matter. Getting that form letter, Eaton said, made her feel like she didn’t.