Dozens of students, staff, and faculty members gathered on George Washington University’s mostly empty campus this month to deliver a clear message to their president: Resign.
Their list of complaints was long. But generally, it boils down to a lack of trust in Thomas J. LeBlanc’s ability to navigate the university through a crisis unlike any other.
In some ways the tensions bubbling up between this president and his campus community have existed at many colleges for years: faculty members decrying the corporatization of the university, students calling out administrators for inappropriate comments and actions, and staff feeling unheard and underappreciated. But six months into the coronavirus pandemic, with the university facing dire financial straits, the familiar tensions have become supercharged.
On Monday, Howard Brookins, president of the Student Association, signed an executive order calling on LeBlanc to resign, The GW Hatchet reported. A pledge was attached to the order that students and alumni could sign, promising not to donate to the university until the president is replaced.
“It does feel much more intense than at any other period,” said Erin D. Chapman, an associate professor of history who has worked at George Washington for more than a decade. She is president of the GWU Faculty Association, which is unaffiliated with the Faculty Senate. “I’ve never seen an atmosphere of such contentiousness and low morale among staff, faculty, and students.”
Some faculty members and former administrators said the unprecedented circumstances put the university in this position. As a tuition-dependent university in an expensive city where colleges opened mostly remotely this fall, GW and other universities like it face distinct financial challenges as a result of the pandemic. The university’s leadership says it is facing a $180 million revenue gap — a number that could change, especially if the university remains remote in the spring — and will fire staff as a result.
LeBlanc declined an interview but said in an email to The Chronicle that the decision to lay off staff was “very difficult.” He said he welcomed “constructive input” from faculty members, staff, and students about how to navigate the university through the pandemic.
“Differing viewpoints and robust discussions on complex issues are expected and encouraged in a strong academic environment,” LeBlanc said.
For Chapman and others, those discussions start with a demand.
“We need a change in leadership to have a steady way forward,” Chapman said. “We’re in a pretty dire place.”
Bringing in Disney
Tensions between students and faculty members and LeBlanc’s administration started before the pandemic. One of the sticking points has been the president’s proposed changes seemingly aimed at improving the university’s ranking and culture. Historically, the colleges that make up GW have had a fair amount of autonomy. The university has sought to take advantage of its location by emphasizing programs like political science, international affairs, public administration, and other social sciences.
Two years ago, LeBlanc’s administration hired the Disney Institute, part of the Walt Disney Company, to survey the university’s culture and run workshops to improve it. Some faculty and staff members considered the initiative — which presented employees with “service priorities,” such as “care” and “efficiency” — infantilizing and surreal.
Maralee Csellar, a GW spokesperson, said in an email that when LeBlanc arrived at GW, he heard about the need to change the university’s “transactional culture that was challenging to navigate for our students, faculty, and staff.” The culture initiative was meant to improve that, she said, and it relied on leadership from faculty and staff.
This is a slap in the face. I have kind of lost trust in the university.
Next, LeBlanc announced a plan to shrink the undergraduate student population by 20 percent over five years and increase the proportion of students studying science, technology, engineering, and math. To some, admitting fewer students sounded like a naked attempt to make GW more selective and improve its standing in national rankings. But in his announcement, LeBlanc noted that the undergraduate population had grown in recent years, stretching facilities, staff, and faculty members. Adding STEM offerings wasn’t meant to replace other subjects, he said, but would “strengthen our students’ experience in non-STEM fields, preparing all GW graduates for an increasingly technological society.”
The plan has faced opposition from some students. Brookins’s executive order said that admitting fewer students would “inevitably result in a student population that is higher income and more white.”
Some faculty, too, disapprove.
“We were an intellectual community that, in part because of our location, saw ourselves as embedded in the Washington, D.C., community, in government, and in nonprofits,” said Eric Arnesen, a history professor. “Then LeBlanc comes in and says never mind, that’s what we used to do. We can’t rest on our laurels.”
LeBlanc didn’t earn himself any supporters this year when a student approached him and asked, on camera, whether the university would divest from fossil fuels. LeBlanc wove a bizarre hypothetical in response: “What if the majority of the students agreed to shoot all the Black people here?” LeBlanc said. “Do I say, ‘Ah, well the majority voted?’ No.”
He later apologized.
Staff Layoffs
Then came the pandemic. Like many other universities, GW went remote after spring break. It also paused its strategic plan, announced a hiring freeze, and, LeBlanc said, members of the university leadership took pay reductions.
After first saying the fall semester would be held in person, officials announced in late July that most classes would be remote, and students who did not return to campus would see a 10-percent tuition reduction.
Joseph J. Cordes, an economics professor who serves on the Faculty Senate, knew that meant that no matter what happened with enrollment, the budget would take a serious hit. “All that revenue you get from the dormitories suddenly is gone,” Cordes said. “At GW, that immediately generates a shortfall of $100 million.”
One of the ways LeBlanc’s administration says it will deal with the shortfall is by restructuring certain administrative functions.
An unknown number of staff members — Csellar said it will be in the “low hundreds” — will be fired. Many were told that they could reapply for their jobs under a restructured administration. One of the departments that will undergo this change is information technology.
One member of GW’s technology team, who spoke to The Chronicle on the condition of anonymity, said he and others were given three days to reapply for jobs under the new structure. He looked up the posting for his job and saw that the pay was lower than what he was currently making.
“This is a slap in the face,” he said. “I have kind of lost trust in the university.”
The Disney Initiative in particular, which emphasized caring for each other, made the firings harder to stomach. Still, the staff member reapplied for one of the jobs because he has a family to support.
Some students, faculty members, and staff saw these layoffs as particularly cruel during a pandemic that has left millions unemployed — a large share of them Black, Hispanic, and Asian.
“As these guys are lining their pockets, they’re kicking mostly Black and Brown workers out of this university,” Yannik Omictin, a senior and member of the Student Association, said at the campus protest.
That revenue you get from the dormitories suddenly is gone. At GW, that immediately generates a shortfall of $100 million.
Cordes said that the LeBlanc administration is looking for inefficiencies in order to save money and “at some level, I think those are the discussions universities need to have.”
But that effort is cutting against a deeply entrenched culture. “There’s a general point of view among the faculty that the current system was working fairly well,” Cordes said. “It wasn’t broke, so why fix it?”
Meanwhile, the administration proceeded with the hires of three new high-level administrators, including a vice provost for enrollment and a senior associate provost who was hired before the freeze but started afterward.
The third was Heather Swain, vice president for marketing, public relations, and digital strategy at Michigan State University. Swain had been named in a report by the Michigan attorney general’s office that accused Michigan State of withholding or redacting thousands of documents from the prosecutors’ investigation into the university’s handling of complaints about sexual abuse by the sports doctor Larry Nassar. Swain was hired to be GW’s vice president for communications and marketing but later withdrew her acceptance of the position. She told The Washington Post that she is confident of her record and ethics but supports “students raising their voices about issues they care about,” and accepts “that the timing and fit wasn’t right for me to make a move to GW.”
In an email to the GW community, LeBlanc apologized for making that hire. “I should have recognized the sensitivities and implications of this hire,” he said. “It is a mistake I deeply regret.”
Finally, last week, the GW Hatchet reported that enrollment had declined 25 percent — a startling figure that the newspaper later removed from its story. Bloomberg News reported that the drop was 17 percent. University officials said those figures were wrong and that enrollment has actually dropped 7.2 percent, to 11,097 from 11,953. They said that in calculating the percentage decline, “media reports have mixed budget projections and official enrollment numbers.”
‘Imperial and Out of Touch’
To many, that’s enough problems for one administration.
“Those things pile on and begin to appear to faculty as an administration that’s imperial and out of touch,” said Brendan Cantwell, an associate professor of education and coordinator of the higher, adult, and lifelong education program at Michigan State.
GW in particular was already “on this competition high wire,” he said. “That makes it hard for administrators to keep everyone happy.”
Universities try to stay selective in admissions and compete with more elite research universities for funding and students. People will disagree on how to pursue those goals and whether they should be pursued. Add a pandemic and an economic downturn to the equation, and there’s little upside.
“He’s in a box,” said Robert Chernak, who worked as a senior administrator at GW for 24 years. Chernak said that LeBlanc’s biggest issue was not the decisions he made but explaining them to people clearly and transparently.
“He hasn’t engaged the constituents to the degree that he has to,” Chernak said.
“The truth of the matter is,” he said, “I’m glad I’m retired.”
