The Latest Assault on Tenure

James G. Patterson got the email in the middle of a movie. It was the Wednesday night of finals week, and Patterson’s “Modern Ireland” class was gathering for the last time.

Whenever Patterson taught “Modern Ireland,” he showed Michael Collins, a biopic about the Irish revolutionary hero, at the end of the semester. He had seen the movie countless times, but it’d been a few years since he taught the course, so, on this night in mid-December, he sat back, in the classroom on the second floor of the Lackland Center, to enjoy it with his students.

This year’s class was an exceptional group, and he would tell them as much when the movie ended, just before he dismissed them for the last time. Patterson, who started his career in the history department at Centenary University in 2001, earned tenure there in 2007, and was promoted to full professor in 2013, had given some version of this speech so many times in his career there.

As the movie wound down, Patterson took his phone from his coat pocket and glanced at it. The email, from Centenary’s head of human resources, had arrived a few minutes before, at 8:03 p.m. It was short, just three sentences, and Patterson only needed to read it once. He was being summoned to meet the next day with the interim president.

He put his phone down, and then realized he’d missed the film’s most dramatic scene — Collins being ambushed and assassinated.

He watched the last 10 minutes of the movie — the real-life 1920s footage of Collins’s casket being carried through the streets of Dublin as text recounts his heroic legacy — but he couldn’t focus on it.

The credits rolled, the classroom lights were turned back on, and Patterson delivered his remarks and dismissed his students. He asked the history majors to stay behind a minute.

Patterson had taught and advised the history majors for their entire collegiate careers. He wanted to tell them what had happened.

The university, he explained, was undergoing changes.

“I think,” he told his students, his voice cracking, “I just lost my job.”

Patterson was about to join a group whose numbers are small but whose significance looms large for the future of shared governance and widely understood norms of academic labor: They are professors whose tenured status has not protected them from being laid off as a cost-cutting measure.

Traditionally, institutions that dismiss tenured faculty for business reasons must declare financial exigency — a kind of higher-education version of bankruptcy, what the American Association of University Professors calls “a severe financial crisis that fundamentally compromises the academic integrity of the institution as a whole and that cannot be alleviated by less drastic means.”

That Centenary faces a difficult financial path is undeniable: The letter of notice Patterson got the day of his dismissal acknowledges “a multi-million dollar reduction in net tuition and total revenue, which has contributed to the University realizing a significant operational deficit.”

To resolve the deficit, the letter continues, Centenary would develop new academic programs and double down on recruitment efforts. It would also eliminate the jobs of nine full-time faculty members — four of whom, including Patterson, had tenure — “to prevent a financial exigency in the short-term and to enable the University to meet its long-term goals.”

Centenary, in other words, would be firing tenured faculty in order to dodge a declaration of financial exigency. Yet a tenured faculty member, suggests the AAUP, can be fired only for cause related to performance or conduct, or “under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency and program discontinuation.”

It’s a twist Patterson and his peers, now ousted from their offices, contend is not only an inversion of how exigency is supposed to work but an attack on Centenary’s academic mission.

Asked for comment, Centenary sent a statement about the importance of being a responsible steward of resources. “The Board of Trustees is moving forward with plans to institute new academic programs that will prepare our graduates for careers in the evolving job market,” it read. “As a result, the Board has made the difficult decision to reduce faculty staffing in some areas. Centenary is investing in those programs that will best serve our students, now and in the future.”

The dismissal of Patterson and his tenured colleagues may have unwittingly been set in motion by the AAUP itself. Experts on its standards-setting Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure revised the definition of financial exigency in 2013.

Under the previous definition, a university’s financial condition had to be so dire that it “threatens the survival of the institution as a whole.”

“We decided, frankly, that that was too stringent,” says Henry F. Reichman, chair of Committee A.

The newer and broader definition staked out in 2013 allowed that “an institution need not be on the brink of complete collapse” in order to declare exigency. But it did need to prove that its financial troubles were legitimate and serious. Exigency, the report says, “is not a plausible complaint from a campus that has shifted resources from its primary missions of teaching and research toward employing increasing numbers of administrators or toward unnecessary capital expenditures.”

And if an institution is to declare exigency, it must take deliberate steps to tell its faculty so. AAUP’s recommended institutional regulations stipulate that a faculty-governance body “participate in reaching the determination that a condition of financial exigency exists or is about to exist and that all feasible alternatives to terminating appointments have been exhausted.”

Colleges are also supposed to try to find alternative positions elsewhere in the institution and not fill the empty position for three years, unless it means reinstating the original faculty member.

Not all of those rules, Reichman acknowledges, are universally applicable. “Each institution is different. But if they don’t follow at least the spirit and basic approach that we outlined,” he says, “what ends up happening is this becomes an excuse for a transformation, not of the mission of the institution, but the character of the faculty.”

That “spirit and basic approach” is grounded in trust and transparency, a faculty member’s faith that their institution will abide by shared-governance standards if it’s considering dramatic changes, and that the commonly-held conception of tenure as a lifetime appointment will generally remain intact.

Increasingly, it seems, institutions want to have it both ways: dismiss tenured faculty — but do so without consulting and communicating transparently with faculty. You might call these new efforts near exigency.

Patterson’s students couldn’t believe what their professor had just told them.

“You’re the best teacher here,” a student named Matt Hoyt remembered his friend saying. “How could they?”

Hadn’t Patterson given his entire career to Centenary, they wondered? Hadn’t the university just installed a new baseball diamond and upgraded its course-management system?

Could they go to meetings? Hoyt asked. Who could they talk to? He and his classmates were so angry at that moment, Hoyt says, they could’ve stormed the administrative offices then and there.

Instead, they exchanged contact information with their professor, shook his hand, and hugged him. “We’re going to fight for you,” they promised.

Hoyt spent two hours that night writing a letter to Centenary administrators. “Dr. Patterson is everything a professor should be: he is caring, insightful, astute, challenges the views and opinions of his students and encourages them to work to their fullest potential,” he typed. “We ask you to reconsider, for the sake of the integrity and future of this institution.”

(The next day Hoyt gathered a few dozen signatures and sent a copy to the administration. He says he never heard back.)

After Patterson said goodbye to his students that night, he headed to his car.

He thought about the fact that seven of his colleagues had gotten emails from human resources earlier that week. Each message, like his, had come between 8 and 9 p.m., and each had announced a meeting the following day with Centenary’s interim president, Rosalind Reichard.

Administrators had said nine faculty members would be terminated in all, so Patterson knew two more people would be getting emails, but figured the chance was slight that he would be one of them. After all, his department was already depleted, and Patterson had seniority. Then the ax hit him, too. Patterson suspected a reason: He was outspoken, the vice president for the campus AAUP chapter. He’d done a stint in the campus administration years ago. In October, he had confronted the interim president at an open forum about the proposed cuts.

Reichard, a five-year veteran of Centenary’s board of trustees and former college president herself, had been tapped to run Centenary on an interim basis. She wound up leaving the job not long after she met with Patterson and his fellow professors to dismiss them. Her tenure had started January 2019, after David P. Haney, the previous president, left his post sooner than expected.

Haney described himself in a 2018 interview with the Daily Record, in New Jersey, as a “turnaround president” who was trying to relieve the institution of a $5-million deficit. But the chair of Centenary’s board of trustees, Wolfgang Gstattenbauer, in a later article took issue with Haney’s characterization. “He should not have said anything about finances, especially since it was not correct. Centenary is not in financial trouble,” Gstattenbauer told a reporter for NJ.com. (Gstattenbauer did not respond to a request for comment.)

Before he drove home, Patterson sent a text message to his wife, Carol, a high-school Spanish teacher.

“They got me,” he wrote.

“Do you want me to take off tomorrow?” she texted back.

He called her from the car, and they talked for five or 10 minutes of Patterson’s nearly hourlong drive home.

“They stole your identity,” Carol Patterson told her husband.

He couldn’t sleep that night. The next morning, he drove back to campus to teach. It was the final-exam period for his capstone class in historiographical methods, and two students had to give presentations.

He climbed the stairs to his classroom, as he had done so many times before. Waiting for him in the empty room was Centenary’s vice president for academic affairs, Amy D’Olivo. Years ago, when he was an administrator, Patterson had hired her.

She had intercepted him, he realized, had looked up which classroom he taught in so she could talk to him before his students arrived.

She felt guilty, he surmised. Her eyes were wet.

“With your skill, with your teaching and your scholarship,” he remembers her saying, “you’ll have no trouble getting another job.” (D’Olivo did not respond to requests from The Chronicle for comment.)

He looked at her.

“Amy, I’ll be 61 in two weeks,” he told her. “I’ll never get a full-time teaching job again.”

He taught what he realized would be the last class of his career, then went downstairs to the human-resources office. The head of campus security was waiting there, as he had been for other meetings with Reichard that week.

The meeting started. Thank you for coming, Reichard and Christine Rosado, the human-resources director, said. We know this isn’t easy.

The meeting lasted five minutes. No explanations were offered, Patterson said, and little eye contact was made. Mostly, it was an overview of insurance and benefits.

Then it was over. Still stunned, Patterson started tracking down colleagues so he could start saying his goodbyes.

Centenary shares some common traits with a handful of institutions that have executed near-exigency maneuvers in the past few years, according to Chronicle research. They have been tuition-dependent colleges with 3,000 or fewer undergraduates that admit more applicants than they reject. Hiram College, in Ohio, and Simpson College, in Iowa, each cut two tenured faculty members in 2018, and the University of St. Thomas, in Texas, in 2019 rolled out plans to do the same.

AAUP’s Committee A rebuked National Louis University, in Chicago, for terminating 63 faculty — 16 of them tenured — without having declared exigency in 2012, and rendered similar judgment in a 2015 case at the College of Saint Rose, in New York, which laid off 14 tenured and nine tenure-track faculty members in an “academic program prioritization.”

Several faculty members affected by these efforts declined opportunities to speak publicly, for fear of jeopardizing future job opportunities. And, of course, these near-exigency efforts have taken place amid a broader trend of adjunctification of the professoriate, which has significantly weakened tenure.

Many of these institutions face their own challenges: Enrollment is declining, and finances are getting squeezed. Leaders are confronting a difficult question: How forcefully should they act in anticipation of what’s to come?

Why not declare exigency if they want to let go of tenured faculty? It may be a calculation by administrators to safeguard their institutions, says Anita Levy, a senior program officer in the AAUP’s department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance. They may be trying, she wrote in an email, “to maintain their reputations and prevent a death spiral.”

Levy says that near exigency, or what she described as “informal declarations” of exigency, seem to have increased since the AAUP adopted its new definition, while formal declarations have decreased.

Even some public colleges, though not in as much danger as private ones of closing, have tried to cut tenured faculty. With many having suffered decreased state funding, says Timothy R. Cain, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education, they “might be in danger of having the academic integrity and rigor undercut due to financial pressures.”

Cain wouldn’t necessarily describe near exigency as a sleight-of-hand weapon in the war on tenure, but he does see it as one dimension of a larger-scale casualization of the professoriate. “As we reshape our institutions, oftentimes without substantial or significant faculty input,” he says, “we are further eroding the power of the tenured faculty.”

That erosion is something that Paul G. Neiman knows well.

After landing a one-year appointment teaching philosophy at St. Cloud State University, a public institution in Minnesota, for the 2007-8 academic year, Neiman went back on the job market. He earned a tenure-track job back at St. Cloud State but soon found his job at risk: His position was among several dozen targeted by a retrenchment in July 2010. That effort was rescinded in early 2011, and he eventually became the department chair. Then, in August 2019, Neiman got his second retrenchment notice, effective at the end of this academic year.

“The fact that I had gotten tenure wasn’t really that feeling of security that I think some people understand tenure to have,” Neiman says. “It’s just not something that I ever felt, because I was still on the bottom of the seniority list.”

St. Cloud State announced in August that it would lay off eight tenured faculty members at the end of the academic year, owing to a history of budget constraints and lower-than-projected enrollment numbers. Three of those faculty members, it said, would come from the philosophy department, four from the libraries, and one from the theater program.

Adding to the frustration for St. Cloud State’s faculty is the fact that, in tandem with the layoffs, administrators hired 29 new faculty members. The eight faculty cuts will cover about 6.5 percent of the institution’s budget shortfalls, according to numbers provided by St. Cloud State.

St. Cloud State’s Faculty Association filed a grievance with the administration alleging that the university’s president, Robbyn R. Wacker, “failed to meet contractual obligations for timely and adequate notice to the faculty association” that she was considering retrenchment. Nor, the grievance reads, was the faculty association provided with adequate data — on enrollment numbers, the university’s budget, vacancies, and attrition — to review.

That’s not true, Wacker says. “We gave a full picture of our financial situation,” she says, “of the data, the drop in enrollment, the drop in number of students being served in these particular areas that were part of the retrenchment.”

That full picture, she says, includes a projected budget deficit for 2021 of $13.8 million, and a 9.3-percent drop in enrollment in the fall of 2019. The enrollment decline is a “code-red issue,” Wacker says, but a declaration of financial exigency is “not anything that I’ve entertained” since she started at St. Cloud State in 2018. “It’s our hope … that we wouldn’t have to officially declare that.”

Reichman, of the AAUP, recognizes administrators’ concern that a formal declaration of exigency, or a full airing of data on enrollment, attrition, and other metrics, could leave institutions doubly vulnerable by scaring students away.

“If they declare financial exigency, if they make public statements that, ‘Our finances are disastrous right now,’ it will only accelerate their decline,” Reichman says.

“The problem is, of course, oftentimes they not only don’t declare it, they don’t really have it. They’re just saying, ‘We have financial problems,’ and if you look more closely, they’re not in such financial difficulty.”

Whether or not a formal declaration is made or the formal steps toward retrenchment observed, the act of laying off tenured professors is bound to affect an institution’s reputation and well-being, says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell University. “It’s not clear,” Ehrenberg says, that laying off tenured faculty sends “a better signal than actually declaring financial exigency.”

That’s of little comfort to Neiman and his colleagues at St. Cloud State. He recently realized that he’d be teaching his courses for the last time. Without Neiman and his colleagues, the size of St. Cloud State’s philosophy department will shrink to four faculty members.

“It just kind of seems like a slow death,” Neiman said. “The person who’s going to be taking over for me as chair next year, she feels like the department is on hospice care. Now that’s her goal: Managing the end of it.”

At Centenary University, Patterson questioned whether appealing his firing was a pointless formality. Appeals would be due on Monday, only four days after he learned he was being fired. He’d need to spend much of that time filing his final grades, anyway.

But one of his colleagues persuaded him, and he filed an appeal to the institution’s mediation panel, citing five points of violation of Centenary’s constitution. Patterson’s students, their parents, alumni, colleagues at other institutions, the American Conference for Irish Studies, and the national AAUP leadership all later submitted letters asking the institution to reconsider.

Two days before Christmas, Patterson received a two-sentence letter from Reichard. The three members of the mediation panel — none of whom held a Ph.D. — had sealed his fate.

“The Mediation and Policy Panel of Centenary University concluded on December 20, 2019, ‘the termination of appointment of Dr. James Patterson did not violate constitutional policies of Centenary University,’” Reichard wrote. “I affirm the unanimous decision rendered by the Panel.”

Patterson’s contract doesn’t officially end until June 30, but he isn’t teaching this semester. Before Patterson was fired, two of the four classes he was scheduled to teach this spring had reached the 25-student cap, and he’d let two additional students into one course. Now, according to Hoyt, his former student, the course-management system shows 10 students enrolled in one of those classes, and five in the other. They’re being taught by an adjunct.

On December 23, the day he learned his appeal had been denied, Patterson drove to campus, cardboard boxes in tow.

His wife and son joined him, as did the professor with whom he’d shared an office. Together, they emptied the bookshelves and desk drawers.

It took about an hour and a half.

Patterson took his diplomas off the wall, his Fulbright Scholar award, his Distinguished Teacher of the Year plaque.

He gave his computer and keys to the head of human resources and chief financial officer, who were waiting for him downstairs.

Then he left.

Three weeks later, a colleague emailed him.

“It’s been eerily quiet and sad here,” the colleague wrote. “The students have not been told what happened and many are angry and the faculty are wondering who is next. But it’s even sadder to not see you on campus. I wish I could figure out how to right this wrong.”