Nearly two dozen faculty members at Manhattan College, most of them tenured, got word last month that they were being laid off. The decision appeared to contradict the “last-in, first-out” approach laid out last fall by the New York college’s administrators, in which the newest employees would be the first to go.
In what felt to some faculty members like a bait and switch, several senior professors who assumed their jobs weren’t at risk now face termination, while more-junior scholars, who signed buyout agreements because they thought they would be dismissed under the policy, now find themselves unable to revoke those deals.
The staffing reductions, which are part of a planned restructuring to alleviate a financial deficit and which will eliminate 20 majors and minors, violate the college’s faculty handbook and generally understood norms of tenure, job security, and shared governance, according to professors interviewed by The Chronicle.
This latest chapter in a continuing conflict at the Lasallian Catholic institution began on January 12, when 19 tenured faculty members and four nontenured scholars were informed in short meetings that they were being laid off (two of the tenured faculty members’ layoffs were later revoked by administrators). The tenured professors were told that their last day of employment would be June 15, 2024, and that they’d receive severance pay through January 12, 2025; the nontenured faculty members’ contracts would end on June 15, 2025.
An appendix to the severance agreement, a copy of which was shared with The Chronicle, says that employees were identified for layoffs based on “an objective methodology in furtherance of the college’s financial budgeting requirements, enrollment, academic and programmatic needs, streamlining, centralization, and consolidation.” But faculty members said that justification was unclear and inaccurate, and that Manhattan administrators had declined to provide further explanation or share data on which the layoff decisions had been made.
‘I Love My Job’
The recent turn of events has made a disruptive period even more disquieting for some professors. Jordan Pascoe, a professor of philosophy who is her department’s second-newest member, was at risk of being laid off under the last-in, first-out policy, and considered signing the voluntary-separation agreement. Administrators said one or two positions would be cut from her department. “So there was still a chance that I was going to make it through. I love my job, and I didn’t want to lose it,” Pascoe said. “I thought to myself, ‘In 10 years, if I never manage to get another academic job, will I feel good about having voluntarily given this one up?’ I didn’t think I would, so I felt like it was worth staying and fighting to keep my job.”
She found out at the start of the spring semester that she wouldn’t get that chance.
Also among the faculty members being laid off is Jeff Horn, a professor of history who told The Chronicle he was the senior member of his department. Horn said he thought he was being summoned to a meeting about who would become the next chair of history, but was soon informed by a lawyer and a human-resources representative of the college that he had lost his job. “It completely came out of the blue as far as I was concerned,” he said. “Without telling anybody and without vetting their process, without ensuring that their data was correct, I did not expect them to come up with an entirely new metric by which they were going to act.”
Administrators told the laid-off professors that Manhattan had abandoned the last-in, first-out policy over concerns that it would affect too many minority faculty members and women, said Horn and Marlene Gottlieb, a professor of Spanish who is also being laid off. But among the senior scholars now being terminated are several faculty members of color and women, said Gottlieb, who has been at Manhattan since 2008 and was until last fall chair of its department of modern languages and literatures. “We really don’t know how they chose.”
Having tenure at Manhattan College is effectively a demerit.
The layoffs, Gottlieb said, marked “a totally unilateral, top-down decision” by the institution’s president, Milo Riverso, an alumnus and former member of Manhattan’s board who took office in July; faculty members, she said, had been allowed no input on the matter. A faculty resolution of no confidence in Riverso passed handily last month, according to The Riverdale Press, but the board chair, Stephen J. Squeri, said in a response that the board “unanimously stands” by Riverso’s decisions, which he wrote had been made to “ensure the long-term financial stability of the college and its ability to pursue its mission for generations of students to come.”
In response to detailed questions from The Chronicle, Riverso provided a statement saying that he could not comment on personnel matters. “It serves no purpose for me to debate the inaccurate statements that have circulated about our financial situation. Suffice to say that we are addressing our issues and we are on a road to recovery,” Riverso said. “As with many institutions of our size, Manhattan College has had to make very difficult and painful decisions in order to address our systemic deficits and to continue to provide the highest level of education for our deserving students. We appreciate the input of the faculty, alumni, and others, and hope that they, in turn, appreciate that there are no easy solutions to the financial predicament that we are resolving.”
Gottlieb and her colleagues considered suing the college, and a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for legal fees brought in nearly $40,000. But the costs would probably exceed that sum, she said, and the professors want to avoid a protracted legal battle. (Gottlieb, Horn, and Pascoe spoke to The Chronicle last week, ahead of a Monday deadline to sign their severance agreements, which include a nondisparagement clause.)
All three professors complained that their nontenured colleagues had been given more notice of their layoffs than they were. “Having tenure at Manhattan College is effectively a demerit,” Pascoe said. “It gives you fewer employment protections than being tenure-track, and if that’s what tenure means, then we no longer have a common-sense definition of tenure.”
Negative Outlook
Both the originally announced layoff plans and the decisions made last month contravene commonly held understandings of tenure, popularized in 1940 by a joint statement of the American Association of University Professors and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. That statement holds that tenured faculty members can be terminated only for cause or in the case of bona fide financial exigency. (The college has not declared financial exigency, and although it has repeatedly cited a large deficit, it has not specified the size.) Meanwhile, Manhattan’s faculty handbook provides 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, the professors said.
“There has just been a blanket rejection of both the AAUP and common-sense definitions of tenure by our college. They have explicitly said that they do not think that the AAUP definition of what tenure is is binding to them in any way,” Pascoe said. “We are only getting the severance that we’re getting because we are signing on to a binding document” — the severance agreement — “rather than it being what we are entitled to.”
A lawyer for the college said in the fall that “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,” Manhattan is not obliged to follow the AAUP regulations.
This is the second round of recent layoffs at Manhattan, which terminated 16 instructors, including tenure-track and non-tenure-track employees, last spring. The college announced in November that it would restructure, merging its six schools into three to cut costs. (In 2022, Manhattan employed 233 full-time instructional staff members.) News of forthcoming layoffs met with sharp criticism, including a letter signed by about 100 faculty members and a Change.org petition started by a Manhattan alumna.
But those changes aren’t likely to immediately improve Manhattan’s balance sheet, according to the bond-rating agency Fitch Ratings, which downgraded the college’s outlook from stable to negative this month. That decision, the agency said, “reflects several years of anemic Fitch-calculated cash-flow margins that are expected to persist at least through fiscal year 2024, after which bold deficit-reduction actions taken by Manhattan College’s almost entirely new management team start to materialize.” Those actions, Fitch noted, were “necessary to achieve longer-term expense reductions.”
