Weekly Briefing

Emporia State U. fires professors with tenure.

Emporia State University, in Kansas, has been firing tenured professors this month.

In January 2021, the Kansas Board of Regents approved a policy that allowed the six state universities to suspend or terminate employees, including tenured professors, even if the institution had not declared financial exigency or initiated that process. The board wanted to give its universities the flexibility they needed to deal with financial strain brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, regents said at the time.

For a year and a half, no university acted on the policy. That changed this month when Emporia State submitted to regents a short “framework for work-force management” that sketches out the university’s criteria for cutting employees, some of which mirrors the language in the regents’ policy. Regents unanimously approved the framework, although before voting, Cynthia Lane, a board member, remarked that this “is a tool that should be used sparingly.”

Ken Hush, president of Emporia State (whose administration building is pictured above), told the board that traditional cost-cutting measures, like hiring freezes and spending restrictions, hadn’t been enough. “So what’s the choice?” Hush asked. “Continually passing the burden to students is a failure of our — ESU’s — previous strategies and is no longer acceptable.” Expenses continue to rise, he said, as enrollment declines. (According to a university spokeswoman, on-campus enrollment declined 24 percent between 2017 and 2021.) Hush told the board that the faculty had had input in the university’s work-force decision.

Brenda Koerner, a member of the executive committee of the Faculty Senate, disagrees about that. “All faculty recognize that higher ed is changing,” Koerner told our Emma Pettit. “A fair number of faculty recognize that some of that change is going to be painful. The biggest affront here is that faculty weren’t involved … in the process at all.”

Shortly after speaking to The Chronicle, Koerner, a tenured professor, learned that she won’t have a job at Emporia State come mid-May.

You can read more about Emporia State’s decision here. Since Emma wrote that article last week, 33 employees have been dismissed, according to The Emporia Gazette. This past Monday, reported KVOE, students and workers held a candlelight vigil for those who were fired. The author Joyce Carol Oates called the move “self-sabotage to a university” on Twitter, and The Kansas Reflector says professors want answers about which departments are most affected before they recruit students for next year. President Hush was seen leaving campus in a police car during protests, according to the student newspaper.

Lagniappe.

• Read, weep. Unthinkable, a memoir by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District, is about his experience on January 6, 2021, the second impeachment trial of President Trump (which Raskin led), and the suicide of Raskin’s 25-year-old son, Tommy, a week before January 6. It is sad and surprisingly uplifting.
• Read. The colors on the wristbands changed every thousand people. Find out what it was like in the Queue of All Queues, the one to pay respect to the late Queen Elizabeth II. (GQ)
• Watch. If you’re in New York City or D.C., two academic plays are in theaters this month. In New York, peerless, about college admissions and twins who will stop at nothing to get into their top choice, runs until November 6. In Washington, Heroes of the Fourth Turning concerns alumni of a conservative Catholic college who reunite in Wyoming to try to make sense of their country, through October 23. (59E59 Theaters in N.Y., Studio Theatre in D.C.)

— Heidi