Senior Vice President and Provost Marcella David told the Faculty Senate on Friday, Feb. 7 that additional faculty layoffs could be possible but she “cannot say at this moment for sure.”
Speaking as a guest at the senate’s first meeting of the new semester, David said there were no “fixed plans” for lay-offs in the short-term.
“In the long-term, I imagine that is absolutely going to happen,” David said, adding that she didn’t have a timeline.
As programs are eliminated, the college will continue to look at faculty needs, she said. “That could mean some as soon as next year, but I don’t know.”
Last month, the college laid off 23 full-time faculty as part of a historic dismissal of tenured and teaching-track professors, as the Chronicle previously reported. The lay-offs represented 10% of Columbia’s 233 full-time faculty and included five faculty from the School of Film and Television.
The college’s deficit grew to $38 million after the seven-week part-time faculty strike in Fall 2023. Former President and CEO Kwang-Wu Kim recommended that the college reduce the deficit through layoffs, sale of real estate and other budget cuts. The deficit has since been reduced to $17 million, roughly what it was before the strike.
In May 2024, the college’s Board of Trustees voted that the college had met the requirements for “adverse circumstances,” allowing faculty with tenured appointments to be laid off.
At the time, Kim, who stepped down last summer, said he expected the college to lay off 11 to 13 full-time faculty across the former English and Creative Writing, Humanities, History & Social Sciences and the Science and Mathematics department because of changes to the core.
The layoffs were almost twice that and reached far beyond the faculty who teach in Columbia’s core, which was reduced to 30 required credits from 42.
Many of the laid-off faculty came from programs that were merged or eliminated when the college consolidated its academic offerings in order to save an estimated $5 million over two years. The college will now offer 33 undergraduate and seven graduate degrees.
Faculty Senate President Rojhat Avsar told the senate that the executive committee had pressed David for more information about the faculty who had been laid off. Citing privacy reasons, David did not disclose more details but agreed to share an outreach from the senate with the affected faculty.
The Chronicle has learned the names of most of the faculty who were laid off but is not disclosing them without the consent of faculty or unless the faculty talk publicly about their dismissal.
David said that the college tried to match what faculty were teaching with what was needed in the new program array.
“That led, as I know you all know, to the nonrenewal of some teaching track faculty and also the termination of some tenured faculty,” David said.
David said the budget crisis may have been the catalyst for the changes to the academic offerings, but it allowed the college to stop and think about “where we want to be as an institution moving forward, think about technology, thinking about changes in creative practices, thinking about the fact that there is a demographic cliff.”
The demographic cliff refers to the lower of high school graduates who could be eligible to attend college, expected to peak this fall and into next year.
The college also laid off 70 staff members on last May, including four therapists in the Counseling Center, four librarians, two academic advisors and nine staff in the tutoring center. Six people who work in student financial aid also lost their jobs.
At the start of the fall semester, 18 full-time faculty members were offered buyouts, and 11 accepted.
Avsar, associate professor in economics at the School of Communication and Culture, said the provost has not directly communicated with the senate’s leadership about any immediate plans for future cuts.
David “said there are no immediate plans, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be,” Avsar said.
The January layoffs included nine teaching-track faculty members and 14 faculty members with tenure appointments. Teaching-track faculty have contracts.
Avsar said that a sense of job insecurity because of the terminations will be a major impediment to faculty productivity and morale, but the executive committee will continue to be an advocate for the impacted faculty with whatever they can offer to provide.
Copy edited by Matt Brady
