The college is working to reassign courses originally planned to be taught by the 20 faculty members who were laid off on Tuesday, June 17, aiming to ensure students stay on track for graduation and the upcoming semester.
“Our priority for these faculty departures is to not affect students’ progress toward their degrees or their planning for the fall semester,” Lambrini Lukidis, associate vice president of strategic communications and external relations, said in an email to the Chronicle. “Our work right now is focused on reassigning courses, and this happens in the context of other adjustments related to enrollment and overall student course needs.”
Course cancellations occur every summer due to enrollment rates in classes, Lukidis told the Chronicle.
“This happens independently of personnel matters,” she said.
Eighteen of the laid off faculty had tenure appointments and two were teaching-track. They included faculty of all ranks, including full professors who have been promoted to the highest academic rank. Some had been at the college for decades.
The college laid off one faculty member in the School of Audio and Music, one faculty member in the School of Business and Entrepreneurship, 10 faculty in the School of Communication and Culture, three faculty in School of Design and five in the School of Visual Arts. Their last day is Aug. 15.
Ames Hawkins, director of the School of Communication and Culture, said the college is “losing respected colleagues and cherished friends.”
“The affected faculty were valued members of our community whose impact will be felt for years,” Hawkins said in an email to the Chronicle. “The grief is real and pervasive and will need to be felt and experienced by each of us in our own way. That said, we also move forward with our unwavering commitment to our students and the future of this college that we all love so much.”
The layoffs come as the college continues to confront a mounting budget shortfall and shrinking enrollment. In January, the college laid off 23 full-time faculty members, including nine teaching-track faculty and 14 faculty with tenure appointments, bringing the total number of full-time faculty laid off this year to 43, which represents about 20% of all faculty.
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.
On Wednesday, June 18, Dirk Matthews, interim vice president for development and alumni relations, forwarded the college’s email announcement about the layoffs to alumni.
“These were challenging decisions for the college to make, but our priority is to align the academic offerings to match the demand of students and the creative industries,” Matthews wrote in the email to alumni.
Alum Jacqueline Luttrell, who graduated in 2020 with a photojournalism degree, said they were glad the college was keeping graduates up-to-date on the college’s situation but was “really upset it’s even happening.”
“We really can’t afford to lose people in those critical areas,” Luttrell said. “At what point do we stop bleeding our faculty to get the budget balanced?”
Alum Colin Lenburg said the conversation about layoffs and courses being cut was a topic before he graduated in May 2020 with a degree in cinema arts and sciences. Looking at current college students, he said they are “being robbed of the best education you can get.”
Lenburg said his reaction to the email was confusion.
“It’s sad they’re robbing you guys of that diversity I got to experience almost a decade ago,” Lenburg said. “I think the email was the college trying to save face in order to squeeze a little money out of alumni.”
This story has been updated.
Copy edited by Matt Brady and Vanessa Orozco
