As students exhaled in anticipation of their mid-semester break, Wabash professors held their breaths last Tuesday, as they learned the details of a new Faculty Restructuring Plan that will reduce the size of College’s teaching corps.
The plan was presented to faculty members during last week’s division meetings and calls for an eight-person overall reduction in the size of full-time faculty. While all three divisions are slated to shrink, Division II departments, which include Art, Music, and Classics, will receive the brunt of the cuts, which will be fully implemented during the 2011-2012 academic year.
Division II faculty positions will shrink by five, from 38 professors to 33 professors. Professor of German Sarah Painitz and Professor of Music Vanessa Rogers, who were both hired tenure-track within the past two years, confirmed to Bachelor staff earlier this week that they have been notified that their positions will be eliminated at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year. The remaining cuts will be realized by not filling some vacancies left by professors who have chosen to utilize the early retirement option.
Chief Financial Officer Larry Griffith said the cuts were a difficult but necessary step to prevent significant student tuition increases while shoring up the budget shortfalls caused by the market decline and the subsequent endowment drop. The restructuring plan is the latest in a series of actions administration officials have taken to address the College’s financial woes.
Previous cost-cutting measures include staff reductions, across-the-board operating cuts of more than ten percent, and offering an early retirement package to faculty and staff members over the age of 55, which 32 people accepted.
“Anytime you make changes it’s difficult,” Griffith said. “I don’t think anything jumped off the table as ‘here’s what we don’t need.’ We need it all, otherwise we wouldn’t have it. But we can’t afford not to make change. For us to not change means students are going to have to pay for it. I think those are the tradeoffs you make.
“Our short range goal [is] to get to the point where we’re living on our revenue sources…and drawing money from the endowment at a responsible percentage so we’re not jeopardizing the future, yet not jeopardizing the present.”
The restructuring plan was the result of months of deliberations by administration officials and Division chairs. The decline in the market led to a nearly $150 million dip in the College’s endowment, a portion of which funds the College’s annual operations. Griffith said his five-year revenue projection showed the college’s expenses would exceed its revenues, which led administration officials to develop strategies to stave off budget shortfalls and rethink the role of the endowment.
“You keep pulling money from your endowment to balance things out, and eventually your endowment goes away,” Griffith said. “You can’t do it regularly. So what we looked at was what’s a plan for us to get from where we are today to where we need to be three or four years out. I did a projection of the number of dollars we would have to get out of salaries to get us back…and how that equates to faculty people, administrators, and clerical workers.”
After arriving at a target faculty number, Griffith and administration officials charged Dean of the College Gary Phillips and Division Chairs with working out the details. According to Division III Chair and Political Science Professor Melissa Butler, the four of them have been meeting weekly since the beginning of the semester to structure the final plan.
“We had a target number, and we went through department by department to see how we could take it from the faculty that we have now to the faculty that fit that target. So we looked at how many students would be affected and what would be the implications of this cut versus the implications of that cut.”
Professor of Chemistry and Division I Chair Scott Feller said they tried to balance the different needs of the institution.
“I would say every position was looked at multiple times in multiple ways to try to get every possible perspective,” he said. “What’s the mix that’s going to maintain high student engagement [and] keep student-faculty ratios as low as possible in an environment where the total number of faculty is going to shrink.”
With the total number of faculty members decreasing and the student population expected to remain stable, administrators and faculty recognize individual departments and the College as a whole will have to retool. For some departments, that discussion has already begun.
“When we realized what was going to happen, we began to go and take a look at our curriculum,” said Spanish Professor Dan Rogers, the Modern Languages Department Chair. “We’re almost ready to present to the faculty a retooled curriculum that gives us more flexibility that I think will allow us to continue offering French, German, and Spanish majors.”
Professor Butler anticipates the restructuring plan will breathe new life into a curriculum review effort that stalled a few years ago.
“A while ago there were a number of ideas put forth for curriculum reform that kind of died,” she said. “But there were a lot of people who thought some of the ideas were very good. And it may be that now necessity pushes us toward some of them.”
