The Board of Trustees at Catholic University voted June 4th on a plan that cut thirty-five faculty members from a variety of academic departments. The plan had been approved by the Faculty Senate on May 9th, and is the culmination of work over the past few years designed to close the gap from declining tuition revenue, this year amounting to about $3.5 million. Academic reduction plans are often branded as commitments to educational integrity, and Catholic University saw no reason to break with this trend, titling the plan “Academic Renewal.”
In order to justify this reduction, the plan emphasized a need to standardize teaching. In the academic world, most universities require tenure-track faculty to teach six courses in a year, three in the fall and three in the spring. However, because professors are researchers, these schedules are unreliable. Minimally, most faculty can expect to take a sabbatical leave every six years. External grants and fellowships also throw wrenches into teaching plans. A faculty member slated to teach three courses in the fall might find out in July that she won a grant that allows her to work on research that can only be used in that semester. Aware of these issues, most departments retain more faculty than they technically need to teach courses in a semester.
The Academic Renewal Plan is set up to ignore the issue of research. Contracting an external consulting agency, Catholic University’s administration created an index of “surplus sections” that are defined by a department’s capacity to teach beyond demand. So if a department has 7 faculty members, they hypothetically could teach 21 sections. If there is only demand for 10 sections, 11 of those sections would count as “surplus,” and on the table for faculty reduction. For the most part, the reduction of these surpluses is a decline in overall student enrollment, and especially a decline in those who major in the humanities. One notable exception is the Economics and Business departments, which are receiving expansions, likely due to a $15 million gift determined to advance the marriage between free-market economics and Catholicism.
This time, Catholic University managed to either buy out contracts or convince individual faculty members to retire earlier, which meant layoffs of tenured faculty were not required. However, had they not met the thirty-five member requirement, the University was prepared to meet its quota on the grounds of not-financial exigency (whatever that means, see pg. 13).
It might seem a little confusing as to why a university with a $330 million endowment would consider laying off tenured faculty before it would consider plugging such a shortfall with emergency funds from the endowment. The answer is partially about declining revenue from lower enrollments, but it is perhaps more so about the choice of investments on the part of a corporate university. While investments in luxury living on campus may be declining, universities are still footing the bill from investments of a decade ago. Catholic University was no exception, beginning a $200 million development project in 2011 (worth mentioning: $200 million might have paid $100,000/year salaries to all 399 full-time faculty members at the university for five years). Over the same period of time, they began to rapidly increase tuition revenue. From 2010 to 2018, tuition increased from $31,740 to $43,120, a 35% increase over eight years. While most universities will claim financial aid also increases, its empirical fact that high tuition costs turn away students. As Dan Nemser and Brian Whitener put it for The New Inquiry:
“We have hit a tuition limit. Although administrators may be reluctant to admit it, students and families are less and less willing to pay ever increasing tuition bills, in spite of the so-called “wage premium” a college degree continues to confer.”
A better path forward would be to remember the purported core values of the university: to advance scholarship, produce research both relevant and esoteric, and to bring these findings to a broader public through teaching and writing. In defending these goals, faculty administrators might find the backbone to fight against corporate interests who immediately translate these revenue streams into profits for private development firms.
Labor For The Tower 