MORGANTOWN – Current and former WVU faculty members – and a few supporters – joined to send an open letter to several media outlets, and a separate letter to the WVU Board of Governors, opposing and describing their concerns about potential damage the university’s reduction in force process could cause.
The open letter, sent Thursday, has 55 signatories and the BOG letter has 58.
The BOG letter begins, “We understand the Reduction in Force (RIF) is being activated in response to the budget crisis, but we ask you to address the financial situation in ways that strengthen rather than decimate our capacity to fulfill our land grant mission. We believe the RIF will damage the university’s ability to deliver quality education and threaten its status as a research institution.”
Facing a current $45 million budget deficit – expected to grow to $75 million by 2028 if left unchecked – WVU’s BOG in mid-May approved a “Transformation Timeline” and OK’d putting out for public comment proposed amendments to its rules for faculty and classified staff RIFs – reductions in force – and severance package schedules.
WVU officials said at the May BOG meeting that faculty RIFs/non-renewals will be based on performance, knowledge and qualifications, and seniority. Assuming a notice date of Oct. 16 and a contract end date of May 9, 2024, faculty will have 30 weeks’ notice. Some faculty will be offered a retention bonus for a two- to three-year “teach out,” which is continuing a program to allow students enrolled in discontinued programs to finish at WVU or move to a similar program or something else they might be interested in.
Thursday’s letters focus on proposed changes to Rule 4.7, adopted in 2018, concerning faculty RIFs. The open letter says the rule “allows for faculty termination regardless of tenure-track, tenure, or contractual status, eviscerated the promotion and tenure system and the academic freedom tenure is meant to ensure.”
The BOG letter asserts that the current rule doesn’t define sufficient cause for declaring a RIF and the proposed amendments “explicitly exclude faculty from participating in developing the RIF plan,” requiring only that the dean or provost give consideration to performance, knowledge and qualifications, and seniority.
“It does not protect employment based on excellence or experience, or ensure the RIF will not be used as ‘a performance management tool.’”
Before continuing, WVU was able to offer a brief statement that we provide here: “The university has been and will continue to be transparent about its structural budget deficit, and we will continue to share information about the larger transformation initiatives as they develop over time. These communications include Campus Conversations, emails and a website which serves as an ever-evolving hub for a variety of resources and accurate information. We encourage those who wish to engage in the process to visit transformation.wvu.edu.”
Potential harms
The letter describes what faculty see as potential harms in five areas:
Recruitment and hiring: “WVU cannot recruit and retain high quality faculty, especially those from underrepresented groups, without a strong tenure and promotion process and job stability. … Needed hires have already declined offers because of the current RIF.”
Academic freedom: “The RIF process undercuts academic freedom by removing protections against punitive and retaliatory job termination.”
Research Intensive (R1) Carnegie classification: “An R1 designation depends on thriving graduate programs and faculty research productivity. The RIF, in conjunction with other budget cuts to graduate programs and increased fees on graduate students, would exacerbate problems recruiting PhD students with assurances of continuous grant-funded employment and/or consistent research supervision. In addition, faculty research agendas require long-range planning and implementation that depend on the continuity provided by the contract and tenure system. Further, the faculty who bring in the most research dollars are the most likely to be recruited elsewhere as the WVU’s tenure system becomes meaningless and its ability to support research programs declines.”
Land grant mission: “WVU faculty serve the residents of West Virginia by providing quality community service, research, and educational programming in areas of importance to West Virginia, such as teacher training, energy, health care, economic development, and cultural and environmental conservation, preservation, and enhancement. Many of these areas do not bring in large amounts of external funding (and some pay for themselves through external grants and contracts). The RIF will severely compromise WVU’s obligation to its tax-paying citizens.”
Student centered: “Program cancellation, reduction of faculty, increased faculty course loads and class sizes, and reduced support staff all work against WVU’s goal to be ‘student-centered.’ Programs have already absorbed massive cuts that affect work productivity and teaching effectiveness, including the non-renewal of instructor contracts, non-replacement of faculty who have retired or left WVU, cuts to graduate teaching assistant lines, increased teaching loads, increased class sizes, increased fees on graduate and international students, and cuts to unit operating budgets.”
The BOG letter concludes: “As stakeholders who care deeply about our students and the state of West Virginia, we urge the BOG to lead WVU toward more structurally sound solutions to the budget deficit.”
Anonymous blog post
The open letter alleges university leadership has not been transparent or consistent in developing its RIF process. It refers to a May 24 anonymous blog post titled “The WVU Budget Crisis,” written by a “concerned group of WVU employees” that offers its view of the history and extent of the problem at considerable length.
The blog states that WVU employs highly paid officials and staff – it lists positions earning salaries ranging from more than $200,000 to more than $400,000 – who should have been able to see and plan for WVU’s declining enrollment (from 31,000 in 2014 to about 26,000 this year, and perhaps to 21,000 by 2033).
Building on that, the open letter says, “The Provost’s office claims decision-making about layoffs will be ‘data-driven’ and ‘transparent,’ but faculty have received conflicting messages on what data will be used and how. As ‘The WVU Budget Crisis’ documents, administrators have twice hired external consultants to provide data the university already has, claiming the consultants will only be generating this redundant data and not participating in RIF decisions.
“Departments,” the letter says, “were first told they would be scrutinized based on class enrollment numbers, then on numbers of majors (but only primary majors). In the June 2023 meeting of the Faculty Senate, administrators still struggled to identify the metrics they are using to evaluate programs and terminate faculty, even though layoffs have already begun.”
Some individual faculty members submitted additional comments to The Dominion Post and noted other issues. One referred to a report by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy that concluded. “If West Virginia lawmakers had simply kept higher education funding at the same levels as a decade ago, West Virginia University would have an estimated additional $37.6 million in state funding for FY 2024, closing the majority of this year’s budget gap.”
That faculty member observed, “In campus discussions, faculty have noted that the drop in enrollment is not hitting universities everywhere. Enrollment at the University of Tennessee, for example, is at an all-time high.”
A personal view
One professor who signed the BOG letter and recently resigned, offered some personal thoughts.
“Since 2021, the climate at WVU, generated by the administration, has made it impossible for me to teach or write effectively. I resigned for that reason, and out of protest against the way our students and WV young people will suffer because of the administration’s top-down slaughter of majors, programs, departments, colleges, and personnel – faculty and staff at every level are being RIF’d, and apparently in every part of the university.
“I’ve been in education a long time. I’ve gone through financial crises many times and at different institutions. What’s happening at WVU right now is a different animal. It will destroy far more than it will preserve. And we haven’t been given the full story about why this is happening.”
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