It’s amazing how swiftly we are seeing downgrades, cuts, and closures in recent weeks. As you can imagine, the faculty at Linfield is not happy about this.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Refusing to Be Their Own ExecutionersLinfield College is planning to cut faculty members as it rethinks how it does business in a time of declining enrollment.But some faculty members at the Oregon institution worry the process and timeline for the initiative thus far suggest disaster.“There is a financial crisis in the sense that the budget is unbalanced. But it is going to be balanced by sending 25 tenured and tenure-track faculty to the chopping block?” said a professor of humanities who did not want to be named, for fear of losing his job. “Are there lots of other measures that could be taken to make up the deficit? Yes.”Linfield maintains that it has not yet decided how many faculty members have to go, even though the Faculty Executive Committee reported that that figure was mentioned during a private meeting with President Miles K. Davis. But the college recently confirmed that it will cut faculty positions through an academic prioritization process. The college has relatively few non-tenure-line positions, so it’s likely that those cut will be tenured or tenure track.The announcement comes as the faculty resist participating in a culling process — one faculty leaders have said they were initially asked to complete within a week.Linfield also says that it already has done all it can to shave costs, except for laying off professors.
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