By Anna Hansen
Edgewood fired seven faculty members on May 27 in their ongoing efforts to cut costs. The college had offered nine Voluntary Separation Incentive Packages (VSIPS) on May 1. These were sent to faculty in the following departments: Computer Information Sciences, Communication Studies, Economics, Mathematics, the School of Education, English, and the School of Integrative Studies. Only two faculty accepted a package.
Four of those fired this week were tenure-track, and three were tenured.
“Tenure” refers to indefinite employment, terminated only under extreme circumstances.
As of 2017-2018, Edgewood’s faculty handbook outlines that tenured and tenure-track faculty being laid off “will be notified by mid-Dec., 2019, which is the beginning of the 1-year layoff agreement notice.” The handbook also states that tenure-track and tenured faculty who are needed to teach in Spring 2020 and Fall 2020 will “be under a one-year layoff agreement to teach those semesters and receive regular health and other benefits.”
According to an anonymous faculty source, this is not the case for the seven faculty members affected by the recent layoffs.
On The Edge reached out to Edgewood’s Director of Strategic Communications Ed Taylor, Interim Academic Dean Margaret Noreuil, and Vice President of Business and Finance Michael Guns for comment. “We’re too small to get into the specifics of the areas involved,” said Taylor, declining to offer further comment.
The source said that affected faculty “will NOT receive any continuing health coverage unless we sign a non-disclosure agreement and also agree to waive our rights to future litigation against the college.”
This includes those who had previously accepted VSIPs from the college. The VSIP offers have since expired, but according to the source, the college has offered faculty a “parallel agreement” in which they would receive 18 months of health insurance through the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA). This would still entail the signing of an NDA and waiving of future rights to sue.
“They are leveraging our health care as a weapon during a national pandemic,” said the source.
The source also expressed concern for the wellbeing of students amid these cuts. “Current and incoming students are already registered for classes that will be canceled because there’s no one qualified to teach them – and the students won’t even know it until after they’ve paid their tuition,” said the source. “Just as EC students didn’t sign up for online courses, they didn’t sign up to have the core courses within their major taught by a random patchwork of exploited adjunct labor.”
Another anonymous faculty source has echoed these concerns, saying “the claim that firing faculty is about aligning needs with enrollments makes no sense to me, at least some of the faculty who just lost their jobs are in departments that were already struggling to cover classes for the fall,” the source said.
“Either a significant number of such classes will need to be canceled, which will leave students unable to fulfill their requirements, or contingent faculty will need to be hired to replace the tenured and tenure-track faculty we just lost. I find the whole situation profoundly confusing.”
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