Dress rehearsal

Flush

 

Felt-leaved yerba santa made the most of a rainy fall

Skittery

(The title refers to Marie Howe's "A Hymn")

Reckoning

A day after our Provost's Office sent out marching orders for an "academic re-envisioning" in the liberal arts parts of The New School in the coming spring (before we even know who's going to be around in the spring!), an article about New School's woes appeared in The New York Times. While we have never quite been the "bastion of the liberal arts" their title suggests ("social research" maybe, definitely "adult education" once upon a time), we do seem to be facing a reckoning. The article quotes faculty, graduate students and the president, but the big picture is revealed in hyperlinked charts I didn't know were public. 

Now the curious can see our exposure to the increasingly hostile environment for international students, and how much enrollment has fallen over the past years ... and that much of that has occurred in the liberal arts divisions of the university (the lower table; Lang is orange). 

And they can see also how small a part of the university we really are. Just over a fourth of students are seeking liberal arts degrees (though all students take liberal arts classes). But liberal arts claims more than a fourth of the university's small full-time faculty community. 

About 90 percent of the [threatened] cuts fall in the liberal arts and social science divisions, where most tenure and tenure-track positions lie. … The restructuring is designed in part to benefit Parsons, the renowned design college that is the economic engine of the university and whose revenues subsidize the New School’s doctoral-level academics. … [although] even at Parsons, which mostly has part-time, adjunct faculty, there is skepticism.  

JFK --> SAN

Birds of a feather

The New York Public Library at Bryant Park has a Christmas tree with a difference. Its branches are full of birds of all kinds, many in nests (and loads of pinecones)! The snowy white owls apparently flew in last year.

Bare

 

 

 

 

A last look at the courtyard maples before the holidays take me westward. This year's leaves are long gone.

Snowed

First real snowfall of the winter. So beautif--- It's hard to delight in it as my friends and colleagues anguish over the impossible decision, due tomorrow, whether to pursue "voluntary" departure from the school.

Visibilize-ing Care

As part of the Visibilize-ing Care Festival in the spring, I'll be doing something to mark the restoration of our relationships with the Lang Courtyard trees, once human access to them is restored. But today visibilized other efforts at care, and needs for more. 

The university leadership met online with the faculty of our college, answering various precirculated questions about the impending "voluntary" and likely subsequent "involuntary" departures of faculty and staff, and their effect on curriculum and student enrollment and retention. We didn't learn much. The administration isn't looking for new ideas. They think they've set in motion necessary and humane processes for reducing the workforce of the university in the face of enrollment decline. (The goal seems to be 10-15% of FTEs, however that falls out.) They emphasized that the "voluntary" stage was a way of showing respect and care for the community, maximizing "choice" and even generating new "opportunities," words that went down like lead. 

After they left the zoom room for another meeting, we faculty had some time to debrief. What are the options facing those deemed "eligible" for "voluntary" departure, how spooked are students by imminent changes and how spooked should they be, have we any leverage? It took some time for the spell cast by their budgetary logic to be broken. We're talking not just about people's careers but their livelihoods - families and health care - our lives. There must be other ways of addressing the budget crisis, one for which faculty and staff are not responsible, after all; why are these not being explored? 

The zoom grid, with more people than usual with their cameras on, felt like holding cells, but we could see each other. Someone had to leave and said "in case I'm not here next year, I love you all." This was someone offered early retirement. Others have other "choices," or none. A recently-hired part-time faculty member put it bluntly: "we need to be clear that a lot of us aren't going to be here next year." Sadness rose to anger and resolve. We're not letting this go down without a fight.

I was struck by how the administration's attempt to show care (they could have just let people go as some other places have, they explained, or fired everyone and let them reapply for their jobs, as others have) had backfired. As the deadlines approach for the "eligible" to opt into "voluntary" departure (Monday!), and then to accept or decline the specific offer made to them (2 weeks after that), and then for the administration to announce such "involuntary" departures as they deem necessary (starting January 2nd), we are a community stricken in ways we don't even know. (I know that I am less at risk than many others at this juncture.) The love flowing over the zoom barriers was palpable, tinged with fear and grief.

The convener of the March "Visibilize-ing Care" festival mentioned that some thought the anguish of university restructuring made this the wrong time for it, but others thought it only more valuable. My part of it, "Care of Trees," is inspired by the ways one of the "Religion of Trees" classes marked the passing of some of the Lang courtyard maples. Even as we mark the restoration of some relationships, we - whoever we are, for a lot of us aren't going to be there - will have to find ways to mourn the ruptures of others, too.

On life-support

We're in the news again. 

Things may or may not get better, but they are definitely getting worse first. The ham-fisted way the administration doled out "voluntary" separation packages (most faculty and staff I care about have received one) has reawakened unresolved misunderstandings and tensions between and within divisions, and is creating new ones, too. As with the Part-Time Faculty strike three years ago, it's revealing anew the inequities built into our school.

The damage goes well beyond the full-time faculty and programs explicitly targeted (and the sole concern of those interviewed in the article above). Today I found myself at the semester's final Religion live! gathering in the Cafe surveying the wreckage with four colleagues, none full-time and all of them adversely affected. One is a part-time faculty member of long standing who gave up their slot in next semester's small Religious Studies curriculum for another. The other was there too, but the course they pitched, "Faith as a story," was canceled for low enrollment. (LREL has had to cancel another class next semester as well, leaving just two.) A third, who teaches in a different program, had also seen their regular spring course cut, the first time in ten years it hasn't filled. And the fourth was an MA student who had been counting on applying to the PhD program in Philosophy, only for the university to pause virtually all PhD admissions for the year. 

I was feeling a little like the messengers in Job, who come describing calamities with the refrain and I alone have escaped to tell you.