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.
