Faculty protest layoffs in letter

By Tatiana Cooke, The Dartmouth Staff

Published on Tuesday, January 26, 2010

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Correction Appended

A group of 75 faculty members submitted an open letter to College President Jim Yong Kim, the Board of Trustees and the Upper Valley Community on Friday proposing cost-saving alternatives to laying off College employees. Kim responded with a letter to the faculty Monday afternoon in which he expressed his commitment to minimizing job losses, according to history professor Annelise Orleck, who helped write and organize support for the letter.

“We know that the administration has considered many kinds of cuts, we just wanted to make clear which we felt should be prioritized,” Orleck said.

Kim’s response stated that he shared the group’s concerns about job loss but did not provide any specifics about what his actions would be, she said.

“It was very cordial and fairly vague,” Orleck said.

Orleck declined to provide the text of Kim’s response letter to The Dartmouth.

English professor Ivy Schweitzer, who also helped organize the effort, quoted an excerpt from Kim’s letter that represented the underlying goals shared by the administration and the faculty, she said.

“We are committed to identifying savings that minimize job losses while also protecting our competitiveness and guaranteeing a rich Dartmouth experience for our present and future students,” Kim said in the response, according to Schweitzer.

The letter outlined a series of proposals that the authors argue could help preserve jobs, including freezing construction projects, cutting back on spending for athletic programs, distributing pay cuts across senior faculty and administrators and selling off College assets. It also expressed concerns about unpaid furloughs instituted by the College that would reduce work and health coverage to nine months annually for employees and the practice of subcontracting services to non-Dartmouth employees, according to the letter.

Schweitzer said she was inspired to help organize the letter-writing effort after attending the Service Employees International Union rally Jan. 13 and speaking with the workers there. She was particularly moved by a conversation she had with a custodial worker who said the staff takes pride in cleaning the bathrooms to help prevent students from catching the H1N1 virus, she said.

“It is like a community – people work in the community, people live in the community, you see people in supermarkets, on the streets, in restaurants,” she said. “We talk about cutting ‘compensation’ and ‘positions’ and those are abstract terms. When you say ‘Bruce is not here’ it adds a human face to it.”

The letter has started a productive conversation among faculty who agree and disagree with its contents, Schweitzer said. She emphasized that she thinks President Kim is making an effort to both protect the interests of the College and maintain its status as an ethical employer, and that the letter encourages that balance. The letter is intended to make him aware of the fact that the faculty is willing to make sacrifices, she said.

“I don’t agree with it at all,” economics professor David Blanchflower said of the letter. “I’m afraid it doesn’t take into account the realities in the marketplace — we are in the middle of the greatest financial crisis in a hundred years.”

Blanchflower pointed out the absence of any professors of economics and hard sciences or faculty at the business school on the list of signatories. The majority of signatures are from members of the humanities departments, which did extremely well under the previous administration, he said.

“President Kim is quite right and he has to deal with the economic realities,” Blanchflower said.

The previous administration failed to save money during good economic times, leaving the current administration to deal with the shortfall during bad times, he said. He added that waiting to act and moving slowly will leave the College in a worse financial situation that could impact the next 30 years of the Dartmouth experience.

“The [College] president has no choice other than to move very quickly and restore the financial position of Dartmouth,” Blanchflower said.

History professor Walter Simons, one of the signatories, traced the origin of his decision to sign the letter to his experience during last year’s cuts, he said. He felt that decisions were made without sufficient consultation of the faculty, he said.

“I think this is a moment for the [College] president to set the tone of his presidency and to make clear to the community that Dartmouth cares about that community, that this is not simply an academic community, that it is different, something special,” said.

While Simons said he is concerned about the threat of layoffs, he said he sees the letter as part of a larger campus-wide issue. Orleck said many faculty members felt they were caught off-guard by the changes from the last round of budget cuts.

“I wouldn’t like to have this letter be interpreted as a criticism or even a questioning of the [College] president— that is not at all our purpose,” Simons said.

Simons added that some members of the faculty are concerned about the appropriateness of the letter and about the administration’s reaction.

The letter was composed by a group of faculty members who met after Kim’s Jan. 15 budget presentation. A set of notes taken at the meeting was sent by members of the original group to other faculty members and eventually became the final draft of the letter that was sent out on Friday.

Orleck said that she felt that with time a larger number of faculty members would have signed the letter. She predicted support for labor organization among the faculty who don’t view unions negatively, unlike other segments of the population, she said.

Public Affairs Officer Susan Knapp declined to comment for this article, saying that she had not been notified of the letter and that College administrators were unavailable for contact.

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Blanchflower is a professor of government. In fact, Blanchflower is a professor of economics.