| << Front page | Commentary | March 18, 2005 |
Exercise care in reductions
With a series of letters to department heads sent out last week, it became clear that the painful but necessary process of reducing Oberlin’s faculty is now underway after months of speculation and anticipation. If successful, the program will eliminate seven faculty positions from the College over the next five years.
With these letters, the College administration and the Educational Plans and Programs Committee have taken the unprecedented step of asking departments to justify their size and the nature of their educational program. One professor at a faculty meeting last week devoted to the topic described this as “an impossible situation.”
From the College’s point of view, however, the situation of some departments may appear more impossible than others. Departments such as classics, anthropology or environmental studies are unlikely to see cuts because of their small size.
Additionally, the political fallout from cutting positions from departments such as African American studies or gender and women’s studies make it highly probable that their faculties will remain at their current size.
This means that cuts are most likely to come from large popular departments such as English, biology or politics. Empirically it makes sense that the largest departments should get the largest share of the cuts; however, this does not mean that College decisions about cuts should not be criticized or closely scrutinized.
It also came up at last week’s meeting that many departments have not had their programs reviewed in over 10 years. This is an unacceptable lapse of academic governance which has most likely led to unnecessary and unjust allocations to departments with more bureaucratic clout at the expense of others. The addition of 15 new faculty positions during the 1990s is a large part of why the College is in the financial doldrums today.
In this current financial crunch, the administration cannot afford to make the same mistake again. Recent developments are not encouraging. When the administration made (and then quickly reversed) its decision to eliminate the Oberlin-in-London program, a small program with no full-time faculty or staff on campus, it appeared to many students and faculty as if the College had decided to cut the program because it was vulnerable without much consideration for how it would impact Oberlin’s academic program or reputation.
The College administration and the EPPC have a monumentally difficult task in front of them. They must assess how each individual cut will affect the overall academic program of this College and try to set aside the inevitable lobbying and bureaucratic wrangling that this process will produce.
If a solution is to be found, the decision-makers must base their
considerations on an objective vision of what would benefit the College rather
than political expediency. If done properly, this process could not only help
Oberlin out of its crisis but make up for past negligence and make us stronger
as an institution.
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