An Update from the End
To open this space, where I hope to share reflections on my work in the college classroom, I start with a brief case study in why many current positions for teacher-scholars, including the tenure-track position I held at St. Norbert College for three years, will cease to exist in the foreseeable future.
As anyone who’s served on an academic search committee will know, attracting and retaining quality junior faculty requires substantial investment from a college or university. In addition to the labor involved in the initial search – reading applications, conducting interviews, and hosting campus visits – hours of labor go integrating and developing new faculty through orientation, teaching observations, grant administration, and the annual review process. Especially at a small liberal arts college like St. Norbert, there are weighty incentives for helping full-time hires make steady progress toward tenure and promotion, so they can obtain the job security that allows them to make long-term contributions to the community through their teaching, mentorship, research, and service. The junior faculty represents the future of the college, if there will be one.
For these reasons and more, it remains staggering to me that in one year, St. Norbert has now lost nearly three quarters of its junior faculty to layoffs, tenure denials, or resignations. Of the 26 tenure-track and visiting positions that have presumably been eliminated (that is, positions for which the College has not indicated they intend to rehire on comparable terms), 17 are in the humanities. And my own discipline of English has gone from eight full-time faculty members at the start of Fall 2023 to what will be three by the end of Spring 2025.
While the official reasons for these decisions have been financial, their effects are also undeniably curricular. In English for example, all four faculty members who were trained to teach British literature have been laid off, along with the faculty member who had built and directed the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Next year the Shakespeare course required for majors and minors will be taught by an Early Americanist, and any leadership position for the writing-intensive classes required by St. Norbert’s core curriculum is currently unfilled.
The changes to staffing made by upper administration thus amount to a large-scale revision of the academic program: one carried out not only without but in many cases contrary to the faculty input that the administration solicited. In Fall 2023, Interim VPAA Dr. Mike Marsden charged the faculty Committee on Educational Policy and Curriculum – which normally reviews one fifth of academic programs annually to provide formative feedback on development – with reviewing all academic programs within a few months, using a combination of internal and consultant-sourced data to sort them into categories: programs to be provided an additional level of support, programs to be maintained at current levels of support, programs to receive a reduced level of support, and programs to be sunset. Of the 26 faculty positions eliminated so far this year, only three have been from disciplines that this faculty committee recommended for reduced support in the report that administration charged them with producing. Interim VPAA Marsden, when asked at a faculty meeting about the criteria that he used to identify positions for elimination, said that he had looked at the data and come to different conclusions.
One is left to come to one’s own conclusions, then, about what the impacts of these decisions will be on the future course offerings at SNC. A non-exhaustive list of classes taught by faculty pink-slipped by the College paints an initial picture: Queer Literature, Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies, Hispanic Film and Media, Spanish in the U.S., Anti-Racist Pedagogy, Feminist Philosophy, Black Theology, Muslim and Christian Theologies, Environmental Justice, Human Rights and Responsibility, Solving Social and Economic Problems with Data, Social Identity and Intergroup Communication, in addition to Shakespeare, Dante, Technologies of Writing, Communication and Mental Health, Child and Adolescent Development, and Christian Ethics.
Such a top-down overhaul of the curriculum is striking at a time when St. Norbert College, a predominantly white institution, is trying to adjust to shifting demographics in both the college-going population and the local populations from which it draws its students. At the final faculty meeting of the year, Interim VPAA Marsden spoke about the College’s efforts to diversify the student body, including reaching out to families that SNC had not historically served, like those in Green Bay’s growing Latiné community. As a member of the College’s Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, news of this priority was a surprise to me, not only because St. Norbert’s new president, Dr. Laurie Joyner, had not returned to the committee since the first meeting, but also because this year’s layoffs included three of the College’s few Latiné faculty. Weeks after this meeting, the Board voted to deny tenure and promotion to all remaining candidates, including one of the College’s only Black faculty members, for financial reasons - just days after announcing a seven-figure donation to support the College’s Catholic mission.
As drastic as this year has been at St. Norbert, the College’s case is also far from unique. There’s a saying in business that you can’t cut your way to health, but in higher education the members of upper administration certainly seem to be able to cut their way to new jobs. At Wittenberg University, for example, where President Joyner served from 2012-2015 before resigning in the middle of the Fall 2015 semester, a letter signed by at least 53 faculty members was presented to the board to express concerns about the administration’s handling of several rounds of budget cuts. There’s since been a decline in enrollment at Wittenberg from 1,788 students in 2013 to 1,288 undergraduates in 2023. At Saint Xavier College, where President Joyner served from 2017-2023 and was the subject of a faculty vote of no confidence, the administration and Board moved to eliminate programs in Religious Studies, Philosophy, Math, and Actuarial Sciences against faculty votes. After it was announced that President Joyner would leave Saint Xavier for Saint Norbert, the student editorial board for SXU Student Media wrote: “Why is Laurie M. Joyner, Ph.D., a lame duck president, being allowed to oversee significant changes when she is on her way to another university?” Saint Xavier has seen a drop in enrollment from 3,764 students in 2019 to 3,497 students in 2024. Careers can clearly be made out of being willing to be the unpopular face for top-down curricular overhauls with little-to-no proven track record in reversing the enrollment challenges they cite as a primary motivation.
Messaging from leadership at St. Norbert has been quick to point out that there are new classes being added as well: certificates, minors, and majors have been introduced in areas like project management, supply chain management, robotics, and game development. Some of these courses are being supported by a “program-sharing,” for-profit company called Rize Education, which uses a model Jon Marcus described in New York Times as “a sort of Amazon Prime approach to higher education.” News searches for Rize Education reveal similar slates of programs and classes being adopted at a number of colleges, including Wittenberg University (supply chain management and program management), Morningside University (supply chain management, cybersecurity, public health), Franklin College (game development), Wilmington College (public health and supply chain management), and Eastern Nazarene College (cybersecurity, cloud app development, supply chain management, healthcare administration, public administration, digital marketing, and project management).
In many cases, these courses lie outside a traditional liberal arts curriculum, which is part of the pitch Rize makes for itself as a cost-saving supplement for small colleges. But what is perhaps a more striking transformation of the educational model for a college like St. Norbert, which places communal and situated learning at the heart of its mission statement and its value proposition, is that Rize’s own value proposition depends on getting more labor out of fewer, less centralized workers – avoiding the need to hire a new faculty member who would live and work in the community by shifting the site of work online and off campus. This too is part of a wider trend in higher education to funnel more institutional resources outside of the institutions themselves: to consulting groups, private communications firms, course management services, and ed-tech start-ups. At St. Norbert, President Joyner has not only spearheaded the effort to partner with Rize, a representative of which wrote her a glowing note on LinkedIn (#CollegeontheRize), but has also shifted work that might otherwise have been done by staff members to outside consultant groups like the rpk GROUP. The rpk GROUP, which trademarked the motto “From Mission to Market®,” has carved out a niche for itself as a purveyor of data presentations at concierge pricing for colleges and universities looking to cut their personnel. Their client list includes institutions like West Virginia University, which invoked rpk data to propose the elimination of 169 faculty jobs and all language programs in the fall of 2023, as well as President Joyner’s previous university, Saint Xavier, where the student editorial board for SXU Student Media has since written of their new president, Dr. Keith Elder, that: “the Saint Xavier community has felt a drastic shift from the environment created by the previous full-time president, Laurie Joyner, Ph.D ... The biggest change is the actual presence of a president on campus.”
For the people who have been at St. Norbert College - the ones who teach students in the classrooms, meet with them after hours, supervise their campus jobs, attend their sporting events and plays and recitals - the human toll of a year of “right-sizing” has been brutal. Among the 40+ staff members whose positions were eliminated in Fall 2023 – along with many more who have left due to the atmosphere of job insecurity – were a number of alumni and several community members who had worked at the College for over 15 years. For the faculty members who have been let go, losing an academic position will often mean losing their entire academic career, and most if not all of the 26 teachers dismissed from the College will now have to leave the state in search of other work.
And for our students, many of whom look to the colleges and universities of Wisconsin for their chance at higher education, the ability to access the kind of whole-person, liberal arts learning that is prized at highly-ranked schools has contracted even further. In a Q&A with the faculty on St. Norbert’s Retrenchment Task Force, President Joyner and Interim VPAA Marsden suggested that the curriculum for many of the College’s majors is overly specialized - more like graduate programs - and that students in general education courses may not need the kind of teaching provided by tenured professors. Tenured professors are, of course, more expensive for a college. They also provide a value that cannot be replicated by casual or short-term workers: it’s the long-term stability of tenure that not only gives faculty members material support to remain experts in their fields but also allows for the extensive time commitment involved mentoring students, supervising undergraduate research, and writing letters of recommendation. It’s hard not to wonder whether someone has looked at the data - about how employers want their workers trained and about what trends are hot in hiring, whether or not those jobs will still exist in the four years it takes students to matriculate - and come to the conclusion that our students don’t need to be taught by scholars, because they won’t be scholars.
As someone who had the good fortune to spend three years learning with those students, and as someone who may never have that chance again, I can only say how wrong I think that is.