BURLINGTON — At least three senior lecturers in the University of Vermont’s College of Arts and Sciences were laid off on Monday, according to several faculty who spoke with VTDigger.
One of the lecturers, Jamie Williamson, is one of a few professors at UVM who teaches courses on Indigenous history and culture. He had taught in the English department for 30 years.
The other two faculty will be laid off from UVM’s history and geology departments.
News of the layoffs comes two weeks after Bill Falls, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, announced the school was slashing 23 liberal arts programs in order to address a budget deficit. The cuts have not yet been finalized and have faced widespread backlash.
At the time, faculty layoffs seemed likely, but had not been implemented. This week’s news is a sign that more layoffs may be on the horizon.
Julie Roberts, the president of UVM’s faculty union, said the news was “devastating.” It is a mistake for the university to address perennial budget issues, she said, by “cutting what are little bits of the budgets, but are huge sacrifices by the people who are affected.”
The university says depressed enrollment, along with other costs of the pandemic, have resulted in a $9.4 million general budget shortfall, even after rounds of salary reductions earlier this year. The College of Arts and Sciences, according to Falls, has its own $8.6 million deficit to contend with and expects that to swell in the next three years.
Charlie Briggs, a senior lecturer with the history department who was informed Monday he would not be reappointed, has taught at UVM since 2009. “I’m not bitter,” he told VTDigger. “I’m disappointed, and I don’t agree with the decision that’s been made.”
Though Briggs emphasized he had “no personal animus” toward the administration, he said his layoff was an outcome of UVM’s funding model. Though many of his courses had students “knocking down the doors to get in,” he said ultimately the university is turning away from humanities courses because they are less lucrative in the long-term.
“There are quite a lot of perverse outcomes that come from the incentive-based budget model that UVM has adopted,” he said.
Lecturers are paid less than tenure-line faculty and many administrators. Cuts to non-tenure positions are a “meaningless gesture” that “doesn’t even make a dent” in the budget crisis, Roberts said. Lecturers have few of the job protections afforded to tenured faculty.
Roberts also criticized the administration’s decision to focus cost-cutting measures on the College of Arts and Science. “[The budget] should be addressed as a university-wide problem,” she said. So far, humanities and language departments have borne the brunt of the reductions, which the university defends by pointing to dwindling enrollment in the programs.
The lecturers received notice on Monday that they would not be reappointed in the coming year, the day before the contract notification deadline. This suggests that more layoffs are coming, Roberts said, as additional contract deadlines will come in the spring for other faculty.
“Predictably, faculty are very, very upset at this point,” Roberts said.
A narrowing curriculum
John Gennari, professor and chair of UVM’s English department, spoke highly of Williamson and said his layoff after three decades was “brutal” for the department, particularly just before the holidays and during the pandemic.
Williamson’s departure raises questions about the university’s commitment to Indigenous studies.
In his 2019 apology for UVM’s role in the Vermont Eugenics Survey, which in the 1920s and 30s targeted the Abenaki people, as well as other people of color, former president Tom Sullivan promised “educational initiatives” as one form of redress.
Yet, the university has a limited curriculum when it comes to Indigenous history and culture. Williamson, who taught a range of English courses including Native American Literature, was “one of the very few who [teaches] any North American Indigenous literature and culture across the college,” Gennari said.
“It’s really almost criminal that we, as a college, offer so little when it comes to Native American, Indigenous curricula,” he continued. “This is a real blow to the department, to the college, to the university.”
In addition, Falls’ recent proposal suggests terminating majors in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Asian Studies, and Russian and Eastern European Studies, as well as German and Italian languages, citing low enrollment numbers for each. Critics of the cuts say they, too, show a disregard for culturally diverse curricula.
“What we teach here signals what we value,” Gennari said. “The cuts that are being instituted are based on value judgments that are being made about what this university needs to teach, and what research it needs to support.”
A diverse humanities curriculum is critical, Briggs said. “We’re moving through so many of the kinds of political problems that I study in my work,” he explained. Next semester, his last at UVM, he will teach a course on the Black Death, and the impacts of the plague on medieval Europe, which is deeply relevant, he said, to the pandemic today.
UVM’s geology department also confirmed that a senior lecturer had been laid off this week. Unlike the history and English departments, which had so far escaped program cuts, the geology department’s major, minor and graduate program are all slated for termination. In an email, department chair Andrea Lini wrote that the department is “still digesting the news and evaluating the next steps to take.”
A coalition of UVM faculty and students, UVM United Against the Cuts, held a car rally on Tuesday to protest the proposed program terminations, and is holding a panel on Thursday entitled “UVM Hoarding Money While Gutting Essential Programs.”
The university did not immediately return a request for comment on the layoffs Wednesday.