Central State began that process and identified 10 programs that have fewer than 15 graduates over three years. Those programs include math, education and water resource management, among others.
Last week, during a board meeting, CSU President Morakinyo A.O. Kuti said faculty will be “realigned.” There are significant amount of faculty in the under-enrolled majors, he said, but cutting all of those faculty would be impractical.
The specific number of faculty to be cut during this process has not been named, nor has a timeline been given about when faculty will hear about layoffs.
Genevieve Ritchie-Ewing, the president of the Central State chapter of the American Association of University Professors and CSU associate professor of sociology and anthropology, said the university has lost 22 faculty since 2023-2024, and hired 10 faculty, most of whom were hired for less money than those who retired.
“As the university is in financial straits, which we understand, there is savings there when you lose faculty and don’t replace them,” she said. “And those savings aren’t being taken into account, either.”
Ritchie-Ewing said there are about 109 faculty at Central State. But some of those faculty are on one-year contracts, she said.
She said it puts a bigger burden on all faculty when there are fewer, especially at a small university like CSU.
Last year, 33 staff members and seven faculty members were cut as part of a cost-savings measure.
Ritchie-Ewing said faculty knew that there were low-enrolled programs last year. Faculty began the process of consolidating programs and deciding which ones to eliminate last year.
“Then, two weeks before the board of trustees meeting in the spring, we were told that some of those new programs were not going to be recommended, and those faculty were in danger of being laid off,” she said.
The board of trustees voted to approve four new degrees but did not say what those majors are since the university is waiting on approval from both the Ohio Department of Higher Education and the Higher Learning Commission, the university’s accreditor.
Ritchie-Ewing said the four were only a small fraction of the number of courses that were recommended.
The union was given little information when the university administrators said they would not recommend programs, she said.
“That showed that shared governance is eroding,” she said. “They didn’t really talk to the faculty at all about these programs.”
Krishna Kumar Nedunuri, professor of Water Resources Management and Environmental Engineering and AAUP-CSU vice president, said low-enrolled programs will take on other work that isn’t just teaching.
He noted he is part of a rare program in the U.S. and takes on additional research that brings grant money to the university. He also teaches general education courses that are often taken by business majors, which is one of the university’s top-enrolled majors, and is part of the university’s engineering department.
“These low-enrollment programs take on this additional responsibility,” he said.
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