Students and staff at The College of Wooster say they're worried about the trajectory of the institution following the announcement it was laying off 22 staff last week.
Students staged several small protests last week calling on the college’s president, Anne McCall, to step down in the wake of the budget cuts. The college has said it needed to cut 18 full-time and four part-time staff to address budget challenges stemming from declining enrollment.
Nemsie Gonzalez, co-editor in chief of the Wooster Voice student newspaper, said students and staff felt "blindsided" by the announcement, with communications from McCall's office around the cuts being muddled.
"Staff were really frustrated because they had asked her multiple times verbatim if there were going to be staff layoffs, if people were going be bought out or forced into early retirement and she had reiterated that that was not true," she said of prior communications from McCall.
Gonzalez and her co-editor Zanna Anderson said the college also did not create an adequate contingency plan for what would happen after staff were laid off, with employees "scrambling" to pick up the slack.
Denise Bostdorff, a professor of communication studies at The College of Wooster, noted the same issue in a separate interview.
"I've taught here for 32 years and there is no place I would rather be. And the faculty and the staff here care so deeply about students. They demonstrate that every day by going above and beyond. And that's why I am, despite all this, really optimistic about the school's future, but it's also why this episode is so immensely disappointing," she said. "Because if layoffs were needed, they did not have to happen this way."
She said an advisory committee of administrators and faculty, meant to be consulted on all big decisions the college makes, was not brought in on the layoff decision.
The college did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
"In all decisions our top priority is to preserve the core of Wooster's academic experience, including our nationally ranked Independent Study program, our academic programs, our students’ residential experience, and the programs that allow them to develop in multiple ways outside of the classroom," the college said in a statement earlier this week. "By taking steps now to more closely align our staffing with the size of our student body, we are shaping Wooster to provide an outstanding education for generations to come."
Laura Burch, associate professor of French and francophone studies, said the college has seen a lack of stable leadership in recent years, with five presidents across the last 13 and a half years. She said that's led to too much short-term-focused decision making.
"My biggest concern is that the President and her cabinet continue to enjoy exorbitant salary and benefits packages while staff members lose their livelihoods and students experience significant cuts in resources and academic offerings," Burch said. "What is worse: these cuts are not a sustainable strategy for the long-term health of the College, because they do not address the underlying structural problem in the budget. That problem is: over the last decade, the Board of Trustees has approved a tuition discount rate that they have not developed a long-term strategy to finance."
Nemsie Gonalez at the Wooster Voice said some on campus are talking about taking action in other ways.
"There has been a lot of talk I think around campus about the potential for unions, seeing as staff has little to no protections," she said. "It's outlined in the staff handbook, which is publicly available on our website, that staff can be terminated with or without really any notice and without any prior conduct issues."
She added staff and students are worried about more layoffs down the road.
