HARRISBURG (TNS) — Nearly half of the 165 faculty members who signed up for its most recent incentive to retire by next summer work at a Pennsylvania state university slated for consolidation in the 2022-23 school year.
Figures from Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education show 50 of those faculty members who took an enhanced payout based on sick leave work at California, Clarion or Edinboro university. Those schools are being consolidated into a Pennsylvania Western University.
At the three northeastern universities that will be combined into a single institution — Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield — 29 faculty accepted the incentive.
The retirement incentive is part of the system’s effort to downsize its workforce and align it with student enrollment that has been in decline for the past 10 years. This year alone, the system saw its largest enrollment decrease in at least two decades, dropping to less than 89,000 compared to about 120,000 students in 2010-11.
Funding to pay for the retirement payouts comes in part from the $50 million downpayment on a $200 million commitment of federal COVID-19 relief money that Gov. Tom Wolf and lawmakers agreed to provide the system.
The system’s workforce reduction goal aims to reach the average student-faculty ratio of 17-1 and a student-non-faculty ratio of nearly 14-1 it had in 2010, which officials maintain allowed schools to operate at peak efficiency.
State System Chancellor Daniel Greenstein two years ago directed university presidents to trim their workforce to the 2010-11 levels by June 2022. He recently told lawmakers he expects that goal will be achieved.
This latest round of the retirement incentive program was offered not just to faculty but to all 11,000 system employees.
The size of the incentive offered to employees varied based on the number of accumulated unused sick leave days and years of service.
In total, 280 employees signed up for the incentive by the Nov. 15 deadline. That brings the number of employees who have ended or will end their career with the system through the three retirement incentive programs to 881, according to the system.
“Our universities have been working for several years to better align their costs with their revenues, and this program has been consistently aimed at accomplishing our financial sustainability goals while being fair to our employees and respectful of their years of service to our mission,” said system spokesman Cody Jones. “The response we’ve received shows we are able to strike that balance.”
But Jamie Martin, president of the system’s faculty union, said she’s concerned by the number of faculty from the schools slated for consolidation who are taking the latest retirement incentive and the future of academic programs.
“There are a significant number of questions regarding the consolidations that have not been addressed; there is great uncertainty about the programs that will exist at the new U’s,” said Martin, president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties.
Additionally, she said faculty are worried about job cuts that have occurred and the potential for more “and all of this is occurring during an ongoing pandemic. Given all of that, I am not surprised by the number of faculty that have chosen to retire, but it is disheartening.”
The first incentive program offered last year drew interest from a total of 403 faculty and staff, according to the system. Another offered earlier this year enticed 198 system employees to decide to retire next summer.
The most recent incentive, though, is the only one that came after the system’s governing board voted in July to move forward with the university consolidations.
The consolidations are part of the system’s overall redesign effort that is intended to ensure universities are operating on a financially sustainable path while expanding student opportunities and holding down tuition increases.
By June 2022, Chancellor Greenstein told lawmakers the system will have eliminated $173 million of operating costs and trimmed its faculty ranks by 21%, which is closing in on the 26% decline in its student enrollment since 2010.
To help achieve that number, two of the consolidating universities, Lock Haven and Mansfield, in October issued letters to 26 faculty members advising them that their job was in jeopardy of being eliminated in two years.
All of these faculty departures, especially retirements, will undoubtedly affect students and younger faculty, Martin said.
“When you are losing senior faculty at that rate, it’s a significant loss not only for students but their junior colleagues,” she said. “You lose mentors, people that can help you navigate all of the tenure promotion processes. For junior colleagues, you lose all of that.”
What’s more, Martin said, the work associated with developing the curriculum at the consolidated universities falls on faculty. What the retiring professors take with them is the experience in doing curriculum work, Martin said. She said it will make that more challenging for their colleagues left behind.
Jones said the number of faculty retirements at the consolidating universities does not change the university consolidation plans.
“We have every confidence that the integrating universities are [on] track and will enroll their first cohort of students next fall, with a full curriculum integration being completed by 2024,” he said.
Martin said what it does change is increase the level of uncertainty for faculty and lowers their morale.
“I don’t know how they think this is going to happen this rapidly,” Martin said. “Whatever faculty that’s left are stretched out thin and morale is where it is, I guess it’s just that make-it-so approach.”
Jones said system officials remain optimistic the faculty who remain will, in fact, make it so.
“The faculty that we have are completely capable of knocking this out of the park,” he said. “Through the [two-year] extension of the curriculum integration process, it created a runway that will allow us to do it really effectively for the benefit of our students.”
