Cutting and gutting

I've been watching with fear and trembeling the news about Wittenberg University's financial problems (links here and here). Many small liberal arts colleges are struggling right now, but Wittenberg looks a lot like Marietta: similar size, similar student population, similar financial difficulties. Their trustees will vote tomorrow on a proposed plan that may cut sixty percent of the faculty and require many students to rely on online courses to complete their degrees. A professor named Ruth Hoff is quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education article as saying the proposal "outsources the heart of what we're all about."

The numbers are terrifying and I would hate to be charged with figuring out how to make the college's budget work given reduced enrollments and burgeoning deficits, but Hoff's comment speaks to how this feels on the ground: Cutting faculty and gutting curriculum hurts our hearts. It feels like a violation of our mission, purpose, and identity, causing irreparable damage to certain intangible but essential qualities of the education we offer.

Today I learned that yet another of my valued colleagues has accepted a job elsewhere, and while he is over the moon about this new opportunity, I keep thinking about what we're losing--not just a prof who can teach a particular type of class, but the prof whose leadership of the jazz ensemble fills listeners with joy, the guy whose leadership of a faculty teaching workshop on jazz improvisation last spring gave us all moments of bliss and freedom from care, and a guy who's willing to put heart and soul into helping his students develop as performers and people. 

And this loss does not come in a vacuum but is piled on top of other recent losses, reducing our music department to mostly adjuncts. That could be my department a few years from now, and Wittenberg could be a model for what may happen here. 

But then again maybe we'll find a way to turn things around. Who knows? The uncertainty is part of the problem--it's hard to commit to a journey without any idea of the destination. I assume that the sun will come up tomorrow, but what it shines down on is anyone's guess.