Retrenchment Journey, Day 234

Yes, still counting down.

During this year of retrenchment, the IFO’s big project has been creating this cool new logo.

Although I haven’t been blogging about it a lot lately, the retrenchment countdown is still ongoing. Only about 42 days left, until my employment as an Assistant Professor of History at Bemidji State University ends. The good news is that I have lined up a full-time job teaching History at St. Paul College. It's a community and technical college on Summit Hill in St. Paul, right next door to the Minnesota History Center. I'm looking forward to teaching urban students and getting an apartment nearby. Looks like it will be an interesting adventure.

It also looks like it's a good time to get away from BSU. In a creative, desperate effort to save a million dollars of release time and "duty days", the three Deans devised a plan to reduce the university's three colleges down to two (eliminating one of their jobs) and its twenty-two departments down to nine "schools" (which contractually are still departments, just much bigger). The little Humanities Department I was part of, for the last seven years, will become a bigger Humanities School that in addition to History will contain English, Philosophy, Political Science, Languages, and Indigenous Studies. The administration has, so far, claimed that no programs (majors) would be eliminated; but since many programs have been reduced to one or two faculty, this may happen "organically". It will be difficult for some of these majors to offer enough of the courses students will need to complete requirements, without significant overload. There are two possible solutions I can imagine to this problem: reduce the major requirements or hire adjunct instructors.

The adjunct pay scale is a little bit lower than what tenure-track or tenured faculty get paid, but adjuncts still need to be paid. On the other hand, they can be hired and let go much more easily, based on enrollment changes. The question is, who will BSU be able to attract to teach on such a contingent basis? I have a friend who teaches in the community colleges in northern Minnesota, whom I think my former department may invite to teach one of my former classes this fall. They seem to think he will jump at this chance to teach at a university; I have my doubts. He's pretty busy at the college campuses he now serves, and there's a bit more job security there. What makes BSU think he would drop what he's doing to commute an hour each way to teach a single in-person course at BSU two or three days a week?

Wait, you say. Why are my colleagues in my former department planning to offer one of my former courses to someone else? If these courses need to be taught, why'd they get rid of me? (Answer: they're trying to add just a single course, to cover the gap left by one of the two remaining History faculty who is becoming chair of this new "school", for which he gets release time.) But, you ask, if they could get special permission to hire someone to teach one of these courses, why wouldn't they offer it to me?

That's a good question. I think there are a couple of answers. First, I think the faculty union would object to the idea that the university could lay off a tenure-track Assistant Professor and then offer him the opportunity to teach his own course at an adjunct rate. I get that, but it's absolutely no help to me. A glaring example of how the existence of the union worked to my detriment. Another possible reason is that the historian who is the new chair, whose course is being backfilled, is adamant that the class be taught 100% in person. His logic is that in-person classes tend to attract more enrollment than online or hybrid. I think that's debatable: online courses typically have a cap of 35 rather than 60 for in-person. And the comparison on which he is basing his opinion is what happens when both an online and an in-person section are offered. I had offered to teach the course as a hybrid, making videos of my lectures and running in-person discussions on Fridays. The response was that it's of paramount importance that the course be 100% in-person. I think this is a rationale rather than a reason. The real reason, I suspect, is to avoid a grievance or lawsuit from the union.

Whatever the reason, someone else will be teaching the course that I would have taught in the fall. I think the guy they have in mind would do a good job, if they can convince him to do it. If not, I suppose they might be able to get the local high school teacher. He already teaches the "college in the high school" version of the class (which for years BSU has been pretending is equivalent to our course at the university). It would be an ironic move, I think, for a university that has been complaining about how the concurrent enrollment programs, AP classes, and PSEO are "eating our lunch". If nothing else, it illustrates how muddied the waters have become. And how much difficulty the university has had, identifying and articulating its value-add.