Philosophy, and tenured faculty jobs, under threat at St. Cloud State University

I was asked to share this statement about ominous developments at St. Cloud State University; I encourage readers to e-mail  the administrators mentioned at the end:

The philosophy department at St. Cloud State University is under threat and we are appealing to the philosophy community for help.  The administration is proposing retrenchment of faculty in the College of Liberal Arts in order to offset a budgetary shortfall.  We believe they have capriciously and unfairly targeted the philosophy department (3 positions), the library program (4 positions) and the theater program (1 position).  No other programs in the college are facing retrenchments, even though several other department in the college are similar in terms of student enrollment, size, etc. 

The three layoffs they are proposing for philosophy involve two tenured full professors (Michael Shaffer and Paul Neiman) and one tenured associate professor (Omar Mirza).  This attack on senior tenured professors and on the Philosophy department is unprecedented at St. Cloud State.  Since there are seven members in our department, this means that the SCSU administration is proposing to cut the positions of almost half of our faculty. The remaining four philosophy professors will also retire in the near future, and SCSU has not approved new faculty hires in philosophy for quite some time. Thus, if these cuts are made, the philosophy major at SCSU will almost certainly be completely shut down. 

Moreover, this attack on our department appears to be in violation of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MNSCU) own retrenchment policy.  This policy explicitly states that retrenchment should occur only after all other means of cost saving (i.e. offering early retirement, reassignment, retraining, etc.) have been exhausted.  No such steps have been taken to date and notices of retrenchment must be delivered by September 16^th.  In addition, all retrenchments are supposed to occur only after sufficient data has been gathered and reviewed that justifies the specific cuts being proposed.  Our Faculty Association president reported to us on August 20^th that when asked about data indicating the need for the extensive cuts in philosophy rather than cuts elsewhere, she was told by the President of the university that they had no such data. 

We have three demands.  First, we believe that SCSU should seriously attempt to avoid all of the proposed retrenchments through other means and in accord with the MNSCU retrenchment policy.  Second, we believe that the proposed cuts are clearly unfair.  Thirdly, even if cuts are ultimately necessary, we believe that they should be fairly spread throughout the college rather than concentrated so heavily on our department. 

We hope that you will lend your support in opposing this unfair attack on the SCSU Philosophy department by emailing our President (Dr. Robbyn Wacker: rrwacker@stcloudstate.edu ), Provost (Dr. Daniel Gregory: ddgregory@stcloudstate.edu) and Dean of the College of Liberal Arts (Mark Springer: mspringer@stcloudstate.edu).