Don’t take a job at Manhattan College, says Manhattan College.

At least that is the message conveyed by the decision of the school’s administration, led by president Milo Riverso, to violate the reasonable expectations of tenured faculty regarding job protection and termination notice.

Last month, it was reported that the school was planning on shutting down several programs, including its philosophy major.

The American Philosophical Association (APA)  sent a letter to Riverso and other administrators raising various objections to the program cuts and recently announced faculty layoffs.

The college went ahead with program cuts.

Now, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports more on those layoffs:

The staffing reductions, which are part of a planned restructuring to alleviate a financial deficit and which will eliminate 20 majors and minors, violate the college’s faculty handbook and generally understood norms of tenure, job security, and shared governance, according to professors interviewed by The Chronicle.

This latest chapter in a continuing conflict at the Lasallian Catholic institution began on January 12, when 19 tenured faculty members and four nontenured scholars were informed in short meetings that they were being laid off (two of the tenured faculty members’ layoffs were later revoked by administrators). The tenured professors were told that their last day of employment would be June 15, 2024, and that they’d receive severance pay through January 12, 2025; the nontenured faculty members’ contracts would end on June 15, 2025.

An appendix to the severance agreement, a copy of which was shared with The Chronicle, says that employees were identified for layoffs based on “an objective methodology in furtherance of the college’s financial budgeting requirements, enrollment, academic and programmatic needs, streamlining, centralization, and consolidation.” But faculty members said that justification was unclear and inaccurate, and that Manhattan administrators had declined to provide further explanation or share data on which the layoff decisions had been made.

 According to faculty, the layoffs were “a totally unilateral, top-down decision” by the institution’s president.

The Chronicle notes that the college has not declared “financial exigency” and so the layoffs violate the norms of tenure protection:

Both the originally announced layoff plans and the decisions made last month contravene commonly held understandings of tenure, popularized in 1940 by a joint statement of the American Association of University Professors and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. That statement holds that tenured faculty members can be terminated only for cause or in the case of bona fide financial exigency. (The college has not declared financial exigency, and although it has repeatedly cited a large deficit, it has not specified the size.) Meanwhile, Manhattan’s faculty handbook provides that tenured faculty members, and tenure-track faculty members who have been at the college for at least two years, be given at least one academic year’s notice of termination, the professors said.

Further, it is unclear whether the program cuts and layoffs will actually help the college:

But those changes aren’t likely to immediately improve Manhattan’s balance sheet, according to the bond-rating agency Fitch Ratings, which downgraded the college’s outlook from stable to negative this month.

They certainly won’t help the college’s reputation.

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