College reduces faculty releases

Author: Katie Siegner

Throughout the process of reducing the College's budget and implementing financial cuts, it has remained a priority of the administration to avoid the elimination of faculty and staff positions and increase the efficiency of the current system. The College will ideally achieve any reduction in faculty and staff through attrition, early retirement and the proposal outlined in President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz's Jan. 29 e-mail to limit the number of faculty course releases - or permission to not teach a particular class during a particular semester - granted. The proposed plan, in addition to providing budgetary savings, would increase the number of classes available to students and potentially decrease class size.

"The Faculty Council will work with the Educational Affairs Committee to recommend to the administration how to reduce at least 35 faculty course releases," Liebowitz wrote in the e-mail that was sent out to all faculty, staff and students. "This change will add courses to the curriculum and make unnecessary the filling of seven replacement faculty positions, which will provide budgetary savings."

Course releases are granted to faculty members who are performing other administrative functions for the College, such as those serving on an elected committee or acting as department and commons heads. Currently, 80 releases are granted per year.

The College gives course releases to those colleagues who are "busy doing other things that the institution values and recognizes requires time," according to Department Chair of Geography and Atwater Commons Head Peter Nelson.

Although the course release reduction may limit the workload flexibility for members of specific departments, Nelson stressed that the administration is "thinking creatively about trying to maximize the resources we have on campus" and striving to "increase the efficiency of certain service roles." The planned decrease would also reduce the need to hire new faculty, which has been necessary in the past in order to fill the void left when multiple professors within the same department were granted releases for the same semester.

Because of this reduction in the need to hire new faculty, Dean of Faculty Susan Campbell said that the amount saved would be "the equivalent of at least $100,000 in a given year, possibly much more." She added, "in the long run, these reclaimed courses will help us to achieve the Strategic Plan goals of a lower teaching load and the new senior work requirement more quickly and with fewer additional faculty positions."

Despite the possible effects of the plan on professors' workloads, the effort has been largely well-received by College faculty.

"I think they're prepared to accept that," said Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry in reference to the reduction in course releases. According to Dry, the faculty shares the desire of the administration to cut costs in a way that will minimize the impact on college life, even if this means limiting the number of course releases granted for the upcoming semesters. Dry noted that he did not take a course release this year, even though it was a fairly busy one for his department due to a recruit and a faculty member up for tenure. He also mentioned that at the March 9 faculty meeting there was "a general consensus that this [limiting the number of course releases] was a reasonable thing to do."

The decision will also benefit students by increasing the number of classes available to them, because since "not all course reductions were replaced in the past, students had fewer courses available to them," said Dean Campbell.

With more classes available, Campbell also said "there will be somewhat less enrollment pressure on existing classes in the curriculum, so class sizes might be marginally smaller."

The process of course release distribution, however, is "murky," according to C. V. Starr Professor of Russian Michael Katz. It is unclear how exactly the reduction will take place because, according to Katz, "people get course releases mysteriously." As an example, he cited a colleague who managed to negotiate a permanent course release for Winter Term. "I have no idea how he got away with this," he said. With the administration looking to cut the number of course releases almost in half, Katz feels that it should "let people know how these course releases are determined."

The current plan is focused solely on reducing fall and spring course releases, as Winter Term course releases are to be reviewed separately. This issue has not yet come up in faculty meetings.