Universities are slashing faculties and blaming COVID

In May of 2020, the University of Vermont’s president, Suresh Garimella, issued an update on the school’s finances. Citing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Garimella put forth a bleak prognosis of lower enrolment, higher costs and stagnant tuition fee rates necessitating reductions in salaries, benefits and staff. In December of 2020, the dean of the university’s college of arts and sciences, William Falls, followed up with his recommendation of terminating 12 majors, 11 minors and four masters programmes, in order to close a US$8.6 million deficit. But Helen Scott, a professor of English at the University of Vermont (UVM), points out that the school’s administrators have alternatives to such “draconian measures”, writes Arvind Dilawar for The Nation.

“As the president put it in his 2020 financial report, ‘the state of UVM’s finances is sound,’ and the university’s net position had increased by US$24 million,” says Scott, citing the University of Vermont’s Annual Financial Report. “A US$34 million ‘rainy day’ fund has not been touched. The administration has thereby manufactured a so-called budget deficit in the college, which allows them to argue that CAS [the college of arts and sciences] is not sustainable.”

The University of Vermont is just one of many schools whose faculties accuse administrators of using COVID-19 as false justification for attempts to push through long-sought budget cuts – even after receiving millions of dollars in pandemic-related relief from the federal government. Faculties are now rallying their communities to oppose the cuts, which they fear will further impoverish educators and students alike.
Full report on The Nation site