If you attended any combination of the meetings about the employment status of Visiting Assistant Professor Andrea Baldwin during the first half of the semester, you’ve heard the term cited, defined, and repeated: staffing plan. While many students—including myself—had never learned much about the College’s staffing plan before, members of the faculty and administration invoked the term frequently when discussing the availability of a new tenure-track line in the Gender and Women’s Studies Department as it relates to Baldwin’s position. Outside of instances when it must be referenced, as in Baldwin’s case, students typically know little about the staffing plan. But shortly after its release, the Voice was sent a draft copy of the staffing plan for Academic Year 2019-20 by an anonymous source.
Dated April 7, 2018 and attributed to Dean of the Faculty Abby Van Slyck, “Connecticut College Staffing Plan AY 2019-2020” outlines which departments and programs—known collectively as “academic units”—requested authorization to conduct hiring searches in AY 19-20, then distinguishes between which units’ requests were granted and which were not. The staffing plan’s decisions are made by the Dean of the Faculty in consultation with the Educational Planning Committee (EPC), the Faculty Steering and Conference Committee (FSCC), and the chairs of relevant academic departments.
Of the 20 total academic units requesting 20.6 FTE (full-time employment) hires—with the point six representing an adjunct position—the plan grants ten tenure track hires, in addition to one three-year visiting position and the conversion of one visiting lecturer position into a permanent lecturer position.
With the opening observation: “this moment calls on us to think very strategically about the College’s long-term staffing needs,” Van Slyck begins the plan on a somewhat grim, but measured, note. She goes on:
“As the number of high school age students decreases across the country, and a decline in average household income increases the need for us to provide ever greater amounts of financial aid, the admissions landscape has become increasingly competitive. Our own student body has been affected by the trends. By contrast to the rapid growth we saw between 2000 and 2010, we have witnessed over the past several years a slow return to earlier enrollment levels. In the context, even if we plan to maintain our generous faculty-student ratio, we face the prospect of a modest reduction in the size of our faculty.”
This potential “modest reduction” is not reflected by the 19-20 staffing plan, which continues to increase the size of the faculty. Shifting to a more positive focus, Van Slyck then notes that the College’s first-year-to-sophomore retention rate increased from 89% to 91% in 2017 before addressing the hiring plan.
The staffing plan approves new hiring searches during AY 19-20 in the departments of Art History and Architectural Studies; Behavioral Neuroscience; Biology; Biology/Computer Science (Bioinformatics); East Asian Languages and Cultures; Film Studies; Government and International Relations; Human Development; Italian Studies; Mathematics; Physics, Astronomy and Geophysics; and Psychology. It denies requested searches in Anthropology, Botany, Computer Science, Education, History, Religious Studies, and a combined request by the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity, Africana Studies, American Studies, and Religious Studies.
In the case of the latter, “the center, department and programs request two tenure-track lines to support a new academic unit, provisionally called the Institute for Critical Public Inquiry,” the request states. It goes on to clarify that one tenure line would be housed in Africana Studies, while the other would convert an existing visiting position in Religious Studies to a tenure line “for a scholar with expertise in the religious histories and cultures of the Americas with a focus on the global study of race, religions, and peoples” and requests opportunity hires for both positions.
In its denial, the staffing plan notes that the request “depends on making changes to the structure of academic units, including creating an unprecedented amalgam of a center with a department and two programs,” deeming it “premature” to authorize the hire. The plan adds that as an academic program, not a department, Africana Studies cannot serve as the home of a tenure line. The denied request for a visiting to tenure-track conversion in Religious Studies coincides with the denial in the Classics department, which had requested not to begin an entirely new hiring search but instead to shift the position of Professor Sharon Portnoff, whose current department is Religious Studies, to Classics.
The Classics department cites “a desire to find the best institutional home not only for Professor Portnoff, whose training is in Jewish Studies, but also for the College’s new Jewish Studies program.” It adds that Arabic Studies is already housed within Classics and that the transfer would open the possibility of “new courses on the intersection of the ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds.”
In response, the staffing plan states that “given the compelling possibilities for bringing together Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic and for creating a Mediterranean studies program within Classics, this transfer is looked on very favorably,” but denies the shift because it would bring the Religious Studies department below three FTE lines. As the plan reports, this staffing level is the minimum permissible on campus. The maximum is 12.
To be clear, not every search approval means that a new tenure line has been created. In some cases—as with Art History and Architectural Studies, Biology, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Government and International Relations—a search is approved to fill a position that has been vacated in an existing tenure line due to a resignation, retirement, or death. Additionally, while most positions approved are tenure-track or at least full-time, not all of them are: Behavioral Neuroscience was approved to extend three existing adjunct contracts, and Italian Studies was approved to hire a three-year visitor, though it requested a tenure line.
With a broader, institutional focus, the staffing plan also includes an overview of the EPC’s work and findings during AY 17-18, which stress “the importance of Connections in staffing decisions,” as well as “the establishment of the Walter Commons [as] a vitally important step in providing institutional stability in the work identified in the Mellon Initiative on Global Education and reflected in Connections and the strategic plan.” The EPC also notes the importance of “curricular innovation and nascent programs with a focus on interdisciplinarity as vital to a forward-looking academic program” and addresses a key change between this new plan and old ones: “while recent EPC reports have acknowledged that high enrollments are a factor to be considered, they have moderated the high priority that previous plans had given to positions that relieve pressures in very high-enrollment departments.”
While the staffing plan may seem tedious and bogged down by academic jargon, it’s an essential indicator for the future of the College. The faculty teaching at Conn determines the direction the institution’s academic programming will take, especially considering that most faculty members stick around a lot longer than most students.
