Courtesy of Sean Elliot
For the second time in as many years, the English department was struck with an unwelcome surprise this summer.
On June 18, 2025, English Department Chair Professor Jeff Strabone announced in an email to English department students that Visiting Assistant Professor and Writer in Residence Renee Branum would be departing.
Like Professor Courtney Sender, whose departure was covered last year in The College Voice, Professor Branum left her position at the College to accept a tenure-track position at another institution. At the College, Professors Branum and Sender worked as visiting assistant professors (VAP). The VAP positions offer lower pay and have lower job security compared to tenure-track positions which allow professors to attain tenure, an open-ended permanent contract, after working a certain number of years in their position.
“The one thing you and the readers have to understand is that Professor Branum and her predecessor, [Professor] Courtney Sender, were hired as visiting assistant professors on one year contacts with no tenure,” said English Department Chair Professor Jeff Strabone. “Every academic wants tenure, a track that leads to tenure…people don’t want jobs without tenure unless they have to or if they are young and at the beginning of their careers.”
Given every academic’s preference for tenure and tenure-track jobs, Professor Strabone understands Professor Branum and Professor Sender’s departures for jobs which offered a path to tenure. “Courtney and Renee did the right things for themselves,” said Professor Strabone. “No one questions that.”
While Branum and Sender made the best choices for their careers, both departures took the English department by surprise due to timing. Both Professor Branum and Sender had signed return offers to continue teaching in their VAP roles at the College. However, both received late tenure track offers from elsewhere, which they then accepted. “The hiring is usually done in February,” explained Strabone. “In both cases, the [tenure] job was offered to someone else [first], but the [first] person didn’t take it…both [Branum] and [Sender] received their offers in June.”
Both departures left the English department scrambling in their wake. As the Writer in Residence, both Professors Branum and Sender had worked in a position specifically dedicated to teaching prose fiction classes. Resultingly, both had agreed to advise multiple creative honors theses in English for English fiction writing students. Their departures left these honors students without an advisor.
“I remember when I heard about [Branum’s departure],” said Julia Conner ‘26, an English student who was approved to write a creative writing honors thesis with Professor Branum. “I had been grocery shopping and saw an email from Professor Strabone…I opened up the email with the lines ‘some of you may recall Professor Sender…’ and thought, oh no, I think I know where this is going… I remember sitting in the parking lot and being shocked and disappointed, but I shouldn’t have been because of what happened last year.”
However, there is more than just the initial shock and disappointment for students. The loss of a creative writing advisor for students is more than just losing an advisor or a professor; it’s losing a trusted mentor and friend who can challenge and push students to write more creatively and openly. “What do students write about? Drugs, alcohol, trauma, and [other] difficult topics,” said Strabone. “Students can only feel comfortable sharing about these things with their creative writing mentor when they have established trust.”
That trust is built through time and continuity, from the professor and student getting to know one another, to understanding each other’s writing styles and how to give feedback on sensitive topics that both pushes and comforts students.
“In creative writing, we often write about very personal and difficult topics so it takes time to get to actually feel comfortable and improve as a writer,” said Michael Cruetz ‘26, another English student who was approved to write a creative writing honors thesis with Professor Branum. “I loved taking classes with Professor Sender and felt she was able to understand and challenge me to be a better writer so when she left last year I was incredibly disappointed…hearing about Professor Branum’s departure just made me feel more frustrated than disappointed or sad because it has happened for the third time in three years.”
The constant turnover of the creative writing professor position also limits the ability for creative writing students to gain meaningful career opportunities. “One of the best things about going to a small school like Conn is that you almost always have direct access to your professors through email and office hours…If you put in the work to grow a relationship with professors in the field you are interested in, that can lead to opportunities like internships, connections, and strong recommendations.” said Kate Jeffrey ‘26. “Because the professors in the field I am interested in have never stayed for more than one year in my time at Conn, it is so much more difficult for me to get opportunities like this…Conn urges students to put in the work to create and maintain these kinds of connections with professors, but I don’t see the work on Conn’s end to ensure we are able to do so.”
Building a strong relationship between professor and student is essential for the creative writing major because all students interested in concentrating in creative writing must take four creative writing classes. “While the basic english major consists of 10 classes…the creative writing concentration requires students to take 12 classes with four creative writing classes,” stated Professor Strabone. “Students who take creative writing have to take 4 classes with creative writing professors or poetry. And those relationships last lifetimes because our creative writing students take creative writing classes in most of their semesters at Conn.”
But instead of getting to build long-lasting trustworthy relationships with creative writing professors, members of the class of 2026 who have invested the time in taking fiction classes to major in English with a concentration of creative writing have been taught by three different creative fiction writing professors so far.
All creative fiction writing was taught by Blanche Boyd, the College’s Writer in Residence for forty years, up until her retirement in 2022. Many of the College’s most famous alums in fiction writers Ann Napolitano, Sloane Crosley, Hannah Tinti, David Grann, and many others, were all taught under Boyd. Boyd’s departure left a gaping vacancy in the English department – a vacancy the department could not and still has not been able to fill due to the College’s ongoing hiring freeze across all departments for tenure-track positions.
“All departments at the College have been prohibited from hiring professors at the tenure level for the past three years and maybe beyond,” explained Strabone. “While I feel sympathy for the administration having to make hard choices, we can’t run a fiction program this way with musical chairs.” The aforementioned musical chairs have forced members of the class of 2026 to learn and develop new relationships with Professors Boyd, Sender, and Branum in their first three years.
The hiring freeze is part of a process that the College started three years ago, spearheaded by the College’s Dean of Faculty R. Danielle Egan, which she calls ‘a curricular equilibrium process.’ “The purpose of curricular equilibrium is to find a path to providing a powerful curriculum we value with a sustainable number of faculty,” according to Dean Egan.
While many may pinpoint or assume the decision to begin the curricular equilibrium process and hiring freeze due to saving money, as VAPs have lower salaries compared to tenure-track professors, that is not the complete story. “The problem we are addressing was created by a series of historical events, including, but certainly not limited to the budget,” explained Dean Egan. “The impacts created a context where we could not hire any tenure track or continuing faculty and we could not offer equity raises regularly…we could not hire [tenured] faculty until we achieved equilibrium.”
Due to this curricular equilibrium process, the English department is not alone in their inability to retain faculty. “It is important to note that English and Creative Writing were not singled out…we care deeply about creative writing at Connecticut College,” stated Dean Egan. “English is not alone, there are other departments that are in equally challenging circumstances. When we reduced the number of visiting faculty positions this year by seven, English was not impacted.”
While it is not uncommon for colleges and universities to have positions staffed by visiting professors, the College is unique in having a visiting fiction writing professor. “Every other English department I know of has a tenure track professor in creative fiction writing,” said Professor Strabone. “Nowhere else is a fiction writing professor position staffed by professors who leave year after year and are expected to leave year after year.”
By being unable to compete with other schools who can offer tenure-track jobs to creative fiction writing professors, Professor Strabone believes that the College is squandering their strong historical strength in creative writing. “Our most famous living alumni are currently fiction writing alumni,” explained Professor Strabone. “How will we produce these alumni if we can’t staff this position?”
While the College’s historically strong English and creative writing program has attracted students across the nation and produced multiple New York Times best-selling authors, that reputation is now in critical danger. “Students come to Conn knowing there is a strong fiction writing program,” according to Professor Strabone. “That is a lie now because we have annual turnover…that is not a program…that’s chaos.”
To help cover the sudden departure of Professor Branum, the English department has moved quickly. “Right now we are conducting a search to replace Renee to teach her five sections of creative writing,” stated Professor Strabone. “We are lucky enough to have [Director of College Writing] Summer [West] advise the five fiction honors students for now.”
The College administration has also moved to help cover the departure. Our Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, Deborah Eastmen, has been working closely with the chair to support the English Department,” said Dean Egan. “We have also worked to support the department with an idea they have to offer workshop support for graduating creative writers.”
Although the department and College administration may be able to find a short-term solution with the arrival of yet another visiting professor, the long-term solution still remains unclear. “We don’t know when the college will allow us to hire a fiction professor on a tenure track basis…we still haven’t been approved to do so,” said Professor Strabone. “This problem will endure for at least two more years.”
While the English department and students are understanding of the College’s hiring freeze, they hope that a solution is quickly forthcoming given the importance of continuity for the creative fiction writing professor position. “I see why the admin is cautious given the financial situation from the enrollment gap and the federal funding pressure and recognize that it may truly not be possible to hire a tenure track position,” said Conner. “But I want the administration to understand how important a fiction writing professor is…I think it is important and maybe more important than any area of study.
While any area of study can benefit from tenure track professors granting students the time to truly develop meaningful relationships with professors, Conner claims that the “nature of studying fiction writing makes it so much more important than others.” This is because “students write about sensitive topics and improve from qualitative feedback which is best given when a student and professor know each other well…when the student knows the professor’s teaching style and the professor knows the students writing style.”
Jeffrey believes that the constant turnover due to the lack of a tenure-track creative writing professor sends a terrible message of carelessness from the College. “The worst thing about this whole situation is that no one really cares about creative writing in the first place…When I tell people I’m studying creative writing, I get funny looks because everyone knows you can’t make money in that field,” said Jeffrey. “A fiction class is one of the only places on campus where your writing is taken seriously, and it’s a very vulnerable and personal space…When the Connecticut College administration does not allocate money to the already microscopic creative writing department, that sends a message to students like me that the school, like most people, does not think creative writing is important.”
College administration is more hopeful the English department may be able to hire a tenure-track professor sooner than two years. “The good news is that we have done a lot of revision to policies and practices over the past three years and we are at a place where we will begin hiring continuing faculty again,” stated Dean Egan. “I cannot guarantee which department will be allotted faculty lines this year, as it is a committee that makes the decision, but we are moving forward.”
In the meantime, the impact of Professor Branum’s departure will be felt. “One impact [Professor Branum’s departure is] going to have is that Professor West and I are going to have to spend some time getting to know each other,” said Conner. “With Professor Branum I had taken a full year of courses so we knew each other as people and she knew me as a writer and what my strengths and weaknesses were…I think that [for the honors thesis] we would have been able to hit the ground running faster.”
While the English department scrambles to find yet another short-term visiting assistant professor replacement for the fiction writing professor position due to the administration’s hiring freeze, the five fiction honors students, all prospective creative writing majors, and even all English department students endure the consequences of the lack of continuity in the creative fiction writing professor position, limiting their ability to develop trustworthy relationships to allow them to truly grow as writers.
