When Provost Risa Palm spoke to the Faculty Senate Friday, she faced many questions from University faculty about the pending instructor cuts that are part of the Flagship Agenda.
Palm regularly speaks at the beginning of Faculty Senate meetings about issues in academic affairs. The instructor cuts in the English and mathematics departments announced in October have been the center of recent debate among the University faculty, staff and students.
“The time [given at the beginning of the meeting] is usually for the provost to speak of anything of interest to the faculty,” Palm said. “This issue is obviously of interest.”
Palm came to the meeting prepared with a packet of graphs detailing characteristics of University faculty. She told the faculty the University is behind its regional and national peers in tenure-track faculty members.
The University has more undergraduate students per tenure-track faculty member than the average for national and regional peers, she said. And though the University has fewer tenure- track professors than other peer universities, the number of instructors is significantly higher.
Palm’s first statements sparked discussion from the faculty that continued for almost an hour.
Some faculty members suggested instructors should be phased out by attrition instead of having their positions terminated and being forced to leave. Through the process of attrition, instructors leave of their own volition.
But Malcolm Richardson, chair of the English department, said this process would take much longer than the three years allotted to the English and mathematics departments to decrease the number of instructors.
Faculty also questioned which instructors would be forced to leave first.
Richardson told the Senate there are 85 English instructors; 60 of whom will be terminated, with 15 of those being reassigned to places such as the Writing Center.
“There are some instructors who have been around a long time,” he said. “There are those who have played a major role in contributing to the excellence of this University.”
There are instructors who have taught English for 41 years, Richardson said.
“The vast majority of them have been here for at least 14 years,” he said.
Jane Collins, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said there are many instructors who have devoted many years to the University and are vital to the English department.
“There are instructors who’ve created a niche and given a unique contribution,” she said. “Those who have been here longer and have created that niche, their contract will probably be renewed.”
But there is a group of instructors that is “somewhat transient,” Collins said. Those will be the first to go.
“It’s the ones in the middle who are really going to be hard to figure out,” she said.
Collins told faculty that no instructor would be notified of their dismissal by mail but personally notified.
“I personally am going to review every one of those files with great care,” she said.
Guillermo Ferreyra, mathematics chair, also said the termination of instructor positions will be handled with “great care.”
“There is a human element we will take into account,” he said
The mathematics department’s 45 instructors will be replaced with 14 new tenure-track professors, Ferreyra said.
When faculty members raised questions about class size in the mathematics and English departments, Palm emphasized that rumors about dramatic increases in class size are “simply untrue.”
“The current size of English composition classes is 19,” she said. “This absolutely will not change.”
Overall, Palm emphasized the positive impact she thinks the change will have on the University’s learning environment.
“It’s a huge step for LSU,” she said. “It’s something the faculty believes in. It’s something the dean and I believe in.”
For Palm, the focus of the change is not the loss in instructors but the gain in tenure-track faculty and the enhancement of undergraduate education.
“It’s about education,” she said. “That’s what it’s all about.”