An Iowa community college plans to lay off 43 faculty members — 33 of whom are part-timers — in response to state budget cuts, according to an article in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier.

The paper reported that a memorandum to employees from Hawkeye Community College’s president, Gregory R. Schmitz, said the decision to lay off the workers — who are covered by a collective-bargaining unit — is “based on the information we currently have regarding funding for the next fiscal year.”

Employees not covered by the unit will face a pay freeze and furloughs in the next fiscal year, the memo said, and layoffs for them are not out of the question.

The cuts mean the institution will be left without any regular part-timers — a move some faculty members believe opens the door for the college to hire adjuncts who would not necessarily teach semester after semester.

Randy Richardson, associate executive director of the Iowa State Education Association, said the faculty members’ contract allows the institution to cut part-timers, followed by those who work full-time.

Federal stimulus money is coming in, Mr. Richardson said, “but a lot of the community-college presidents have panicked and decided they need to do staff reductions. It’s one of the things that appears to be happening around the country — they’re cutting part-time staffers.”

The director of a regional unit of the association and the group’s lawyers will meet Friday with faculty members who were laid off to try to determine “whether the layoffs were done properly and whether the right people were chosen,” among other things, Mr. Richardson said. —Audrey Williams June