Hiring Bytes

Rutgers University has tapped Wendell E. Pritchett to be the next chancellor of its Camden campus, Philadelphia’s Inquirer reports. Pritchett, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School who has also served in the administration of Philadelphia’s mayor, Michael Nutter, and on a task force for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, will take office on June 30, the newspaper writes.
According to an article in the New Hampshire Union Leader, big expected budget shortfalls (of $9-million and $17-million in fiscal 2010 and 2011 respectively) have prompted the University of New Hampshire to scrap raises for nonunion workers who take home more than $40,000 a year. The university estimates that the wage freeze will save it $1.3-million in the 2010 fiscal year and $3.6-million in 2011, the newspaper reports. Unfortunately, that still leaves UNH with a lot of ground to make up, so furloughs and tuition hikes may not be far behind, university officials warn.

The somewhat silver lining, a university spokeswoman, Kim Billings, told the Union Leader, is that UNH “is not considering layoffs at this time and that any decision on furloughs or a hiring freeze probably wouldn’t be made until the fall, after the university knows for sure how many students will be in its freshman class.”
Professors at Parsons the New School for Design are in an uproar over the institution’s decision to drop nine fine-arts faculty members who taught on either a semester-to-semester or year-to-year basis and reassign three others, The News York Times reports:

“If they can get away with doing it to these people, they’ll do it to us,” said Laurence Hegarty, a part-time professor at Parsons. “It is wrong to fire people, for no good reason, who have excellent track records as teachers, excellent track records as artists.”

In an e-mail message sent to New School officials, … faculty members from Columbia University’s visual arts division called the move “anti-artist, anti-arts education and frankly anti-culture.”

“We stand united in expressing our dismay at the recent firings (and demotions) of so many talented artist/educators,” the e-mail message said. “The suddenness of this wholesale action coupled with the clear lack of prior dialogue makes these firings particularly grievous. But even more troubling is that these decisions were made during a period of crisis for all cultural institutions in this city and beyond.” …

Speaking in the institution’s defense, Tim Marshall, its interim provost, told the Times that “this is not a disciplinary action — no one’s been fired. As you update the curriculum, you have to look at the best fit.”

Marshall was also quick to add that it’s hardly unusual for professors not to be reappointed: “This is very typical of what happens in the school every single semester, all the time, all over the place,” he said. “There’s nothing extraordinary about what’s happening here.”

But Dale Emmart, one of those faculty members who was not reappointed, told the newspaper that she was stung by the way in which she was let go: “I felt personally humiliated and also one of the fallen in the restructuring of the school,” she said. “The manner of this e-mail was as though I was an account number.”