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GAYATRI DEVI
Lock Haven
Has the time come for Dr. Daniel Greenstein, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), to look for another job?
It would appear so. The chancellor revealed his appalling lack of imagination, his total absence of vision for the state system, his abrasive leadership skills and his passive-aggressive temperament when he told the Senate Appropriations Committee on March 18 that if the proposed consolidation of the six targeted universities is not approved, he would recommend the shutting down of the 14 state universities.
"I will be recommending to the board that we come back to the Senate next year with a legislative package to dissolve the system," Greenstein said.
Though to the ordinary ear it sounded like a threat, according to Pennlive, Greenstein later said that it was not a "threat," but his "best advice."
The proposed consolidation would merge Lock Haven, Mansfield and Bloomsburg Universities into a single institution. In the western part of the state, the merger would consolidate Clarion, California and Edinboro into one university. The chancellor noted that all five of the six communities affected by the merger--"except Lock Haven"--are upbeat about the consolidation.
In the last two weeks, a relatively new motif can be heard in the chancellor's sales pitch to consolidate the six universities in his media remarks and his one-sided webinars for state system employees. The new riff is not all that new; it is the old "divide and conquer."
PennLive reports that at the appropriations hearing, Greenstein argued that "when any university faces financial difficulties, the other universities come to their aid." This "cross-subsidization," according to Greenstein, "is going to drain all of us."
"The universities that are subsidizing can no longer afford to support those that are subsidized," Greenstein noted.
Pennlive reports that Sen. Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, in response to Greenstein's remark, stated that he would "introduce the bill to dissolve the system."
"I'm seeing at IUP right now pay a terrible price in terms of retrenchment and clerical retrenchment and other layoffs and I can't help but believe that that price is being paid for years of cross-subsidization to weaker universities," Pittman said.
Beyond the inhumanity, crassness and sheer vulgarity of dividing Indiana University against "weaker universities," it is rather incredulous to hear an elected politician propose that the best way to fix the unemployment in his county is to introduce a bill to shut down the university, one of its biggest employers.
Since Spring 2020, when talk of the consolidation first started, faculty, coaches and staff at the 14 state universities have daily coped with each new incremental piece of bad news with as much internal strength and external cheerfulness--for the sake of our students--that we are able to muster.
The chancellor calls the state system a "corporation," and with declining student enrollment, faculty were told by local managers who calculated the "return on investment" that there were too many of us and some of us needed to be "shed." Just a couple of years ago, we had an administrator at Lock Haven University who told faculty each time we brought up the slipping enrollment numbers that that "low" number was exactly the "right" number for LHU! The mistakes managers make!
For about a year now, with retrenchment -- a fancy word for firing faculty -- letters on the table, several faculty colleagues in the state system universities have learned that they will be unemployed at the end of Spring 2021 after years of dedicated teaching. Senior faculty colleagues who can afford to retire are retiring in large numbers to save the jobs of their junior colleagues. Other faculty colleagues are actively in the job market trying to get away from the state system where tenure appears to be decisively meaningless.
The faculty union, APSCUF, has been working tirelessly to reduce the number of faculty layoffs and to find alternate work assignments for colleagues who have suddenly become jobless. Academic programs have been put into moratorium, their faculty fired or about to be fired, leaving departments scrambling to identify qualified faculty to teach out the remaining students.
But we still attend open houses for students, teach, advise, and help our students every day in and out of class. We are doing this in the middle of a pandemic without scaring our students. We are aware that we hold their precious futures in our hands.
We are trying to find a path forward not only for ourselves and those who depend on us, but also for our universities, our students, and our communities so that the places we call home do not become scorched earth in the wake of Greenstein's blitzkrieg of the state system. It is people like us, and the places we call home with students who have become like our own children that Greenstein so callously and carelessly plans to "dissolve."
Lock Haven University is planning to potentially lay off 43.66 additional faculty and 50+ staff in 2021-22. That is about a hundred-plus people and their families who might move out of Lock Haven next year; fathers, mothers, children, pets. That is mortgage, taxes, school districts, teacher salaries, groceries, gas, hospital, restaurant revenue leaving Lock Haven.
Both state and local faculty and staff union leaders have asked management to reconsider retrenchment and explore alternatives to the firing of faculty and staff. But the chancellor's tantrum appears to have found an audience. The manufactured crisis has management in thrall.
It is time for the people of Pennsylvania to ask themselves if Chancellor Greenstein is their ally in higher education. It is time for the board of governors, elected politicians in Harrisburg and the Governor himself to explain to the people of Pennsylvania why they are underfunding the state system. It is time for them to explain to rural Pennsylvania counties how an Ivy League graduate -- Greenstein attended the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University -- with Silicon Valley corporate speak, a six-figure salary and other perks, can walk in after just three years of working in the system and casually state his intent to "dissolve" hundred-year-old, rural universities if he does not get his way.