Doug Fiore, Ashland University’s interim provost, spoke to faculty senate last Friday, attempting to explain and clarify the issues surrounding the faculty cuts made. Several students as well as extra faculty members filled Ronk Lecture Hall in the College of Education for Fiore’s comments as well as the faculty questions that would be raised.

Fiore acknowledged how deeply the cuts affected the entire campus, from the administration to faculty and students. However, Fiore tried to remain optimistic looking towards the future. While addressing the faculty senate, he said, “I don’t think you know the extent to which we have excellence on this faculty.”

He also appealed to a spirit of cooperation between the faculty and the administration. He repeatedly said that the two parties share the same goal; a stronger university. To reach that end, Fiore said that the financial state of the university needed to be taken into account. Programs that are not as financially productive become less of a concern after the university becomes financially stable, which Fiore said these cuts help the university do. 

“What happens now is that programs that are rising and take a couple of years to build up, they have to get sacrificed now because we don’t make money,” he said.

The 22 faculty positions cut, including 15 current faculty who will not return, three retiring faculty members and four unfilled faculty slots that will not be filled, were never sought out to fulfill a budgetary number, he said. Rather, these were areas Fiore said the president saw low productivity numbers, and felt action was needed before the October 15 deadline for notifying faculty of their non-renewed contracts. The cuts were not limited to the least productive departments on campus, but were made to the departments where non-tenured faculty could be cut. Fiore did not know the number of faculty cuts until right before the decision was made.

Fiore also said one of the mistakes made in the past was not seeking input from Scott Van Loo, the vice president of enrollment management and marketing, and Stephen Storck, the vice president of business operations, in developing academic programs.

“The reality of the situation is it makes perfect sense that as we design academic programs we go to our experts on finance, on enrollment management and marketing and we say take a look at this, give us some ideas,” Fiore said.

He also commented on the potential for growth and innovation the university could exploit given a larger endowment and other revenue streams, as well as having the ability to make decisions without the same emphasis on the “dollars-in, dollars-out” numbers that currently drive many of the decisions the university makes. 

Faculty senators asked repeated questions about the rationale for the cuts, the number of cuts necessary, and how this would impact the prioritization process. They also challenged the credit hours generated (CHG) statistic, the metric used to initiate the cuts. The metric is used to determine a numerical value for a faculty member’s productivity by analyzing the number of students in each section they teach. 

Gretchen Dworznik, a faculty senator and the chair of the Journalism and Digital Media department, raised her concern that this metric failed to account for the hours her department put into instruction outside of the classroom.

“I have three faculty members who receive load reductions so they can work outside the classroom in three media outlets with the students. My faculty member that was cut has spent 7,500 hours outside the classroom teaching students on remotes, on television studio productions, but yet he was cut due to the almighty CHG,” she said. 

Dan McDonald, a faculty senator and chair of the art department, wanted to know what the rationale behind 15 cuts.

“There has to be a rationale for why we initiated the process in the first place,” he said. “Was it to drive the overall credit numbers up? That may have been an answer. There was a need for a certain buffer? A certain amount of money? We needed a certain amount and 15 got us to that amount, and we found 15 spots that came close to what we were aiming for? There is no answer that just says, we didn’t need to cut these folks, and we only picked the people who were not productive. There needs to be an answer.” 

The standardized method of evaluating faculty was brought up by Boris Kerkez, a professor in the mathematics and computer science department. He asked for the number of full-time faculty members compared to full-time administrators, while also asking if the administrators were being evaluated by any sort of standardized metric.