Duquesne University cutting faculty to reduce costs

Duquesne University is moving forward with faculty cuts, informing some non-tenured instructors this week that their contracts would not be renewed.

The university had announced measures to reduce faculty as early as Dec. 4, according to an email shared with the Tribune-Review.

“As a first step, Duquesne has offered a comprehensive voluntary retirement incentive program to long-serving faculty,” the email reads. “As a second step, the university will not renew a subset of contracts of full-time, non-tenure track faculty and a few others who do not have tenure.”

The email, signed by Executive Vice President and Provost David J. Dausey and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Matthew J. Frist, states these measures would reduce faculty by less than 5%.

Gabriel Welsch, Duquesne’s vice president of marketing and communication, said retirements and non-renewals of contracts occur every year, and this year’s faculty reduction will affect “a very small number of faculty who do not yet have tenure, in areas of limited demand.”

“With the financial realities created by the covid-19 pandemic, this year the university provided a broader voluntary retirement incentive than we have offered in the past, and chose to replace fewer positions than we typically have done, thus minimizing the number of contracts we did not renew,” Welsch said. “These moves are a continuation of our typical practices.”

Welsch said the university is still working through the process, and would not give specifics on how many faculty members have been affected so far. Welsch did not say which academic departments have been affected by the changes.

In the past decade, Welsch said, the university has been consolidating and eliminating certain academic programs. This follows a pattern with universities nationwide, cutting costs to counter persistent declines in enrollment.

“Fashioning academic programs that mesh with student interests and advance student employment goals is the top priority,” Welsch said.

Duquesne is one of many universities across the state and country struggling financially amid the covid pandemic. This fall, undergraduate enrollment declined by about 4.4% compared to last year, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse.

Duquesne’s cuts follows major restructuring and reductions in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, which recently took steps toward combining Edinboro University, Clarion University and California University of Pennsylvania into a single educational unit. Meanwhile, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, also part of the state system, will combine its College of Humanities and Social Sciences with the College of Fine Arts, resulting in some furloughs and eliminated programs.

In the administration’s Dec. 4 email, they note that many of these “financial realities” existed prior to the pandemic, but the crisis “shortened our timeframe to respond to many of those challenges and limited our range of options to respond.”

The email said enrollment at Duquesne has declined by about 12% in the last 10 years, and staff has been reduced, but full-time faculty had remained approximately steady.