Mills opts for layoffs over admitting men
Decision stokes fears for future of Oakland women’s college
Mills College faculty cheered when hundreds of students occupied the Oakland campus for 13 days in 1990 and forced the school’s trustees to reverse their decision to admit male undergraduates as a way to raise money.
Now Mills, one of only 36 women’s colleges remaining in the United States, is again deep in the hole. But unlike dozens of other women’s schools that have voted in recent decades to admit men to solve financial woes, Mills trustees made a controversial decision of a different kind this summer: They fired tenured professors, a move rare in academia and unprecedented at Mills.
For many on the Mills faculty, doing so was a worse decision than admitting men, according to a survey conducted in June by a professor trying to gauge support for alternatives to layoffs. The survey found that 71 percent of the 65 faculty members who responded supported admitting undergraduates “of any gender.”
But this time, the trustees did not replay their decision of 27 years ago, when Warren Hellman — the late financier whose estate still pays for San Francisco’s free Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival each year — chaired the Mills College board of trustees and championed admitting men.
Instead, they voted privately in June to fire five tenured professors and several other instructors and staff, angering alumnae and
triggering fears for the future of the 165-year-old school, located near Interstate 580 and the Oakland hills.
Campus officials acknowledged that the firings last month were a drastic step. They said the decision was part of a major restructuring of the campus to address a $9 million budget gap they hope to close within three years.
The restructuring does not include admitting male undergraduates, although the deficit is partly caused by a steady decline in undergraduate enrollment. The total is down 26 percent since 2013, from 997 students to 740.
“We have fewer students than we used to, but Mills has long faced ups and downs,” said the college’s president, Elizabeth Hillman.
But many faculty are no longer as sanguine as Hillman is that Mills can survive as a single-sex school.
“Mills has served a great purpose by being a women’s college all these years,” said Kathryn Reiss, an English professor and author of young-adult fiction. “But the attraction of a women’s college is just not there.”
Reiss favors admitting men. “I don’t see it as a terrible loss,” she said. “I see it as another way for Mills to educate more people.”
Roger Sparks, an economics professor who conducted the June survey of his colleagues, said he agrees with those who think it’s time to “go open gender.”
Sparks said Mills’ steep enrollment decline is part of a national trend. Dozens of women’s colleges have gone coed in recent decades — most recently on June 14, when the University of St. Joseph in Connecticut voted to admit men — and many more have closed.
As head of the faculty’s executive committee, Sparks meets with Hillman monthly and often suggests admitting men. He said he tries to reassure the president that “we don’t need to have fraternities or a Division 1 football team, so we’re not going to attract the prototypical male who wants to have keggers.”
The faculty’s willingness to open Mills’ doors to men coincides with a trend, particularly on college campuses, away from looking at gender as an absolute. At Mills, for example, new students are asked which pronoun they prefer — he, she, they or something else. Faculty avoid using the term “coed,” which some say suggests that only two genders exist.
In 2014, Mills became the nation’s first women’s college to admit female undergraduates who were born male. The new admissions policy also covered biological females who did not fit into the “gender binary,” meaning they were neither men nor women, as well as women who became men after enrolling.
Yet the restructuring proposal that administrators introduced in May includes no plan to admit undergraduates who identify as men.
Hillman said Mills stands out in the Bay Area precisely because it’s a women’s school.
“There are many struggling small liberal arts colleges that are coed,” she said. “I don’t think that going coed is an instant answer to the problems.”
Instead, Mills trustees voted to adopt a broad plan that includes partnerships with UC Berkeley and the Peralta Community College District, cuts to academic programs, and a move that many at the college consider nearly as controversial as admitting men: firing tenured professors.
Tenure is academia’s version of the First Amendment — a job protection that safeguards professors from dismissal if they make statements or conduct research that their employers disagree with.
The trustees terminated five tenured professors, in the fields of history, philosophy, physics, English and ethnic studies. Two others, government and art history professors, agreed to take early retirement. As many as five nontenured faculty and up to 18 staffers are also being let go.
“This is a historic moment for Mills,” Hillman said. “We need to face honestly the big problem in higher education — it’s a high-cost problem.”
She said trustees will soon consider lowering Mills’ tuition because the college’s current price tag — nearly $60,000 a year, including tuition, fees, room and board — scares away many applicants who don’t realize they can get financial aid.
“We’re looking at a tuition reset,” Hillman said.
Katie Sanborn, who chairs the 32-member board of trustees, agreed with Hillman that Mills’ gender exclusivity is one of its selling points. Students may not always come to Mills because it admits only women, she said, but they appreciate it once they arrive.
“I don’t believe (admitting men) is a panacea,” she said.
It hasn’t been a panacea for Mills’ graduate program, which has admitted men since 1920. Graduate enrollment has declined by 25 percent since 2013, from 611 to 460 students.
The college announced its faculty layoff plan in late May, after the school year ended. That averted any possibility of a repeat of 1990, when protesting students shut down operations simply by preventing administrators from reaching their office phones.
Still, students, faculty, alumnae and others sent more than 400 emails to trustees criticizing the plan. Another 600 people signed petitions urging the trustees to reject the cuts and retain professors.
The Mills trustees make decisions in private and don’t typically set aside time to hear from students and college employees. But in June, four days before their vote, the trustees made an exception and reserved 45 minutes for testimony.
Dozens of students, faculty, staff and alumnae showed up. Some students begged the trustees not to fire their professors. Some cried. One student said she had planned to commit suicide one day last semester but stopped herself because her professor texted her and wanted to know where she was.
That professor was among those fired.
Another effort to get the trustees to change their minds came from Sparks, the economics professor, who developed an alternative plan that he said would save more money without firing anyone. The trustees did not adopt it. Others asked a national advocacy group for professors to intervene.
In a June 13 letter to Hillman, the American Association of University Professors said Mills should avoid firing tenured professors. The group warned that it could censure the college, a move that could jeopardize Mills’ place in national rankings.