Petition drive unable to save popular state university professor’s job
The woman who appeared on screen nine minutes into a Zoom forum Thursday night seemed a little uncomfortable and out of place.
“I’m sorry,” Vivian Severn said. “I’m nervous.”
For 13 years, her husband, Eddie, has taught music at one of Pennsylvania’s 14 state-owned universities — that is until Friday when he was to be laid off from his tenured position at Lock Haven University.
“I decided to speak tonight because I’m tired — I’m tired of a lot of the rhetoric,” she said, invoking State System of Higher Education Chancellor Daniel Greenstein and others.
“I’m really tired of witnessing the chancellor and upper management referring to my husband as being — and I’m quoting — ‘Excess teaching capacity, part of a headcount reduction and a faculty member needing to be shed to right size the university and the PASSHE system.’ I find this incredibly offensive.
“So, I am sharing my husband’s story of being right-sized, and I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” she said, her voice wavering. “I’m very emotional about this as you can
imagine.’’
How public higher education in Pennsylvania reached the point where six of its 14 state universities are to be merged is a bitter and complex tale of population decline and enrollment loss, of spending choices by individual campuses, and a decades-old practice by the state Legislature and governor of giving the state’s universities far less aid than almost every other state.
The results are evident east and west, including planned mergers of overbuilt and under-enrolled California, Clarion and Edinboro universities in Western Pennsylvania and Bloomsburg, Lock Haven and Mansfield in the northeast.
Yet for a few minutes Thursday, the policy and politics of it all gave way to something more personal as Ms. Severn, among several speakers, told her story in the first of eight public forums — this one hosted by the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties:
▪ A professor’s career interrupted.
▪ A family that is reeling.
▪ A campus that has lost a popular faculty member despite a petition drive, and a Central Pennsylvania college town with one more reason to wonder about its future.
In July, the State System’s board is to take a final vote on whether to combine the six campuses — part of a broader redesign of 14 state-owned universities that enroll 94,000 students.
On one level, the reasons are obvious: Enrollment is down nearly 22% from a peak of 119,500 students in 2010, and several campuses are approaching insolvency, Mr. Greenstein has said.
The chancellor and others say the cuts and consolidations are part of a fight to save the system, established in 1983 to give the commonwealth’s low- and middle-income students affordable access to a university degree. There are those in the Legislature and elsewhere eager for the mergers, even cheering them on.
Critics, though, say the system’s woes, including years of price hikes that made the campuses less affordable, are the product largely of weak state support — 47th among states per capita in spending. They say, if anything, students are the victims of a state government unwilling to prioritize education.
Either way, there is collateral damage, and Ms. Severn on Thursday night laid bare what that means for her family.
On Lock Haven’s website, her husband can still be seen in a youthful photo playing an instrument. His faculty page cites a doctoral degree in musical arts from the University of Salford, Manchester, England, where he also received his master’s degree in music.
He taught classes such as jazz and brass ensemble conducting and has expertise in such areas as trumpet and jazz performance, jazz theory and ear training.
In October, more than 250 petition signatures from faculty, alumni and staff urged the school to withdraw his letter of retrenchment — official parlance for layoffs. His wife said comments attached citedthe importance of music and the role her husband played in the lives of students. Some vowed to withhold donations.
“My husband has dedicated his entire career to Lock Haven,” she said. “I know and assume that every retrenched faculty member in the system also has brought incredible value to their institutions.”
Estimates vary about how many hundreds of teaching and non-teaching staff — a total perhaps approaching 1,500 — already have been or will be cut in the next few years. System officials say those are largely tied to a workforce reduction program that is separate from the campus mergers, but Ms. Severn doesn’t buy that.
She said the petition for her husband was forwarded to university leadership and to the State System board of governors.
“As expected, there has been no response,” she said.
Minutes after she spoke, Clover Wright, an assistant professor of education at California University of Pennsylvania, talked about the impact of scaling back offerings that make her campus and others unique. “We’re going to lose these unique programs,” she said.
“We’re already losing students,” she said.
Then there’s the economic impact.
“California is a dot. Has anybody ever been there? It is basically an intersection with a stop light,” Ms. Wright said. “If the university falls, it’s going to affect a lot of people in that town. It’s going to affect the schools in that town as professors lose their jobs and have to sell their house. Or can’t sell their house.”
Kim Johnson of West Chester University, the most robust of the system’s 14 universities, said she fears that there is a longerterm agenda that could lead to closures once schools due to be merged become campuses instead of stand-alone universities.
Paul Berlet, a senior secondary education major at Kutztown, said his campus is not directly affected by the mergers, but job losses are expected in his community. As far as he’s concerned, “The students have had a disservice done to them.”
About 50 people participated in the virtual forum, and a dozen or so spoke.
Ms. Severn said she has sat in on and transcribed many meetings in which Mr. Greenstein discussed the importance of preserving teaching talent as the State System’s top resource.
“The faculty and the students are real people. They’re not just numbers on a spreadsheet,” she said. “Lastly, I’m tired of seeing the tremendous destruction and academic suicide that this redesign has already caused, even before being passed by the board of governors, but I am not too tired to speak up and fight for what I believe is in the best interests of students.”