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Takeaway: The administration is putting unprecedented pressure on SAS departments to cancel classes and increase class sizes. Talk to your colleagues about the harm this will cause—and what you can do in your department to resist these unnecessary cuts.
Dear colleague,
We are writing to full-time faculty in SAS-New Brunswick to alert you to the pressure being put on department chairs and UPDs to cancel fall classes before all students have had a chance to enroll and to increase class sizes for remaining classes. It’s clear that the damaging policies our Writing Program colleagues alerted us to during the spring are being imposed throughout SAS by Executive Dean Juli Wade, without regard for best pedagogical practices and the needs of our students.
Program and scheduling officers report unprecedented pressure coming earlier than ever to cancel courses based on enrollments. At least some departments are being asked to provide reports on classes with low enrollment by June 24—the day BEFORE first-years start to register! Other departments are expecting draconian enforcement of a policy requiring a minimum enrollment of 15 students for classes taught by lecturers but only 10 for classes taught by full-time faculty.
This pressure comes on the heels of drastic cuts to the Writing Program, where the number of sections were slashed and stop points raised from 22 to 24; much higher enrollment minimums for SAS summer classes; and an increase from 25 to 30 in the stop points for what are advertised as “small discussion sections” in the SAS Signature program—with cancellation required for all sections that don’t reach 20 students. Meanwhile, caps for asynchronous online classes are being raised all over SAS.
Chairs, program directors, and department scheduling officers will face these questions directly, but we hope all of you talk to your colleagues about the damage the administration is causing and what you can do in your department to resist:
- Enrollment stop points and minimums should follow pedagogical best practices confirmed by research, not some arbitrary directive from the Dean. No class involving recitation or discussion should have more than 25 students, and no class with a significant writing component should have more than 17 students (that’s the class cap for Rutgers’ celebrated Honors College). And there is no pedagogical reason why enrollment minimums for these classes should be higher than eight.
- No classes should be canceled for under-enrollment before August 8, the last date for incoming first-years to register—and that includes advanced classes, since teaching load considerations need to be weighed across each department.
- No class taught by a lecturer should be canceled for under-enrollment if the same class taught by a full-time faculty member is allowed to run at the same enrollment level. This policy is a divide-and-conquer tactic designed to break the unity our unions achieved during our strike and contract campaign.
If we don’t resist these measures in SAS, the home to more than half of all New Brunswick students, they will be applied across the university, and Rutgers will become less and less the world-class public university we want to be. Please talk to your colleagues about what we can do as faculty. If you’re a UPD or Chair who is dealing with Wade’s demands and want to talk to union colleagues about this, reply to this email or contact aaup@rutgersaaup.org, and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.
In solidarity,
Todd, Bryan, Becky, and Amy
Todd Wolfson, President, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Bryan Sacks, President, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union
Rebecca Givan, General Vice President, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Amy Higer, Vice President, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union
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