Dear colleague,
As you’ll remember, SAS-New Brunswick faculty voted in May by an overwhelming 382–39 margin in favor of a resolution calling on Executive Dean Juli Wade to reverse her decision to raise course caps and cancel upper-level Writing Program seminars and to reinstate the 30-plus Writing Program Lecturers who were terminated for the fall. Dean Wade never responded.
We haven’t forgotten or given up on these demands. Last Thursday, a small group of us met with Dean Wade, Executive Vice Dean Jim Masschaele, and Vice Dean Susan Lawrence to ask what the administration intends to do about those demands.
We wish we could report better news. We learned that Dean Wade does not intend to heed our faculty vote. She insisted that by restoring a small number of Lecturer-taught sections and keeping “open” the option of leaving some courses at lower caps, she was doing all she could. We beg to differ: Dean Wade has inflicted cuts in wide swathes but is restoring classes inch by inch—if that.
At the meeting, Dean Wade displayed a startling equanimity about the impact of her choices on student success. She said that we need to “wait and see” whether raising course caps in first-year writing will have a negative impact on students in Rutgers’ only required course. Yet when we asked whether she had any plan for how to assess the results of these course changes, she said no.
Dean Wade seemed unconcerned that her changes would give Rutgers some of the biggest first-year composition class sizes in the Big 10. In fact, Wade stated that the Writing Program should feel “lucky” she didn’t raise class sizes to 25 students, instead of 24, a threat that we have heard before. This logic of escalation and punishment should be concerning to all SAS departments.
Dean Wade told us that she seeks to balance the needs of SAS’s own research and teaching missions with its role as the main provider of general-education courses to all of New Brunswick. But though we agreed that these multiple roles might entail complex tradeoffs, we made the case that balancing these priorities was a matter on which the whole faculty should decide.
But Dean Wade seems to have a different philosophy—that she knows better than faculty what an arts and sciences curriculum should look like, and that she feels empowered to rewrite departmental course offerings, with or without the consent of department officers. She seems unmoved by the damage she is doing to the school by laying off several dozen experienced Lecturers. Her priority seems to be maximizing bodies in seats, with little interest in the downsides—for students, for teachers, and for the reputation of Rutgers—of ever-larger course sections staffed by ever-more-precarious faculty.
Dean Wade told us she believes in the value of liberal arts education. But her version of this educational mission entails setting up new “dashboards,” through which the Dean’s office can monitor and micromanage student enrollment across all departments. Some program directors and chairs might be given access to those dashboards, too, but Wade seems uninterested in faculty input or shared governance.
We asked whether budget cuts were the real driver of Dean Wade’s recent decisions. Wade said that the budget was “a factor,” but at other moments suggested that the Writing Program upper-level courses were unnecessary because other SAS courses fulfilled the same core requirements. She indicated that her office was struggling with limited resources but did not want input from faculty about how to allocate those resources.
The Writing Program has been the most visible—though far from the only—target of the current round of cuts in SAS-New Brunswick. But Dean Wade has made it clear that she could turn her attention to other programs at any time. We are gravely concerned for our students; for our colleagues who are vulnerable to increased workloads and arbitrary terminations; and for the future of SAS under Dean Wade’s leadership.
This won’t be the last time we confront Wade over the damage her administration is causing. We ask you to discuss this report with department colleagues—and be ready to organize around this issue when the semester starts.
In solidarity,
Julie Flynn, Assistant Teaching Professor, English Writing Program, SAS–NB
Andrew Goldstone, Associate Professor, English, SAS–NB
Karen Thompson, Lecturer, English Writing Program, SAS–NB
Shelby Wardlaw, Assistant Teaching Professor, English Writing Program, SAS–NB