I Gave VCU 25 Years. Now Administration Wants to Terminate Me Without Cause.
38 years ago, I started my teaching career in rural King William County. During that time, I won Teacher of the Year for King William High School, Teacher of the Year for King William County, Teacher of the Year for Region III of Virginia, and the Superintendent’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.
25 years ago I was hired as an adjunct professor in the English Department at VCU. After being named adjunct faculty member of the year four years in a row in that department, I was offered a full-time faculty position. In 2007, I was hired into a new and exciting department that hand-selected faculty for their proven teaching excellence. The hallmark of this department was the increased emphasis on student success through the implementation of innovative and learning-centered pedagogy. The department later became The Department of Focused Inquiry.
During my 17 years in the Department of Focused Inquiry, I have continued to hone my teaching skills and pursued excellence with single-minded rigor continuing to serve the students of VCU with innovative and engaging learning experiences. That hard work has paid off. My students have a proven record of success. Focused Inquiry sponsors a student essay contest that honors the best work across the department each year. One of my students has won the synthesis and analysis category for the last five years. Two years ago 10 out of 10 finalists in the narrative essay category and all of the winners came from work completed in my class.
In fact, in the last 2 years alone 40 % of the winning projects in our contest have been completed in classes that I teach. This result is in a department that boasted nearly 60 teachers and that taught over 4000 students. In the last two years, 16 of my students have become published authors. Last year, my students entered the library Jurgens contest for the first time because the topic of censorship worked well with the concepts we were studying in my course. Again, one of my students was one of the selected winners. My students do excellent work, and I facilitate the conditions under which they do so.
I only bring these things up to show that for the last 38 years, I have been focused on students learning and succeeding, and until the fall of 2021, I believed that my goals aligned with the goals of the administration at VCU. Traditionally in our department, we have elected a department chair from within the faculty. Our university-approved bylaws include procedures for doing so. That fall we were told that VCU would be conducting a national search for a new department chair in focused inquiry. Unbeknownst to faculty, we were already operating under a budget deficit. In addition, faculty overwhelmingly questioned whether this would be good for the department or students. We were told we should be grateful that the administration was spending money on our department. The search moved forward, and we hired a department chair with a signing bonus, negotiated travel budget, and a $30,000 higher salary than the previous department chair. All of this while our department was operating at a deficit.
In the fall of 2022, our dean directed the new department chair to hire six new faculty members, again when she already knew that we were operating under a budget deficit, a budget that was created when she lowered the class size for focused inquiry courses, a move that faculty had not requested. Also in the fall of 2022, we were told that moving forward the department would only be hiring faculty with terminal degrees, but that the faculty currently working in the department would not be impacted by this decision, only new hires. Further, we had been told previously that promotion was not a requirement in our department and would have no impact on our continued employment in the department. That spring, we learned that both of these promises had been a lie when we were told that 14 faculty members would receive terminal contracts. It turned out that not having a terminal degree and our promotion status were weaponized against us in deciding which faculty members would go.
In May of 2023, I was promoted in my department with glowing recommendations from the promotion committee, the department chair, and the dean. I received a letter from President Rao, congratulating me on my fine service to the University. A mere month later, on June 28th I received a terminal contract outlining that VCU was no longer interested in that fine service. I was confused, to say the least. In the last three years alone, I have been chosen as a faculty mentor for GTA’s who can now apply to take my place as post-docs, I have led 15 department in-service sessions on innovative pedagogy, given three presentations at conferences, chaired multiple committees, and been elected by my faculty peers to one of the highest administrative positions in the department. I have participated in 18 Faculty Learning Communities and 78 professional development opportunities. In fact, I have been told by department leadership more than once this year that I work too hard and do too much because it makes other faculty feel bad and like they need to do more, too. In addition, in two cases this year I have stepped up to lead faculty initiatives that recognize and reward students for their achievements after they fell to the wayside because of the low faculty morale this situation has caused. I might also mention that the committee I am leading in one of these initiatives has as its members only faculty who have received terminal contracts. In the face of essentially being fired, we are still working to serve the students of VCU.
In the fall of 2023, we began the difficult journey of continuing to relentlessly serve our students while walking the halls of our department like ghosts who didn’t really belong there and wouldn’t be there for long. Just when it didn’t seem possible that the situation could become more ludicrous, it did. Six faculty members have quit the department since terminal contracts were issued, one of which was a new hire in 2022. Administration realized that enrollment was up, our department was currently operating at an $800,000 surplus for the year, AND that since they had essentially fired so many faculty they wouldn’t have enough staff to teach the courses for at least the next two years. Administration admitted that they hadn’t considered staffing for classes when doling out terminal contracts, only money. This clear lack of consideration for the success of students was committed simultaneously with the constant refrain of student success being their prime objective.
Then when it was clear that budget wasn’t really the problem, and they were going to have to hire adjuncts in record numbers, hire back faculty, or hire new faculty, the narrative changed and the argument became, “the Provost is insisting that we only hire faculty with terminal degrees.” This new narrative smells suspiciously like the real narrative all along. Confoundingly, with the expressed stipulation that terminal degrees are the goal, did the department chair hire back the one person with a terminal degree who had been laid off or the one person who was laid off who was actively pursuing the credential of a terminal degree? No, she did not.
Upon receiving my terminal contract, I immediately followed protocol and asked for a review of the decision. I thought, at the time, that I might get to discuss the situation with a human, but instead received an email that my contract had been reviewed by legal and everything was in order. After continued shifting narratives, finally resulting in the hiring of post-docs to take my place, I highly suspect that there is a very good case here for wrongful termination based on ageism, but I am not a lawyer and have no wish to harm VCU or its wonderful students, so I am simply asking the Board of Visitors, not if VCU can legally be this type of university, but if this is the type of university decision-making and injustice that they want to be a part of? If the answer is no, please step in before the inevitable impact on our students begins to damage their experience.
