Stop Firing Faculty
by Apollo Hurley, VCU Sophomore & Undergraduate Teaching Assistant
The layoffs of focused inquiry professors is a hypocritical act. The focused inquiry requirement has an intentionally small classroom size in order to create a feeling of intimacy for incoming freshmen and therefore give them college connections early on. Its proven to increase graduation rates between those who have and haven’t taken the class.
VCU has repealed the mandatory class on racism due to “large class sizes” while simultaneously making larger class sizes on purpose for the required focused inquiry class. Both things cannot exist simultaneously.
Thousands of students have stated they don’t want faculty to be fired and prefer the smaller class sizes. The claim that firing faculty is what students want is not only entirely false but an active attempt to divide the community so we don’t stand up to the VCU administration for consistently not caring about the student body and staff.
They claim everything they do is for the betterment of students, but there is mold in all of the dorm buildings what was consistently covered up along with mold in nearly every single learning building. There are protests after protests about poor decisions Rao and the Board keep making that they ignore “for the sake of the students” while my educational experience has only consistently declined with every decision they make. Even the governor of Virginia has stated the direction VCU is going in is not a positive one.
There shouldn’t be a cut to nearly 1/3 of an entire department. There is no benefit for that. Two student’s tuition can pay for a single professors wage, and that’s if said wage was increased. It’s only claimed to be a financial problem because they’re turning VCU into a for-profit system instead of keeping it an educational one; there is no deficit that would be caused by keeping the entire department nor giving raises to faculty. It’s been seen in healthcare and private prisons in America, and that’s not a great comparison for a public college.
It’s up to students to be loud enough now and take this farther than the streets. It’s been proven that a protest won’t do anything as VCU has banned protesting in the past and arrested those who did, or completely ignore the protest altogether and act as though they aren’t aware.
This is a fixable problem. If it doesn’t take care of itself, we will, as the student body of VCU. And if that isn’t enough for administration, then maybe it’s time to take this to larger media sources.
The only reason it keeps happening is because its swept into the shadows of VCU, and I’m sick of lurking in that darkness.
