Ohio State to lay off 18 adjunct lecturers in the English department

UPDATE: The Ohio State University has decided to honor the contracts the lecturers signed at the beginning of the summer and will not carry out any unexpected or predicted layoffs this semester.

Today, news was released that Provost Bruce McPheron is threatening to cut 18 adjunct faculty members in the Department of English because of budget cuts within Ohio State.

According to Travis Neel, an English PhD candidate at the university, after OSU made the switch from quarters to semesters a couple of years ago, graduate students only took on two classes per semester, leaving classes like English 1110, a general education requirement for all students, without instructors. The chair of the English department then took action, hiring the professors necessary to cover these courses and provided the Dean and Provost with a cash request for their salaries, yet three days after the first day of the semester, only a fraction of the money had come in with no more to follow.

Neel also states that this is part of a larger problem: “departments across the humanities have been asked to trim more than 10% from their budgets over the past five or six years and the English Department has been losing full-time faculty over that period.” He believes that “this plays into a broader ‘crisis in the humanities’ or costs of undervaluing the liberal arts in favor of ‘STEM’ or ‘STEAM.'”

There is no statement of these circumstances from the university at this time, but the Ohio State English Department Twitter released this tweet earlier this morning: “OSUEnglish supports our associated faculty. #contingentacademiclabor.” Students have also created a letter to hand to Provost McPheron in protest.