University Priorities: Education or Finance?

Dylon Harrison

Managing Editor

Like many colleges and universities across the country, Idaho State University is facing large budget cuts due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of this, some schools have been forced to end the employment of some of their faculty.

ISU began letting impacted employees go earlier this year. Some have been asked to continue teaching for the 2020-2021 academic year before their jobs are terminated. Others were fired immediately.

This was in addition to the university’s decision to require a predetermined amount of mandatory furlough days for faculty and staff making more than $40,000 per year.

From the College of Arts and Letters alone, seven members of faculty were let go in order to meet budget cuts.

Of these seven, six were women.

All seven were childless. Three of the seven were tenure track faculty.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Brunner, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Persuasion is one of the recently fired faculty members.

Brunner received notice that her position was being terminated on May 18 through a phone call with the chair of her department, James DiSanza.

During this phone call, Brunner said she asked the chair if he could tell her why she was being fired, only to be told, “no.”

When reached for contact on the situation, DiSanza said he is unable to comment on personnel issues.

Having received her Ph.D. in communication in 2016, Brunner had been employed at ISU for four years at the time of her firing. She had been on the tenure track and was supposed to receive her tenure this year.

According to Brunner, Idaho State is one of the few universities that chose to fire tenure track faculty in response to their budget cuts.

“Most of the time when budget cuts occur at the university level, instructors go,” Brunner said. “And instructors go, not because they’re not important, but because they usually only have a master’s degree. It’s easier to hire them. When you hire a tenure track faculty member, it’s a year-long process.”

Many instructors were kept on instead of Brunner. She also said that out of three tenure track faculty that had yet to receive tenure and could have potentially been let go, she was the only one. She was also the most senior of the three.

“I’ve worked to be where I am for 10 years,” Brunner said. “By letting me go, they are sending me out into a job market that doesn’t exist.”

Because of the budget cuts that many colleges and universities are facing right now, there are currently very few opportunities to be hired as a professor.

Brunner said the year she was hired at ISU, she had applied for over 30 jobs. There are currently less than 10 available.

“When they fired me, they basically destroyed my career,” Brunner said.

Many students felt that Brunner’s firing was unjust and that ISU had made a mistake.

“Betsy was one of my favorite professors,” said Samantha Winslow, a fourth-year student and ASISU senator for Arts and Letters. “She went out of her way to accommodate every single student. She made me feel welcome at ISU.”

Over the summer, a student committee was created with the goal of getting Idaho State to reinstate Brunner by sending personal emails directly to President Satterlee, detailing the instances in which Brunner had positively impacted their education and helped them achieve success in their career.

“It makes me tear up. It’s so sweet,” Brunner said. “Having that level of student support was pretty integral to me not having a worse reaction.”

As of the writing of this article, Brunner has not been reinstated by the university.

“I think a lot of students don’t know what happened,” Brunner said. “When I’ve talked about it in class, they’ve had some pretty strong reactions. The university should be aware that students are very upset that they have chosen to let go of faculty.”

“It is unfortunate that rumors are being perpetuated about possible reasons for reductions. The unfortunate reality is that the positions we had to eliminate were due to the teaching needs and student demand for classes. Difficult decisions were made to allocate the scarce resources available.  No one wanted this outcome, but it is the one necessitated by the credit delivery needs of departments across the University. All decisions were made by University leadership with input from the impacted departments,” said ISU President Kevin Satterlee.

There are fears among the student population that the university may be prioritizing finances over people, resulting in a negative impact on the quality of education being received.

“I’ve heard [the students] say over and over and over again that it seems like they value money more than students,” Brunner said.

The university will be making further budget cuts over the next few years in order to keep in line with the State Board of Education’s requirements to deal with income lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.