To the Editor:
This Thanksgiving dozens of University of Southern California families sat around the table without a job to be thankful for. That’s because USC’s core college of arts and sciences, Dornsife, has eliminated 30 percent of its academic staff positions. In fact, in an act of startling cruelty, all of the academic support staff at Dornsife were fired six weeks ago, and invited to reapply for a smaller number of centralized positions. We, the faculty of USC Dornsife, condemn this action, which will have a profound impact on the teaching, research, and reputation of our university.
Many of our staff have spent their entire working careers — decades of their life — as part of the Trojan family. Many are also USC alums or the family members of Trojans. Our staff advise students on their courses and career paths, help them find the care they need when they have medical or health crises, and provide an open door when students need someone to talk to. Embedded in more than 40 departments and programs, they’ve turned cold offices into a home away from home for our students. They carried our entire community through the grief and struggle of the COVID crisis and a string of major scandals. They are keepers of our institutional memory, understanding how things work, and how to get things done, better than anyone.
Dornsife claims that it is slashing staff positions because it’s been asked to help pay for a massive, university-wide budget deficit — running to hundreds of millions per year — that it did not create. USC’s financial crisis is due to multiple reasons, including the COVID epidemic, which hit our multibillion-dollar hospital system, including Children’s Hospital, Keck, and Los Angeles General, especially hard; and a series of major scandals within the university’s student services division, its medical school, and its athletics program, generating lawsuits costing the university billions in damages.
Dornsife is the heart and soul of USC. As the core school of arts and sciences, Dornsife is the home both of the central undergraduate education mission and of essential research. It is made up of a diverse array of departments and institutes that range across the sciences and humanities. Some departments are larger than other schools within USC. It operates the majority of Ph.D. programs at the university, training the next generation of researchers and faculty to address future challenges in the environment, society, and our understanding of the human condition. It is also the home of our most advanced research, supporting cutting-edge laboratories that make USC a top-tier research university. It is a home to Nobel laureates and Pulitzer prize recipients. This work is expensive, requiring skilled staff, advanced teaching facilities, and significant resources. It is also invaluable. Unlike USC’s professional schools, Dornsife cannot prioritize lucrative Master’s programs to balance the books.
Dornsife’s leadership has announced we are moving to a new, centralized “hubs” model, pulling staff out of our departments and tasking them to support multiple departments spread across campus. We recognize that reorganization of university services is inevitable and necessary over time, and that centralizing functions has succeeded in some other universities. But centralization only works when driven by a desire to improve services and student outcomes. At universities where it has been pursued as a cost-cutting measure, notably UC-Berkeley, UT-Austin, and the University of Michigan, there has been abject failure, with degraded services and depressed student outcomes.
We were told that staffing cuts were necessary to preserve all of our valued research programs and departments. But at the same time this cut was announced, most of the staff of the East Asian Studies Center, which supports dedicated major, minor, and masters programs, was laid off, with its academic programs rolled into another department. Sitting at one edge of the Pacific rim, rooted in a community with deep and essential ties to Asia and a matching student body, USC should be deeply invested in studying the culture and history of this region, rather than treating it as a disposable afterthought.
The remaining staff are now being asked to do more with less. The reorganization strips away the specialized, tailored advising that our students rely on. It burdens research scientists with reams of paperwork previously handled by experts. It will degrade the quality of our graduate programs, many of which are ranked at the top of their fields. Eventually, the reputation of the university will suffer. Top-tier faculty and students do not join institutions that are in a state of chaotic retreat.
This Thanksgiving, our staff sat around the dinner table with family and friends in the knowledge that our school, to which they devoted so much of their lives, does not truly appreciate the work they have done and the sacrifices they have made. At this moment, we are again failing to live up to several of USC’s stated core values: community, well-being, and accountability. Our community is fracturing, with morale at an all-time low. Our mental and financial well-being is in crisis. And the entire process, from the demand that Dornsife pay its “fair” share, to a rollout conducted without consulting our faculty or staff, marks a failure of accountability.
USC’s current financial crisis is not of Dornsife’s making — but our staff, and ultimately our students, are being handed the bill. It is time for the university to operate with integrity. If the administration won’t lead, the faculty must show the way.
This letter is signed by over 100 faculty members. The full list of signatories is here.
