Newly Tenured Professors

Congratulations to the following three faculty members who were all awarded tenure this week by the Board of Trustees:

Norman Danner
associate professor of computer science
Danner’s teaching interests focus on open-source software development. His research interests are primarily focused on the development of practical programming languages with guaranteed resource usage and low-latency networks for anonymous web-browsing.

Fernando Degiovanni
associate professor of romance languages and literatures
[Degiovanni] specializes in issues of nationalism, cultural politics and canon formation in Argentina, focusing on the first popular series of national “classic” authors in early 20th century. His research explores the ways in which opposing intellectual projects attempted to build and impose contrasting versions of the Argentine cultural tradition in times of massive immigration and democratic institutionalization.

Greg Voth
associate professor of physics
Voth’s research involves experimental studies of the dynamics of soft-condensed matter and fluid systems. Current experiments include those that use high-speed video imaging to measure particle trajectories in granular and turbulent flows.

Bigger classes, higher tuition, major budget cuts

The Board of Trustees recently met for their first board meeting of the year, and the news that emerged was not good.

Due to the economic downturn, the University's endowment has lost over $120 million... and if you remember, Wesleyan's endowment isn't all that big, compared to our "peer institutions."

A student in the know writes:

Wesleyan's endowment is down 20% over the last 4 months, and there will be major repercussions for the University's budget over the next few years—a $15.5 million deficit each year.

The trustees are considering a proposal from the administration that would deal with the problem by increasing class size by 30 for the next four years. There would also be major cuts across all the departments, a one-year salary freeze for staff and faculty, and a slightly larger than normal increase to the cost of tuition. No faculty positions or departments would be eliminated under this plan.

Students should be particularly aware of the ramifications of the first and last strategies being proposed. By increasing class size over the course of the next four years, if we reach our target admission levels, we'll see around 120 more students on campus—making residential space even tighter (meaning triples for many more freshmen, and a lack of class-appropriate housing in general), leading to longer lines at dining venues, and possibly causing class sizes to swell. By tacking on an additional increase to tuition, the University would raise your bill next year by 5.9%, a bit more than the standard 5% annual increase.

The future is always hard to predict, but current projections, assuming a 5% year-over-year return on the endowment, put us back at our pre-downturn total in 2013. So, in a nutshell, current predictions show that it'll take us five years to get back to where we were four months ago.

The Board of Trustees meets again in February—unless they decide to call a meeting sooner. It seems fairly certain that a quick reversal of fortunes isn't on the horizon, and of course, there's no guarantee that further erosion of the endowment won't occur. By February, we'll see if even more restrictive measures are needed to secure the financial stability of the University.

No Divestment

Word is that the Board of Trustees voted not to divest from weapons contractors (for which SEWI has been advocating).

They are, however, setting up some kind of socially responsible investing committee.

Anyone with more information about the decision is encouraged to spill.