BY CAROLYN BETENSKY

In the middle of the summer and in the middle of a pandemic, with an overwhelming majority of faculty and other community stakeholders voicing their objections to the plan and with few students weighing in on it, the Board of Governors of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) voted on July 14 to consolidate six separate colleges and universities into two.  As of August 2022, just one year from now, Clarion University, California University of Pennsylvania, and Edinboro University will begin merging into a single academic entity, and Bloomsburg University, Lock Haven University, and Mansfield University will be merged into another. The plan was floated and voted on under opaque conditions and in a remarkably hasty fashion.  Governor Tom Wolf’s support for Chancellor Dan Greenstein’s proposal appeared to seal the unpopular deal.

It is important to understand that, while the three campuses within each of these consolidated institutions will remain open, these different campuses will not function like, say, the different campuses of the University of California. There will be one Department of Physics, for instance, spread across three campuses. The absurdity of this plan might be lost on you if, like me, you reside outside of Pennsylvania.  You might not know that the distance between California University and Clarion University is 117 miles and takes over two hours to travel. Edinboro University is even further away from California University, at 148 miles.  Mansfield University is separated from Bloomsburg by 94 miles.

Some are touting the consolidation as a money-saving measure to combat declining enrollment, but with many details remaining to be worked out and the complex costs of implementation (including those of program reaccreditation and potential changes to NCAA status) still unknown, such claims appear dubious.  When confronted on this question, the chancellor has changed his rationale, suggesting that the changes are intended to “expand student opportunities.” Of course, given the distances between campuses, these “student opportunities” will potentially be of the online variety. The trend of declining enrollment is unlikely to be reversed if students reject the consolidated versions of the schools by voting with their feet.

Details as to exactly how these six universities will become two in such a short period—the curriculum integration will start going into effect one year from now—have not been specified. Incredibly, as members of the Board of Governors were told not to concern themselves with the “how” of implementation, it appears that this ungodly problem will be left to faculty and administrators to resolve.

I spoke on July 22 with Dr. Jamie Martin, the president of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties (APSCUF), who addressed the Board of Governors before the vote. I asked her about how these plans for consolidation surfaced so quickly and about what they portend for faculty—and for the rest of us. She told me that the breakneck speed with which the consolidation plan was proposed and voted on was deeply concerning.

For faculty at the universities slated for consolidation, the implications of the plan have not yet been made clear.  In October 2020, at the height of the pandemic, faculty at five State System institutions (two of which were not slated for consolidation) received 113 letters of retrenchment. PASSHE maintains that retrenchment and consolidation are unrelated.  In 2019, Chancellor Greenstein had already ordered campuses to make themselves “sustainable” by 2024—before moving the deadline for “sustainability” up to 2023.

APSCUF had just negotiated a new contract for its members in 2019. Among the many questions the union has about the impact of consolidation on their contract is how tenure and promotion procedures can be followed when campuses are spread so far apart from each other. How, for example, can classroom observations be performed when a chair or senior colleague must travel, in some cases upwards of two hours, to do so?

For students, the consolidation plan will potentially not only make in-person education a rarity, but it will also impede access to faculty, according to Martin. Students who need help navigating university services of any kind will have far fewer in-person opportunities to ask for their assistance. More importantly, consolidation means that the many students faculty typically notice in their in-person classes who are suffering from mental health and other problems may go unnoticed. When faculty are interacting with students only from a distance, it is much less likely that they will know whom to refer for counseling services and other kinds of help.

Martin pointed out that consolidations undertaken elsewhere have not been successful.  At the University System of Georgia, for instance, mergers ended up being far more costly than their proponents expected.  Reaccreditation and rebranding proved, unsurprisingly, to be very expensive, and the reconfiguration of universities and colleges caused them to lose the support of alumni groups. As Lee Gardner cautions in the Chronicle of Higher Education of the Georgia consolidations, “Perhaps the most surprising — and possibly unwelcome — lesson is that mergers may not actually save much money.”  PASSHE would have been well advised to learn from the history of the Georgia consolidations, Martin told me.

All of us should pay attention to what is happening in Pennsylvania. The consolidation plan offers an example of what Anna Kornbluh has called academe’s coronavirus shock doctrine, the threat of an administrative and political opportunism that lets no crisis go to waste.

Contributing editor Carolyn Betensky is professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, an AAUP Council member, and a cofounder and executive committee member of Tenure for the Common Good.