Almost a year ago, the Hatchet’s last editorial board wrote that University officials needed to be more transparent about how they made the decision to lay off 43 staff members across the University and which areas were affected by the layoffs. We criticized officials for only making a public announcement of the layoffs to faculty, keeping students and families out of the loop. But now, a year later, we have seen layoffs impact three different GW schools in the last three months, and we have yet again seen no University-wide communication or transparency from officials about how these layoffs are impacting GW’s academic mission or how the layoffs are helping our financial situation. While our editorial board is aware that all of higher education is going through tough financial times and making layoffs, GW cannot stay silent or refuse to talk about these issues. At the start of the semester, we wrote that GW officials needed to learn from their past mistakes regarding transparency and communication about official decision-making, but these layoffs are evidence that officials have not taken that feedback to heart and instead decided to leave most of the community in the dark.
Since July, the deans of the School of Medicine & Health Sciences, the Milken Institute School of Public Health and GW Law have announced layoffs to their faculty and staff. The only reason the wider GW community knows about these layoffs is because individual faculty members have shared these communications with The Hatchet, which prompted us to ask the University for confirmation. Unlike last year, where officials sent out an email to all of GW’s faculty and staff to announce they had laid off 43 employees University-wide, these communications have been entirely siloed to individual school faculty. While we understand that these are private and hurtful personnel decisions and the community does not need to be privy to the minute details, layoffs across multiple academic schools in such a short period of time warrants communication from top-level officials, as these layoffs not only impact GW’s fiscal health, but the broader University’s academic mission.
We want to make clear that it is not the layoffs themselves that we are criticizing. We understand that the University is facing an unprecedented convergence of financial challenges that have compounded our structural budget deficit and forced us to cut costs. GW’s financial issues are something that we have all become aware of in the past year. GW’s structural deficit, Medical Faculty Associates debt and the low enrollment of international students and graduate students — which tend to contribute a lot of money — only exacerbate their financial issues. We also recognize that these issues are not unique to GW. Harvard University laid off approximately 100 employees last month and Johns Hopkins University laid off about 110 employees in June. GW, like other universities, is making difficult decisions like layoffs of people from three different schools now, in addition to the 43 layoffs from last year. What we are criticizing is how University officials have gone about communicating these decisions to the GW community…