THE SHAKEOUT OF HIGHER EDUCATION CONTINUES.

Cleveland's John Carroll University, one of the few Jesuit institutions not better known for a basketball team, might be giving up on being competitive in the academic job market hereafter.

Whereas financial exigency means a budget crisis that threatens an institution’s survival, John Carroll now says it can fire individual tenured faculty members without cause in cases of “budgetary hardship.” This is defined as a projected -- not final -- annual budget deficit of 6 percent, plus two more years of foreseen challenges.

At the same time, John Carroll is denying faculty members the right to appeal these terminations.  Faculty members still have certain protections under the more dire concept of financial exigency.

Even more ironically, at least to faculty members, is that John Carroll’s Board of Directors says it’s taking these steps to protect and strengthen tenure. It’s said so in numerous campus communications and in a public statement about the recent changes, which are now codified in the Faculty Handbook.

Is anybody surprised that the language of sugar-coating a reduction in services as an improvement in services has made its way into higher education, particularly where the governing board has the corporate sounding "Directors" rather than the "Regents" or "Trustees" or "Visitors" of traditional practice?

On the other hand, might a Pajamas Media "get woke, go broke" moment be at hand?

Dianna Taylor, professor of philosophy and vice president of the campus AAUP chapter, said, “One of the most objectionable things about this is that violates a lot of the principles of Catholic pedagogy around issues of social justice and academic freedom and our ability to teach students as whole persons, as we are supposed to do.”

John Carroll’s holistic approach to education is why so many professors wanted to teach there in the first place, she said, as it means appealing to students beyond their intellect and sense of reason. It means asking them to think about their role in the world and “interrogate” -- not necessarily change -- long-held beliefs and values.

Taylor, for instance, teaches courses that involve discussions of love, sex and gender. Students are generally receptive; sometimes former students contact her years later to say that the ideas she’d presented finally make sense.

But it will be impossible to teach this way moving forward, she said, absent academic freedom.

“This is horrible for the faculty and it’s horrible for the students,” Taylor said. “It’s not fair to them. This flies in the face of the values this institution says it holds.”

The board said in its statement that six months ago, it proposed three amendments to the university’s Faculty Handbook “as one of several strategies aimed at helping JCU operate and compete more effectively in the fast changing and increasingly competitive world of higher education.”

There's that stupid "interrogate" again, which might be woke word-noise where "cultivating lifelong learning" or "no final say" might suffice; and it's clashing with that corporate-speak in the form of "fast changing and increasingly competitive."