The state tries to get rid of as many tenured professors as possible, so it changed the retirement rules. If you are retirement age (around 55+, not a typo), you either retire before July 1 this year, or you lose a large chunk of your retirement.
I might lose my entire French program by the end of this semester. I don’t blame the professors but this came entirely out of left field.
(For those who don’t understand how this works, once somebody retires, I can’t just hire somebody else. I can’t hire anybody at all. These positions are gone forever).
Clarissa's Blog 
It sounds like they (management? the industrial-bureaucratic complex? the Establishment?) have decided that foreign language learning is totally expendable.
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It’s even worse in physics. Those guys are getting eviscerated.
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“worse in physics”
How long before your “university” is nothing but diversity training and indoctrination (cause that’s where it’s going).
Girl needs to get her CV out there….
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Is this because of COVID decimating the budget? Is the administration layoff people as well?
I’m wondering if this is happening all across the board.
Regardless, this is very bad for public education.
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“COVID decimating the budget?”
I think it’s also ‘free’ college since the state of Illinois gave universities no alternate funding source to make up for the loss in tuition, so more students generating less income…. time to cut programs….
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It’s absolutely “free college,” aka austerity. COVID hasn’t been a factor. It will be an excuse eventually but this all started 10 years ago. I was literally the last hire at my department within the logic of hiring somebody when a professor retires. We haven’t been able to do that since then. This was in 2009 but we haven’t had any retirements until 2015.
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No, COVID hasn’t impacted our budget. This is a trend from the whole last decade. It used to be that if somebody retired, we could hire a person to fill the position. That is no longer the case. Now if somebody retires, that tenure line is automatically dead. By the end of this year, we will have lost 40% of our tenure lines in 5 years.
Before anybody says anything, we are NOT allowed to hire lecturers or adjuncts or graduate students or anybody at all to teach these courses instead of the retired tenured professors. That’s all in the past, too. Adjunctification of academia is dead. Bad as it was, we are beyond all that. I fired all of my lecturers in Spanish this semester because I was forced to do it.
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I wrote recently to a friend (she’s French like me, and presently teaching in Africa) that public education became compulsory in the 19th century, when the nascent industrial sector literate workers, technicians and engineers. Now that factories have gone to Asia, public education is no more a priority.
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Edit: when the nascent industrial sector NEEDED literate workers…
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Exactly. Public education is the product of the nation-state. In the 19th century, capital needed the nation-state, so it flourished. Now it no longer does, so the nation-state is withering away. And its attributes – education, policing, democracy, middle class, etc – are dying, too.
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The government is notorious for this. My dad was a chemical engineer in one of the National Labs for his entire career. They changed the retirement rules on him a good decade before he had planned to retire, basically holding his pension hostage. He could retire within the calendar year at full pension, but lose 30% if he waited 1 year, 40% if he waited 2 years, and 50% if he waited 3.
I strongly believe that the forced retirement is largely responsible for his mental/cognitive decline.
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