'For 20 years—ever since I received tenure—I assumed I’d always have a job if I kept up my teaching and research. But the [COVID19] pandemic had brought long-standing problems to a head.' Read one of our top ScienceWorkingLife essays from 2021:
I logged onto a video call last month, not knowing what to expect. Faculty members in my department had just 1 day's notice of the meeting with our dean, which made me wonder,"Is it another budget cut—or worse?" After a quick apology, the dean pivoted to the news: Given the crunch on university finances amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he'd made a difficult decision to terminate the geology department.
We convened faculty meetings to discuss how to move forward. Our curriculum hadn't changed much in decades. Our students learned how to identify rocks and stare down microscopes, but they weren't much exposed to many of the more pressing problems in geosciences, such as climate change and groundwater pollution. Some of us, including me, wanted to overhaul the curriculum. But others argued against abandoning our focus on traditional skills and concepts.
Then came COVID-19. We stayed open and taught students on campus, but enrollments continued to fall. We expected administrators to make cuts, but we did not think entire departments would be axed—especially not ours. Our seven professors collectively bring in hundreds of thousands of federal research dollars every year and publish dozens of papers. But the overhead from our grants did not make up for the lack of tuition dollars. The quality of our research wasn't enough to save us.
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