Recession Finally Hits Faculty

The good news: George Washington University is laying off professors.

The bad news: in the hard sciences.

“The University is offering buyout packages to 39 full-time professors in the School of Engineering and Applied Science as part of a move to increase the school’s research presence, top-level University officials said in December,” Lauren French writes in the GWU Hatchet online. “All full-time faculty on active status were mailed letters on Oct. 22, and professors offered the package—those who joined the SEAS staff before 1994—have until Jan. 29 to accept the ‘voluntary separation incentive program,’ SEAS Dean David Dolling said in an e-mail.”

“The 39 faculty members offered the package comprise about half of the 83 full-time faculty in the school, according to data from the Office of Institutional Research’s Web site.” Left unmolested in the downsizing are such liberal arts, in every sense of the word, stalwarts whose activities Accuracy in Academia has covered as:

• Marcus Raskin, who the GWU website refers to as “an intellectual pillar of the movements for progressive social change for nearly half a century.” In a speech in 2004, Raskin called the United States “the biggest purveyor of violence” in the last 70 years. That would leave out the governments of many communist countries with which Raskin’s Institute for Policy Studies has had close ties.
• Robert McRuer, an “associate professor of English,” who won online “Kudos!” from his employer when he “won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for his book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. The award is given annually by the Gay and Lesbian Caucus for the Modern Language Association.”
• Frank Sesno, the former CNN bureau chief turned journalism professor who saw no evidence of media bias.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.