To the Editor:

Seven of my colleagues, all tenured faculty, some with more than 30 years of service to SUNY Potsdam, were recently summoned to HR and unceremoniously informed that they will be terminated in a year. At least now, after years of vague threats, they know they are getting fired.

Our union, UUP, has informed us that they will not fight the decision. Apparently, even they agree that being tenured in the SUNY System signifies nothing. If SUNY can fire faculty at will regardless of tenure status, then, on any reasonable understanding of tenure, there is no such thing.

Dr. Suzanne Smith, President of SUNY Potsdam, tried to control the message by sending a campus wide email. It speaks of “difficult decisions” and of “continuing to adjust our workforce to serve our existing enrollment.” 

Such appeals are empty. The more difficult the decisions the more care one should take to justify them, both to oneself and to the world. Difficult decisions cry out for consultation and collaboration, and when that is all done, for some sort of public justification, particularly at a public institution. One might think that Dr. Smith is professionally, and morally, obligated to attempt to show that the destruction of people’s careers will address rather than exacerbate the college’s financial difficulties. But astonishingly, to date, SUNY Potsdam has given no justification for discontinuing nine programs, which, in turn ‘justified’ destruction of an unknown number of careers. Those terminated, those to be terminated, those to be retained, indeed, the entire community need to hear more than platitudes. Merely crying out ‘fiscal crisis’ is simply unacceptable.

It is quite evident that this is just the beginning. As the discontinued programs get ‘taught out’ their surviving faculty make themselves obsolete by fulfilling their professional duties. Moreover, it is clear that these program discontinuances and resultant firings, devastating as they are, get SUNY Potsdam nowhere near to covering its deficit, though they certainly do undermine the academic integrity of what was once a respectable public institution of higher education. The college is already a shell of what it was. What it will become bodes ill for the educational, cultural, and economic health of the North Country. 

David C.K. Curry
Professor of Philosophy
SUNY Potsdam