The private university announced the agreement Friday, just two weeks after new President Gregory Dell'Omo told students he planned to cut 13 majors.
LAWRENCE -- Rider University's faculty union has agreed to a two-year wage freeze and other concessions that will spare the college from slashing more than a dozen majors and laying off professors.
The private university announced the agreement Friday, just two weeks after new President Gregory Dell'Omo told the school's 3,712 undergraduate students he planned to cut 13 majors, which would have forced 123 freshman and sophomore students to transfer or change majors.
The wage freeze alone will cover the more than $2 million Rider would have saved through the budget cuts, Dell'Omo said. The university will also extend its early retirement incentives to more full-time faculty members and have more flexibility in replacing them with adjunct professors, he said.
In exchange, the union saves the jobs of 14 full-time faculty members and an undetermined number of adjunct positions that would have been eliminated.
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"We really wanted to eliminate these cuts or pull back these cuts to the programs, and that's why we, as the union, yesterday came to the decision that we did," said Bryan Spiegelberg, Rider's union president.
However, the compromise does not mean that the union agrees the planned budget cuts were necessary, he said. The faculty still disagrees with Dell'Omo over the severity of Rider's financial challenges, Spiegelberg said.
Dell'Omo said he appreciated the union engaging in a collaborative, problem-solving approach.
The majors that are saved from elimination are art and art history, advertising, American studies, business education, French, geosciences, German, marine science, philosophy, piano and web design. The bachelor of arts program in economics and the graduate program in organizational leadership are also spared from being cut.
Three majors -- business economics, entrepreneurial studies and sociology -- would have been reduced to minors, and the school's minor in Italian would have been be eliminated.
Rider, which projects a $7.6 million deficit in this year's budget, had been in talks with its faculty union for months about its financial challenges, Dell'Omo said. With talks about concessions at a standstill, the school announced the cuts on Oct. 29, two days before the contractual Oct. 31 deadline to notify the union of layoffs, he said.
That kicked off a 21-day window for the union to come back with its own proposal for cutting costs, according to the university. The two sides agreed to the deal Thursday and the board of trustees approved it on Friday.
"This is a great step forward for Rider," Dell'Omo said.
In addition to laying off the 14 full-time professors, Rider would have cut two clerical jobs and five vacant faculty position. Part-time faculty who teach in eliminated academic programs would not have been re-hired for those positions next school year.
Dell'Omo said his original decision to cut majors and layoff professors was not a ploy to get concessions from the union.
"It would be way too risky to employ a strategy just out of gamesmanship," he said. "This was a serious issue that we had to address."
Rider's budget challenges come at a time when many small and mid-size private colleges across America are struggling to stay out of the red.
While elite colleges are attracting record numbers of applications and large donations, many smaller schools are losing students. The number of college-age students is declining and the stagnant economy has prompted many families to shy away from schools with high tuition.
The deal with the union gives Rider time to consider whether it wants to combine or eliminate any academic offerings in the future, Dell'Omo said. It also hopes to design new programs for high-demand majors, he said.
"This gives us more time now and more awareness on everybody's part that the world is changing," Dell'Omo said. "We owe it to ourselves to really look for that continued improvement."
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