Number of faculty layoffs at Delta State still in flux

Delta State University is still working out the number of faculty it needs to lay off after the college board last month approved the president’s plan to achieve financial sustainability.

The regional college in the Mississippi Delta had initially planned to let its more than 200 faculty know on July 1. But the president, Daniel Ennis, wrote in an email a few weeks ago that he can’t finalize the number of layoffs until he knows more about the shape of the four new interdisciplinary degrees that will replace the 21 programs the university is shuttering.

This means faculty will learn whether they need to start looking for new jobs for the 2025-26 academic year on a case-by-case basis around the start of the fall semester — a delay that Ennis wrote is necessary but regretful.

Other considerations for layoffs, Ennis wrote, include if faculty will be needed for general education courses or to teach students who are currently enrolled in degrees the university plans to stop offering, like English, history and mathematics.

“We are working throughout the summer to finalize next steps,” Ennis told Mississippi Today through a university spokesperson.

The cuts come as Delta State has been struggling amid the region’s population decline to keep its tuition-dependent budget in the black — a situation likely to be exacerbated by increased competition among the eight public universities for the declining number of high school graduates going to college.

Last month, the Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees approved Delta State’s proposal to close 21 programs the university selected through an academic review process that weighted metrics like total enrollment and awarded degrees more heavily than departmental profits or enrollment growth and decline.

Initially, some faculty were relieved to see in the IHL board book that just 16 faculty would be “affected” in four programs — music, art, languages and literature, and chemistry.

But Ennis wouldn’t say why faculty would be laid off from those four departments and not others, or if 16 is the total number of faculty that will be laid off considering some have already departed from the institution.

In total, about $750,000 needs to be cut from the payroll, Ennis previously told Mississippi Today. Seventeen staff have already been laid off, and 49 vacant positions were left unfilled.

Faculty have been working over the summer to write plans for the four new degree programs that will replace the deleted 21: Visual and performing arts, humanities and social science, digital media and secondary education.

Ennis said these four programs will be introduced to faculty in the fall through a curriculum review process, with the goal of implementing the programs by January 2025.

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