Approximately 156 out of 834 eligible University employees have chosen to participate in the University’s Employee Separation Program.
Dave Kielmeyer, senior director of communications, said the deadline for faculty, administrative staff and classified staff to enroll in the program was Monday and participants have until Feb. 8 to back out if they change their minds. The program, which is expected to net the University around $5 million over three years, offers employees with at least 15 years of service a chance to voluntarily leave the University and be paid out their base salary over a set number of years.
“As we get closer to the eighth and then the ninth, we’ll be able to dig into the details and find out exactly what our work has to be from here on to strategize how we move forward with staffing for the future, both with faculty lines that we’re going to keep open, and fill them eventually the proper way, and also the staff positions,” said Ken Borland, senior vice president for Academic Affairs and provost. “Unfortunately, we can’t get into a whole lot of detail until everything is at and beyond that final date.”
It would not be abnormal if three to five faculty members change their minds about participating in the program, said Rebecca Ferguson, chief human resources officer.
Forty faculty, 33 administrative and 83 classified staff are enrolled. Ferguson said that as of right now, 18 more employees opted for the program than originally estimated.
She said the University’s program is only the third of its type in Ohio and is the first to exceed expectations.
“That says volumes about the fact that we really did work at making sure people heard about it,” Ferguson said.
The University now has to look at where the majority of the people who have chosen the program come from.
“We want to make sure we don’t adversely affect service to students,” Ferguson said. “Hypothetically speaking, if we had an entire department who had chosen to take this program, that’s going to adversely affect our ability to teach our students and availability to deliver student services.”
With faculty members choosing to leave, the University has to figure out which positions to fill and which to eliminate, Kielmeyer said.
Because there will be vacant positions, Borland said the University is expected to rely on temporary faculty.
“It’s not going to be possible to replace every tenure tract-line with a tenure tract faculty member,” he said. “We will probably be dependent on temporary faculty as well as some of the participants in this program who are entitled to come back in a qualified, limited sense.”
Ferguson said the employees who have chosen to participate in the program could leave the University any time between last December and June 30, 2010.
“It’s really quite amazing for us to have made this opportunity available to our employees,” Borland said. “It’s simply an opportunity to say to long-term employees, ‘Here’s a chance for you to leave; it’s a way for you to leave here with something nice in your pocket, and for the University to save some money.”
