The Cut:
Inside the July Layoffs at SAIC

Budget cuts may have saved the school from financial crisis,
but deepened distrust of the administration
By Leo Smith

Seventeen years ago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) was in dire financial straits. A combination of economic slump, fraud, and real estate depreciation had decreased the value of the school’s endowment; in an effort to eliminate the deficit, all SAIC departmental budgets were cut 6.5 percent, and 30 staff were laid off. 
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Today, the school's financial picture is vastly different: SAIC has drastically reduced its debt, and revenue has been growing for the last 10 years — but this year’s economic recession and enrollment drop have sent the future into doubt. 
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Soon after the COVID-19 lockdown began in March, closing campus and sending many students home, SAIC’s senior administration began to prepare for a sharp decline in enrollment for fall 2020. They estimated that there would be a decline of 15 percent for the upcoming fall. In preparation, a 20 percent budget cut was ordered, schoolwide. 
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In July, at the start of the new fiscal year, 65 full-time positions, 12 part-time positions, and 26 contract positions were eliminated at SAIC, plus 29 other positions that were vacant. Most of the layoffs were announced on July 1, followed by an additional handful later in the month. 
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This represented 11 percent of school staff, and involved deep cuts in Instructional Facilities Resource Management (IRFM), Undergraduate Admissions, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the Sustainability Office, among many others. Some employees who were laid off had worked at SAIC for decades. 
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Said one longtime staff member in an email to F, “A lot of institutional memory has been lost.” 
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The cuts were made suddenly — decided by the highest-paid SAIC employees, with little to no recourse for departments  — and as a result, the administration has lost the trust of many faculty and staff.

Sudden and severe cuts

On June 18, just a week before staff would be laid off, Vice President of Campus Operations Tom Buechele warned IRFM staff in a departmental Zoom meeting that there would probably be “some” layoffs. As former Dock Operations Coordinator Nate Lowe (BFA 2005), told F via email, “Understandably, this raised a lot of questions at the time (who, when, how, etc.), none of which were answered.”
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“I suspected I was being laid off the night of June 30 when I got a text from my boss's boss telling me to attend a Google Hangouts meeting the next day (July 1),” he wrote. “You know the rest.”

Staff members were invited to a video call and told they were being let go. Their email addresses and SAIC Google account access were shut down immediately.  

IRFM saw numerous positions cut, in both facilities management and instructional resources. Facilities management lost positions including director of design and construction and operations manager in charge of special events. 

In instructional resources, numerous shop positions were cut. Though they report to IRFM, staff in these positions work closely with their departments, and contribute to teaching students. Positions cut included metal shop, materials lab, photography equipment circulation, and other positions inside academic departments.
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Despite the impact on curriculum, department chairs say that senior administration made these cuts without consulting them. Cuts were determined, as Provost Martin Berger told F, by the school’s Budget Planning Committee. Then, deans and vice presidents recommended positions that could be cut "with the least disruption to their operations,” he wrote in an email in September. The chairs, he said, “were involved in providing input,” but he did not specify how.
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But most chairs only found out about the layoffs a few days earlier, when they were invited to individual meetings with Buechele and Berger.

“We were dismayed to learn from our administrative and IRFM staff that the school has communicated with them about upcoming layoffs with no involvement in, or even knowledge of, the process by the chairs of their departments or any transparency as to how these decisions were made,” the department chairs wrote to senior administration on June 28, in a co-signed email obtained by F.

In their letter, chairs from 24 (out of 25) academic departments requested that the layoff plans be halted until they were fully briefed on the budget concerns, and given involvement in the decisions.
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In a follow-up email the next day, department chairs wrote, “We are not wholly satisfied that alternative avenues for savings were explored before the movements to enact layoffs were started. We need a greater detail on the savings that layoffs would garner versus other strategies. What other strategies have been explored, and by whom?”  

On June 29, after meeting with several department chairs, senior administration decided to preserve one IRFM position whose elimination would have affected the curricula of several classes. The rest of the layoffs went ahead as planned, two days later.

Losses of departments
and trust

Some departments were cut more severely than others. The Gene Siskel Film Center, a staple of the Chicago film scene since 1972, lost the majority of its employees. Positions including projectionists, house manager, and box office staff were eliminated. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has shifted to streaming. These cuts cast the theater’s future further into doubt.
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IRFM also eliminated its Sustainability Coordinator, an office that was created in 2018, with the hiring of David Vasquez. Vasquez was leading the ongoing green initiatives, including managing SAIC’s recently announced carbon offset purchases, as well as working with Professor Kathryn Schaffer’s Carbon Audit course, where students examined the school’s carbon footprint and sought ways to reduce it. Without Vasquez, those efforts have halted.

“I do believe that sustainability needs to be at the center of any vision of the future for the school,” wrote Schaffer in July, in an email to SAIC leadership regarding Vasquez's termination, “but (as with many other things of late) my trust is lacking. The school has taken actions recently that have undermined my work, my teaching, and my attempts at leadership on this issue.”  

“With David Vasquez joining the school, I was beginning to see a positive path forward. . . That sense of hope has been very much undone by the removal of the most critical partner in the effort. [Students’] work, and much of our collective work collaborating with David, has disappeared into the void.”

In response to F’s email inquiry, Berger said that the school remains “committed” to sustainability, and that “waste diversion, energy conservation, and our participation in local and national sustainability networks continue uninterrupted,” but he did not say whether the school has plans to replace the Sustainability Coordinator’s office with a similar body. 

The Career and Professional Experiences office (CAPX) lost one of its longest-serving members, Assistant Director Nancy Gildart. Gildart (BFA Fiber 1998, MFA Fiber & Material Studies 2000) began working at CAPX after completing her MFA, and worked there ever since. Among the many students to whom she gave career advice was Caroline Feyling (BFA Fiber & Materials Studies 2020). Feyling told F that two weeks after being laid off, Gildart forwarded her a job posting to help in her post-grad career search.

“She was genuinely interested and invested in my goals,” said Feyling. “Any help she could offer, she did.”

Undergraduate Admissions also saw severe cuts, losing over one third of its staff. (Graduate Admissions lost no staff.) Some of the faculty who spoke with F questioned this decision, in light of the expected enrollment decline.

This decision was also questioned for another reason. Of the staff laid off from admissions, several were involved in the SAIC Solidarity campaign, which had published its first letters less than a week before. The campaign, which emerged in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, demands racial justice from the SAIC leadership. The project was spearheaded by student workers in Admissions, and publicly supported by their staff counterparts — several of whom, including Kaycee Filson, Maribel Ang, and others, were laid off only a few days later. 

Because of the timing of the SAIC Solidarity letter and the layoffs, rumors circulated on social media that staff were being laid off because they signed it, or in some cases, because they helped organize it.

To answer questions about the layoffs, and other rumors, President Tenny held a schoolwide webinar on July 7. In the virtual address, she denied that there was any connection between the letter and the layoffs.
Whether or not the layoff decisions were related to SAIC Solidarity, the student organizers of the group told F that those losses have hindered their campaign for racial justice.
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This September, four more admissions officers left the department, two resigning and two taking a leave of absence. Of the 13 admissions staff who signed the SAIC Solidarity letter in June, six remain.

Income inequity in the spotlight

Concurrently, in late June, the AIC was undertaking similar layoffs, and facing a similar backlash. The museum laid off eight percent of its staff. Executives also took pay cuts of 40–50 percent during the 20-week closure, reports ArtNews. 
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A letter, which was signed by nearly 30 percent of the AIC staff, objected to the layoff decisions being made by a “very small group of the most highly paid staff in the museum with privileged identities.” This fall, school faculty who spoke with F about SAIC’s layoffs made similar criticisms.

SAIC President Tenny, in the last reported tax year, earned $711,000. In the same email that announced the layoffs, Tenny announced that she would be taking a 20 percent pay cut, and that other senior administrators making over $150,000 per year would be taking 10-17 percent cuts. (More detail on upper administration salaries can be found in our detailed breakdown, here.) It has not been made public exactly how much money that represents, and there has consequently been much social media speculation.

Tenny addressed questions about this, and the SAIC Solidarity connections, in the tense July 7 webinar. In it, she also stated that no further layoffs were planned. Yet at the same moment, a second, smaller round of layoffs was brewing — which, again, department chairs would try to divert, again, in vain.

The fight to prevent round two

Each academic department is aided by 2-3 administrative staff members who work closely with department chairs to help manage class schedules, enrollment, and budget. Department staff do not report to their department chairs, however — since a change in operational hierarchy several years ago, these staff report to Academic Operations, a department which reports to the Dean of Administration, Budget, and Policy, Gretchen Talbot. During a staff meeting on June 25, Talbot informed staff that decisions about layoffs had been made, and would be shared in early July. 

So, it was administrative staff who broke the news to their department heads that some of them would be laid off. Alarmed by the potential impacts this loss of staff would have on an already chaotic semester, department chairs requested a chance for input into these staff cuts. Senior administration gave them a July 7 deadline to submit an alternative proposal for a 15 percent staff cut. 
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After deliberation, department chairs decided to refuse any cuts. 

“The proposal to restructure academic departments with the goal of eliminating senior administrative staff is neither feasible nor adaptable,” they wrote in a July 7 letter to the administration. In light of COVID, Make Ready, and Fall 2020’s numerous enrollment challenges, “The proposed [...] staff cuts will severely curtail our academic departments' ability to effectively plan and deliver curriculum, and will substantially compromise our ability to fulfill SAIC's core values.”  

Provost Berger replied later the same day, writing that without cutting from academic departments, the school would have to cut more deeply from other areas that had already been reduced. Instead, he offered department chairs time to propose a 15 percent cut of their own. 

Two weeks later, department chairs returned their alternative proposals. Still objecting to the layoffs, they presented alternative ways to cut the same quantity from this year's budget. Instead of cutting administrative staff, suggested that tenured faculty and senior administration could take a voluntary 1 percent pay cut to save their staff’s jobs. They also suggested fundraising options, and additional temporary salary cuts for those making over $250,000 a year, and that the VPs implementing 20 percent cuts schoolwide should also take 20 percent salary cuts.
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Upper administration declined the proposal, and finalized the layoffs on July 27. 

Said one longtime staff member, at the start of COVID, the institution told its employees that it would keep everyone employed and on healthcare, at least in the spring semester. “That heartfelt statement was admirable, I was proud of our institution and comforted. Those concerns to protect our community were somehow lost, or maybe I was naïve to believe it. Now it’s all about numbers.”

Four more years of winter

The budget cut was made in preparation for a 15 percent drop in enrollment. Now, after the add-drop period, overall enrollment is down by 19 percent, slightly worse than expected. The incoming undergraduate class is more than 30 percent smaller than last fall’s incoming class. 
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As Berger detailed in his email to F, “Even if the pandemic ends and all returns to normal next year — which is the best-case scenario — the loss of students will be with us for four years, as the class of 2024 progresses toward graduation.” It would be impossible to make up for this by accepting a larger class of 2025, Berger added, because of space limitations. 
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“Emergency fundraising, such as an art sale, can be helpful for offsetting a one-time loss of revenue, but does little to address the long-term problem we face,” he wrote. In total, Berger wrote, the layoffs and vacant eliminated positions, plus the cancellation of staff and faculty raises for this year, saved the school $9.3 million for the 2020-21 fiscal year. 

Across the U.S., many colleges and universities are in the same dire financial straits that SAIC was in in 2002. Then, SAIC was $200 million in debt; now, as announced at the first All Faculty Staff Meeting of fall 2020 on Sept. 25, its debt has decreased to $36 million. 
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No faculty were laid off this summer, but part-time faculty remain in a precarious position. Because of the enrollment decline, over 150 classes were cancelled by the end of the add-drop period. When classes are cancelled, part-time faculty only receive a small cancellation fee.

SAIC does not normally provide health insurance to lecturers, who account for 52 percent of the faculty body. This fall, 140 uninsured lecturers are teaching in-person classes, according to numbers provided by Part-Time Faculty Representative Danny Floyd. A recently announced plan will provide basic healthcare to lecturers via telemedicine, with physician care and diagnoses, but without prescription drug coverage.
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The staff layoffs have altered the operation of departments and their curriculum, and put additional strain on the health and safety measures necessary during the pandemic — all without any input from faculty, department chairs, or anyone in the classroom. At issue for many is the lack of administrative transparency — a problem cited by faculty and staff in numerous letters, statements, emails, and in their interviews with F.

“The school administration describes it as ‘shared governance,’” one long-time faculty member told F in an interview. “But I believe there is no shared governance. Everything that is done is decided on the eighth floor by a select few.”
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“Basically, what’s happening is, in the guise of moving from a faculty-governed institution, we are now absolutely relegated to not even sitting on the sidelines. We’re just observers in this process.” 

“No one expected to get through this [without any layoffs],” said another long-time faculty member in a phone interview, “but the question is when they happened and how they happened.” 
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As they saw it, there were many alternatives that leadership never considered, and never consulted departments about — options like a fundraising auction, which saved the San Francisco Art Institute from closing permanently earlier this year. 
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“Why not things like reducing hours?” suggested the same faculty member. They also broached other possibilities, like furloughs, keeping the positions in existence with the potential to re-hire, post-pandemic, or making offers of early retirement. Or balancing the cuts in other ways, such as larger pay cuts for VPs, for longer periods of time. 
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To some faculty, this is indicative of a gap between the teaching faculty and the administrators running the school. As the same long-time faculty member pointed out, none of the senior administrators are practicing artists — including Tenny, Milkowski, Berger, or Talbot — IRFM VP Tom Buechele (BFA 1989, MFA Sculpture 2017) being the exception. 
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“None of the people running the school are artists,” said the same faculty member. “Most of them have never been inside a classroom.” Their decisions, says this faculty member, are made with little knowledge of curriculum. 

“They’re charged with trying to keep the school alive. I really do think that their primary goal was to save the school,” and prevent financial hardship, said this faculty member. But the layoffs, they said, were made with a “lack of compassionate and creative leadership.”

Editor's note, October 10: An earlier version of this article inaccurately gave the school wide budget cut percentage as 15 percent. The correct figure is 20 percent.

Editor's note, October 20: An earlier version of this article inaccurately gave the Undergraduate Admissions cut at 25 percent of staff. The correct figure is 37 percent of staff. One inaccurate quotation was also removed, and another inaccurate quotation was clarified.