Rutgers and Kean will be among the local universities handing out layoff notices as students return to class for the fall semester, campus officials said Tuesday. Pink slips have already begun going out at Kean University in Union, where 26 positions will be eliminated, a school spokesman said. At Rutgers, employees will be notified about layoffs within the next...
Rutgers University sign in New Brunswick in a 2002 photo. Rutgers and Kean will be among the local universities handing out layoff notices as students return to class for the fall semester, campus officials said Tuesday.
Pink slips have already begun going out at Kean University in Union, where 26 positions will be eliminated, a school spokesman said.
At Rutgers, employees will be notified about layoffs within the next few weeks. But officials at the state university declined to say how many of the school’s 13,000 employees will lose their jobs.
"We don’t have figures as yet. Managers are working to make a determination," said E.J. Miranda, a Rutgers spokesman. "We anticipate that departments throughout the university will be affected."
Other local universities, including Seton Hall and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, announced layoffs earlier this summer. UMDNJ will cut about 100 positions, while Seton Hall eliminated 32 employees — its first budget-mandated staff cuts in a quarter-century.
The staff cuts come as all of the state’s public and private colleges and universities are dealing with a reduction in state funding. Public colleges and universities lost about $173 million in the budget approved by Gov. Chris Christie and the Legislature.
The budget also required the four-year public colleges and universities to keep their undergraduate tuition hikes to 4 percent to make sure the schools did not turn to students to make up the lost money.
Most of New Jersey’s colleges found ways to make cuts without eliminating employees. Yesterday, several schools — including the New Jersey Institute of Technology, New Jersey City University, the College of New Jersey, Montclair State, William Paterson, Rowan, Ramapo, Richard Stockton and Thomas Edison State College — said they had no plans for layoffs.
At Kean University, officials said the 26 layoffs are a last resort and will not include faculty or campus police.
"The administration asked the union to agree to forgo at least one mandated raise in order to avoid layoffs. That request was denied," said Stephen Hudik, a Kean spokesman.
James Castiglione, president of the Kean Federation of Teachers, denied his union was asked to forgo raises. He said Kean is laying off staff because the university’s bloated bureaucracy is draining the budget. Union members plan to picket the campus entrance today to protest the cuts.
"This is really a problem of mismanagement of university resources," Castiglione said.
At Rutgers, school officials canceled raises and froze salaries for all employees in June. The university’s unions vowed to fight the freezes and the two sides are scheduled to appear before an arbitrator in Trenton later this month.
But the salary freeze is not enough and Rutgers needs to plug a hole in its budget, campus officials said.
"We understand the hardship this places on the members of our university community and we regret that any employees will lose their positions. However, the number of layoffs would have been much higher if the university had not implemented a salary freeze," said Miranda, the Rutgers spokesman.
Union officials at Rutgers were angered by the layoffs and the lack of information about the cuts from university administrators.
"Are they laying off anyone who makes $200,000? Or only people who make $25,000?" said Lucye Millerand, president of the Union of Rutgers Administrators-American Federation of Teachers.