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Adjusting to life in the classroom after WIU layoffs

Nathan Heidenreich was hired to teach a class ten days before the start of the semester. He had been working for the University Printing and Mailing Center.
Jaycie Doerr
/
TSPR
Nathan Heidenreich was hired to teach a class ten days before the start of the semester. He had been working for the University Printing and Mailing Center.

Western Illinois University laid off more than 100 faculty and staff members this summer in an effort to close a budget deficit.

Some non-tenure track faculty were let go immediately.

This led to a mass rescheduling of classes before the start of the fall semester.

In the newly combined School of Communication and Media -- formerly the separate departments of Communication and Broadcasting & Journalism -- professors are stretched thin.

Combined, they lost 11 faculty members.

Ten days before the start of classes, Nathan Heidenreich was brought on to teach BC&J 410: Graphic Design for Broadcast.

Heidenreich is a graphic designer for the University Printing and Mailing Center. He said he hadn’t been in a classroom since his time as a WIU student in the early 1990s.

He was hired to teach the class ten days before the start of the semester. He was given a former professor’s syllabus that was four years old and out-of-date with current graphic design technology.

“It was just a mad scramble to try and figure out what the heck I was going to do, and what am I going to talk about each day of class,” Heidenreich said.

Heidenreich said the biggest challenge is trying to teach a class of students with varying degrees of graphic design experience.

“I had half of the class that is already familiar with [Photoshop]. So, am I boring them?” Heidenreich said. “So come up with something just to keep them occupied, and that way I can focus on the [students] that only had a very baseline familiarity with the program.”

He said teaching is getting easier every day, and he would come back to teach the course again if offered the opportunity.

The School of Agriculture lost three professors during this summer’s layoffs.

Director Andy Baker called in the remaining faculty members to meet over the summer and strategize. Without this, he says, the department wouldn’t have been as successful as they were at the start of the fall semester.

“I had basically 97 percent of my faculty there and we talked about fall schedule,” Baker said.

He combined sections of classes to reduce the time constraints and canceled some upper level classes, prioritizing core classes over electives.

In addition to course loads, Baker said they discussed the 16 clubs within the department and who would be advising those with fewer faculty.

“We talked about who is going to handle student organizations and how that was going to be advised,” Baker said.

“We had one that did not have an advisor and that was Sigma Alpha. I made some suggestions to the ladies this summer and they were able to find another advisor.”

All of the School of Agriculture’s professors are currently on overload this semester, and they might face the same situation in the spring.

Baker and his faculty members are planning to look at their curriculum structure to ease their workload in the future.

Baker believes they did not lose any students due to the cuts, and the School of Agriculture’s enrollment is up 1.5 percent this fall.

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