The union representing professional staff members at Columbia College is urging their president to halt planned employee layoffs, as college leadership weighs cost-cutting measures in the face of budget woes.
Staff members delivered a petition with 150 signatures to Columbia President and CEO Kwang-Wu Kim, who is stepping down in July, imploring him to seek alternative budget strategies.
Professional staff numbers have been dwindling at Columbia for years, with currently only 275 staffers employed in 2024. Since 2015, layoffs have affected more than a third of the professional staff, according to the United Staff of Columbia College, the union representing Columbia employees.
Union representatives say the layoffs will most affect the roughly 6,000 students at Columbia in the South Loop, potentially creating longer wait times to meet with academic advisers, difficulty meeting with campus therapists and reduced support in the Department of Equity and Inclusion.
“Additional cuts would only further damage our community and our collective efforts to support our mission,” said USofCC spokesperson Craig Sigele in an email Monday. “Reducing our staff would mean declining the support and services we can offer students, which isn’t fair to them. They deserve a college that’s fully equipped to support their success.”
In an emailed statement, Lambrini Lukidis, Columbia’s associate vice president for strategic communications and external relations, said the college was instructed by the Board of Trustees to cut the school’s budget deficit in half by September. The college’s deficit is expected to be $38 million at the end of the current fiscal year.
Lukidis said layoffs are “an unavoidable part of budget reductions at this time,” as half of Columbia’s operating budget is personnel-related expenses.
“The college is prioritizing the elimination of vacant positions and striving for proportional balance between non-union and union staff positions. Our goal is to minimize the number of position eliminations as much as possible by finding alternative reductions in non-personnel expenses where feasible and advisable,” Lukidis said in the email.
The Columbia College Board of Trustees also voted to increase tuition in the fall of 2024.
The college was already experiencing significant financial challenges when it was met with Columbia College Faculty Union’s 49-day strike, which was believed to be the longest in higher-education history. In a statement, the college said the strike cost the institution $13 million.
The walkout kept nearly 600 part-time faculty members out of their classrooms for nearly two months while department chairs and some full-time faculty members took over those classes. Some classes were at a standstill without an instructor until the semester ended Saturday, and some had shifted to an asynchronous model.
Prior to the strike, department chairs at Columbia were told to eliminate five to six courses for each of the 58 academic programs, a few weeks before the fall semester began.
Kim’s term ends July 1. Jerry Tarrer, senior vice president of business affairs, will assume duties as interim president the next day while a search for a new president is underway.
