The GW
HATCHET
September 16, 2024 Vol. 121 Iss. 6
AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER • SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904 • ONLINE AT GWHATCHET.COM
Faculty senators press officials on funding, staffing concerns FIONA BORK
SENIOR STAFF WRITER
HANNAH MARR NEWS EDITOR
Faculty senators raised concerns about personnel vacancies, resource allocations and missing department budgets at a meeting Friday — points of contention that officials didn’t directly address. Members of the Faculty Senate said Columbian College of Arts & Sciences departments like history and Romance, German and Slavic studies have yet to receive a budget for FY2025, which hampered their ability to plan events and arrange speakers. Katrin Schultheiss, a faculty senator and professor of history, asked if the department is lacking a budget because officials haven’t yet allocated one to CCAS and questioned how GW is “investing heavily” in the University’s academic mission while paying “huge” salaries to top-level administrators. “It hasn’t been visible to us in CCAS where those enormous investments in the academic mission of the University are being done and huge salaries are being paid to top-level administrators,” Schultheiss said. University President Ellen Granberg did not respond to Schultheiss’ comment. CCAS officials told department chairs in January to accommodate a 15 percent cut of the school’s expected noncompensation spending to meet its budget target set in late March by GW for fiscal year 2024. Kausik Sarkar, a faculty senator and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said the School of Engineering and Applied Science has 25 empty faculty positions across the school. Provost Chris Bracey said some ongoing faculty searches have not yet yielded candidates, but he noticed SEAS has been filling vacancies. He said the University has a dashboard for faculty to track the last years of statistics on full-time faculty “in real time,” which students cannot access.
Task force members question progress on emissions cuts ELLA MITCHELL
CONTRIBUTING NEWS EDITOR
RORY QUEALY NEWS EDITOR
Faculty senators listen to Provost Chris Bracey during a senate meeting in March.
Tarek El-Ghazawi, a faculty senator and the electrical and computer engineering department chair, said his department has lost a dozen faculty members over the last decade, who have not been replaced. Masha Belenky, a faculty senator and professor of French, said the University hasn’t replaced faculty tenure-lines for certain departments, including hers, after departures. She said instead, officials fill the vacancies with nontenured contract faculty, who are compensated at a lower rate. Officials failed to meeting a Faculty Code clause requiring 75 percent of regular faculty to be tenured or on a tenure track for the fifth-consecutive year in April. “We have people in our department who are making $60,000 teaching seven classes a year, and I think that’s important to state in a public forum because those faculty really struggle with morale, which makes sense because they’re working really hard and
DANIEL HEUER | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR
not getting any compensation,” Belenky said. Faculty senators also raised concerns during the meeting about whether GW is properly allocating funding to schools and departments, citing the more than $900,000 in severance payments since 2022 to former officials like former University President Thomas LeBlanc and former Chief Financial Officer Mark Diaz as a particular worry. Granberg said the University has begun talks with Grant Thornton — an independent CPA firm based in London, England, who has a “long-term contract” with GW and audits the University’s consolidated financial statements — to receive input on the University’s budget model, which she said is in need of revisions. “We are hampered by a budget model that does us no favors, and so I am, that’s part of why I’m very excited that the budget revision process is moving forward,” Granberg said.
Granberg also said officials were working on a new budget model to make more efficient use of GW’s money, which she previously announced at a Staff Council meeting in January. The current model has not been updated since 2017, Bracey said at the Friday meeting. “There is a clear sense in speaking with several deans that the budget model that was adopted in 2017 really does need to be tweaked and fine tuned to provide additional resources and support for the academic enterprise,” Bracey said. Faculty senators also pressed officials on the input they reportedly gave to the U.S. Attorney General for D.C. regarding stayaway orders, which barred five students arrested by local police at the pro-Palestinian encampment last spring from entering any public spaces in Foggy Bottom for six months.
Community members said they are skeptical of the University’s pledge to divest from fossil fuels by 2025 due to a lack of communication from officials, who maintain that they are on track to reach their goal. GW reduced its emissions by 29 percent between 2008 to 2023, according to the University’s public emissions report, leaving the University with two more years to lower emissions by an additional 11 percent to hit its target of 40 percent by the end of next year. After almost a decade of student protests for fossil fuel divestment, the Board of Trustees in 2020 established the Environmental, Social & Governance, Responsibility Task Force and adopted environmental recommendations from the group that included total divestment, lowering emissions and a 10year acceleration of GW’s initial plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2040. GW Office of Sustainability Director Josh Lasky said the University has a “multi-pronged strategy” to meet its emission reduction goal by next year, with an emphasis on energy efficiency on campus and the administration’s renewable energy development and sourcing. He said officials are currently working to to reduce the University’s energy consumption through lighting, heating and cooling in 43 campus buildings.
See FACULTY Page 5
See MESSAGING Page 5
GWPD faces vacancies at end of arming plan
Severance extended to former officials may have incentivized exits, faculty senators say
RORY QUEALY
HANNAH MARR
NEWS EDITOR
The GW Police Department faces more than five months of turnover and leadership vacancies at the completion of its contentious three-phase plan to arm 22 officers with 9 mm handguns. In April, GWPD Chief James Tate said the department planned to fill three supervisor vacancies but cited a regional and national trend of fewer applicants with less experience as reason for a potential hiring lag. Since then, the department has turned over three senior leaders and faces vacancies in some of its 22 armed officer roles, meaning despite officials’ announcement earlier this month of the end of GW’s arming implementation plan, the number of armed officers falls short. Former Lieutenant Christina Hunsicker left GWPD in August after working at GW for more than a decade. Hunsicker was the sole officer in the department’s senior leadership to precede Tate’s hiring in January 2020. Prior to Tate, GWPD changed its leader four times in about two years. Former GWPD Chief RaShall Brackney and former Assistant Chief Michael Glaubach resigned simultaneously in early 2018. The resignations prompted interim Chief Bessie Burrus to take over until officials hired Darell Darnell
as superintendent of police in April 2018. Darnell left the department in March 2019, and Mary Paradis, who was serving as assistant chief of police, headed the department on an interim basis before Tate. Hunsicker’s departure comes after former Lieutenant Sean Brown — who served at the University since March 2022 — left the department in May, and former Captain of Operations Gabe Mullinax departed in April. Mullinax was one of the first two officers armed in September 2023. As lieutenants, Hunsicker and Brown served in the department’s third-highest rank, while Mullinax occupied a role in the second-highest position. Officials filled Mullinax and Brown’s vacancies by hiring Captain George Davis and Lieutenant Cheryl Crawley this summer, but the department’s senior leadership holds one lieutenant vacancy. Tate declined to comment on how many of the department’s 22 armed officer positions are vacant and if turnover within the GWPD senior leadership impacts how the department trains armed supervisors or other operations. “As with any police force or organization, staffing fluctuates from time to time for a variety of reasons, and we continue to successfully manage our staffing to ensure we fulfill our mission,” Tate said in an email.
TOM RATH | STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Former GW Police Department Lieutenant Christina Hunsicker holds the University Yard flagpole rope in May.
NEWS EDITOR
JACKSON RICKERT STAFF WRITER
Faculty senators said the over $3 million in severance that the University paid four former officials between 2022 and 2023 may have been used as a tool to help administrators carry out departures. Annual financial disclosure forms from fiscal year 2023 show that former University President Thomas LeBlanc received $1,167,000 in severance since he retired from the University in 2021 and former Chief Financial Officer Mark Diaz has received $976,440 since leaving in 2022. A University spokesperson declined to say if the officials left on their own volition or involuntarily, and members of the Faculty Senate suspect the administration may have used the severance payments to usher them out of their positions. By the time of their departures, both former top officials were considered deeply unpopular among faculty, staff and students. LeBlanc’s fouryear term culminated with widespread calls for his resignation from faculty members who felt his leadership did not match the University’s core values. Diaz and LeBlanc came under fire by faculty in January 2020 over the 20/30 plan, with some faculty senators saying the move would force GW to take on more debt to account for lost revenue. Jennifer Brinkerhoff, a faculty senator and professor of international affairs, said decisions about severance payments were made by the University before she was a senator, but some of the severance paid to Diaz could be the
HATCHET FILE PHOTO Former University President Thomas LeBlanc speaks during a Faculty Senate meeting in 2020.
result of GW trying to replace LeBlanc’s administration. “These buyouts can become very large if the ‘separation’ of that person from the university is a high priority, they already command a large salary, and they know they are in a strong bargaining position,” Brinkerhoff said in an email. She said it is common in the “business world” to use severance as a way for a new leader to phase out the old administration and replace it with their own people. Diaz was hired by LeBlanc in August 2018 after the two worked together at the University of Miami and left shortly after the former University president. LeBlanc stepped down in January 2022 after announcing months earlier that he planned to leave in at the end of the academic year and told trustees he was “flexible” about his end date and would be open to leaving earlier if desired. Officials announced LeBlanc’s departure as
a retirement and maintained that Diaz chose to depart on his own accord, never specifying where he would work after GW. Severance pay provisions are common across higher education, with 60 percent of respondents to a 2014-15 survey of fouryear college and university presidents reporting they had severance agreements in place with their leaders, according to Inside Higher Ed. GW does not list a severance policy on their Human Resource Management & Development website. A University spokesperson declined to explain GW’s policy for granting severance payments to employees who leave on their own accord. They also declined to comment on how officials determined severance payments for LeBlanc, Diaz or former General Counsel Beth Nolan — who retired from the University in June 2021 — who determines severance recipients, payment frequency and the method used to calculate allocations. The spokesperson de-
ferred comment on LeBlanc and Diaz’s severance payments to a previous statement on the University’s Form 990 filing in August, which states that “compensation for senior administrators is determined by a multitude of factors, including the prevailing market rate, experience and the qualifications that an employee brings to the job.” Philip Wirtz, a faculty senator and professor of decision sciences and of psychological and brain sciences, said he wonders if money that could have been used for faculty, staff and student needs was instead allocated to severance payments last year. He said he has to ask “where is the money coming from” to support these expenses, including the “eye-popping” salaries that recently appointed administrative hires have received like Provost Chris Bracey, who received a $391,811 pay bump in the 20222023 tax cycle to earn $966,960. See MOTIVE Page 5