LCC Faculty Council: Class cuts damaged trust, created unnecessary disruption

Presenter: The Faculty Council releases a report on the Lane Community College winter and spring class cuts. During public comment sessions at the board meeting June 3, Gerry Meenaghan:

Gerry Meenaghan: I’m Gerry Meenaghan, one of the Faculty Council’s co-chairs. And at the direction of Faculty Council, I am here this evening to present a summary report on behalf of Faculty Council’s Class Cuts Task Force, the full version of which has been included in the public comments documents.

The task force was established by Faculty Council to investigate the class cuts implemented for winter and spring 2026, and to better understand both their impacts and the process by which they were made.

The task force included faculty representatives from multiple divisions and gathered information through data analysis and a faculty survey that received responses from sixty three faculty members across eight divisions.

The task force found that approximately 79 course sections were cut from the winter 2026 schedule and 60 from the spring 2026 schedule.

While the cuts represented roughly 6% of scheduled sections, they were not evenly distributed across the institution. Instead, the reductions were concentrated in a limited number of subject areas, with some disciplines losing 20% – 50% or more of their offerings.

A central concern identified by the task force was the lack of transparency and stakeholder involvement. Requests for information about the cuts, their rationale and the impacts were either denied or redirected away from public forums.

Survey responses further indicated that many faculty either had no input into the decisions, or were unaware whether faculty input had been considered at all. The task force also found evidence that some canceled classes were not low-enrollment courses.

Faculty reported that several cut sections were already full. Some had wait lists, and in a number of cases, courses had to be reopened after cuts were made because student demand remained high.

This raises questions about whether the cuts achieved their intended financial goals and whether lost tuition revenue was adequately considered. 

Perhaps the most significant impact fell on students because annual registration had already occurred. Many students had planned their schedules, employment, child care, and academic pathways around classes that were later cancelled.

The report documents cases in which students were displaced from required sequenced courses, faced uncertainty about remaining on track for graduation, and experienced significant stress and frustration.

Faculty and division staff spent substantial time helping students rebuild schedules and navigate waitlists.

The task force concludes that the process used to implement these cuts created unnecessary disruption, damaged trust, and did not reflect the collaborative governance principles outlined in board Policy 325, or the college’s stated values of collaboration and partnership and inclusion.

Accordingly, the task force makes two recommendations. First, any extraordinary class cuts should be implemented through a transparent process that includes meaningful participation by deans and faculty and prioritizes minimizing harm to students.

Second, the college should establish a task force to evaluate annual registration and determine whether it is serving students effectively or contributing to unintended negative consequences. Thank you for your time and consideration. 

Wendy Simmons: I’m Wendy Simmons and I’m speaking tonight in solidarity with my faculty colleagues to provide the history of our institutional research department as well as apprising the board of our ongoing data needs.

Educational institutions are increasingly charged with ensuring that decisions are data-informed and LCC’s local context mandates transparent communication around institutional change administered through shared governance. Therefore, it is paramount that this department be adequately staffed.

Unfortunately, as of June 2, it won’t. During the late 2000s and up until 2019, Lane enjoyed the expertise of an IR director, Craig Taylor, who engaged in data generation and analysis, two full-time data analysts and one additional employee tasked with cleaning data.

During this time, Cathy Thomas and the second analyst Molloy Wilson created a standard data package for the college, so an annually-produced document that allowed college stakeholders to access key data elements so that they could better understand the financial and academic context of the college.

In addition, both Cathy and Molloy worked closely with faculty undertaking academic program review so that programs could access, synthesize, and use data to evaluate their programs.

This access to data, along with the consultation with Cathy or Molloy, gave many faculty a more nuanced understanding of their students and the health of their programs.

This work, however, along with satisfying other needs of the college, has been overwhelming for Cathy. Given that Craig Taylor was pressured to retire in 2019 and Molloy was unceremoniously retrenched in 2020 even though data requests had increased rather than lessened a retrenchment he could have fought but didn’t.

Also, Cathy became a one-person IR department, often working evenings and holidays to satisfy stakeholder data requests.

In winter 2025, we were heartened when the college hired Keith Comer to serve as director of IR. After his hire, Cathy announced she would retire at the end of academic year ‘25-’26, and the college subsequently hired a new data analyst who had been apprenticing to take over Cathy’s duties.

In order to onboard the new hire to the scope of Cathy’s work, Director Comer asked the college to hire Cathy as a part-time employee for six months after her retirement. Until a week ago, we all assumed that Cathy would continue to be an employee of the college for this six-month period.

On May 26, we found out she would not be retained despite verbal assurances to the contrary, a situation that will leave us shorthanded and undermine the college ability to provide adequate data to faculty and staff engaged in program review, among other data needs.

Having access to valid, mutually agreed upon data is paramount for a functioning institution of higher ed. The loss of Cathy’s expertise and experience during this complicated transitional period is, quite frankly, disastrous. 

Kate Sullivan: My name is Kate Sullivan. I’ve been a faculty member at Lane for 26 years.

I want to start with what’s probably a pithy observation and may be familiar to a lot of you, given national politics: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. to wit, there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

And I want to talk about what’s happened with a classified staff member of late, and that’s Cathy Thomas, who’s worked tirelessly at LCC  for the past few years. She served as our primary data analyst.

Last fall, she announced her retirement, her intention to retire at the end of this academic year. And Keith Comer, her immediate supervisor, worked with upper administration to secure a part-time contract to extend her work six months post-retirement to mentor our new data analyst who is still very new and very green.

On May 26, however, President Bulger refused to sign the contract to extend Cathy’s employment. Neither Keith nor Cathy had an inkling that the administration had reversed their decision to hire Cathy on a limited part-time contract.

In other words, it appears both individuals were blindsided by this decision.

Some individuals may have a salary that insulates them from the economic shock of losing an expected salary of $30,000 to $35,000. But the vast majority of us are not so lucky.

I want the board to think long and hard about an administration withholding information from an employee and her immediate supervisor that a verbal agreement would not be honored.

We should all be appalled at what is at best carelessness and at worst, cruel disregard. Kathy had not put in for Social Security nor Medicaid since she was counting on a half-time position.

She hadn’t begun to sift through her files—and she has a lot of files in her office—or removed personal items from her office because she believed the word of the upper administration was good, and that the agreement that had been months in the making with months of assurances was valid.

The same day she found out she wouldn’t have an extended contract, she was also informed that she would have to vacate her office and clean out everything and turn in her laptop to the college on the second of July.

For anyone who thinks that administration is always within their rights to make these kind of decisions, I want to reply that the behavior that I have now witnessed reveals a concerning lack of consideration for an employee and her supervisor. It disregards their specialized expertise and smacks of callousness.

I want to end by saying the Board shouldn’t turn a blind eye to this kind of autocratic behavior, that we should pay attention to how employees are treated. And this also reminds me of how employees were treated with closure programs, and they didn’t find out until they found out from their students.

Good leadership requires fairness, that those outside of circles of power are treated humanely and ethically. And increasingly, I do not see that humane and ethical treatment in play. 

Jay Frasier: Jay Frasier, reading this on behalf of the LCCEA (Lane Community College Education Association). 

This past April, all employees were asked to take the Gallup Employee Engagement and Climate Survey; 598 of us participated for a 54% response rate. The results require your attention and action.

It is very clear overall that employee morale, as well as our trust in the current administration, have eroded even further among all employee groups.

Specifically, confidence in the administration’s ability to act ethically and with integrity is even lower than before. Trust that the administration will treat all employees fairly, regardless of individual differences, also drops substantially since the last survey.

The upper administration is becoming less transparent in communicating financial priorities and outcomes to the college community, and is viewed as less collaborative overall.

There was a very substantial drop in employees’ confidence in the upper administration strategies to improve enrollment, student retention, completion and transfer rates, and monitor progress, which are, of course, necessary steps to keep our college thriving.

Currently, the administration is forming budget workgroups, perhaps intended as a response to these problems. These workgroups promise to make things worse. They subvert governance, and by denying any real voice for classified professionals, faculty, and students, they avoid the administration’s obligation to include employees in a meaningful process of shared decision-making.

We have no actual authority in these groups. We only provide opportunities for input to the upper management. The administration could increase collaboration and trust simply by fulfilling their legal and contractual obligation to work with the unions. 

Failing to do so not only neglects critical opportunities to act in the best interests. It also means multiple violations of labor law, leading to excess legal expenses, ultimately causing even more harm to the institution.

For instance, the administration is legally and contractually obligated to work with both unions on budget cuts because they did not, nor did they share information transparently or in a timely manner within the budget development subcommittee, and perhaps because they either do not understand the union contracts or decided to actually disregard them because they are not actually saving money according to their claims to the board and to the public.

Savings would come from 20 fewer FTE positions. Because of the way union contracts work, these positions are mostly still intact, and part-time faculty who are the lowest-paid and vulnerable employees, and whose labor also helps keep LCC afloat, are most impacted.

Again, let me repeat that: The savings never happened. Unfortunately, the administration did cut entire programs and critically important supports and resources for students. The true results are fewer resources for students to come here and less help for those who are here, and less revenue for the college.

These numbers about the Gallup poll are startling and serious, and we need your leadership.

Presenter: LCC faculty and employees say though class cuts sought to lower spending, the only thing that went down was employee morale.