The religion and culture office on the ninth floor of the Arts Tower was shuttered and the secretary laid off Nov. 27. By January, all humanities and fine arts departments will use a single office.

Five administrative staffers from the humanities and fine arts were unexpectedly laid off Nov. 27 as part of the university’s sweeping plan to slash $44.5 million in permanent spending over the next four years.

The layoffs came just weeks after the university held its third financial town hall of the year to update campus on its comprehensive review of expenses meant to uncover cost-saving measures without diluting services.

The university must reduce operating costs by 8.5 per cent to avoid massive debt in the coming years. About 70 per cent of those costs are in salaries and benefits.

The five layoffs were from the department offices of history, art and art history, drama, and religion and culture. Both drama and religion and culture lost their only secretaries.

The employees — some of whom had spent more than a decade at their job — were met by human resources in their offices Nov. 27 and given just hours to hand over their computers, clear out their desks and leave. The heavy-handed treatment included transition councillors on the scene to discuss employment options for the future and to deal with anyone who broke down once being laid off.

The office staff from each department in the humanities and fine arts are now in the process of pooling their resources in a central office on the fifth floor of the Arts Tower.

The “administrative commons,” as the new office structure has been dubbed by Vice-Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts David Parkinson, will provide all clerical support for the division.

Humanities include the departments of English, French, history, linguistics, languages, women and gender studies, religion and culture, and philosophy. Fine arts include the departments of music, drama, and art and art history.

Parkinson was told months ago by top officials to devise a more efficient workforce plan after the university learned the provincial government would be scaling back its operating grant increase. The annual grant provides roughly 70 per cent of the school’s operating budget.

“The model that presented itself as the most efficient way to provide the range of [administrative] services was through a co-ordinated provision, which is largely located in one place, and that’s the fifth floor of the Arts Tower,” Parkinson said in an interview following the layoffs.

The office staff mostly looks after a department’s reception duties — taking phone calls, handling mail and pointing students in the right direction when they need assistance. With dwindling resources available, Parkinson said the only possible way to provide those services for humanities and fine arts departments was to bring all the office staff together.

The new structure allowed Parkinson to identify which administrative employees were needed and which were less vital. The laid off staffers were given severance, according to their collective bargaining agreements.

The vice-dean’s goal is to have the administrative commons fully operational by Jan. 4.

“I know layoffs are coming in January. I know layoffs are coming in April. It’s important that the division be ready with its new model at the start of the new term so that as much as possible there is no break in the delivery of services,” Parkinson said.

“There has been breakage in services [since the layoffs]. We need to minimize that breakage and be making sure that as much as possible over the next few weeks and into January, we are providing consistent services to students.”

Despite being told to remain tight-lipped, religion and culture professor Alexander Ervin spoke to the Sheaf and lambasted the layoffs.

After finishing a lecture Nov. 27, Ervin returned to his office to widespread anger and sadness amongst his colleagues over the layoff of the department’s only secretary, Kathe Harder.

Harder was notified of her dismissal around noon, and while finishing some last-minute tasks, her computer was forcibly removed.

“I’ve been here 42 years and I’ve never seen anything as heartless and as vile as this. And there’s been some pretty bad stuff,” Ervin said. “They are picking on the ones who are weak.”

The university’s financial problems, according to Ervin, are a direct result of over-funded research facilities and swollen bureaucratic structures guzzling resources. Projects like the Canadian Light Source, programs like the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy and non-academic divisions such as human resources and university advancement eat up far too much of the university’s budget, he said.

Ervin thinks the university’s president, vice-presidents, many deans and vice-deans, and other central administrators, should be the first to be impacted by cutbacks.

“These folks frequently make $200,000 to $425,000 a year. I think to show their goodwill, each of them should take a 10 per cent cut. If they do that I would be more than happy to do the same,” Ervin said.

“I’m a full senior professor. I make a really good salary. In my case [10 per cent] would be about $15,000.”

At a recent meeting to brief the faculty on the new administrative structure, Ervin said Parkinson and Arts and Science Dean Peter Stoicheff handled the complaints “with grace.” He understands they have a job that needs to be done but argues it was unwise to target the administrative assistants.

“Each department has a head, obvious, but it’s got a heart, too. And the heart was the secretary,” he said. “The secretary was the face of the department. She would greet students, she would have a lot of patience helping them solve their problems, do course overrides, make appointments with professors…. They had the institutional memory to train the department heads. They were indispensable.”

Savhanna Wilson is a fourth-year religion and culture student and member of Students Against Austerity, a new group on campus that has often spoke out and rallied against rising tuition and the recent cuts to the humanities and fine arts.

Wilson and others from the group attended the Nov. 29 students’ council meeting that featured an address from Greg Fowler, the acting vice-president of finance and resources for the university.

She felt students’ council and the union’s executives sat idle and failed to ask Fowler tough questions when it came to the layoffs of the secretaries.

“I felt like they were placating the vice-president and apologetic to him for having to put him under scrutiny,” she said. “I just think that is not indicative of a council that is really operating in the best interests of students.”

Wilson wants to see the university act more transparently when making decisions that affect students.

She’s transitioning from her undergraduate degree to a master’s program in January and worries there will be confusion without Harder, the religion and culture secretary who was laid off, taking care of the administrative work.

“She was a fantastic secretary. She went above and beyond her call of duty, any inquiries you had she would try and find the answers that you were looking for. She was really a go-to person in the department.”

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Photo: Raisa Pezderic/The Sheaf