Early in the pandemic, art history Prof. Hannah Feldman said she and her coworkers struggled relationally, physically and psychologically.
“Most of us, especially women, were doing a lot more emotional work with our students,” Feldman said. “In my department, we worked all summer, which we’re technically not paid to do. After all of that, when we all redesigned syllabi, learned how to teach on Zoom, people home-schooled … it was awful.”
During this period, colleges and universities nationwide braced for fiscal deficits. At Northwestern, the projected loss — $90 million — led University President Morton Schapiro to announce a suspension of faculty retirement contributions on May 11, 2020.
Spanish and Portuguese Prof. Jorge Coronado, president of NU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said a small group of faculty has consistently spoken out against the suspension.
“(The retirement cuts) were simply unilaterally announced with no consultation on the faculty (who disapproved) of that cut,” Coronado said.
Coronado said faculty grew more critical when the University announced an $83.4 million surplus for the 2020 fiscal year. NU resumed retirement contributions on Jan. 1, 2021, which Feldman said she thought meant it would return money lost during the pandemic.
But more than a year later, Feldman said the University has failed to recuperate these lost funds and communicate transparently about the retirement losses.
“We were incredulous and pretty angry,” Feldman said. “To realize that at the end of (all of this) money was earned and that we were not going to benefit — in fact, we’d actually lost money — from that kind of entitlement that the University experienced, it was really just depressing.”
Legal complexities around recuperating funds
Coronado said teaching contracts did not outline if the University could legally remove retirement funds in the case of financial exigency.
But even if NU made the cuts for that reason, Coronado said Schapiro’s May 2020 announcement came while the University was doing fine financially. According to the report, NU’s S&P 500 index, a gauge on capital availability and institutional holdings, was 11.64% higher in 2020 than the previous year.
“It was like somebody saying, ‘We’re gonna stop paying you because the company’s going bankrupt, but there’s no proof that the company went bankrupt,’” Coronado said. “In fact, everything would prove the opposite, that it’s actually doing quite well.”
In an email to The Daily, University spokesperson Erin Karter said NU can amend its retirement plan and suspend contributions …….