When professor David Shaner retired after three decades at Furman last December, the philosophy department lost one of this country’s premier scholars of non-Western philosophy, leaving a legacy that would be hard for any new professor to follow.
But due to budget concerns, Furman will not even be hiring someone to replace Shaner, which has forced the philosophy department to make adjustments to keep business running as usual, shuffling professors and eliminating three classes that Shaner taught.
“Furman has a nationwide reputation in Asia due to its interest in non-Western philosophy which was practically lost overnight,” said Sarah Worth, chair of the philosophy department.
Budget concerns have been affecting the hiring practices of other departments as well, with faculty saying that the administration has decided to carefully watch and temporarily cap the number of professors that certain departments can hire.
Dean of Faculty John Beckford explained that when faculty retire departments must submit a formal request to his office to fill the vacancy, following the same process as a new position request.
“Interest in majors and areas of the curriculum change over times, so we use retirements as an opportunity to reassess the best allocation of our faculty,” Beckford said via email. “If the position is not filled, it might be reallocated to another department where there is a demonstrated need for additional professors.”
He said that although the university had replaced professors retiring from Sociology, Religion, and Modern Languages and Literature at the end of the 2012-2013 academic year, the position in Philosophy was reallocated to the Department of Health Sciences.
According to professor Danielle Vinson, chair of the political science department, health science surpassed political science as the most popular major by number of students this year.
Vinson added that political science, though now Furman’s second most popular major, has classes “bursting at the seams.”
German professor Jane Chew will be retiring at the end of the year from the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and department chair Bill Allen said he didn’t know whether the administration would hire a replacement.
Allen explained that the university makes employment decisions over a long period of time since hiring a tenure track requires a commitment to that job position for 25 to 30 years. The university, he said, must ask what positions will be important to have in the future.
While the administration’s reluctance to replace professors has created challenges for certain departments, Allen suggested that those challenges did not constitute a major setback and were in fact a normal part of university operations.
“We all would take more professors to our departments if we could,” Allen said. “All of us are focused on our own areas, but in the end we all have to be realistic.”
Stephanie Bauer contributed to this article.