By Emma Loenicker Since May 2022, a council of Tacoma Art Museum employees has been making efforts to unionize. They are organizing for livable wages and benefits, no further staff reduction, accessible grievance procedures to create accountability, transparency from leadership, standardized hiring and training procedures and influence in decision-making processes to improve their work conditions. This effort would make the TAM Washington’s first major art institution with unionized workers. On Oct. 17, TAM’s board of trustees received the workers’ letter requesting union representation. In the letter that TAM Workers United...

By Albert Chang-Yoo On Oct. 28, the Board of Trustees voted to affirm a plan created by President Isiaah Crawford aiming to avoid an estimated $10.5 million structural deficit by 2025. The vote was held at an open session following a week of deliberation. The recommendations include much of what the Academic, Administrative, and Auxiliary Program Review (AAAPR) report had advocated for; however, there were also important differences between the proposals. the proposals. President Crawford presented his plan in a less-thanprecise bullet-pointed slideshow entitled “A Sound Future: Recovery and Renewal.”...

University of Puget Sound is not immune to the financial and enrollment realities facing higher education nationally, and as campus leaders we have a responsibility to maintain the academic and financial health of the university. For this reason, I charged the AAAPR Committee with providing their recommendations for how best to balance the academic priorities and financial reality of the institution given the current $10 million structural budget deficit. I thoughtfully considered their recommendations in light of our strategic plan goals, shared their report with the campus community for additional...

At the October 2022 meeting of the Board of Trustees, the Board voted on the President’s recommendations to move the university towards financial equilibrium by the end of Fiscal Year 2026. General bullet points were shared with the university community. The plan was not. Faculty requested to see the full report and supporting documents that were provided by the President and ultimately approved by the Board. To date, the President has not shared those documents with the faculty. This is a departure from the transparency and collaborative process the president...

From Monica DeHart, Nancy Bristow, Robin Jacobson, and Siddharth Ramakrishnan; all are previous members of the AAAPRC. In the hopes of clarifying the work and recommendations of the AAAPRC, we would note that our committee was charged with closing the university’s $10 million deficit by Fiscal Year 2025. Therefore, our recommendations to reduce 35 FTE faculty and consolidate programs were in response to that call, rather than an independent finding about what would be good for the health of our liberal arts institution. That proposal sought both to help bridge...