Hi. My name is Jazmin. I'm an English major and a member of the MSU Student Union.

Since the threat of throwing out the Classics Library books in the spring, the attacks on the disciplines of the Humanities have escalated. After the books were moved – reluctantly – to a different room in a different building, the summer has been filled with disfigured whispers of a “restructuring” within the college.

The "Restructuring" of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences is coming as a surprise to every faculty member's desk it's skidded across. For the past year and some change, the Restructuring Committee and the University President Jonathan Koppell have made a mission of being as non-transparent as possible with its proposals: the idea has been, since its conception, to liquidate and consolidate all humanities departments and replace them with schools with names like "School of Human Expression" and "School of Thought and Writing". The departments and department chairs would disappear and the ability for professionals in a discipline to influence curriculum would fall into the hands of administrators and brand-new faculty with no experience. Individual classes in “complex thought” would be offered. The confirmation of this plan was finalized and sent out in an email to faculty members on November 4th.

Faculty members across the board have been against restructuring the college since the general idea was proposed early last year, but every request to stop the initiative and shift focus to funding programs has fallen on deaf ears. There is a large number of faculty members — including department chairs — who haven’t even been invited to restructuring meetings where they could even give their input about the future of their jobs and the university. Every faculty member that I have personally spoken to has expressed the concern for literacy, specialization, and its accessibility: Montclair does hold its status as one of the more affordable options in the state but is now making the switch in becoming the least. The point of accessibility and affordability is to offer a high quality, well rounded education to a population of students who otherwise might not have been able to afford it elsewhere. As if the recent tuition rise wasn’t impactful enough, the restructuring plan promises to make it harder for Pell grant recipients, first-generation students, and New Jersey natives to achieve the comprehensive education that the university promises.

Even from a business perspective the restructuring is a poor choice: it's going to cost millions in administrative expenses – annually, forever – to make the switch, prospective students won’t want to major in made-up subjects that are nonspecific and unintelligible, and accredited faculty members will lose their jobs. It will cost more in the long run for the university to liquidate and split specialties into “schools” that study the "human connection and complex thought": it is a change that would be astronomically expensive to enact and keep going, especially seeing as the proposals mainly advocate for more administrative offices instead of keeping the one Dean’s office. Not only do all of these factors make Montclair a worse school to go to, it affects the very lives of the people that make the university as accredited as it is today.

The most insidious part of all this is that nobody knows: current CHSS students have no idea, faculty are purposefully kept in the dark at-large, and alumni have no clue. President Koppell has said, on record, that he will use the "re-imagining" of CHSS as the precedent for other colleges at the University.

The University is making the active decision to not serve any of its people.

Actively ignoring the protests of the departments and individuals that are the foundation of Montclair’s respectability is a conscious choice in favor of more bloated administrative positions instead of producing smarter people and a better school. If Koppell's ten or fifteen year goal for the university is to become a better place to pump out illiterate workers, the administration should really consider building Amazon workhouse training facilities instead of school buildings on campus.

Please – help us protect literacy, art, and history on our campus and in our community.