To The University of Akron Administration and Board of Trustees, 
 
We wish to express dissatisfaction with The University of Akron’s proposed retrenchment plan and exhort the Administration and Board to pursue other cost-cutting measures which will have a less deleterious effect on the University’s research capabilities, reputation, and student learning outcomes.  As this petition was initiated by graduate students in the School of Polymer Science and Polymer Engineering (SPSPE), we are particularly focused on the potential dismissal of 10 polymer faculty members; however, we are also concerned about other elements of the retrenchment beyond the scope of this petition.  We demand the following: 

1. Keeping the polymer faculty and students together as a single academic unit. SPSPE is a unique department, in that it combines expertise, research, and instruction in many sub-fields within chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering, design, manufacturing, and simulation. This creates an environment for breakthrough research in polymers. Such an environment could not exist within something like an interdisciplinary working group shared among departments. 
 
2. Maintaining UA’s legacy of excellence in polymer research by retaining faculty and capabilities. If over half of the faculty in SPSPE are dismissed, Akron’s capability for cutting-edge polymer research will be crippled. Remaining faculty will be discouraged and may seek other employment, current graduate students will be forced to change research projects or finish projects without adequate support, and the best prospective polymer graduate students will cease to consider UA when applying for grad school since the department’s brand image as a collection of polymer scientists and engineers will be gone. Further, the department has only recently launched and is rapidly growing its undergraduate program; drastically cutting the department now would damage the attractiveness for prospective undergraduates. 
 
3. Transparency in communicating with graduate and undergraduate student stakeholders and responsiveness to feedback before retrenchment measures are finalized. The students deserve to know the reasoning behind proposed cuts, including detailed financial rationale and considered alternatives, and to have their voices heard. 
 
4. Guarantee to take care of PhD students if advisors are dismissed. The University of Akron made a promise to admitted PhD students that they would have funding to pursue cutting-edge research and graduate with doctoral degrees from UA. If advisors are dismissed or leave UA, their students may lose assistantship funding which was available through advisors’ grants. In such cases UA must ensure that assistantships will be made available to allow PhD students to complete their degrees at the current level of support. 
 
Respectfully, 
(The undersigned)