CSCU seeking to fill new position of Vice Chancellor of External Affairs at $218,403 a year. Unions object.
The Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system is shedding frontline employees while seeking to fill a new high level position of Vice Chancellor of External Affairs. Unions are objecting to what appears to be a serious misallocation of resources.
The job posting appeared online last week. The winner of search will report “directly to the CSCU Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor is responsible for providing strategic direction and oversight to the Government Relations and External Affairs team as well as the Communications team in the CSCU System Office.”
The deadline to submit an application is August 2nd. The job posting indicates the winning applicant will start working in September. This is a short time to accept applications, review them, interview promising candidates and make a decision. The compressed schedule suggests to the skeptical that a candidate has been chosen and the hiring process is being observed because it must be.
CSCU has a grim history of conducting faux searches for high level positions–or no search at all–to benefit well-connected insiders in need of a job, sometimes one that boosts pension prospects.
Six union leaders objected to filling the new position in a message Thursday to Chancellor Terrence Cheng. “Faculty and Staff have long decried the expansion of the CSCU System Office, particularly at the expense of resources for our constituent universities and colleges during a decade of chronic underfunding,” they wrote in an email distributed by Seth Freedman, a professor of computer information systems at Capital Community College .
“In our community colleges campus managers have already begun cutting [part-time] and [full-time] staff who work in our Advising offices, Libraries, Tutoring Centers, English as a Second Language departments, and Workforce Development offices,” Freedman continued. He concluded by asking Cheng not to fill the new position while cutting student-facing services on our college and university campuses….”
CCSU’s central office saw finance director and former state budge chief Benjamin Barnes depart last week. General Counsel Ernestine Weaver was announced as Senior Fellow Advisor the next day.
The adumbrated search for a Vice Chancellor will add to growing concern among state leaders that Cheng is about to make some serious missteps at a time when regents and others require confidence in the system’s leader as the iron laws of demographics bear down on Connecticut’s colleges and universities.
Published July 20, 2023.