One university conducts another queen sacrifice

How do colleges and universities respond to enrollment and financial pressures?

One response is to cut tenure-track faculty members. Years ago I nicknamed this “the queen sacrifice” after the desperate chess move, when a player gives up the most powerful piece on the board (here tenure-track faculty stand in for the queen) in a big to win. I’ve tracked too many of these sacrifices, and today will describe another.

Cabrini University recently laid off six professors, three of whom were not just tenure-track, but tenured. For perspective, that half-dozen “represent 8.7% of Cabrini’s 69 full-time faculty,” according to that short Philadelphia Inquirer account.

Which departments felt those losses? The same sources lists “writing and narrative arts, two science, one math, and one visual and performing arts.” Yet Cabrini did not cut a single program this time.

Why these cuts? The campus faces a $5–6 million deficit, which looks like it was driven by a shocking enrollment drop, “from 2,360 in 2016 to approximately 1,500,” according to Diverse Issues in Higher Education.

Cabrini has been having problems for years. Back in 2021 the university led an even larger queen sacrifice, “eliminat[ing] 46 positions and cut[ting] or chang[ing] 15 of its 69 programs.” Targeted…