Ryan Quinn | 18 April 2024 | Inside Higher Ed

Howie Swerdloff has been a Rutgers University at New Brunswick lecturer for 14 years. A week ago, he said, while driving from a faculty meeting on the fall curriculum to teach a class, a text message appeared on his car’s console telling him to read his email. He pulled off to the side of the road, read it and was shocked.

Swerdloff learned he likely won’t be around to teach that fall curriculum. And he wasn’t alone: he said at least a score of other lecturers in the Rutgers Writing Program, which teaches writing to undergraduate students across the New Brunswick campus, are not being reappointed to teach. More than 100 classes are being cut and the maximum class sizes for the remaining instructors are increasing from 22 to 24, he said. A Rutgers spokesperson would not confirm or deny this Wednesday.

“There’s no educational justification for this,” Swerdloff said, adding that increasing class sizes “goes against all evidence of how to teach writing.” The program is “like a cultural icon,” he said, an “institution” of over 30 years, and cutting it is “shocking to people.” He said he worries about Rutgers taking away his email account that students use to reach him—sometimes to get a job reference from the only teacher they got to know well enough to request one. It’ll be like “I never existed here,” he said. “That’s really painful to think about.”

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