Rider faculty layoffs felt by students, colleagues

By Grace Bertrand and Caroline Haviland

Laid off full-time faculty were offered by the administration to return as adjuncts in spring 2026 with more than a 70% pay cut and no benefits, after mass faculty layoffs took place on Dec. 29, according to Director of Communications Rachel Stengel. 

In the last week of 2025, the university laid off 30 full-time faculty as part of Rider President John Loyack’s March to Sustainability Plan. The layoffs were determined by inverse seniority within disciplines chosen by the administration, as the faculty’s contract requires, rather than the initial performance rubric outlined in the Plan.

The layoffs affected 14 departments universitywide: English; music studies; communication, journalism and media; government, politics, and law; computer science and physics; earth and chemical sciences; history and philosophy; languages, literatures and cultures; health sciences and nursing; information systems, analytics and supply chain management; finance and economics; graduate education, leadership and counseling; teacher education; and the university library.

The full-time faculty impacted were offered to remain at Rider as adjunct faculty members, receiving a largely reduced salary and no benefits. Stengel told The Rider News on Jan. 8, “All affected faculty were extended the opportunity to teach as adjuncts, pending course availability beginning this spring and beyond.”

Loyack and Provost Kelly Bidle did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Rider News. 

Vincent Toro, now an adjunct English professor, was a full-time faculty member before getting laid off and agreeing to return in spring 2026 to “volunteer” to teach. 

“I could choose to just collect unemployment and not help the school this way, but I know that it needs professors to teach those classes in order to keep going, and the students need the consistency of working with professors that are already mentoring them,” Toro wrote to The Rider News on Jan. 6. 

Toro is set to teach a 200-level introduction to creative writing class and a 300-level playwriting class in the spring semester. After previously receiving a salary of $80,000, Toro said his salary as an adjunct will be less than $10,000 for two classes. 

“I am doing this because I mean it when I say that I always, always put students first. And that is what is most tragic about this situation because the students have made clear that what they want is to work with junior professors such as myself who are active and successful in their field, and who bring contemporary approaches to teaching that are student centered and innovative,” Toro wrote. “The students deserve that much, considering all they give to this school.” 

Former professor-librarian Heather Dalal found herself dealing with “emotions like grief” upon receiving her termination notice from Bidle on Dec. 29. Dalal said in an interview with The Rider News on Jan. 7 that the emails being sent out two days before faculty members lost their jobs was “really inhumane.” 

The impacted faculty joined individual Zoom meetings on Dec. 30, where they were notified that their health insurance would be discontinued beginning on Jan. 1, Dalal said, and their offices and email accounts were to be cleaned out by Jan. 9.

The university provided faculty laid off with an offer to partake in three months of career coaching and instructions on how to apply for COBRA insurance, also known as the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, and Medicare, Dalal said, but a severance package or “a little acknowledgement” would have been preferred among the faculty. 

Starting at Rider in 2012, Dalal worked in the university library, the Norm Brodsky College of Business and the graduate education program to help students better understand researching techniques and platforms. With her removal, the university is left with five librarians. 

Faculty morale plummets 

Following the university’s announcement on Nov. 10 of the impending faculty layoffs listed in the Plan, Dalal said campus morale reached a record low. 

“[The university] definitely knew something was up a long time ago, so they could’ve prepared and not dragged this on to make all the faculty feel this way,” Dalal said. 

The anxiety of the layoffs were felt by more than just the faculty members impacted. Justin Burton, a music professor who was not part of Rider’s layoffs, shared a similar sentiment. 

“The fall was pure anxiety as we waited to find out who would be culled, and December was excruciating as we waited for the notices, only to have the date of those notices pushed back multiple times,” he said. “For several weeks during the fall semester, faculty became numbers to the administration and contractual grist to union leadership, with no direct say in what would happen to us. Those are conditions for terrible morale.”

Burton said his hope is for the morale at Rider to be better in the spring than it was in the fall, though he acknowledged it will be difficult for faculty to move on from the loss of colleagues — a loss Burton said he knows all too well from the multiple rounds of layoffs Rider has undergone over the years. 

Laurel Harris, an associate professor of English, who was also not impacted by the layoffs felt the weight of losing colleagues she’s worked with for years, as well. She said, “While I was fortunate not to be laid off, I lost so many hardworking and committed colleagues who I greatly admire. I’m still very much trying to process what happened.” 

Harris is also the director of the Baccalaureate Honors Program, making her a mentor for many students like most of the laid off faculty who were also academic advisors. 

“Losing a mentor is certainly going to be difficult for the students affected,” Harris said. “I hope they’ll be able to get the guidance they need moving forward.”

Lilly Trace, a senior English major, was faced with the removal of two professors that she “has come to value a great deal,” through their extensive counsel in her time at Rider.

“I can’t put into words how much their being laid off upsets me. I feel saddened by losing their counsel, concerned for their future careers and angered that they have to leave at all,” Trace wrote to The Rider News. 

Among the laid off faculty was one of the professors that teach upper-level French courses at Rider, Trace said, which has caused her to lose a mentor that “reignited [her] love for the French language” as she is in pursuit of completing a French minor. 

“The financial turmoil that Rider University is in demands swift and drastic action, I recognize that, but these were two of the best professors I have had at this school, and I can confidently say that Rider has suffered a huge loss by no longer having them,” Trace said.

For Burton, it is clear that the responsibility to step in and provide guidance for the students will fall on the remaining faculty, causing them to “stretch” themselves in the support they can offer.  

“It is impossible to replace the relationships students have built with faculty who have been laid off, and it’s impossible to replicate the expertise of those faculty members, too,” Burton said. “I’m especially mindful of students whose best queer ally at the faculty level has been laid off, or who lost a faculty member from the same racial or ethnic group they come from. Those losses are simply losses, and it does us no good to pretend otherwise.”

Further faculty sacrifices  

Originally, the administration announced through the Plan that the layoffs were set to follow a performance rubric designed by Bidle. However, Rider’s chapter of the Association of American University Professors fought for the layoffs to go by inverse seniority per its contract. 

A neutral third-party, or an arbitrator, then ruled in favor of the AAUP, deciding that “a performance-based termination is a harsher burden for an employee seeking other employment than a layoff due to economic exigencies,” the AAUP wrote in a Jan. 8 facultywide email.

Although the AAUP said it did not demand for the enforcement of the required 10-month notice of the layoffs or the layoff of all adjuncts in an affected department or discipline, given the “emergency nature” of the situation, it did ask for the layoffs to be given out with pay or at least a two week’s notice. However, the arbitrator declined the request. 

Although the discussions over the faculty layoffs are finished, the AAUP said further conversations surrounding other faculty sacrifices are far from over. 

The AAUP continued in the facultywide email, “This win does not prevent the extreme measures the administration has taken nor change the underlying reality that drastic action is necessary in order to save Rider from closing. We have now entered into discussions with the administration over what changes will be necessary and for how long.” 

Starting in the 2026-27 academic year, according to Rider’s Plan, there will be an end to external faculty tuition remission benefits, saving $600,000 annually, and reduced paid faculty development benefits saving $374,000 each year. The university is also requiring tenured or tenure-track faculty to teach four courses a semester instead of three, and lecturers to teach five classes per semester instead of four. 

“My final hope is that, as faculty, when we are exhausted and at the end of our patience, we remember where to put our fight,” Burton said. “It isn’t with students, and it isn’t with our staff colleagues. Our fight is to continue to push to hold the Board of Trustees accountable, to demand an administration that won’t repeat the errors of its predecessors, and to call for union leadership that solicits and listens to the voices of its membership.” 

Despite having found the layoff process “cruel,” Dalal said she believes the university’s faculty has built a “strong thing,” and similar to Burton, has hope that Rider can persevere through the current campus climate. 

“I really hope this is the darkest day and that things grow from here, I really do,” Dalal said.