Gianna Hayes
Chief News Editor
Students crowded the entrance of the Governance Room in the Scot Center on Thursday, Feb. 5 at 3:30 p.m. during an emergency campus meeting called by President Anne McCall. Though faculty and staff were initially the only invitees, students had gradually heard news of mass layoffs initiated that morning and stood outside the doors in hopes of learning more. The decision was made by McCall in consultation with Lin Hillis, vice president for people, culture and talent, and David Jones, vice president for finance and business and treasurer for the College. Decisions were not made in consultation with the Strategic Planning and Priorities Advisory Committee (SPPAC), any faculty or the board of trustees.
In her opening remarks, McCall outlined the “structural deficit” challenges the College has faced due to low enrollment rates and acknowledged previous and ongoing strategies to sustain operating costs. In total, 18 full-time and four part-time staff were laid off and over a dozen vacant positions were closed. Other changes included reorganizing offices like APEX, the Dean of Students and Student Engagement. Those laid off were told Thursday morning that they were let go, effective immediately, and were asked to clear out their office spaces.
“I know there is uncertainty for the moment, and pain, and there are limits to what we can resolve this afternoon — but I want to say clearly that we are taking these actions to protect the mission of the College, and to ensure that Wooster remains strong, able to serve students for generations to come,” said McCall, addressing the staff and faculty. “You are a vital part of that work.”
After reading a prepared statement, McCall took questions and heard comments from the audience. Flynn Cowie ’26, Scot Council president, was first, and asked about the “sudden, seemingly harsh way” that the layoffs were communicated.
McCall responded, “we’ve been talking about that in faculty and staff meetings throughout the fall.” She was interrupted by most of the faculty and staff shaking their heads and a chorus of “no.” McCall continued, “actually, yes, and an outsider happened to tell me recently that she heard me saying it … I specifically brought it up in the December staff meeting as well, where I took questions from two of you on this.” She was again interrupted, this time by a staff member.
“No! No, you denied it at the faculty meeting on Monday! You did not answer a direct question about this! To say that we’ve been discussing it is to completely lie in front of everyone who’s sitting here,” said the staff member. McCall “disagree[d] heartily” with the staff member.
McCall went on to explain how the board of trustees asked her to decrease the budget deficit that started at $8.7 million to “reduce it as significantly as we could.” She also shared that “on an annualized basis, [the staff layoffs and positions closed] equals over $4 million in savings. So there’s actually a reality to what we had to do today.” Later in the meeting, she shared that the staff reductions have met about 80% of the goal for budget deficit reduction, and that about 20% more is needed by the end of the year. When asked why more was not done now, she responded that “because there may be people who simply leave.”
When asked why employees laid off were not given more than a day’s notice, McCall responded that in her experience it was not standard to give employees notice before their positions were terminated. “It’s not healthy for an organization to have a group of people who in fact know that the organization has separated itself from that person,” McCall said.
Next to speak was Meagen Pollock, department chair of earth sciences and associate dean for experiential learning (EL), who spoke about the implications of these decisions. “From a strategic standpoint, we’ve undermined our own stated priorities. We just gutted the very initiatives tied to our recruitment and retention goals and the strategic plan,” Pollock stated. “Particularly in EL, we didn’t just eliminate positions, we eliminated the people with the relationships, credibility and social capital to actually move this institution forward — at the exact moment we need that change most.”
A few times throughout the meeting, McCall was asked about why the highest paid employees of the College were not taking a pay cut as part of the strategy to reduce the budget deficit. When a faculty member asked about this, McCall responded that “if this were a one-time problem, that is exactly what we would be doing … we are not doing that now, because this is a structural deficit, this is a multi-year piece, and personally, I’d very much like to have this extremely talented cabinet stay with me.”
According to publicly available 990 tax forms for The College of Wooster on ProPublica, McCall’s current compensation is $262,797. The Voice consulted with anonymous sources with experience in economics to verify this number, but our sources expect that this is, in fact, an underestimation. When asked about why she was not taking a pay reduction in an interview with the Voice, McCall shared that “there are parts of my pay, my compensation package that I have actually never claimed because the College is in difficulty,” but she “consider[s] them private, I’m not going to be talking about them.”
Tessa Hammond, director of The College of Wooster Preschool, shared about the period of time during which the fate of the Preschool, previously known as the College of Wooster Nursery School, was unclear due to budget cuts. “When that scenario happened, I was new, and my staff, who had been employed at the preschool for, some of them, over 20 years, all took a significant pay cut to ensure that the program remained … because our heart and our values aligned with that program,” Hammond said.
Faculty and staff members at the meeting also raised concerns about morale and continued investment in the College. Rebecca Roper, Special Collections librarian, shared that “as an alum, going into a capital campaign, this kind of decision with the communication we’ve received does not incentivize me or my peers to donate.” In email communication with the Voice, she also shared more about communication issues, saying “There have been dozens of direct questions and opportunities for Anne [McCall] to be clear or transparent in the plans for balancing the budget, and at every opportunity she has spewed word salad answers or overly optimistic responses. It’s this lack of transparency and communication, lack of consulting with affected parties, as well as the cruelty of the layoffs, that are signs of poor leadership and lead me to not want to contribute monetarily as an alum.”
Roper also shared that “The way this transpired … is antithetical to the promises of [the] Wooster community I knew as a student and loved enough to come back as a faculty, and directly goes against the mission of the College despite what Anne [McCall] claims.”
Throughout the meeting, McCall shared plans and hopes for the future of the College, talking about “the Greenway plan” — a plan to create more green space on campus — or potential collaboration programs with Arizona State University.
A student asked what alternatives were considered and why they were not implemented. McCall shared that “we had hoped to close the gap significantly in a natural way. However, this year nationwide, it’s what’s called the quit index, the quit rate plummeted and ours did too.” The quit rate is measured in the number of quits during the entire month as a percent of employment. Looking at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics economic news release, it appears the quit rate in the private education sector has increased from 1.4% in Dec. 2024 to 1.9% in Dec. 2025.
Some faculty and staff feel concerned about the amount of added work that this will create for different departments across campus. One audience member brought this up in conjunction with the concern that faculty was not consulted in the decision making process, saying “we do so much free labor for this school, we have expertise across different peers, we are economists, we are accountants, we are survey people, we are data people, we have made tough decisions in our lives, we are capable of deciding where and what needs to be done in a community that we are the frontline of.”
One staff member shared her frustration at what she perceived as a lack of support for extra work that staff members do and how they support students, saying “we are [students’] support system. How could we be treated like we are just a bunch of numbers?”
Students asked McCall what she would do to continue informing the campus community the details of the budget deficit. She pointed to the meeting minutes of David Jones’ budget presentations to SPPAC. SPPAC is a committee of elected faculty and staff who advise the president and the administration on questions of College strategy and resource allocation, per the Statute of Instruction. Agendas and minutes are available on their page on Inside Wooster. Paul Seling, one of the 18 full-time employees who was laid off on Thursday, was an elected voting member of SPPAC, and Ashley Reid, another full-time employee who was laid off on Thursday, was a nonvoting member.
McCall ended the meeting just after 5 p.m., with McCall encouraging students to attend her open door office hours the next day from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and reaching out personally to talk about their questions or concerns.
These budget cuts come at a time when higher education as a whole is facing more scrutiny from the federal government, with grants not being renewed and visas for international students, staff and faculty being revoked. In Dec. 2023, Bloomberg published an article identifying small liberal arts schools who were facing significant financial trouble, with Wooster meeting three of the five stress factors. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on stressors to college budgets currently facing many institutions. One of the stressors identified was staff salaries rising to meet inflation and health-care premiums — a trend that resonates with Wooster.
The Voice received a tip that earlier this academic year, Human Resources (HR) would be raising health premiums, requiring employees to pay more in employee contributions to health coverage. Additionally, annual vacation accrual is capped at 30 days and must be used by July 1. According to an anonymous source, McCall’s 2% raise for all employees does not cover these costs.
