By Anna Gustafson
About 1,700 full-time employees at St. John’s University have been offered voluntary buyout packages and college officials said they will know next week how many individuals at the school will accept them.
The weak economy in part prompted the offers made to 350 faculty and 1,345 administrators and staff, although St. John’s spokesman Dominic Scianna emphasized the school is “still in good financial shape.”
“This wasn’t an emergency precaution,” Scianna said. “It’s something we had been looking at doing in terms of meeting challenges. The university is still on solid ground.”
The approximate 1,700 full-time employees — the bulk of the 2,100 full-time individuals at SJU — had to respond to the buyouts by March 12 and have a seven-day grace period in which to change their decisions, Scianna said. College officials notified employees of the buyouts in January and have since held numerous seminars on the packages.
Scianna did not specify the benefits of the buyout, but said the packages were “generous” and include benefits and salary.
SJU does not have a specific goal as to how many full-time employees it hopes will accept the buyouts and no layoffs are being considered at this point, according to Scianna.
“The last thing we want to do is do layoffs,” Scianna said.
Universities across the country have been rocked by the recession and college officials said they have worked hard to curtail spending.
“We’ve cut budgets internally, we had a soft hiring freeze, and budgets have been cut in a lot of areas across the board,” Scianna said.
Marilyn Martone, an associate professor of theology who accepted the buyout, said the rough economic climate can be especially daunting for a school like St. John’s, which does not have a large endowment and relies heavily on tuition.
“I don’t know intimately what the financial situation is here, but everybody’s a little concerned,” Martone said.
Martone, who has been at St. John’s for 26 years, said the buyout was a good deal for her because she was already thinking of retiring. She added that tenured professors are not worried about layoffs, but “staff and administrators might be concerned that if they don’t take the buyout there will be cuts.”
Theresa Maylone, a St. John’s librarian, told SJU’s student newspaper, The Torch, that 10 percent of the library staff had accepted buyouts by early March.
If too many people accept the packages, Scianna said university officials would ask people to remain at the school.
Reach reporter Anna Gustafson by e-mail at agustafson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.
