St. Francis College, a Catholic institution that’s been in the heart of Downtown Brooklyn for 166 years, fired around 17 employees including academic advisors, registrar workers and librarians last week.
It’s the latest in a series of drastic cost-saving measures implemented by college President Tim Cecere that current and former employees and students told THE CITY are turning a beacon for first-generation college students from Brooklyn into a shell of itself, catering to international graduate students who are rarely on campus.
The layoffs, representing about a quarter of the school’s already dwindling staff, are the latest blow under the leadership of President Tim Cecere, a former human resources professional on the board of trustees, who had no experience in higher education before joining the school as chief operating officer in 2022, later becoming interim president in March of 2023. He was officially named the storied institution’s 20th president a year later.
His tenure as president began with the abrupt end of the school’s Division I athletics department — which includes the city’s oldest basketball program, a charter member of the NCAA — and the sale of the school’s campus in tony Brooklyn Heights.
That was followed by widespread layoffs, turnover and two votes of no confidence by faculty, according to internal documents reviewed by THE CITY.
Many in the St. Francis community who spoke with THE CITY lamented what they described as the downward spiral of the historic Brooklyn institution, which for decades was a beacon for local college students seeking an affordable alternative to CUNY.
“It was like the Harvard of Brooklyn,” said one fired staffer, who’d also attended the university as a student. “If you went to Saint Francis, that meant your life had elevated. You’re gonna do something with yourself and your people are not gonna have to worry about you.”
But, the former staffer went on, “Now I have a kid and I would never send my kid to that school.”
The college’s remaining faculty have accused the president of “inappropriate appointments and removals, financial mismanagement, grossly poor leadership, and abandonment of the mission and values of the College” according to a letter to the school’s leadership reviewed by THE CITY.
Reached for comment, Cecere dismissed the concerns about the school’s future and said the cost-savings measures he’d implemented were setting St. Francis on a trajectory of success for years to come.
“The college hasn’t been this strong in years,” he said. “We have zero debt, which not a lot of colleges can say. Every dollar that comes in is optimized for the benefit of the students.”
Cecere declined to say how many people were still there on staff. He said that the college is continuing to hire even as it lays people off but declined to provide specifics. As to the concerns about the possibility St. Francis could close or merge with another school, he said, “It’s just not true.”
He also said he is unfazed by the no-confidence votes on his leadership by full-time faculty members.
“This seems to be a very common practice,” Cecere claimed. “I don’t really have an opinion on that other than I think I’m doing a fantastic job,” he added.
‘Small College of Big Dreams’
St. Francis was founded in 1859 by Franciscan friars who had immigrated from Ireland, opening it as the first private school in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Two decades later it expanded to offer university degrees.
For the past century, the university has prided itself on being one of the most affordable private colleges in the state, and a “small college of big dreams” attracting first-generation college students.
“It was really comforting to see that SFC was like a really small campus,” said Maryam Shuaib, 22, a Palestinian-American who grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and graduated last spring with a degree in political science. When deciding between CUNY colleges and St. Francis back in 2020, she picked the latter because of the low student-teacher ratio and the full scholarship she’d been offered.
“I’d essentially be going to college for free for the next four years,” she said.
But after a year of remote learning, the gradual return to campus in 2021 was nothing like Shuaib had pictured it. Stories from upperclassmen solidified her understanding that post-COVID, St. Francis was simply not the same place it had been.
“We had a pretty active dance team. We had Division I sports, and students would go to all of the games. There’d be like a constant sense of camaraderie among students and athletes and whatnot. And the quality of teaching was a lot better.”
But after the pandemic, Shuaib said, some of her classes were taught “asynchronously” — meaning students had to work through assignments on their own time instead of attending lectures with their professors. Student advisors who helped her navigate the college experience or prep her resume kept quitting or getting fired. Her professors seemed overworked. Campus cleared out by 4:30 p.m. in the afternoon.
“It was essentially like you were stepping into two different campuses before COVID and after,” Shuaib said.
Despite her frustrations, Shuaib got involved in student government and later became class president her senior year. Her pro-Palestinian activism put her on a collision course with university leadership. While the school had no major protests or encampments like many other New York institutions, Shuaib said she happened to be leaving campus the same time as Cecere one afternoon and took the opportunity to question him about the university’s stance on the Israel-Hamas conflict as they rode the train together.
The next day she got a letter from another administrator warning her not to contact Cecere without an appointment. Several months later after she sent an email to Cecere she was issued a “no contact order,” which barred her from reaching out to the college’s president directly in any way, an order which remained in effect for the rest of her time as class president.
Cecere didn’t immediately return a request for comment on his interaction with Shuaib.
Failing Math
Like many higher education institutions, St. Francis has struggled to stay afloat facing ballooning costs and flat revenues. A 2023 audit ordered by the federal government found “substantial doubt about the College’s ability to continue.”
Cecere and other administrators took drastic cost-cutting measures that year, including laying off around 50 employees, abruptly closing the entire athletics department and selling a historic Brooklyn Heights building, where the school had been located for more than a century. Classes moved to a nearby office building on Livingston Street where the college is renting out three floors.
In a statement issued on the day that the board of trustees killed the athletics department and announced that the school’s former president had requested a personal leave, with Cecere appointed as acting president, its chair said that the changes were a necessary response to “increased operating expenses, flattening revenue streams, and plateauing enrollment due in part to a shrinking pool of high school graduates in the aftermath of COVID”.
Several current and former students at St. Francis said they noticed an immediate change. Advisors were few and far between, leaving professors to shoulder some of those duties and making them harder to connect with outside of class.
“Very suddenly there was not as much support for students,” said Kayla, a 23-year-old St. Francis graduate from South Brooklyn who was the first person in her family to attend college.
Another student who asked that their name be withheld because they are still attending the university said they had the sense that staff and faculty were being overworked.
“I just don’t know what’s going to happen next,” the student told THE CITY. “I’m always evaluating if I should have a Plan B — if I should transfer out.”
Undergraduate enrollment dropped to 1,900 undergraduate students in the 2023-2024 school year from 2,500 two years earlier. But that decline has been masked by the explosion of the graduate programs. Those programs, which had enrolled just 89 students in 2021, ballooned to more than 1,700 last school year, with 2,200 students, more than half of the school’s entire population, hailing from abroad.
Karen Fox, an assistant in the president’s office who worked closely with administrators until she quit last summer, said leadership supplemented declining local enrollment with heavy international recruiting, first from India and later from the Philippines.
Administrators regularly discussed how, “every two students from out of the country equate financially to every one undergrad student,” she said.
‘An Inhospitable Environment’
Full-time faculty members have conducted two no confidence votes in two years, raising their concerns about layoffs and staff turnover, and about whether St. Francis would be able to maintain its accreditation when it comes up for review by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education next year.
A spokesperson for the Middle States Commission, which accredits schools based on five principles including the centrality of the student experience, and “Emphasis on Data and Evidence-based Decision-making,” didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The current work environment and skeleton staff will create an inhospitable environment for students, who are at the core of our mission,” reads a letter full-time faculty sent to senior management in June 2023, after 68% of the 60 full-time faculty members voted they had no confidence in Cecere, who at the time was the acting president. That followed the layoffs of 47 staffers and the end of the athletics program.
A second “no confidence” vote happened last August, with faculty again raising alarm bells citing a shrinking staff then down to 85 from 313, according to the letter.
“Faculty and staff morale has reached its lowest point under the current leadership of St. Francis College, to the point where faculty and staff are retiring early or resigning at unprecedented rates,” the letter to administrators read. “The current administration’s demonstrated wanton disregard for student needs such as first-year support.”
This month’s layoffs have Cecere’s critics again questioning what his plans are for St. Francis’ future.
“What will the student experience be if there are no academic advisors, there’s no registrar, there’s no library staff,” wondered Meaghan Davis, the former assistant director of student leadership and professional development, who quit her job this fall amid the ongoing turmoil. “The only reason why a college would do this in my mind is that you’re either preparing for an acquisition or you’re preparing to close.”
In a follow up statement sent over email, Cecere added, “St. Francis College remains committed to the tireless pursuit of enriching students with the best of all worlds — world-class faculty, small class sizes, flexible schedules and modalities, support resources always within arm’s length, experienced administrators, and receiving marketable degrees that fulfill our long-standing mission of providing a financially attainable, high quality education; firmly planted in Franciscan values of community, collaboration, and connection.”
