Majority of Wheelock Staff Will Lose Jobs in Boston University Merger
More than 100 employees will be terminated when the schools officially combine on June 1.
Photo by Olga Khvan
More than half of the employees at Wheelock College will lose their jobs after the school merges with Boston University.
The institutions are scheduled to combine on June 1, at which point 111 members of the Wheelock staff will be terminated, according to the Boston Globe. BU will offer severance packages to the outgoing employees, and the university extended job offers to 93 other Wheelock staffers, as their work does not duplicate that of existing BU personnel.
“Losing talented staff and faculty is hard,” David Chard, Wheelock’s president, said in a statement to the Globe. “Boston University has offered us a unique opportunity to retain the academic knowledge and expertise of Wheelock’s tenured faculty and the capacity of many of our high-quality staff members.”
In October, BU and Wheelock reached an agreement to join forces. Once the merge is complete, a new school of education bearing the Wheelock name will become a part of BU, and Chard will serve as its interim dean.
The 1,100 current Wheelock students are not required to apply to BU and will have their credits honored. Wheelock sought out potential institutions to merge with based on the school’s “position given changing demographics, demand of programs, cost of operations, the national higher education landscape, and projections of the next few years,” according to the BU website.
