Two Staff Laid Off, 17 Faculty Take SIP. Provost Announces No Curtailment.
By James Kelly
Published November 25, 2025
Two staff were laid off last week, according to President Donald Birx, just days after Provost Nate Bowditch announced that Jan. 2026 would not see program curtailment or retrenchment for tenured and tenure-track faculty. The curtailment decision was based on the result of the separation incentive program, Bowditch said.
“The SIP worked in the way we had hoped,” with a total of 17 faculty accepting the package, Bowditch told members of the American Association of University Professors – the union that represents tenured and tenure-track faculty at PSU. The announcement, which Bowditch made Nov. 17, came two days before two staff members were laid off on Nov. 19.
“We honor our departing colleagues who took the retirement incentive and will depart PSU at the end of this semester,” AAUP President Elliott Gruner said in a statement. “They represent a significant and vital cohort of colleagues impossible to replace.”
The two laid-off staff members, Will Loughlin and Peter Miller, worked in the Advancement and Communications & Marketing departments, respectively.
Miller, who joined PSU in 2018 and has served as Associate Director of Communications and Marketing since 2020, told The Clock he is particularly proud of the work he did with the Granite State News Collaborative during his time at PSU.
“Being laid off without warning, the week before Thanksgiving, is never how I imagined my time at Plymouth State would come to an end,” Loughlin, an Annual Giving Officer who graduated from PSU in 2024, wrote on LinkedIn. The news seemed to come out of nowhere, he told The Clock. “We had zero warning about anything coming and were still being told the week before that our jobs are safe,” Loughlin said. “[Bowditch] and Birx had been saying for months that there were no plans to layoff any staff as the number is already so limited.”
The icing on the cake, Loughlin said, was on the paper copy of the layoff notice itself: “My name wasn’t even spelled right,” he said.
The layoffs were a consequence of a “restructuring of the needs” of the Advancement and Marketing & Communications departments, Birx said in a statement to The Clock. There are no staff layoffs “contemplated or planned” for the Spring semester, he said.
But in a Nov. 21 interview, Bowditch said that future cuts to staff and non-tenure-track faculty were still up in the air. “We haven’t made those decisions yet,” he said. “There’s so much volatility and so much uncertainty, I think anything’s possible right now.”
Likewise, the potential for program curtailment after Jan. 2026 remains. “We’re making [decisions] one at a time,” starting with the decision to offer the SIP and followed by the decision to not curtail programs or retrench faculty in January, he said. “We’ll take each subsequent decision, look at where we are, make an assessment, and move from there.”
With 17 faculty taking the SIP, substantially fewer than 30 faculty – the rough target that faculty have said PSU has aimed for since March – are leaving PSU. University leadership has “stated explicitly since the beginning that we don’t want to retrench,” Bowditch said. “17 allows us to say: in January 2026, we will not be retrenching.”
For Gruner, the news is reason to recognize successes within the University System when they appear. In October, the University System Board of Trustees reported a better-than-expected 2025 fiscal year for USNH, according to the meeting’s minutes. Those announcements were among many that represented good news, Gruner said. “I highlight these positive stories in contrast to the previous signals about the need for retrenchment, which should remain an extraordinary measure taken under the most dire of circumstances.”
“We take as operating truth the positive story we heard at the last Board of Trustees meeting in October and parry deficit thinking we’ve heard in the past in favor of more productive strategies,” Gruner added. “We join University and System leadership in recognizing that only through cooperation can we take full advantage of the intellectual capital and energy of our faculty for progress.”
Faculty and staff cuts are happening across the University System. Keene State College announced last week that 12 faculty took the college’s SIP, according to The Keene Sentinel. Keene also laid off 25 staff, The Sentinel reported. 23 employees were laid off from UNH in August, according to The Portsmouth Herald. Another 35 UNH employees were laid off in May.