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When Jim Walsh takes the stage, shouts and cheers greet him. Walsh, a history instructor at CU-Denver, started using theater to teach history eight years ago and organized the Romero Theater Troupe to bring that education into the community.
At any given Troup performance, the audience is crowded with his current and former students, their friends and family, and members of the community interested in a little self-education. He's been investing himself at UCD for 16 years as a graduate student and a teacher. He consistently receives high ratings on student class evaluations. In March, he thought it was all coming to an end.
Walsh is on an annual contract, like many members of the faculty considered to be "at will." He was informed earlier this year that, in spite of his success in reaching his students and community with a unique approach to teaching, because of the budget cuts, the history department would be unable to renew his contract.
As UCD administrators struggle to run the university on a significantly smaller budget next year, staffing may be one area in which administrators try to reduce spending. At this time, administrators still haven't heard a figure for UCD's portion of $50 million eliminated from the University of Colorado system budget.
"UCD will face cuts. The exact amount, we do not know yet," said Jacqui Montgomery, Director of Media and PR for UCD. "We're doing everything we can to communicate with our community, with faculty, staff, and students, but there's a lot of uncertainty at this point."
UCD college deans have been instructed not to comment on the budget. Questions are being referred to the chancellor's and president's offices.
According to Montgomery, deans have been alerted to prepare for smaller budgets, and they will be able to direct the cuts made within their schools. But they won't get to move forward on those decisions until the Board of Regents gives them a number. The final figure should come out of their next meeting on May 18 and 19 at the Anschutz campus.
In an interview in March just following his dismissal, Walsh said, "I have a great love and admiration for the department. I've decided to fight the decision, not the department."
Walsh wasn't alone in his campaign. After the Romero Theater Troupe's March 14 performance of We Shall Not Be Moved, students who had acted in the play stood up in front of the packed Mercury Café audience and asked them to attend a rally on April 2 to demand that Walsh be reinstated. Borrowing and revising a song from the show, troupe members led the audience in singing, "Jim Walsh is our teacher; we shall not be moved."
They distributed flyers with the phone numbers and email addresses for Chancellor M. Roy Wilson, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs Dr. Roderick Nairn, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Dr. Daniel J. Howard, and Dr. Myra Rich, chair and associate professor of the department of history. Audience members were encouraged to write, call, or email those offices and ask that Walsh be reinstated.
The rally they planned never happened. It didn't need to.
A few days later, after being contacted by several people interested in seeing Walsh continue on staff, Dean Howard offered Walsh his job.
"The extent that he had gone to, to listen, to consider, and to understand, I think was extraordinary," said Walsh. "To me, the greatest thing that came out of it was the students' power to raise their voices."
Brighton Dawn Finger was one of the UCD students who organized a decentralized student committee to push back against the university's decision to dismiss Walsh. A junior majoring in political science, she took her first class with Walsh in spring of 2005 and joined the Romero Theater Troupe in October 2006.
"I found out [about the decision to let Walsh go] during one of our rehearsals before our performance at the Mercury Café, and so I told him that I could help out because I had previous experience in being part of a decentralized committee like that fighting against administration," she said.
Dawn Finger had participated in a decentralized committee that responded to an administrative decision to cut the Educational Opportunity Program, and won that program not only continued life, but increased funding.
"I told Jim about that and said, 'don't worry, I think we can get your job back,'" Dawn Finger said.
The decentralized committee members set the date for a rally and put together a community committee to meet with the dean. Dawn Finger said she was confident they could put enough pressure on the college to rehire Walsh.
"We knew that the university did not want a rally like that to be held," she said. "That's what they did with the [Educational Opportunity Program]-they caved in and met our demands right before the rally because they do not want publicity like that."
She said she would encourage other students frustrated by college administrators' decisions to make their opinions known. "I think people don't always realize the power they have if they organize, strategize, and take action."
Walsh is back on the schedule for fall at UCD, teaching immigration history and post-Civil War U.S. history.
So although students returning for the fall may see the university making some changes to accommodate for the budget squeeze, in one classroom at least, students will be, as Walsh said, "using the beautiful art of expression as a vehicle for learning."
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