The realities of the “Higher Education Bubble” have intruded on two campuses recently, and professors are angry to find out that jobs can be eliminated without faculty involvement or even awareness of the possibility.

Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty offers these details:

Laying off faculty should be the last course of action for struggling institutions, and professors should play a role in determining whether those layoffs are necessary — and, if so, how those layoffs happen, according to recommended and common shared governance practices.

But faculty members at two institutions that have terminated otherwise well-performing professors in recent weeks say they’re still in the dark as to how those decisions were made, and whether they were really necessary.

Both institutions are private, and so faculty members lack the access to open records or required open meetings requirements of public institutions.

“We’ve put our heads together but we just can’t find a commonality,” said Robert Ingoglia, a longtime professor of history at Felician College in New Jersey and one of 16 professors who recently were told they won’t be coming back next year. The Roman Catholic college doesn’t have tenure, but some of the terminated professors have been there for more than 20 years. “I was just up for retention and I got a [perfect] score.”

Ingoglia continued: “Some students don’t like me, but I’m fair and rigorous, and many of the students I interact with love me. I’m just really hurt by this, to say the least.”

…Last week, Carroll University, a tuition-dependent liberal arts institution in Wisconsin, also sent shock waves through the faculty by laying off two well-performing assistant professors of history. Presidents of both of the university’s shared governance bodies, one of whom is the most recent chair of the department, said they were unaware of the decision until the day it was announced.

Two other assistant professors in other departments were let go, following their annual reviews and not for financial reasons, according to information from the university.

“I was completely taken off-guard, and particularly taken off-guard because two of the faculty came from my program and they were not the most recent hires in the department,” said Kimberly Redding, who recently resigned from her position as history chair for unrelated reasons. “They were seen as critical to [new programs].”.