Surprise news about campus consolidation. Any wisdom?

[welp2019]

Greetings to all.  An article came out yesterday in a real estate blog about selling the main building on our campus (in NYC), and it looks like we are about to deal with a campus consolidation about which we (faculty)  had no idea.  Union seems to be in the dark too.  Anyone go through something similar?  I'm trying not to panic (ha).

[mamselle]

Do they have another campus they're going to focus on?

If so, I saw that, yes.

Pretty weird if they didn't tell anyone.

But that happened at the Episcopal Divinity School, too....trustees played close and tight and suddenly....wham.

My sympathies.

M.

[spork]

It could be a lease-back arrangement: somebody buys the property, the university gets a chunk of cash, and the university becomes a tenant in what it used to own. But what has happened to enrollment over the last decade? Up, down, flat? Same for tuition discount rate. If the campus's total square footage is going to shrink because there are fewer students and net tuition revenue is going down, that's not a good sign.

[welp2019]

Thanks for the replies!

M, yes, you've got it.  Thanks for the sympathies (and the faculty was completely blindsided).  AAUP leadership did not know.

S, from the news leak, there is an intention to lease for 1-2 years, but it seems unlikely that the new owner (when--not if, given the prime location--it sells). 

We have a contract that allows us to "bump" by seniority, and it's one CBA across campuses.  However, I am not putting my eggs completely in that basket.  How could anyone at this point? Needless to say, it will be a heck of a beginning to the new academic year.

[mamselle]

I'm dealing with a different kind of need to suddenly start imagining alternative realities to the one I've been working at for the past few years...it's very hard.

Suddenly, instead of imagining ways to do work that you know is before you, that has context and purpose, and so on, you have to pull your imagination out of that setting and set it loose into an unknown world.

My imagination needs a ballet class to develop more flexibility, I think.

M.