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All seven full-time nursing faculty members at Dickinson State University in North Dakota resigned Wednesday in response to high workloads and accreditation concerns, according to KFYR-TV, Bismarck’s NBC affiliate.
The resignations are part of a wider faculty backlash to new credit hour production requirements and an increased minimum number of students per course, which DSU’s administration enacted earlier this year in an effort to cut costs.
Under the new policy, faculty contracts for the 2024–25 academic year require instructors to fulfill 24 credit hours and 320 modified credit production hours—the number of student credit hours generated by program faculty in an academic year. But nursing faculty argue that those requirements ignore the particulars of nursing education, which requires small faculty-to-student ratios in safety-sensitive clinical settings, The Dickinson Press reported.
“The modified credit production formula is unattainable under the current conditions,” Teresa Bren, one of the resigned nursing faculty members, told The Dickinson Press. “It’s unethical for me to sign a contract that I know I can’t fulfill.”
In May, the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) sent DSU a letter stating that the baccalaureate nursing programs were classified as accredited with good cause, according to The Dickinson Press. That's a probationary status that means the accreditor will visit the campus in spring 2025 to decide if the program is in compliance with accreditation standards.
Although the current probationary status stems from seemingly resolved concerns that “the nurse administrator has sufficient time for the assigned role responsibilities,” the new credit production requirements are also putting the program’s accreditation at risk, Bren told The Dickinson Press.
And last month, the North Dakota Board of Nursing expressed concerns that DSU’s heavier teaching loads wouldn’t allow faculty time for academic advising, clinical coordination of preceptor assignments and professional development.
In response to the resignations, DSU president Stephen Easton doubled down on the new policy, according to The Dickinson Press.
“The nursing faculty believe, or I should say the former nursing faculty, they apparently believe that the rules that apply to all of the rest of the DSU faculty should not apply to them,” he said, noting that the ACEN doesn’t have specific workload requirements. “I will not have a special set of rules for an entire program that allows that program to produce less credits and to work less hard than the faculty in other programs.”
DSU will hold a meeting with nursing students on July 19 to discuss the implications of the resignations.
“We are working hard to possibly identify, hopefully identify, new nursing faculty members and to work on partnerships with other North Dakota University system institutions,” Easton said. “I can’t tell you right now how those efforts will end. I can just say we are actively working on those matters.”
