Right now Berklee is a sinking, direction-less boat. At the outset of the pandemic they laid off dozens of staff members. Some were furloughed and brought back, and some were just let go entirely. Faculty are in a union so employee cuts had to come from staff (or at least that's my understanding). I wish staff had a union too because it often feels like staff have no protection from the changing whims of leadership, as we saw with the furloughs.
Not once did Berklee dip into it's endowment to help prevent lay offs, as other higher ed institutions in the area did. The pay is VERY low, even among higher ed, and Berklee just refuses to raise pay to retain employees, so people are leaving in droves and they are having trouble hiring replacements, probably because the compensation is so terrible.
Fast-forward to 2022, people are leaving, pay is stagnant, benefits are sub-par, but the institution decided to spend boatloads of money to reorganize parts of the college in ways that are chaotic and harmful to staff morale. I hope that they're right and the reorg does improve things for students, but in the mean time this is one of the last straws for a lot of people who just don't want to deal with the stressful environment anymore. The president just really, truly does not seem to care about the staff.
It's also worth mentioning that the management has made a lot of diversity and inclusion blunders, and have a very poor record of disciplining faculty and staff accused of misconduct.
