Lebanon
The good news that preceded it was that more than nine times as many former Geisel employees would be hired on favorable terms at Dartmouth-Hitchcock.
And, in what is not yet news but could be in the future, a D-H executive held out the prospect that even more jobs could be generated within five years as a result of the restructuring.
Things went into motion Tuesday afternoon, when D-H, the Lebanon-based hospital and clinic operator with ties to the college but a separate corporate and financial existence, said it would offer jobs to 285 Geisel employees who will be losing their places on the college payroll.
The new D-H employees will “continue to maintain, or in some cases increase, current salaries,” said John Birkmeyer, a D-H executive vice president and chief academic officer. New employees’ years of service at the college will also be used to calculate vacation time and the vesting of their retirement benefits, he said.
The former Geisel employees — 182 physicians, researchers and staff in the psychiatry department and 103 faculty and staff involved in clinical research — will meet the new boss on July 1, according to a release from D-H.
But more than two dozen former Geisel employees will be out of work.
“On the net, when the dust settles, we expect that 30 individuals may not have employment offers” from D-H, Geisel Interim Dean Duane Compton said in an interview early Tuesday evening.
Tuesday’s announcement culminates a process that began to surface 22 months ago when the college announced that former Geisel Dean Wiley “Chip” Souba would not be reappointed. Concern about the future of the school intensified following a round of layoffs during the fall of 2014, a pay freeze the following spring and a series of deficit estimates that eventually topped out at $30 million.
That set the stage for a restructuring plan that Geisel and Dartmouth leaders outlined in September that they said would move hundreds of jobs to D-H and eliminate a smaller but unspecified number of others.
What followed was a wrenching, protracted and often public transition sequence that roiled some faculty and employees concerned about their jobs, pay and benefits. Looming in the background were questions about faculty and staff’s future relationships to the college that, with its $4.7 billion endowment and Ivy League pedigree, serves as an economic and cultural anchor in the Upper Valley.
Birkmeyer said that up to this point the most difficult and contentious part of the process was “dealing with affected individuals.” Going forward, he said, attention will shift to the organizational needs and challenges that will come as D-H steps into the role of grantee on federal and non-federal support for research.
For its part, D-H’s willingness to redefine its relationship to Geisel reflected its “strong interest in strengthening its academic brand and the research portfolio of its physician faculty,” Birkmeyer said. D-H’s goal is to double the size of the research portfolio — now about $35 million — within three to five years, he said.
An expected byproduct of the transaction, Birkmeyer said, would be “substantially increased employment opportunities in the Upper Valley and beyond.” That’s because a $10 million increase in the research portfolio would generate 100 jobs, so that meeting the target of doubling the portfolio could produce 300 to 400 new positions, he added.
Over the next months, D-H managers will focus on creating the “administrative infrastructure” to oversee the expanded research portfolio. About 75 percent of the load is expected to be carried by the existing workforce at D-H or employees transferred over from Geisel, but an additional 10 to 20 employees will be needed to fill positions ranging from administrative staff to two new management posts: chief research officer and vice president of research operations.
Compton said that work at Geisel will now focus on the detailed arrangements for transferring administration of the research portfolio to D-H and on carrying out the academic reorganization that will transform eight existing departments into five basic science and one medical education department.
Compton defended Geisel’s approach to restructuring. “We’ve tried to engage with the affected individuals as much as we could every step of the way,” he said. That approach, when it got ahead of the available “granular information,” had been unfairly criticized for its vagueness, he added.
Compton stressed that the final plan “preserves the most jobs in the community and the most programs we support.”
Rick Jurgens can be reached at rjurgens@vnews.com or 603-727-3229.
Correction
Dartmouth-Hitchcock estimates that an addition of $10 million to its research portfolio would generate about 100 jobs. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the ratio of research spending to jobs.