By Matthew Hersh

Princeton University’s Keller Center, the multi-disciplinary engineering hub that operates within the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), will lay off its entire staff as part of a restructuring first outlined in February by University President Christopher L. Eisgruber.

While Keller Center staff will not be immediately affected by the plans, the move continues a planned effort to temper increases in employee benefits and salary increases across campus as part of Eisgruber’s long-term vision for the University and its financial health.

A March 5 email to affected Keller Center faculty, first reported in The Daily Princetonian, delivered news of the “very difficult decision,” as described by SEAS Dean Andrew Houck, but necessary to ensure Keller’s long-term financial viability.

Houck’s email to faculty indicated that employees would have the opportunity to apply for new positions listed on the Center’s website. Currently, the University has listed positions for the Keller Center’s executive director, undergraduate administrator, and communications and events specialist.

The Keller Center “equips undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty with the knowledge, mentoring and resources needed to conceive and execute projects of personal and societal impact,” according to its website. Its mission explores ways to fuse liberal arts and engineering through “curricular and co-curricular programs organized around design, design thinking, entrepreneurship and innovative teaching, at the intersection of technology and society.”

The restructuring of the Keller Center “is the result of careful financial and programmatic analysis particularly in the context of the current budgetary environment,” said University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill. “The Center’s faculty positions and course offerings are not affected by the restructuring and the Minor in Entrepreneurship and the Minor in Technology and Society will continue. The School of Engineering remains committed to the Keller Center’s critical mission of interdisciplinary education in entrepreneurship, design, and societal impact.”

In his “State of the University” letter to students, Eisgruber addressed the current state of navigating political threats, preserving a commitment to free speech, and outlined budget limitations and obstacles as the school has seen an increasing reliance on its endowment. “Endowment payout provided about 15 percent of the University’s operating revenue in 1985. In 2016, when the Board published the University’s strategic framework, the endowment supplied 55 percent of Princeton’s operating revenue. Ten years later, that number stands at 65 percent,” Eisgruber wrote in the February 2 memo.

The University would also shift toward consolidation and away from expansion. Eisgruber characterized this as a transition toward a period of strategic consolidation, focusing on maintaining current excellence rather than further expansion.

News of the Keller Center’s restructuring arrives just a year after SEAS expanded Keller’s leadership team, appointing a new director and introducing an associate director role.

Serving as a bridge between engineering and the wider University, the center had been expanding its role as a problem-solving hub through design. Dean Houck, a Princeton University professor and national leader in the field of quantum science and engineering, took the SEAS helm last August, succeeding Andrea Goldsmith, who went on to become president of Stony Brook University.

In the two decades since its founding, the Keller Center has built a wide range of programs that bridge disciplines within engineering and connect them with the wider University, with the overall goal of providing students experience and skills to achieve impact beyond their academic disciplines, including an alternative first-year engineering curriculum that integrates foundational math and science with practical engineering problems.