Crises beget rumors. Our current financial crisis has generated lots of rumors about how our administration is going to “solve” our ongoing financial crisis. Most of these rumors deal with ways that some administrator is going to reduce university or college expenditures. Because I am president of the faculty senate, many faculty, and even staff, feel compelled to pass these rumors on to me. They seem to be testing me to see if I know what is really going on behind the scenes. They also want to know what the faculty senate is going to do. These rumors range from closing down one of the colleges to firing some staff member in charge of a specific facility. In spite of the fact that I serve on two university-wide budget advisory committees, most of these rumors have been news to me. With the exception of some university-wide ways to reduce expenditures (furloughs and reduced contributions to retirement accounts), as far as I know, almost nothing else has been decided at this point. What fuels the rumor mill is that there has been little public discussion to date about specific measures that are being considered to reduce expenditures.
It is always hard to know how much credence to give rumors. I judge the credibility of rumors using three simple criteria: (1) How likely is it that the person passing on a rumor has access to “privileged information”? (2) Are there multiple sources for a rumor? and (3) How realistic is the rumor? The third criterion puts most rumors into the improbable category. As the level of paranoia has risen among faculty and staff, the rumors reaching me are becoming more preposterous. Unfortunately, more preposterous does not always translate into more improbable. Sometimes they really are out to get you.
One recent rumor is that the administration is going to suspend tenure. This preposterous rumor unfortunately is coming from multiple, credible sources. There have been a number of variants of this rumor. In essence, it goes like this: (1) The administration will dissolve some departments of their choosing and will fire all the faculty in these departments. (2) The administration will create one or more new departments. and (3) The administration will then rehire selected faculty from dissolved departments into the new department(s). In effect, this plan allows the administration to “cherry pick” the faculty that they want to keep and to reduce expenditures by firing the faculty that they think are underperforming. For all faculty, but especially tenure-track faculty, this is a frightening rumor. Faculty believe that it is tenure that will prevent them from being fired without good cause. This is undoubtedly some frustrated administrator’s fantasy (simple-minded?) solution to the complex and difficult problems created by our budget crisis.
After a six-year or longer probationary period, tenure is granted to faculty to ensure that they have academic freedom; that is, the right to comment on issues on which they are experts without fear of retribution from politicians, administrators or fellow faculty. Any plan to reduce expenditures that requires suspending tenure is not something that any university administration would (or should) consider lightly. (Think lawsuits and lots and lots of bad publicity.) The faculty senate would resist the implementation of any such plan. The senate represents the interests of the faculty, and it is not going to approve or concur with any plan that undermines tenure and faculty job security. Although tenured faculty can be fired under very specific circumstances, these rarely occur, much to the frustration of some administrators.
Among the short list of reasons that tenured faculty can be terminated is financial exigency. It is financial exigency that is the supposed justification for the rumored plan to close departments, to fire all their tenured faculty, and to rehire faculty selected by administrators into newly created departments. Suspending tenure by declaring financial exigency is the academic equivalent of suspending civil rights by declaring martial law or suspending the claims of stockholders and creditors by declaring bankruptcy. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has a definition of financial exigency that is used by most universities: an “imminent financial crisis which threatens the survival of the institution as a whole.” All other ways to reduce expenditures must be exhausted before a university can invoke financial exigency so that it can begin to terminate tenured faculty. For more detail on the AAUP’s position on financial exigency, see the report “Financial Exigency, Academic Governance, and Related Matters (2004).”
We are not in a state of financial exigency or close to it. We are still hiring faculty and administrators. We are far from exhausting all other ways to reduce expenditures. Unfortunately, we do not use “financial exigency” in our faculty handbook to describe a financial crisis that is serious enough to consider suspending tenure. I suspect that this is the reason that some administrators may think that they can suspend tenure so easily. In our handbook “extraordinary financial crisis” is used instead of financial exigency. An extraordinary financial crisis is not defined, and there are no criteria given for establishing if such a crisis exists. This is a shortcoming of our faculty handbook that needs to be corrected immediately. In the meantime, it is best for all concerned to assume that an extraordinary financial crisis is synonymous with a financial exigency.
Will a financial exigency actually be declared in order to suspend tenure? I have no idea, but I hope not. It would be disastrous for faculty morale, which is already as low as I have ever seen it. It would also be disastrous for all future discussions with administrators about how to deal with our budget crisis. Faculty leaders would no longer have any confidence in administrators who would rather terminate tenured faculty than to cut subsidies of athletic programs, reduce administrative staff, impose a hiring freeze (or even a traveling freeze), etc.
Although rumors are often unreliable, rumor mongers are useful because they let me know that there are proposals being discussed to reduce expenditure of which I was unaware. So keep those rumors coming. In the spirit G. K. Chesterton, anything that is worth knowing is worth knowing imperfectly.
One of the major changes that has occurred since I became a faculty member over 35 years ago is the proliferation of contingent or non-tenure eligible (NTE) faculty on campus. During this period, we lost a large number of tenure-track faculty. Why this increase in NTE faculty? The most important reasons for this given by administrators have been to save money and to provide greater program flexibility. The increase in NTE faculty has also had some unintended consequences on faculty workloads and on faculty status markers.
NTE faculty teach many more course or course sections per semester than do tenure-track faculty. Most NTE faculty are poorly paid and hence cost the university much less money than tenure-track faculty. Administrators have responded to declining budgets by hiring cheaper faculty. The low pay of many NTE faculty on my campus has been described as disgraceful, and it truly is. Many NTE faculty teach primarily in introductory courses, but they have also been used to staff off-campus and on-line courses. One common characteristic of courses taught by NTE faculty is that they are the least desirable courses within a given department or program. These are the courses that administrators threaten to assign to uncooperative tenure-track faculty as a punishment.
Because of alleged uncertainties in the number of courses or course sections that will be needed from semester to semester or year to year, administrators argue that they need the flexibility to hire NTE faculty as needed. This argument has little validity. Although there are situations such as a faculty member going on leave or dying that may require hiring a temporary replacement for a semester or year, most NTE faculty teach the same courses year after year. In fact, there is not a lot of difference in the number of NTE faculty from one year to another. I know NTE faculty on my campus who have been teaching the same courses for decades. Much of the high turnover in NTE faculty is due to poor pay, poor treatment, and poor working conditions, not due to changing course needs. Unless we stop teaching freshman English, math, foreign languages, etc. , the number of NTE faculty that we need to employ annually is not going to change in the foreseeable future.
In reality, it is not flexibility but salary savings that is responsible for the decline in tenure-track faculty and the increase in NTE faculty. “Hiring faculty on the basis of the lowest labor cost and without professional working conditions” represents a “disinvestment” in the university and “in the nation’s intellectual capital” as noted in a recent AAUP report (Conversion of Appointments to the Tenure Track (2009)). The number of NTE faculty varies considerably by department, and their roles in departments also vary. One of the unintended consequences has been that in some departments NTE faculty are on track to become the majority of the faculty. This increases the workload of the remaining tenure-track faculty who have to take on more of the service load (primarily committee work) of the department. Because NTE faculty feel that they do not have academic freedom, they are unwilling to speak up on controversial issues at department and college meetings This complicates all decision-making within departments with large number of NTE faculty because hallway conversations have become more important than faculty meetings.
For those lucky enough to be tenure-track faculty, tenure has become an increasingly important status symbol, as it is to administrators who are drawn exclusively from the tenure-track faculty. Tenure-track faculty do not want to see the status of tenure reduced by giving NTE faculty tenure or its equivalent. Tenure-track faculty argue that they were recruited after a national search and a comprehensive interview process. They claim to be the most qualified people in their fields. NTE faculty are believed to be drawn only from local pools of people who were not good enough to get tenure here or elsewhere, ignoring the fact that many of these people are spouses. The reality is that many NTE faculty are hired as a result of national searches. The real issue is not credentials or hiring criteria, it is the prestige associated increasingly with research. Tenure-track faculty are expected to do research. Having tenure has become the most important status marker for research faculty. Being a researcher entitles you to tenure, being a teacher does not.
The low status of teaching at research universities is not new, and it continues to decline. When I was hired, it was well understood by starting assistant professors that you could only get tenure based on your research productivity. Your teaching just had to be competent — not a very high bar to clear. However, over the intervening years, there has been a change in what it means to be a productive researcher. Publish or perish has been replaced with get large grants or perish. Research faculty are valued increasingly because they bring money to the university. Tenure-track faculty now equals research faculty, and research faculty is linked to indirect cost recovery (cash they can spend) in the minds of administrators. Ironically, teaching, of course, brings in much more money (tuition) than indirect cost recovery.
The AAUP has been worried about the impacts of the increasingly large numbers of NTE faculty at universities for many years. In a recent report cited above, the AAUP suggested a simple way to solve this problem, give tenure to NTE faculty who hold what are, in effect, permanent positions. This obvious solution solves a multitude of problems. However, there are some major obstacles to its implementation. The most important of these is not increased costs or decreased flexibility, but the unwillingness of research faculty to share the status associated with tenure with teaching faculty. Whether they will be willing to do the right thing and extend tenure to teaching faculty will have a profound impact on the future of American universities.
A friend of mine ran into my wife recently in a store and asked her whether fame was going to my head. She was puzzled by this question until my friend explained that he had heard an interview with me that morning on the local public radio station. She told him that I was handling it well. I think that I am handling it well, if for no other reason than there is not much to handle. Fame may be only fleeting at best, but, in my case, it is almost nonexistent.
My claim to fame is based solely on a series of interviews about our ongoing budget crisis that I have given in the last few weeks to local newspapers, radio stations, and one local TV station. The only reason that I was interviewed is that I happen to be president of the faulty senate. If the budget crisis had ended last year, fame would have passed me by. The press needed somebody to provide “the faculty” perspective and who better to represent the faculty then the president of the faculty senate.
Needless to say, what finally appeared in the newspaper, on the radio or on TV was only a small fragment of the interviews. Newspaper reporters mostly interview you on the phone. Consequently, it is impossible to know what exactly they jotted in their notebooks (typed into their computers in reality based on the key clicks). When talking to radio and TV reporters, I do not worry very much about being misquoted or quoted out of context. What I do worry about is sounding like a fool. Like most academics, I talk too much and do not naturally speak in 30 second “sound bites.”
It is not being misquoted, quoted out of context or quoted to support a point in a story with which I do not agree that really worries me after an interview. My real concern is “Should I be speaking for the faculty? “ I have been a faculty member for over 35 years. During this period, if I have learned anything, it is that among faculty there is no unanimity, or rarely even a consensus, on any topic. We disagree on curricula, prerequisites for courses, foreign language requirements, hires, administrative appointments, promotion and tenure decisions, etc. As they did at a recent meeting, faculty members can argue for 30 minutes about the wording of one simple sentence. We are a cantankerous lot.
After one story in a local paper in which I was quoted, a faculty member emailed me to ask if the positions that I had taken in this interview had been formally endorsed by the faculty senate. The best answer that I could give was sort of. They were consistent with a series of guidelines and principles that the senate had passed to deal with budget issues.
When it comes to budget cuts, faculty continue to disagree on what is the best approach to reducing expenditures. In this context, the faculty fall into two broad camps, the bleeding-heart liberals and the tough-minded realists. The bleeding-heart liberals favor options that preserve jobs. They would rather see faculty and staff sacrifice collectively than see anyone laid off. Thus, they favor furloughs and reductions in benefits rather than elimination of programs. In fact, they favor furlough that will not adversely effect students. The tough-minded realists believe that budget reductions require a realignment of the university’s programs. They do not favor furloughs or benefit cuts. If there have to be furloughs, realists favor closing down the entire university on furlough days. They want consequences. They also want the administration to make the tough decisions needed to realign our programs with the new budget realities. Realists want so see the administration eliminate programs that they view as underperforming or no longer needed. These are, of course, never programs in which they teach.
Until recently, I was completely in the tough-minded realist camp. I had a list of weak programs that could be closed down and whose elimination, as far as I was concerned, would benefit the university. Of course, I do not teach in any of them. I believed that administrators, who would not make the tough decisions to close these programs, were shirking their responsibilities. I wanted furloughs with consequences. As I noted in my most recent blog, I no longer think that strategic planning can be done or should be done during a budget crisis. The university needs to focus on cutting expenditures by eliminating all unessential services and support programs across the board. Until this is done, we should not be considering closing or scaling back academic programs or reorganizing departments or other academic units. These kinds of programmatic decisions with significant long-term consequences need to be made in a considered way after due deliberation of the pros and cons. During a budget crisis, there is no time for due deliberation. In any case, these kinds reorganizations do not result in the significant short-term reductions in expenditures that are required during a budget crisis. On the other hand, I have not become a full-fledged, bleeding-heart liberal. I still do not believe in furloughs without consequences and in cutting benefits.
Andy Warhol famously said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. My guess is that I have been famous for about 5 of the 15 minutes allotted to me. I can hardly wait to see what my remaining 10 minutes of fame will bring. Unfortunately, I suspect that most of them will be the result of yet more interviews about budget cuts. We are less than half way through the academic year and planning for the FY2011 budget has just begun. I may not represent the views of “the faculty” in future interviews any better than I did in the past, but I will continue to defend their interests as best I can.
Having now endured innumerable meetings dealing with budget reductions, I am beginning to realize reluctantly that budget cutting can never be done in a rational way during a budget crisis. If any institution should be able to address its budget problems rationally, you would think that it would be a university. Alas, this is not the case. Our administrators constantly tout the need to make strategic budget-cutting decisions that will phase out weak and underperforming academic programs, that will protect strong programs, and that will promote growing programs. Whenever specific programs that are underperforming or that are not central to the mission of the university are discussed, administrators inevitably raise objections to reducing or eliminating them. That program has some outstanding professors. Eliminating this program will not be tolerated by certain members of the state legislature. This program has a lot of students. And so on.
More than 20 years ago, Cynthia Hardy published a case study (The rational approach to budget cuts) of how administrators at one Canadian university dealt with budget cuts caused by a significant reduction in provincial appropriations. The parallels between this Canadian university and the one that I work at are remarkable. They are both about the same size and the magnitude of the budget cuts is similar. There are also some major differences. The Canadian university had medical and law colleges while we have vet and engineering colleges. Being a Canadian and having gone to Canadian universities as an undergraduate and graduate student, I can attest that Canadian university academic cultures and administrative structures are very similar to ours. Hardy’s case study does much to illuminate how our administrators have behaved, are behaving, and will continue to behave while responding to our budget crisis.
Administrators have no choice but to take the stance that budget cuts are going to be strategic. This is the only stance that makes them look like leaders both to their bosses and the faculty. It makes it appear that they have a vision and a plan to implement it, whether they have either or not. This supposed strategic plan can also be used later to justify budget cuts, regardless of how strategic these cuts really are. In spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, strategic planning is also believed to be the way that businesses deal with budget crises. And the university is increasingly being viewed as just another business by its leaders and academic staff.
The problem for university administrators is that universities are not businesses and are not organized like businesses. Universities are complex entities with many internal constituencies and are administratively highly decentralized organizations. Other major complicating factors that constrain strategic planning include tenure and academic freedom. Faculty cannot be fired. They pay little attention to administrators and they are not reluctant to criticize administrators. University administrators spend very little time trying to influence the thinking of their faculty. In fact, they are often so politically inept at dealing with faculty that many of their efforts to influence faculty backfire, often unbeknown to them. Faculty do not look forward to visits to their departments by deans, provosts or presidents, and such visits rarely produce much good will. Many academic programs at universities also have outside constituencies with significant political connections and any attempt to cut these programs will raise an immediate political outcry that administrators cannot ignore. In short, internal and external realities make strategic planning largely ineffective, as Hardy demonstrates.
Strategic planning involves a series of fundamental steps: setting goals, identifying alternatives to reach these goals, collecting and analyzing relevant data that can be used to choose among alternatives, evaluating the consequences of each alternative, and finally selecting the best alternative. In reality, this rational process is undermined at all steps. Powerful vested interests within the university that oppose differential or any cuts to their programs (empires) begin to apply pressure on senior administrators to limit cuts. External constituencies are quickly alerted and political pressure put on senior administrators. Administrators also have their own biases. Then there is the overriding problem of being unable to predict the future. Which programs will become nationally recognized if they get cut less? “Investing” in already nationally recognized programs by limiting cuts to them is a much more certain strategy that few will fault, especially in the short term. These days for administrators only the short term is relevant.
What happened in Canada is what I predict will happen here. The administrators at the Canadian university worked out a rational plan for making differential budget cuts. In reality, actual budget cuts to units often did not resemble those that were planned. In the end the relative percent of the university budget going to each unit was nearly identical before and after the cuts. This same thing happened here with the cuts to the FY2010 budget. Limited differential cuts were made, but many of these cuts were “backfilled.” Some units that nominally received budget cuts, in fact, got no or only minimal cuts in reality.
The only way strategic planning can be done at a university is from the bottom up and any proposed changes need to be implemented jointly by administrators and faculty. For this to happen administrators have to spend time listening to faculty. During a budget crisis, they do not have the time. Consequently, the inability to do strategic planning in response to a budget crisis is ultimately a good thing. I did not believe this a year ago and, in fact, strongly endorsed strategic planning. I now think that Hardy is right and that strategic planning to deal with a budget crisis is impossible and even undesirable. The constraints on administrators that prevent them from making meaningful differential cuts more importantly prevent them from making stupid mistakes. During a crisis, “do no harm” is a much better mantra then “don’t let a crisis go to waste.”
Now that the regents have approved the university’s plan (mandatory furloughs and a 20% reduction in the university’s contribution to retirement accounts) to deal with the 10% budget reversion, we are left with a number of nagging questions: What does this all mean? Where to do we go from here?
What does it all mean? This is obviously a multifaceted question. For most faculty, this question translates into what will happen to my department or its academic programs or to me? At the moment, we don’t know. Decisions about departments and academic programs at being made at the college level. Most faculty have heard rumors and speculation and not much else. Administrators claim that this secrecy is needed in order to avoid unnecessary pain. What this secrecy has actually done is create almost universal paranoia and fear. The faculty would much rather have public discussions of various restructuring options than back-room discussions of re-reorganization by a handful of senior administrators whom most faculty do not know or trust.
One of the most common complaints of faculty is that the university seems to have no plans, no policies, and no procedures for dealing with current, previous, and anticipated budget cuts. No university-wide committee has been set up to make recommendations about how to restructure or refocus the university. No guidelines or principles have been developed that could be used to evaluate potential restructuring plans. Consequently, many faculty feel that the sacrifices that they have been asked to make may be in vain because administrators seems unable to make the difficult decisions needed to restructure the university that are required bv new budget realities. In any case, faculty believe that they are being left out of whatever discussions are being held in the fancier conference rooms around campus. Faculty should not give up pay without getting in return a greater voice in analyzing and making recommendations about budgets and strategic initiatives for dealing with budget cuts.
One thing we did learn in the last few weeks is how powerless the faculty and staff are. We were never seriously consulted about how best to handle the latest budget cuts. Even the university committee that advises the provost on budgetary matters was not fully informed about what cuts the university would recommend to the regents. There was no emergency meeting of this committee to get faculty and staff input before the Regents’ meeting. We also learned that the university’s commitments to faculty and staff about salaries and benefits were meaningless. In fact, administrators seemed to pick and choose arbitrarily which commitments they deemed legitimate and which they could ignore. They used no obvious or consistent criteria – legal, moral or ethical — when deciding what to cut, expediency excepted. These are worrisome lessons that the faculty and staff will need to ponder and to which they will need to respond.
One question that remains unanswered for us is why we have mandatory furloughs while faculty and staff at another regents’ institution do not. The simple answer is that federal stimulus money was used to cover about half of the 10% reversion at our sister campus. What happened to our federal stimulus money? The administration knew that a budget reversion would occur in October or November because of declining state revenues. Why were no federal funds set aside? Being asked to give up part of one’s salary and benefits because of a legitimate budget crisis is one thing, but, because of poor fiscal management by administrators, is another.
The faculty union at the only campus in our system that is unionized is questioning the legality of the regents and the university unilaterally reneging on their contract. It is unclear at the moment whether the union will prevent mandatory furloughs from being imposed on faculty. If they are successful — and I hope that they are — this would send a powerful message to faculty at non-unionized institutions like mine. One of the immediate consequence of the events of the last few weeks has been a significant increase in the number of faculty formally joining this union as a sign of solidarity (or perhaps fear).
Where do we go? We need to make sure that faculty get a larger voice in decision-making about budgets and the future direction of the university. Our faculty are entitled to that much at least. If administrators are not willing to consult with and get the approval of faculty for salary and benefit cuts and if they are not willing to engage faculty in meaningful discussions of restructuring the university, then the faculty need to begin to think seriously of how best to protect themselves from administrative indifference and caprice. The obvious way is to unionize.
There is always a silver lining. It turns out that death rates decrease during recessions. According to a story in Fortune (November 9, 2009 edition), there is “a virtual epidemic of people not dying.” Consequently, profits are down at companies that make coffins. Evidently, a 1% increase in unemployment reduces death rates by 0.5%. People smoke less, exercise more, sleep more, and eat less during recessions. All that free time when you are laid off allows you to spend more time in the gym or going on long walks.
Fortunately for me, our board of regents has just been given me an unprecedented opportunity to improve my lifestyle. Starting soon I will be going on mandatory furloughs and having my retirement benefits cuts. Although I am not joining the ranks of the unemployed, my compensation will be reduced significantly and I will get a tiny taste of what it is like to be unemployed. Consequently, the resulting improvements in my well-being will be modest (minuscule may be more accurate), but it will be a start. If some of the regents get their way, I will have many more opportunities to improve my well-being in the future.
I had better use my furloughs to improve my health because the 20% cut in the university’s contribution to my retirement account will make it harder for me to retire. To boot, because I will be living longer, I will need a larger amount of money to retire. Thus I will have to work longer than I planned. As a result, the very modest saving to the university from reducing its contribution to my retirement account will be minor compared to the salary that they will be paying me for an additional year or so beyond when I planned to retire.
To be honest, the last paragraph was rhetorical hyperbole as far as my personal situation is concerned. It would be true if I were a beginning assistant professor, but I am not. I have been a full professor for more than 25 years and have worked at the university over 35 years. The size of my retirement savings is primarily a function of how well the economy performed, especially over the last 10 years — very badly. The actual impact of the retirement benefit cut for me will be negligible. I will be working longer than I had planned, but not because of the reduction of the university’s contribution to my retirement account.
In all fairness to the regents, this cut in contributions to my retirement account is supposed to be temporary. Let’s hope it is. I hate gyms. Unfortunately, some of the regents would like to reduce the university’s contribution to my retirement account even more and to make these cuts permanent. I hate their involuntary wellness plan.
There is, of course, another way that I could use my new free time. My health and other benefits remain largely in tact. Perhaps, I should use my furloughs to eat, drink and make merry. Instead of spending more time in the gym, I should be spending more time in bars and fast food places. I have never made any use of our employee assistance program. Now would be a good time to become an alcoholic or drug addict or to become obese. I can make up for my lost pay by making use of free university counseling and other services for those that have fallen by the wayside. This beats going to the gym, and I won’t have to worry about outlasting my retirement savings. Unfortunately, as a life-long non-smoker and non-toker, minimal drinker, and facultative vegetarian, a dissolute life style does not really appeal to me. My mother would be proud.
In any case, the recession will have to last a long time before I will be fit enough to live much longer than I am currently slated to live. The longer the recession lasts, however, the more my compensation will be cut. This means that my furloughs will get longer and that I will get healthier and live longer. It is a vicious circle. My only hope for getting out of it is that the regents will come to their senses and save me from the gym and immortality.
As noted in Deja vu all over again, the university’s budget has just been cut again by 10%. Our board of regents had an emergency meeting to discuss this latest cut and during the meeting suggested 7 ways that could be used to reduce expenditures. It is a rather mixed bag that includes cutting faculty salaries and benefits, eliminating programs and permanently reducing the number of faculty and staff, imposing a tuition surcharge for the spring semester only, and postponing deferred maintenance. This list was evidently cobbled together at a meeting of regents and institution heads a day or so before the regents’ emergency meeting. During the meeting, one regent added another suggestion to the list, selling university assets to raise money. The regents gave the universities two weeks to develop a plan to reduce their expenditures by 10%.
Reactions of faculty and staff with whom I have talked about the regents’ dismal list have been uniformly negative. The universal complaint is that there is no plan, or even a suggestion of how to develop a plan, to get us through this budgetary crisis with minimal damage to our teaching and research missions. However, the regents’ efforts have resulted in some alternative plans being proposed in our hallways and coffee rooms. I’ll outline two of them, one facetious and one serious.
The suggestion that we sell of some university assets to raise money prompted one wag to propose that we sell the main administration building – a pseudo-Hellenic pile of limestone and marble – that would make an excellent headquarters for a bank or insurance company. (There is no nearby parking, but I am sure that we can throw in part of the central quad on which it sits for this purpose.) As a bonus, it was suggested that we throw in the president and provost. The latter is undoubtedly illegal, and, in any case, ethical objections to including them in the sale would undoubtedly be raised by faculty in philosophy and religious studies. The main justification given for this plan was that our new budget model uses formulas to distribute tuition and state appropriations to the colleges and other formulas to transfer money from the colleges to supporting units like the physical plant, purchasing, and the library. Consequently, my colleague insists that we don’t need the central administration anymore: we are now just a collection of semi-autonomous colleges. This interpretation was born out by the president’s response to the board of regents budget-cutting suggestions: he passed the responsibility of figuring out how to cut the budget to the deans.
Because state revenues are projected to be about 7% lower than the FY2010 state budget, the governor just announced that there will be 10% an across-the-board budget cut to all state agencies. (This is the highest budget reversion in state history: the previous high was 4.3% in 2001.) This 10% reversion means that the university will have to cut its budget by about $25 million ($19 million from the general university budget and an additional $6 million from directed state appropriations to various units). We have known for sometime that a reversion was likely, and local pundits had been estimating this reversion would be between 5 and 10%. Unfortunately, this budget cut is a case of “Deja vu all over again” as Yogi Berra so famously put it. The university’s FY2010 state appropriation had already been reduced 15% over its FY2009 appropriation.
The announcement of this latest budget cut has suddenly made me popular with the local news media. Several newspapers called me for interviews and a local TV station came to my office to interview me on camera. As with most interviews only a few snippets of what I said ever made it into print or onto TV. I was basically asked asked two kinds of questions (1) How will the budget cut effect me and other faculty? and (2) What should or can the university do to reduce expenditures? I am not going to try to summarize my responses to these two questions, but I am going to give more candid, if very partial, answers to them here.
There have been a number of stories on the news recently in which somebody was beaten or killed by a group of strangers. These innocent people had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. News stories about unprovoked violence are much more disturbing to me than stories about robberies or hate killings. Although I have obviously not suffered any physical harm, the repeated budget cuts and reversions in the last year – this is the fourth – are taking their emotional toll. Like the victims of random violence, I am increasingly asking the question, “Why me?” I have not done anything to deserve being robbed by a gang of white color thugs who I have never met or even seen, nor probably has anyone else at the university. Nevertheless, these white collar thugs are threatening my economic well being by forcing the university to consider ways to trim expenses that may include reductions in my benefits and indirectly in my pay through a leave-without-pay. I don’t understand why I should have to suffer the consequences of the irresponsible actions of unknown and unregulated financial speculators in New York. Unfortunately, like all victims of unprovoked attacks, all I can do is live with the damage and move on with my life.
My main role as faculty senate president this year will be to try to minimize the impacts of budget cuts on the faculty. I truly believe that the faculty are the heart of the university: after all, they do all the teaching and research. To preserve the university means preserving the faculty. To put this another way and more directly, I am not in favor of spreading the impacts of budget cuts equally across the university. We need to retain faculty lines at all costs. read more…
Henry Kissinger is reported to have said that the reason academic quarrels are so bitter is that there is so little at stake. Academics are often quick to take offense, even at actions, comments or questions not intended to be offensive or insulting. According to some commentators, incivility among academics, euphemistically called a lack of collegiality, is becoming increasingly common. Multiple causes for this have been cited, including increased workloads, individualism, expectations, etc. The adoption of a more corporate ethos and administrative structure by universities has also been frequently cited as a cause. It is each person for themselves in the modern university.
Collegiality is increasingly being touted as a criterion that should be considered in making tenure decisions. It is not collegiality, of course, that will be considered in making tenure decisions, but perceived non-collegiality. You will never be tenured because you are a nice person. For many faculty, collegiality smacks of conformism, inflexibility, and political correctness. A requirement for collegiality, it is rightly feared, will ultimately be used by administrators, especially department chairs, as a way to control or eliminate troublesome faculty, i.e., their vocal critics and detractors. Incivility in academia rarely translates into fist fights, shouting matches or any kind of bullying. It usually is expressed as a form of shunning. I’ll illustrate using an example from my life. read more…
As the president of the faculty senate, I opened our recent annual awards ceremony with a few words of welcome. Because I had never attended this ceremony before, I had no idea how many awards the university hands out each year. It took nearly two hours to award all the distinguished professorships, university professorships, Regents awards, teaching awards, early career achievement awards, mid-career achievement awards, outstanding achievements in research awards, etc. There were also more than 20 new named chairs announced this year. It is much too late for me to receive an early or even mid-career award. Nearly all of the endowed chairs went to engineers or agricultural scientists. It evidently pays to work in a field in which your graduates acquire skills that enable them to go out into the world and make money.
I already knew a surprising number of the awardees, but, in most cases, did not know much about their academic achievements. With one exception, I did not know any of them professionally. I had encountered them over the years on various college and university committees or socially. For each awardee, there was a brief description of the achievement(s) for which they were being honored. While listening to these, I inevitably began to compare my record with those of the awardees. Overall, they were a stellar lot. One had trained over 150 masters students and 75 PhDs. One had brought in over 60 million dollars in research funding. Another had published over 500 papers. I will be the first to admit that I am not in their league. However, many of the awardees’ records were more modest, and, in fact, they were comparable or, even in some cases, numerically inferior to mine. Admittedly such snap comparisons of partial academic records are fraught with problems. Nevertheless, I must admit that by the end of the awards ceremony I was feeling jealous. Why haven’t I gotten an award?
At least a partial, if unsatisfactory, answer to that troubling questions was provided by another recent event that I attended, a memorial service for a retired colleague who had died. This was someone who had had a very long career; more than 50 years on the faculty, including a stint as department chair. Even after retirement, she came into work every day to work on research projects. I have always had the greatest respect and admiration for her. She was an exceptionally hard worker who truly loved her academic field, teaching, and her students. Over the years, she received just about every university award available. Perhaps the secret to getting an award is longevity. Wait and awards will come to you. (Self promotion, however, can often significantly shorten your wait.) read more…
