Wednesday, December 18, 2013

The other scandal in Colorado

Less titillating than the Adler case, but ultimately at least as threatening to the effective functioning of universities.  I'll let the CSU-Pueblo AAUP chapter, via Jonathan Rees, describe the situation:
Image from Jonathan Rees' blog.
As many of you are no doubt aware, CSU-Pueblo has been tasked with cutting 3.3 million dollars in the 2014-2015 budget. What may be less clear to some of you, is that job cuts are not a “possibility”; they are a foregone conclusion. Faculty and staff alike have been told to expect as many 50 of our co-workers will lose their jobs. More troubling is that, though most faculty just learned the specifics of the cuts on Friday, names and positions have already been submitted to the deans, and deans have submitted proposed cuts to the provost. . . .What this means is that proposals have been put forward with minimal faculty input and without adequate time to communicate information to those on campus and off who will be most affected by the layoffs that are coming.
Aargh.  To some extent, this is just business as usual, and some might even say that the administrators are the ones who see the bigger picture, and so are qualified to make the best decisions in a difficult situation.  But I'll believe that line when I see substantial cuts in administration, rather than an ongoing trend of hiring more and more administrators (and staff to support them), a number of them apparently tasked with making the teaching side (including support to same) more "efficient." 


4 comments:

  1. Where are the adjunct administrators when you need them?

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  2. Prorated cuts in administration and in staff. Anything less is a screw job.

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  3. We are going through the same thing here in CheeseheadLand. They hired consultants to come up with a list of places we could cut ourselves (further, as this is the fourth or fifth biennium in a row that's had cuts to the state system). The list was laughable, as it had NO ADMINISTRATIVE CUTS at the top. Hilarious. Meanwhile, each campus has its share that it has to come up with, and it will mean people's jobs. And lucky me, I'm one of the faculty who has to figure out who.

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    Replies
    1. I quit my teaching position more than 10 years ago.

      One of other tenants in my apartment building teaches at that institution and he told me a similar story. The teaching staff is being cut and has to do more with less. (That was, apparently, due to a government initiative in which various post-secondary schools would be operating under some unifying umbrella organization. From what I've heard, that program's shaping up to be a right royal mess.) Meanwhile, the number of administrators, particularly at the top, increases.

      Maybe I got out at a good time.

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