By now most of our academic community has heard the administration’s call for faculty and staff to examine work habits and to do better, but it is really more than that. They seem to be convinced that we are not doing all we can to save the university from the dire fiscal situation in which it finds itself. What they’ve told us: we are short unexplained millions of dollars for FY 2012-2013 – $20 million? $30 million?
… what we know and what we don’t …
We know we’ve hired a lot of non-academic employees, and we use a significant number of poorly paid part time faculty to deliver our curriculum. We know that until this coming semester tuition and fees have increased every year to the maximum allowed by state law. And we know that until this semester enrollment had been increasing – up 6000 students since 1997.
What we don’t know, and the university isn’t telling us, are details about the source of our newfound “poverty”, and how circumstances could become so dire in the course of just a couple of semesters.
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