I always get wary of letters like this from faculty bodies. I donāt think my institution is in a unique position here, so hereās what it looks like from our side.
Our faculty flip their shit every time thereās any faculty department even proposed to be cut - no matter how small it is. We have multiple departments that service less than 0.5% of the student body, but they are never considered for cuts because of the political struggle with the faculty. The faculty point at the staff and say, āThis must be their fault!ā Staff are running vastly more ragged than faculty. In the last six months, weāve had two different staff departments completely collapse and leave because they ran for so long on such shoe-string budgets, often running 33 - 50% short of staff. One staff member would leave due to burn-out. The next in command in the office, not knowing if that person would ever be replaced, immediately said āIāve been doing two and a half jobs. I canāt do another,ā and left. Then the next in command after them, then the next, until finally both affected offices were empty, all in the span of a month. And when I say ācollapseā, I mean completely collapse. No retention at all. 0 people left. Every single drop of institutional knowledge in those offices are gone. Weāve got a third office heading that way, losing the VP and then the interim VP in three months. But no, staff must still be the issue.
Faculty always act like theyāre god-sent and the only reason colleges and universities exist, but weāre in this together. Good luck teaching without any software support or classroom technology. Good luck teaching with no students because admissions fell apart. Good luck teaching when no one can afford to attend because thereās no one navigating the mess that is federal financial aid. Stop treating the staff like theyāre ancillary fat to be cut. If anything, weāve got a lot more faculty than we really should for an institution our size.
Now maybe thatās not whatās going on hereā¦but the arguments they make sound almost exactly like the arguments the faculty here make, and I know theyāre BS. Yes, our president is the highest paid member of the college, but she gives literally 100% of her pay back in donations every month. My boss makes just 10k more than me despite having 35 years more experience and exponentially more stress. We canāt get people to fill senior staff positions because our pay is so low and our benefits so meager. The only reason we got a CFO to come in and try to save us at all is because his entire career is saving failing institutions in order to maintain their history.
All that āAdministration explosionā people keep talking about? Yeah, thatās because the systems needed to keep the school running have become orders of magnitude more difficult. You canāt do regular-ass, physical registrations anymore. All that data needs to be in a system and shipped off to the government, maintained in a very particular format and way. People donāt understand the massive amount of work it takes to keep a school regulatory compliant and running. Iām not saying that regulation is a bad thing - it keeps people from getting taken advantage of by for-profit āinstitutionsā - but that comes with a real, tangible cost for each and every institution, and that cost is higher staff costs. No, you canāt just cut those staff and expect that work to get done. If you fall out of compliance, you lose your accreditation. You lose your accreditation, you lose federal aid. You lose federal aid, the whole institution goes bye-bye. I donāt care if you have Steven fucking Hawking teaching, if you donāt have federal aid, youāre done.
Staff have born the brunt of cuts here for decades - itās time for the faculty to step up and take their losses too. We have to bear this burden together, or else faculty are suddenly going to find out that it turns out all those staff they mistreated and abused actually were doing 3x the amount of work that number of people should be doing.
And obviously, but Iāll state it anyway because someone will wander in and think Iām happy to see faculty āget their just dessertsā, Iād much rather that we not have to cut anybody. As I said, weāre all in this together - I donāt want to see my colleagues suffer and lose their jobs, and the students lose the professors they love. But things are changing in education right now, and either weāre going to weather this together, or weāre going to fall to pieces.
If I can chime in for the faculty side of things: absolutely, weāre in this together.
Iād add, though, that the ballooning of responsibilities over time is not unique to staff. Faculty have been increasingly pressured to take on more students, inflate cohorts and class sizes, bring in more dollars in a more competitive funding landscape, etc.
In the same meeting today where I met our new Associate Dean who is filling a newly-created position to chop in half another associate Deanās duties, we were told thereās a reorganization and one of us has to āvolunteerā to take on slew of new admin duties.
The crux for me is: I donāt know of anyone thatās saying we should ācut the fatā from the staff on the ground keeping these colleges and departments alive (it sounds like youāve got some shitty colleagues and I empathize!). But thereās multiple tiers of senior leadership being paid on scales far and above other staff.
Itās great your president is fortunate enough to be able to donate her entire salary. But thatās doesnāt take away from the high dollar figure she and others like her are being paid. How many staff could be hired if the āextra fatā from her salary were directly rerouted to staff compensation?
Iād add, though, that the ballooning of responsibilities over time is not unique to staff. Faculty have been increasingly pressured to take on more students, inflate cohorts and class sizes, bring in more dollars in a more competitive funding landscape, etc.
Thatās fair, and I donāt want to see faculty cut either - you all do a shit-ton of work that I canāt even imagine trying to do. Fortunately our institution has class size limits and has stood firm on that for at least 30 years, but the rest is definitely still applicable here.
In the same meeting today where I met our new Associate Dean who is filling a newly-created position to chop in half another associate Deanās duties, we were told thereās a reorganization and one of us has to āvolunteerā to take on slew of new admin duties.
Ew, asking faculty to take on admin duties is really wrong - Iām sorry that happened.
How many staff could be hired if the āextra fatā from her salary were directly rerouted to staff compensation?
None, because we already had to promote internally because we couldnāt get someone externally due to pay / benefit reasons. We already canāt get anyone to take the positions we have, even at the current pay rate. I donāt know if thatās because our pay rates are already low, but decreasing them further would probably make it literally impossible to hire. We gave up on getting an Advancement VP, weāre 3 months with no bites on a VP of admissions and 3 months with no fin. aid director.
Maybe weāre smaller than average, but we only really have three levels of staff, and they all have different responsibilities that canāt really be put together. You have regular workers who do front lines jobs, department managers / associate VPs who manage the budget, staffing, and day-to-day management of each department, and then you have the VP level, which represents a collection of offices to the Board of Trustees and works on large scale initiatives across multi-departments. Do you all have more layers?
Yep, the explosion of administration in colleges/universities since the early 80ās is the massive problem.
Whatās interesting is some people recognized the oncoming issues in the 60ās! Robert Persig notes it, albeit somewhat obliquely, in his book āZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceā.
We need to see some new educational competitors out there. When you can get the education for a fraction of what these government-secured organizations charge, then weāll see change.
bostonreview.net
Hot