I always get wary of letters like this from faculty bodies. I don’t think my institution is in a unique position here, so here’s what it looks like from our side.
Our faculty flip their shit every time there’s 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, “This must be their fault!” Staff are running vastly more ragged than faculty. In the last six months, we’ve 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 “I’ve been doing two and a half jobs. I can’t do another,” 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 “collapse”, I mean completely collapse. No retention at all. 0 people left. Every single drop of institutional knowledge in those offices are gone. We’ve 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 they’re god-sent and the only reason colleges and universities exist, but we’re 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 there’s no one navigating the mess that is federal financial aid. Stop treating the staff like they’re ancillary fat to be cut. If anything, we’ve got a lot more faculty than we really should for an institution our size.
Now maybe that’s not what’s going on here…but the arguments they make sound almost exactly like the arguments the faculty here make, and I know they’re 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 can’t 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 “Administration explosion” people keep talking about? Yeah, that’s because the systems needed to keep the school running have become orders of magnitude more difficult. You can’t 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 don’t understand the massive amount of work it takes to keep a school regulatory compliant and running. I’m not saying that regulation is a bad thing - it keeps people from getting taken advantage of by for-profit “institutions” - but that comes with a real, tangible cost for each and every institution, and that cost is higher staff costs. No, you can’t 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 don’t care if you have Steven fucking Hawking teaching, if you don’t have federal aid, you’re done.
Staff have born the brunt of cuts here for decades - it’s 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 I’ll state it anyway because someone will wander in and think I’m happy to see faculty “get their just desserts”, I’d much rather that we not have to cut anybody. As I said, we’re all in this together - I don’t 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 we’re going to weather this together, or we’re going to fall to pieces.