dcat

Nevada 36%
South Carolina 16%
Idaho 10%
Kansas 9%

It will be interesting to see how these university systems deal with the cuts “in different ways”.

Wellesley College faces a 10% shortfall in 2010-11 budget:

As difficult as this sounds, and it will be difficult, our projections are not based on the worst-case scenario, but on the most likely scenario, given what we know now. Our situation could well be worse, depending on the direction of the economy.

In addition to staff layoffs and hiring freezes for all but the most critical faculty and faculty leave replacement positions, Wellesley also plans to freeze faculty pay:

Compensation

Salaries and benefits comprise half of our operating budget and it is not possible to make the reductions required without implementing a salary freeze for all faculty and staff for next year (FY10). In addition, there can be no merit pool for faculty or bonus pool for administrative staff. While this is unavoidable for next year, I do not believe that this is an effective or desirable long-term strategy, given our commitment to attracting and retaining the best faculty and staff.

I never said that UTPB is not facing economic difficulties. I have, in fact, said on multiple occasions and explicitly precisely the opposite. I have laid out facts, however, about what we are doing. And then you mock my school (you were saying something about assholes?), and then you claim that only UTPB must be the only university in the country not facing difficulties despite the fact that I never said any such thing. Then I point out how dozens of other universities in the last two days have listed positions. No response from you — and why should I expect any when you have made selective ignorance the foundation of everything you have argued here?

And then you return by arguing something no one disagrees with — that schools are cutting back. No one is arguing against that fact, hwc, and I have reaffirmed it myriad times. All I am asking you to acknowledge is that institutions are dealing with this crisis differently, as the literally hundreds of jobs still being filled at hundreds of institutions clearly indicates. You are thus making your points against a straw man. My only point is that none of this necessarily means that any institution has to freeze all hiring — many, many, many universities quite clearly are not (Harvard just today posted a spot for a professor of Asian history, for example). You’ve made the catagorical assertions. I have not. So every example of evidence that I put forward to show how other institutions are acting differently from your Word of God proscriptions undercuts your argument, while every example you cite of schools cutting is irrelevant — its evidence for something no one else is arguing.

Furthermore, I have no idea why you place the comments about Morty in bold font. For one thing, Morty’s example would be a sign of splitting the difference between your case and mine. I have said I would not freeze tenure track searches. You would freeze all searches. Morty has not frozen all searches. How you think that redounds to your benefit to the point where you would place it in bold, the equivalent of screaming, is beyond me. After all, I have never said here that cutting searches is unacceptable, because I have not spoken that categorically here. Only you have. And so while I have kept my views as to what Williams and other schools should do fluid, you have not. You have taken the my-way-or-the-highway approach, and then have cited evidence in which Morty has clearly rejected that approach. I have taken an “I would prefer Williams to consider another route” path and you find that sort of thing objectionable, apparently.

Again: No one denied that cuts are happening all over the country. No one. I have no idea who you think you are arguing with on these points. This has nothing to do with what must be done at Williams, what options are available, whether or not faculty should get raises, whether or not some searches should go on, or whether or not jobs are going to be cut. It has even less to do with what must be done. I would prefer Morty to take a different tack. By your own argument up to now, you are the one who thinks he is 100% wrong, because in fact he is going forward with a good number of searches.

I await your arguing something else no one has contested. In bold font. With your favorite didactic hectoring approach, as if you are the foundation for all knowledge about college and university operations.

Hey, what’s this? The University of Texas-Pan American has multiple faculty searches open? Just announced today? But, that’s impossible! hwc says so! Wait, Princeton has a position? Stanford? Yale? Marshall? Louisiana State? Dartmouth? Wesleyan? That cannot be. It simply cannot be.

dcat

To deal with a 10% budget shortfall in the current year, Stanford Business School announced layoffs of 49 staff members (12% of its staff), plus hourly cutbacks for 8 more, plus elimination of 12 contractor positions.

You have argued that every single institution in the United States faces the exact same challenges in the exact same ways.

Not any more I don’t. I have seen the light. From now on, I will clearly state that every college and university in the country is facing extreme budgetary pressure with the exception of The University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

My argument, which has been my argument since I wrote the initial post that this discussion is based on, is that I do not believe that Williams must curb spending in terms of faculty hires.

I suggest that you take your beef up with Morty, then. You may have missed it, but Williams College has already cancelled 8 of 14 approved on-going tenure-track searches and 14 of 20 approved on-going visiting searches. I don’t know what ya’ll mean by “curbing spending in terms of faculty hires” in the Permian Basin, but around here cutting the faculty by 22 approved slots for next year would count as curbing faculty spending.

In other news this week:

Middlebury lays off 100 employees.

University of Florida announces 10% cut in next year’s budget.

On top of the hiring freeze previously announced, Temple University announced an interim 5% budget cut for next year, a freeze on all non-union wages, and pulled its offer to the faculty union off the table to be replaced by a scaled back package.

University of Washington is being given a proposed 13% cut in state funding for next year on top of a mid-year 4.5% cut for this fiscal year.

Cornell University announced a target of cutting 5% of the budget for next year and the need for 10% in cuts in the three year time frame.

These are cuts. Compared to budgets that were projected to grow substantially over the next few years, the cuts are deep and serious.

You should thank your lucky stars that The University of Texas of the Permian Basin is able to weather the economic downturn while continuting to hire new faculty and increase faculty pay. That’s fantastic.

My argument, which has been my argument since I wrote the initial post that this discussion is based on, is that I do not believe that Williams must curb spending in terms of faculty hires.

In the last two days along 118 new jobs have been posted on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s job listings. In the last two days alone. But yes, hwc, there is just one true way, yours, and my institution is the outlier. All this other evidence just shows how wrong everyone else is but you.

dcat

Great, so what? I’m thrilled for school. But seriously, who cares? As if that is supposed to invalidate the financial squeeze that thousands of collegea and universities are under right now.

What is the matter with you? I mean, seriously, do you honestly want to bust my chops because I didn’t say “all colleges but one are facing serious budget shortfalls”?

dcat

From now on, I will say that all colleges and universities (except The University of Texas of the Permian Basin) are contingency planning for significant budget cuts. I wouldn’t want to unfairly include your fine institution.

BTW, do they have a lot of assholes teaching there or just a few?

I have laid out the facts about my institution. And I have laid out my view that I would prefer Williams not yet resort to touching faculty salaries, to engaging in across-the-board freezes, or to cutting coaching or staff positions. And I have asked to avoid categorical my-way-or-the-highway assertions about what MUST be done. For that, I get the fatuousness of someone incapable of dealing with evidence that counters his world view and insults about the place that I teach, where my wife teaches, and where many of my friends teach. Fine. You’re brilliant. I’m dumb. Yet I’m winning this argument.

You’re lucky, hwc, that you have the benefit of distance so that I am only kicking your ass in this discussion. And for that alone, shouldn’t you be rather embarassed since I teach at such a lamentably insultable institution worthy only of your contempt? Imagine if you were dealing with someone from one of them there smart schools. Then you’d really look bad.

dcat

It’s a shame all these other colleges and universities around the country are so mismanaged that they actually are struggling with budget reductions, hiring freezes, layoffs, and salary caps in the face of declining revenue streams.

In any case, it’s quite clear you’re losing the argument and you know it. You have made these overarching assertions that you cannot back up, and now you are trying to taint with innuendo. And you try to place words into people’s dialogue boxes that they have never used. And use sarcasm when you’ve been thrashed on the evidence and facts and other such ephemera that gets in the way of your little God Complex.

In fact, were you not so obtuse you’d get the larger point, which stands in direct contradistinction to what you just snidely wrote about my institution and that connects directly to Williams and thus this discussion: My university is ten thousand times more vulnerable than Williams is, (and literally hunders of millions of times more in terms of pure resources) and yet we don’t fall for these categorical generalizations that you find so compelling. So while we freeze most hires, we do not freeze all hires. While we cut across the board, we have not cancelled two major building projects. While we keep an eye on things like travel money, we try hard to maintain very modest faculty raises. While we freeze spending one type of institutional money, we do make available other kinds of institutional money. But you’d prefer not to think in the terms that real people whose thoughts have consequences have to think: Pare here, be smart there, conserve elsewhere, plan for the future but not wholly at expense of the present, and oh yeah, hope enrollments at least hold steady and possibly rise. No, you’d rather come in like a brain-damaged version of Solomon, preaching to we benighted lessers, informing us (in a half-informed way, of course) of things in our backyards as you go.

You know what hwc? Maybe, just maybe, you’re not the only person who knows something about higher education. And maybe rather than come in with your Teutonic Rules by which all must abide, you’d consider have a conversation like every single other person here, including folks like Dave who fundamentally agree with you.

dcat

“Get back to me when they whack your pay next year.”
*** Ok, smart guy. You know my institution, my institutional culture, and my institutional approach so much better than I do, I’ll give you the opportunity to back it up: I will bet you that my institution will have merot raises next year. And I’ll bet you that I get one. I’ll bet $100 right now on this proposition. You’re so certain that you’re the font of all knowledge about what’s what in academia, and especially in my own institution, put the money where the mouth is.

“Harvard has a hiring freeze and you think that UT is going to escape unscathed when the state is facing a 25% budget shortfall over the next two years?”
*** Here is what I know. On Monday our last finalist is coming in to do his on campus interview. As of right now we will be hiring one of the finalists. We will be thrilled and will be getting a great candidate BECAUSE other people are not hiring. I am flabbergasted that I am telling you that we are hiring, and you are somehow exrapolating that we could not possibly be hiring because Harvard is having a freeze. So, are we not hiring? Am I lying? Was I also mistaken to see many schools interviewing at the American Historical Association annual meeting? I mean, seriously. harvard isn’t so therefore no one else can be?

“What do you think is going to happen when your state legislator passes a tuition freeze bill tomorrow?”
*** Here’s what’s going to happen: Nothing. You see, despite your infinite wisdom about my school, this little tidbit must have missed your omniscience: My university never planned on asking for a tuition hike this year. Twice since I have been here we have gone forward with tuition hikes. Both times we asked the students to vote for it. Both times they did so. Then they added a third hike in order to build our new student center. So despite our reliance on tuition, we are not planning on asking for tuition hikes, assuming that’s what my legislature did today. Does that answer your question? Your little google efforts to try toi trump me on the politics of education in my state appear to have left a few gaps.

“I love how you find fault with my economic pronouncements and then say that Williams shouldn’t cut any track coaches when they’ve already started shrinking the faculty with a hiring freeze on leave replacement visiting profs.”
*** I have read this five times. Now six. And I have no idea where you are finding the parallelism between your many absolute promouncements here and the supposed assertion that . . . Wait for it . . . I never made. I never said any such thing. What I said was that in my ideal world I would have had more coaching in college not less. And it is my belief that Williams should not be cutting any positions. But that’s different from your assertions here about what WILL happen, about what MUST happen. That you see the two things you placed to one another as being in any way akin is a pretty perfect encapsulation of your facilities throughout this discussion.

So a review:
hwc insists I will not get a raise next year.
hwc insists that my institution is in trouble because the state is going to freeze tuition hikes today.
hwc insists that two things that have nothing to do with one another are somehow connected.

Words defy how giddy I am about the perfect storm of idiocy hwc just brought to us all. It’s an unintentional comedy gift that keeps on giving. hwc is like the herpes of argumentation!

(So, on the table: $100 that I get a raise next year. Put up or shut up, fount of all wisdom.)

dcat

Get back to me when they whack your pay next year. Harvard has a hiring freeze and you think that UT is going to escape unscathed when the state is facing a 25% budget shortfall over the next two years?

What do you think is going to happen when your state legislator passes a tuition freeze bill tomorrow?

I love how you find fault with my economic pronouncements and then say that Williams shouldn’t cut any track coaches when they’ve already started shrinking the faculty with a hiring freeze on leave replacement visiting profs.

dcat

I gave a range of 10% to 30% because I want Ronit to look at the size of the dollar amounts attached to those percentages before going on about coming up with the necessary cost reductions out of the coffee fund.

Feel free to disagree with my range of 10% to 30%. I’m quite comfortable saying that virtually every college and university in American has planning underway within that range. The only ones who might escape will be those that were at the very low end of their endowment spending and have the luxury of major increases in endowment spending percentages (like a 33% increase from 3.75% to 5%). However, these schools tend to be conservatively managed and will begin implementing budget cuts sooner rather than later.

Your own state legislature meets tomorrow to begin grappling with a 10% reduction in state revenues in 2009 and an even larger reduction in 2010. They may have a rainy day fund to save higher education budgets for 2009, but that leaves 2010 in a world of hurt. The state can’t reduce expenditures by 20% without gutting the higher ed budgets.

We aren’t hearing the full extent of the budget cuts because nobody wants to fess up to the cuts in faculty and programs until they’ve got an enrolled freshman class in April.

dcat

I did, and they are correct, in my opinion, about the coming problems. The yet to be recognized losses in the private side of college endowments will be very bad. There are simply no buyers for this asset class. Endowments are in the trade jargon “stuff accounts”. You feed them things that are very difficult to swallow and even harder to spit back out, as in monetize. I express no opinion about wages and the like or what to do with less money. When the dust settles Harvard will have around 18 billion and Williams around 1 billion and they will still be near the top of their peer groups on a per student basis. One thing that should be done, all colleges should refuse to fund any unfunded commitments and if need be sue to hang on to their cash. Given the fraud and failures on the street those lawsuits should be easy to win.

PTC writes: “As far as “tenured jobs” caveat goes…. that is like asking if a person who has worked his way up to a senior level of management at company X could pull up and get an equally senior level at a job with company Y in a similar field. A completely misleading caveat.

Can my friend who is a senior cook at Williams quit and get a job as a senior cook at Amherst that pays more… I doubt it. Amherst is most likely going to hire from within…”

I don’t know what to say except you’re wrong. Faculty move from elite institutions to other elite institutions all the time. Your Amherst cook comparison is silly and irrelevant. Again: Senior people move on with fair regularity. This is not an arguable position. It happens. It’s a fact.

PTC also falsely places the hiring market for a school like Williams withon the context of the economic and job market in Williamstown. When it comes to hiring and paying professors, the local economy is largely irrelevant. Williams has to pay a fairly competitive salary based on national liberal arts colleges and a large swath of universities. A professor or prospective professor does not care what the local economy means in terms of people taking lower salaries. Williams might be able to geta cost of living discount (until someone asks about housing prices in Williamstown, anyway) but what you know about the local economy and salaries has almost nothing to do with the negotiating process for a professor who is almost certainly not from Williamstown or even Western Massachusetts.

hwc writes: “David’s 75% estimate seems to be confirmed by Swarthmore’s success in hiring their first choice candidates (22 out of 27 tenure track offers) as touted in the self study released yesterday”

This is not really an apt comparison. The markets for a person applying for an entry-lever assistant professor position is different from that of a senior faculty member. The nature of application and recruitment is different. The leverage someone has on the market is different. Those Swarthmore numbers actually do not tell us all that much, especially ina tough job market where most places get pretty high yield rates when it comes to acceptances of jobs offered. That swarthmore got 80% or so of its tenure-track offers to be accepoted tells us literally nothing about the ability fo Swartmore’s senior faculty to move on.

And please, hwc, don’t provide absolutes like: here are the three things every college in America will be looking to do. All it takes is one example to utterly invalidate the argument. We do not even know that your assertion applies to Williams. But I know you have no idea if it applies to my institution. It’s really tiresome to read so much in the way of categorically absolute assertions from people in no position to assert so categorically.

dcat

Undergraduate Instruction/Research 51,440
Scholarships & Fellowships 26,797
Student Room & Board 13,290
Other Activities 69,789
Facilities 12,215
Administration 9,764
Technology 7,529
Alumni Relations & Development 7,584
Student Services 8,283
Athletics 6,189
Libraries 6,029
Auxiliaries 4,241
Graduate Programs 2,572
Museum 2,481
Security 1,499
Health Services 1,403

TOTAL $161,316

Here are the three contingency levels that every college is America is planning for. The first level will be for Fiscal 2009 beginning next June.

Find 10% in cuts ($16 million)

Find 20% in cuts ($32 million)

Find 30% in cuts ($48 million)

Williams is facing a major budget crisis. Williams will need to cut its budget over the next few years by more (whether in dollars or as a percentage) than it has had to do in a generation or more. Williams can no longer afford to spend as much as it has been spending. Cuts must be found. To deny this is to deny reality.

First, Williams’ financial situation is way worse than people seem to realize. Second, Williams could make substantial cuts in faculty-related spending (say, a two year salary freeze for those making more than $100k and an elimination of many/most of the programs discussed in the Report)

The cuts required over the next three years are too large to be achieved without addressing payroll.

Hmm. So, David/hwc, did either of you call the housing crash in 2004 or the credit crisis in 2005?