Response to College of Arts and Sciences Statement on the Budget
Read our latest statement regarding the from our Director of Legislative Affairs, Matt Harvey:
On Wednesday, December 2nd, the Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences released a statement illustrating the dire forecast for the university’s fiscal budget. In order to meet a 4.8% budget reduction, the College has announced that fifty tenure-track positions will be eliminated in favor of adding 25 instructors. Overshadowing this statement is the veiled threat of “eliminating about three medium-sized departments or disbanding the college and reforming it with fewer faculty from many units.”
The Dean’s statement asserts that the reduction of tenure track faculty will mean “investing in more staff, infrastructure, better support for research and creative work, travel, an ‘excellent new ideas’ fund, faculty retention and the like. With somewhat smaller ranks of tenured faculty, we would be able to better support the faculty, staff and students we have.” However, we fully recognize that this transition will place an undue labor burden on contingent instructors, while the university can conveniently eradicate the fiscal costs of benefits associated with a modicum of job security. This is a blatant means of cutting expenses by marginalizing labor within the university, and it is particularly telling that administrative salaries are left untouched in these desperate fiscal times.
The end result of these cuts will be the marginalization and exploitation of a temporary workforce, poor continuity of education for our students, and likely the continued systematic undermining of the humanities – all made under the cover of a pandemic-generated fiscal crisis. Despite what our administration might believe, the university is not a marketplace. The university is not an investment bank. The university is not a corporation. And these appeals for a “nimbler” College of Arts and Sciences predicate cuts that we vociferously oppose.
We at GPSG stand in solidarity with our tenure-track faculty, instructors, and staff. We call for university administration to readily embrace the financial cuts to their salaries that they are so ready to inflict upon an overburdened workforce with little to no bargaining power or job security.