UEA President: Michael Pfau
When any institution falls on hard budget times, there is inevitably a great deal of apprehension, fear and worry, and ultimately there is no escaping the need to make painful choices. When budgets contract, we will need to sacrifice some valuable programs, positions and persons. From my perspective, the question becomes one of priorities.
Personally, I applaud efforts by our leadership to shrink the size of administration in favor of instructional delivery and to attempt to support more of our instructional resources from more reliable recurring funds rather than non-recurring access funds. These are steps we ought to be taking in order to ensure that our central mission – the delivery of high quality instruction to our students – is privileged in our budget discussions.
But I would argue, even as we face massive cuts in the access funds that fund most of our term faculty lines, that we ought to do even more to protect our most essential resource – our faculty. And while it may well be the case that these cuts are only temporary emergency measures until our budget is on a more stable footing, they would nevertheless seriously disrupt not only the lives of those who face layoffs but the students as well.
When faculty are lost, students bear the brunt in terms of diminished course availability, and increased class sizes.
For the sake of both our term faculty and our students, then, I believe that there are ways that we might to re-allocate funds – on an emergency and temporary basis – in a manner that reflects this priority.
One example of this kind of creative “thinking outside the box” involves the proposal I made at the recent budget forum, in which I argued that it might behoove us during the present emergency to consider using some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars allocated toward strategic planning grants in order to plug some of the holes in our access funds.
This program, providing competitive grants to implement the action steps of the recent strategic plan, is valuable to be sure. But in my opinion, it is more essential to our instructional mission that we retain as many of our term faculty as possible.
The same logic, I would argue, ought to be applied in other areas as well – we ought to be willing to sacrifice funds and programs that are merely important, in favor of supporting the quality of instruction that is crucial to our very existence as an institution.