reimagining…

currently, major universities across the US are taking drastic measures to cope with their huge budget shortfalls. the University of California Board of Regents, for instance, just approved a 32% tuition uptick, thereby tripling the undergraduate academic fees over the course of a single decade. Harvard posted a 27% hit to their endowment, or a loss of $11 billion, the total endowment of MIT and twice the size of the entire UC system’s endowment. of course, such wincing financial burdens are impossible for a mere mortal like myself to wrap my head around, and even the simple statistic of an endowment drop is not a very good indicator of financial health. Instead, I suggest we look at the consequences the financial crisis has leveled against the institutions themselves.

Cornell is currently undergoing a stressful reorganization process that has been merrily named “Reimagining Cornell” by the Provost, as if we can still have lofty goals and dreams but that those dreams should be slightly modified in light of present circumstances. Those circumstances quite starkly include a 15% across-the-board budget cut, from all academic and administrative departments. Being that the huge preponderance of the budget is tied up in salaries of faculty and staff, it is clear that layoffs will be inevitable. The initial reports from Provost-organized task forces were released a couple weeks ago, and the options laid on the table are not-at-all for the feint of heart. A quick read through the College of Engineering 23-page report (the report for the entire University is over 300 pages) reveals that the budget cuts will need to affect every aspect of how we do business here.

In discussing the structure of the college, the task force laughingly recommends that all science-related fields be gutted from the College of Arts & Sciences and College of Agriculture & Life Sciences and merged into the College of Engineering. While the recommendation states that this would be “very complex,” and that “no further action” was taken by the committee to vet this proposal, it is still the number one recommendation provided by the committee to the Provost. It’s as if a few committed college administrators said “we couldn’t get our committee to agree on this, but that won’t shut us up.” While the report recommends no additional mergers (beyond the T&AM and M&AE merger from last December that effectively orphaned the department in which I was studying), it asserts that further collaboration is necessary in order to cut out “redundancy.” No definition to such heavy terms are provided, thereby exacerbating the feeling that I’m facing a thinly-veiled attempt at obfuscating the desired future of our college.

Other suggestions aired by the task force are similarly concerning:

• Halt recruitment of faculty and wait for natural attrition of professors as they retire. The report states “AEP and TAM/MAE will bear the brunt of faculty retirement.” Of course, department chairs don’t want to lose faculty lines indiscriminately, so as to incentivize chairs to encourage retirements, 25% of a faculty line will be returned to the department upon a professor’s departure. Any new faculty hired will be in the fields of bio & energy.
• Implement stronger post-tenure review. As a part of this process, each chair must identify the bottom 10% of faculty from each department to the Provost. This seems, to me, unprecedented.
• Cancel small- to medium-sized courses, especially graduate courses. This will effectively end many upper-division applied math courses at Cornell.
• Eliminate small-section teaching of math courses, thereby putting all graduate students currently teaching those courses out of work. This hits close to home, because about 50% of the T&AM field members are funded by teaching small-section math courses. If these are eliminated it seems almost political on the side of MAE, which sees our Teaching Assistantship culture versus their Research Assistantship culture akin to a country working with two currencies– sooner or later, one of them needs to fold.
• Increase incoming class size to the College by 10% to provide more money in tuition to the University, as if to say “if we give you more money, could you give us a little bit less of a budget cut?”

I find it mildly entertaining that the College of Engineering touts its moral high ground and “lean infrastructure” before it goes into any details of how it should deal with the cuts. Terms such as “societal good” and “strong net contributor” are self-aggrandizingly applied to our College, arguing that our dangerously low faculty:student ratio, the number of huge grants we haul in and the relative importance of STEM research do not justify budget cuts. I have mixed emotions toward using the necessity of STEM research to try to argue that our research is more important than that which is done by our liberal arts counterparts. While I would agree with Fareed Zakaria that the state of American innovation is quite abysmal, I know that other departments carry out research that is just as necessary to being human– even to understand what that means. However, I do know that the research we do takes hundreds (if not thousands) of times the amount of money of comparable breakthroughs in less technical fields, so perhaps that should be recognized when determining who gets cut the worst.

Other fun quotes from the report:

(on why no further administrative positions from IT can be cut from the college) “We often must rely on graduate students to support faculty IT needs as well as a great deal of purchasing activities in departments.” … no shit?

(on why this is not wholly about budget restructuring) “Some have expressed the view that due to initially small level of estimated savings, that all of this restructuring may not be ‘worth it.’ We believe it is, as many of these recommendations make sense, even without a financial forcing function.” you can always rely on management to say “we’re in deep trouble, we need to take drastic action;” stakeholders tacitly agreeing; and management taking that agreement as a mandate to change how business is done.