The Impact of College and University Budget Cuts - Solicited Comments

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Related, A concurrent session at SCUP–44, July 18–22: Sustaining Small Colleges: Using Models in an Integrated Planning Process

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Some of you may, like us, enjoy Rick Reis' Tomorrow's Professor mailing list (and now blog). It's one of the more thoughtful email newsletters we receive. Recently he asked his readers to share their stress about the budget cuts on their campuses. The responses reveal, among other things, some of the stress and angst within academic departments - from real live faculty. He's worked to make those responses available on his blog, here. It's a valuable read. Some excerpts:

The good news is that anything related to direct instruction will likely be funded, but not optimally funded (i.e., a thousand small cuts). Everything else gets a big cut.

Sometimes I felt like a beheaded chicken because in spite of these, I still have to do research and service. Guess what, we have not have any increase for 2 years now and we are supposed to be getting this term, but I guess, I can forget that also. Bummer!

At Cal State X, the students are not allowed to print out schedules for fall registration. This paper-saving initiative creates more problems for advisors because few students come in with their classes planned.

In my own department and college, I've been impressed with efforts by our leadership to maintain transparency - information, as it comes in, has been passed down, discussed in open meetings, and on the whole we've kept our sense of humor about it (although our Dean and Chair tend to look at times like they're bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders); in fact our department meetings have been more amusing and more united than they've been in ages over the past semester. I deal with grad student funding, which is precarious at the best of times, and right now we are having to be very, very cautious in making funding decisions and in deciding how many to admit.