Department Planning: Fiscal Crises and the Question of Community

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

---

---

SCUP Link

One department at UNC, when planning for budget cuts, asked itself some discerning questions about "community": "Who are we as a department? To whom are we responsible? Where does that responsibility begin and end from professional, personal, and fiscal standpoints?" Here's what they did:

Are those solutions universally applicable? No. Will they completely satisfy everyone in our department? No again. Indeed, given the continuing context in which we live and work, such measures may only provide a short-term solution.

However, one overall lesson surprised us in our move against the increased dependence on adjuncts in academe: The practice, we found, could be unpragmatic, creating misleading expectations and difficult ambiguities over responsibility within our community, and at a cost.

Fiscal crises introduce situations and feelings that create discomfort for people seeking the life of the mind—uncertainty, worry, disappointment, and vulnerability. Matters of the heart tend to interrupt intellectual pursuits that we typically follow in isolation from one another on a day-to-day basis.

---

---

SCUP's Planning Institute: Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers while you engage in one of the three SCUP Planning Institute Steps. In addition to being offered on demand, on campuses to teams of campus leaders, the institute steps are also offered to all professionals at varying times and venues. Currently scheduled are:

• May 22–23, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• July 10, Minneapolis, MN - Step I (in conjunction with SCUP–45)
• October 2, Ann Arbor, MI - Step I
• January 21–22, Tuscon, AZ - Step II and Step III