University Budget Blood 1

I've been trying to find public universities that are slated to get cut as much as my own, the University of California, whose President as of June 17th is offering a menu consisting of three kinds of 8% pay cuts. I have yet to find anything this bad.

To get started, here's a CHE overview of state cuts, with a table at the bottom, and a CHE overview of the crisis that focused a lot of UC minds on the California issue. Here's my slightly irritated response.

Nevada: 5% fee hikes and 5% pay cuts.

Arizona: ASU - furloughs for all employees 2008-09 equaling 4-6% of total pay
University of Arizona: 8 days/year, or about 3%


Florida: 0% so far

North Carolina: 5% cut in overall budgets translating into unknown pay cuts

Wisconsin: 8 day/year furlough, about 3% cuts

Concordia University (NE): 3%

Worst cut recently announced: 20% at Greensboro College (NC)

Harvard: salary freeze, plus layoffs of 275 after retirement buyouts of 500, on a core staff base of 16,000

So far, UC wins for the biggest faculty cuts (on top of an ongoing 10-15% lag behind competitors in existing salary levels).

There is much anecdotal evidence that faculty are reduced to powerless wailing in the face of cuts: see this good CHE piece for many examples. The Obama election was thought by some - me at least - to mean a reduction of economic determinism. But at universities the opposite is happening: financial factors are overriding everything.