Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Turn it around; don’t give it away: AAUP Statement on Budget Transparency and Pay Cuts

The Executive Board of the AAUP has issued a statement calling for full information and transparency regarding campus budgets, and for faculty to resist cutting salaries to avoid cuts in areas not central to higher education or to achieve budgetary "flexibility". Sounds very familiar, but very well put. Here is the first paragraph:

Recent decades have witnessed: (a) a systematic shift of institutional monies from educational to administrative expenditures; (b) a disjuncture between rapidly rising tuition versus overused and underpaid contingent faculty and graduate student employees; (c) a growing gap between rising numbers of Full Time Equivalent students and the numbers of tenure-track faculty; and (d) a growing gap between faculty/academic professional and senior administrative salaries. Each of these patterns work to the detriment of educational quality, institutional effectiveness, student access and success, and broad social benefit.


1 comment:

  1. This is an articulate (and partial) list of the kinds of moves made by a "politics of caution". What is the cumulative effect, over 15 years, of missing small thing after small thing? If the blimp stays trim as it descends, it is not, apparently, a crash.

    Jim Collins in How the Mighty Fall identifies the third stage of corporate failure as the denial of risk.

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