My department in L&S, which isn’t large but nevertheless world-recognized for research and scholarship in its field, had a faculty meeting earlier this month to grapple with the assigned exercise of finding 8% that could plausibly be cut from our departmental budget.
The chair put up an overhead transparency itemizing all of the major components of our current annual budget. Our challenge was to assemble enough proposed cuts in specific areas to reach our target, and we were specifically asked to do this in a way that “wouldn’t hurt students.” The presumption apparently being that there must be 8% somewhere in our budget that has nothing to do with teaching or mentoring our undergraduate or graduate students and could be jettisoned without students ever noticing. (more…)