Although Ronnie M. Day desperately wants to hire professors of French, Latin American, and 20th-century American history, he'll be lucky if he gets to search for something as fundamental to a history department as a Civil War historian.
The money to support the position just isn't there, says Mr. Day, the chairman of the history department at East Tennessee State University. Things aren't so bad that the administration has clamped down on long-distance telephone calls and photocopying, at least not yet. "We're fine here in history unless we get an impoundment in the spring," Mr. Day says.
Even before the economy started to sour, East Tennessee was tightening its belt during the boom that eventually went bust. Budget shortfalls and battles over Tennessee tax reform have caused public colleges and universities to get less money from the state in recent years. The current recession has only exacerbated the problem.
With a budget shortfall of $500,000 that could rise to as much as $2.5-million this year, and with a $24-million endowment that has lost, at the latest count, about $1.37-million in the last year, the university has had to put the brakes on some of its hiring. "We do not have a university-wide hiring freeze, but we're hiring very selectively, only for the highest-priority areas," says Bert C. Bach, the university's provost and vice president for academic affairs.
The university is hiring faculty members -- almost entirely at the assistant-professor level -- in areas with the greatest student demand, such as digital media, computer science, and marketing and management. The institution is mounting only 21 national searches for faculty members this year, compared with 26 last year.
The reason for East Tennessee's staggering budget shortfall, Mr. Bowman says, is that the state's "primary source of revenue is sales tax, and as people decide not to buy goods and services, then we don't collect the sales tax."
"Our state is struggling now with tax reform, which doesn't look like it's going to help," he says. "It doesn't look like there's a lot of sentiment among the population for income tax or other revenue sources."
Campus officials have been looking to cut costs and have discussed with community colleges across the state the possibility of not duplicating course offerings. Officials also have raised student fees, to $112 a credit hour from $97.
While the university has not eliminated administrative positions this year, it's not hiring to fill them, either, and it has opted to forgo administrative hires in favor of faculty ones, says James D. Bowman, vice president for business and finance. Some general and academic administrative positions, such as the dean of the College of Applied Science and Technology, the director of public safety, and the athletics compliance coordinator, he says, are now filled with interim appointees pending an upturn in the economy.
"We don't expect to add administrative positions in the near future at all," Mr. Bowman says. "Turnover has been low. Every position will be looked at carefully before it's refilled." Everyone, he says, is stressed, but "if it comes down to major cuts, they'll first be made in administrative areas."
Still, Mr. Day says his history department is already feeling the pinch.
When he arrived at the university in 1968, the department had 20 professors. Today it has 15. Last year, two professors -- a Civil War historian and a Latin American specialist -- retired, and the department has yet to replace either. To help out, the Latin American historian is teaching part time this year.
The department had received money to hire an assistant professor to teach the Civil War and 19th-century American history, but the position was pulled in October before it could be advertised. To teach the department's Civil War offerings in the spring, Mr. Day was able to hire an adjunct whose primary field is World War II and whose secondary field is Civil War history.
Asked to justify money to fill the position next year (whoever is hired wouldn't start until 2003), Mr. Day says he told the administration: "We're the only department in the entire world that does not have a Civil War historian. Even foreign universities that are a bit light on American studies might have one." He has yet to hear whether the department will get the money to make the hire next year, but he is hopeful.
"We've got an aging department," says Mr. Day, who is 62 and is himself mulling retiring in a few years. "Many of us came in the expansion period of the '60s, when regional schools like East Tennessee State University were expanding rapidly. What we desperately need is to keep building at the assistant-professor level with some young blood."
But that may not be possible, at least for now, when money is too tight to even pay for a national search to replace Mr. Day's boss, Donald R. Johnson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His successor will come from inside the institution and will serve on a one-year interim basis starting in July.
THE STATE OF HIRING:
All this week the Career Network looks at how the recession is affecting hiring at different types of colleges.
