William T. Mishler misses the mundane. But there's simply no money to pay for it.
Gone are the days when Mr. Mishler, the chairman of the political-science department at the University of Arizona, could hire two new faculty members a year, when he and his colleagues could make long-distance calls and photocopy handouts to their hearts' content.
For three months, the university has been under a hiring freeze in anticipation of a 4-percent cut in state appropriations for higher education. This month, that turned into a 4.5-percent cut. For the University of Arizona, the cut translates into a nearly $16-million budget shortfall this academic year.
Once the university established a plan for handling the budget crisis, officials softened the hiring freeze a bit, says Richard J. Roberts, the budget director. In November, the university's president, Peter Likins, allowed departments to hire adjuncts again to help with the teaching requirements in the spring semester, and in December, he announced that exceptions to the freeze could be signed off at the vice presidential level, instead of by him.
To break the freeze, administrative and academic departments must show that they can afford the hires and still keep within their budget limitations, Mr. Roberts says. The exceptions to the hiring freeze have been faculty members who can teach core-curriculum courses, required classes in the majors, and graduate courses.
Still, "in all the colleges and departments, it's a real hit," says George H. Davis, the university's provost and senior vice president for academic affairs. "People are not able to hire faculty, develop start-up funds for new faculty hires, and purchase capital equipment." And this year the university received no state money for rebuilding and renovating laboratory space, so "this cut hurts us significantly in recruitment of new faculty."
Because of the bad times, the university has allowed a number of its tenure-track positions to die by natural attrition, as faculty members have left or retired in the College of Business and Public Administration and in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. But the university hasn't stopped recruiting faculty members entirely, and it is hiring them on a case-by-case basis, primarily at the assistant-professor level.
The university has also delayed filling some administrative openings because of the downturn. It is conducting national searches for a dean of social and behavioral sciences and a comptroller, but Mr. Davis says it has postponed a search for a chief information officer. The position will not even be filled by an interim appointee.
And when the vice provost for academic affairs goes on sabbatical in January, the vice provost for educational technologies, who had been on sabbatical for the fall semester, will come back not only to handle the responsibilities of her own job, but also to oversee those of her colleague. "Normally, we would have wanted to hire an interim vice provost," Mr. Davis says, but there wasn't enough money.
The budget crisis has also led to the death of an experimental college within the university. After investing $8-million in the Arizona International College, a liberal-arts college with an international emphasis, administrators recommended that the Board of Trustees eliminate it, and the board did so last fall. "The university decided that supporting the college in this fiscal climate would not be prudent," Mr. Davis says.
Many academic departments across the university, like political science, have had to put their hiring plans on hold. Normally, Mr. Mishler's department would have 30 full-time, tenure-track faculty members. This year he has only 25. "We've had a fairly high level of turnover in recent years and a number of retirements," he says.
Last year, his department had four professors retire and three leave for work elsewhere. Mr. Mishler was able to bring in three new professors last year, and he had expected to be able to hire at least two this year. His department and others in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences made their hiring requests, but only four were approved. Both of Mr. Mishler's requests were turned down.
The hiring crunch has crowded classrooms a bit more this year. Upper-level courses, normally capped at 35 students, will have as many as 90 students this spring, while introductory courses, capped at 90 students in the past, will have as many as 300 students. The department is also allowing advanced graduate students to teach independent courses and using adjunct instructors in core courses -- practices the department would normally not allow.
His department has had to slash routine expenses as well. Professors are limited to photocopying 50 pages a week using departmental paper and are prohibited from giving away handouts in class. "We're asking them to put it on the Web and let students download it themselves," Mr. Mishler says. Faculty members are even thinking about posting their syllabuses on the Web next fall and not handing out any hard copies, he says.
Mr. Roberts, the budget director, acknowledges that the situation "creates a climate that's dispiriting," but he's trying not to despair. In his budget office, he has positions open for a senior budget analyst and an entry-level computing technician. He's not even going to ask the administration for exceptions to fill these positions because he's sure he wouldn't get them.
"It's nice for everyone to have goals and aspirations," he says, "but you have to adjust in these current circumstances."
THE STATE OF HIRING:
All this week the Career Network looks at how the recession is affecting hiring at different types of colleges.
