You know what puzzles me? Whenever budgets get tighter, our management imposes more control on us: like getting additional signatures for "odd" expenses. This requires me to bug two extra people because I spent an additional 15 dollars on an expense that I thought was worth it. The efforts of all these people costs way more than those lousy 15 bucks. Just give me my own budget responsibility. Make me accountalbe, not my manager!

At the same time they are adding controls, organizations often overlook the impact of non-academic staff who are costing more than they deliver. Salaries and benefits are often a large budget item, and top performers are anywhere between 2 and 10x more effective than average performers. Marginal, but 'protected' employees can negatively impact finances, service, as well as morale.

I have a problem with my institution spending millions of dollars on unproven distance learning technologies and computerized management systems like ERP while neglecting the pitiful conditions in the classrooms. The tuition dollars they are spending should go instead to improving the sanitary and acoustic conditions in our classroom as well as broken blackboards, desks, and chairs. In general, faculty are held to a very high standard when it comes to accountability for reappointment, promotion, and tenure. It should be that way. However, there is no where near that kind of scrutiny permitted of administrators and their performance.

Here at Mediocre U we have a multi-million dollar deficit and the new dean has responded by throwing the department's business office into receivership, which means the dean's business office now reviews all requests for reimbursement, no matter how small. The idea seems to be that somewhere in the Amazon book orders and taxi receipts, there are millions of dollars of overages. When it comes to making executive decisions, however, the dean and his team are frozen in the headlights. Tinkering here and there, shaking down folks for this Starbucks receipt and that airport parking receipt, all while the classroom fall to pieces and class sizes explode. Vision: it turns out it doesn't come with the job.

Oh, yes. Here at Flyover State U, rather than look at hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries being sucked up by stagnant and useless staffers, those of us who remain productive have had our travel and continuing education expenses cut completely.

Amen. My

The Golden Rule: "The one with the gold, makes the rules." Or, "The one who makes the rules has the gold." Admin makes the rules. Admin keeps the gold. Admin never cuts its own budgets.

I joined 8 other new faculty at a liberal-arts university this fall. All of our positions had turned from tenure-track to "one-year full time" because of budget cuts. We may all be re-hired for another year, but after that, the jobs have to be re-advertised as new tenure-track positions. The amount of HR work that must be involved, plus faculty searches. .... and of course, we're all looking for other jobs! My department has two of us, out of 7 total faculty, which means the dept is on its toes, not knowing when they'll have to start looking again for 2 new people. Apparently our jobs are supposed to be re-advertised in the same year that the university's salary freeze ends, which will create a huge burden on the system all at once. Another strange thing was that the state offered early retirement and then found they had a shortage of professors for the classes listed. Which meant looking for new part-time people. It all seems so inefficient.

The first and major cut should be to the black hole of football and other costly sports programs. For example, UC Berkeley's academic budget is subsidizing million dollar deficits in its athletic department. At my own Mediocre University, hundreds of thousands of dollars are lost each year on a losing football team. When we will we see a larger groundswell against the athletic program excesses that harm and steal from academic programs? Why should faculty be furloughed while football coaches earn six or seven-figure salaries?

After 40 years in higher education it appears that most of our institutions of higher learning parallel management at GM and Chrysler. Does it take a complete collapse before anyone responds?

Open up the books. Let everyone in the department, college/school, university see where the money is going and where it's coming from, where the cost- and profit-shifting is occurring, see what the top executives are bringing in and pulling down.

You can't lead when you're afraid of losing your job. Too many adminstrators I've worked with over the years--at UC, private CA schools, and a half dozen Northern and Southern California community colleges--care more about keeping their positions and stroking their egos than in supporting student success. I became a teacher for a reason, and I don't believe someone should be an educaitonal adminstrator who hasn't actually worked with students at some point. There's just something about looking the people whom you are working to support in the eyes that makes an impact on what and why you do your job, no? Administrators that only look at little marginal costs aren't really interested in or aren't capable of examining what and why we do what we do.

We do a horrible job allocating resources (especially in our school), but the upper administration of the university does nothing to correct this, even when obviously bad choices are pointed out by the faculty. For example, while many of our programs are understaffed (almost to the point of having to shut down even though they have relatively high graduate enrollments) and depend on adjunct faculty to teach over 50% of our courses, we continue to hire faculty into programs which use no adjunct faculty. Our problem is the result of having Dean's with personal agenda's and not having an upper administration willing to address real issues.

Our university warehouses faculty in shared cubicles that are so tiny that you can't fit more than one student at a time - so helping several students at once is out of the question. Also, there are no lights! and no whiteboards in the cubicles. And there is only one outlet per cube, so there are masses of electrical cords going into power strips. Best yet, the corridor to the cubes is locked so that it is really difficult for students to get in to see a professor. As a result, very few students ever make it in to see a professor (which is just as well given the space problems).
Yet, in an effort to increase "student engagement", we just built a huge multimillion dollar "student engagement building" with a lounge, where presumably faculty will sit and drink coffee with the students. Wow, talk about misallocation of resources...