Hiring and Firing Bytes

Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, has been picked to lead the university, the Las Vegas Sun reports. 

The Wheeling Jesuit University Board of Trustees has dismissed the Rev. Julio Giulietti, president of the institution since 2007, the Wheeling News-Register reports.

The University System of Maryland plans to slash 175 jobs — 151 of which are currently vacant — and freeze hiring as part of an effort to carve $37.8-million from its 2010 budget, the Baltimore Sun reports. Only 24 employees, none of them tenured or tenure-track professors, are expected to receive pink slips, but “the cuts include a fair number of adjunct and part-time faculty, and I think that’s where the students will see a real impact,” Chancellor William E. Kirwan told the newspaper. “There won’t be as many sections of courses, courses will be harder to get, and some will be larger. So it might take some students longer to graduate.”

The University of California Board of Regents gave raises to more than two dozen top administrators at the same time it cut $800-million from its budget, laying off or cutting the pay of many workers, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Not surprisingly, the raises aren’t going over well with many faculty members and employees. System officials insist that the raises were needed to keep administrative salaries competitive.

Metropolitan State College of Denver has put its faculty performance-pay plan on hold as a result of state-budget cuts, The Denver Post reports. “Faculty evaluations for distributing the money were to begin in January 2010. But Metro’s administration had to take back the merit pool when the amount of money it expected to get from the state for the 2009-10 school year was cut by $7.9-million, or 20 percent,” the newspaper says.

The University of Hawaii is one step closer to laying off faculty members, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports. And faculty members at Florida Atlantic University have filed a formal complaint claiming that the recent layoffs of tenured professors in the College of Engineering and Computer Science violated their union contract, The Palm Beach Post reports.