Ouch!

Dean Dad has some pretty harsh words for the University of Florida’s administration, which recently instituted a hiring freeze to cope with the university’s projected deficit of up to $30-million. Instead of standing up to its faculty and doing what was necessary, the administration has chosen to live in never-never land, he writes:

The U of Florida seems to be operating on the denial of necessity. Cuts cause conflict? Screw cuts! We’ll just conjure more money from, uh, well, somewhere! That didn’t work? Uh…it’s the governor’s fault! Yeah, that’s it! After all, who elected him?

Oh. Right.

The point of the university is to serve the people of Florida. It is not to serve the faculty. If we grant that fundamental truth, then ‘shared governance’ should come with some pretty glaring restraints on it. Otherwise, people with obviously vested interests – that is, faculty with life tenure – will use their power to pervert the university to serve them instead. Astoundingly, they will have the gall to claim the moral high ground while they feather their own nests. When the irresistible force of angry tenured faculty crashes headfirst into the immovable object of Objective F-ing Reality – in this case, the governor’s veto – bad things will happen. Like hiring freezes. Underfunded areas will continue to languish; overstaffed areas will continue to produce graduates for already-overcrowded fields.?

Inertia kills. Just in the last month we’ve had word of two colleges dying, and of several more on life support. In many states, public higher ed has been the go-to budget line any time there has been a shortfall – the tenured faculty may or may not feel the pain, but the underemployed adjuncts certainly do. Most of higher education is still nonprofit, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to economics. We can choose to try to get a grip on those realities, or we can continue to let them buffet us in the name of conflict avoidance. But the Florida approach of closing your eyes real tight, clicking your heels together, and waiting for the unaccountable windfall to pay everybody off just ain’t working.

A hiring freeze is an abdication of strategy. It’s exactly the wrong move. You can’t wait for flush times to start trying to make changes. If anything, you need those changes all the more when budgets are tight. Now that nobody – nobody – can deny the reality of the budget shortfall, this is the time to get serious about reallocation. That means not setting up processes that will inevitably ratify existing imbalances. It may mean sucking it up and having some nasty political battles. That’s what leaders have to be willing to do.

Good luck, Florida. If you figure out where that secret ‘windfall’ tree is, let me know. I’ve been doing this for a while now, and haven’t found it yet.