What’s Going to Happen Next Year?

I think my university is finished with faculty hiring for this year. We completed four of the five tenure-track searches we anticipated at the beginning of the fall, and suspended the other with the consent of the program faculty members affected. I don’t anticipate further searches — at least full-scale ones — at this point in the year. So my thoughts now turn to what our hiring season will look like next year.

I’m already thinking about several factors. First, we will face a further decline in endowment revenue, as the dismal returns of the past year will continue to eat into our three-year retrospective endowment average. We will know a lot more about enrollment in a couple of months, and once we see what happens next fall we should have a better idea of how the current economic downturn will affect student demand over the next several years.

Some faculty members are considering retirement. They are among our more highly paid professors, so their retirements might free up money while still enabling us to replace them with junior faculty members. But their TIAA-CREF accounts have absorbed the same losses as university endowments, so it will be harder for them to retire now and they may postpone it.

Moreover, a number of the budget “fixes” planned for next year are one time only. For example, we won’t be replacing colleagues on full-year sabbaticals; instead we’ll put that savings toward budget relief. (Fortunately, we should still be able to maintain curricular integrity, which won’t always be the case.) So any savings we get from retirements this year may be needed to resolve future budget problems.

The good news is that we can and will hire where needed, and will still do our best to offer competitive salaries and good working conditions for our current and incoming faculty members. It would be fabulous to return to normal as soon as possible, but I’m now thinking that “normal” is at least several years away.