How to run a university - This is your budget (Right!).

One of the good things, a tiny silver lining to a dark cloud, of having no salary or pension that depends upon the state, or not having any budget for running your herbarium, or not having any staff to support, is that your budget can't really be cut. Sigh. And of course since Lincolnland has a GnOPe governor, the state budget must be cut, especially higher education, that most dangerous of public institutions. More on this later. Let's suppose you are a department chairman, and here any similarities to real people are completely accidental, and your dean tells you you have a budget of say 4.5 million dollars. OK, that sounds like a lot, but mostly that consists of the cumulative salaries of your faculty and staff. However, that total is used to calculate how much you must cut your budget based on some magic percentage figure. Well, suppose professor Z is retiring in December, so you decide to cut the budget by an amount that equals half of his current salary. No, you can't do that because as soon as he retires that salary is no longer part of your budget. Well, can that half salary be deducted from the budget now so that the percentage cut is based on a smaller total? Well, no, you can't. Now this folks is a budget catch-22 where the total only counts against you and never counts for you. Actually, only about $140,000 exists that isn't salary, so your cuts must come out of that amount, and departments with more highly paid faculty will suffer larger cuts from other funds than others. Now TPP has pointed out before that departments never get the tuition dollars that their courses generate either, or the decision about which administrative services to retain might solve the budget cut problem easily.

No money for tiger chow

Is there some contest among GnOPe governors to see who will be the "REAL" fiscal conservative as determined by who can make the most drastic cuts?  Now there are cuts, and then there are cuts, but the GnOPe always takes aim at the same two things, social programs for the poor and public education. Until recently, the USA could look to public education as one of its great achievements, institutions that allowed kids like TPP from blue collar backgrounds to become college professors, of course in the process, of becoming educated and gettting ahead, it makes many of us into liberals.  Gasp! Being able to think has never been good for ideologies, so when your party's policy is to create, maintain, and reinforce a wealthy elite, to which us college professors while comfortable, are not a part. So little Bobbie Jindal who once said the GnOPe has to stop being the party of stupid, is proposing a whopping 82% cut to LSU's budget! No institution can absorb such cuts in the short term, so this is designed to be damaging to the state's premier institution of higher learning. In truth, illiterate and uneducated is different from being stupid, so clearly the LA governor is aiming for the former not the latter. Does it ever occur to these fiscal conservatives that higher education pays back for its cost in spades?

Academic bureaucracy

One of the first things to get the Rauner-round^TM here in Lincolnland are its universities.  Our new GnOPe governor says he'd like to give universities more money, but first they have to "cut their bureaucratic waste".  Now TPP is not a big fan of the administration, but he does know a few things after so many years as an academic. And TPP knows a few things about his university after having been around so many years. The state has been slowly but surely cutting its support for higher education which means the cost is shifted to the student in the form of tuition and fees. Here in Lincolnland the state support has shifted from around 68% of the cost and now some 30 odd years later state support is around 16-18%. Yet if you figure in inflation, and the actual real cost of doing business, our university is spending less of its budget to run itself than ever before. In other words to minimize the burden on students, our university has gotten more efficient. Another thing that is known by this academic is that our salaries are below the median of our peers at comparable institutions. Sigh. One wonders how us over-paid faculty escaped our governor's criticism? The majority of the administration operates to do things for students many of which the state mandates the university to do, and a lot of unfunded mandates have come our way; the state still wants things, but doesn't want to pay for them. Now the university could probably do with a few less deanlets, but seriously where is all this bureaucratic waste our governor wants cut? Well, he doesn't know, but it's his business acumen  and GnOPe belief that higher education is wasteful. Do not hold your breath for him to show you data, nor will he look at yours especially if it doesn't support his beliefs. What all of this means is that higher education is going to get its budget cut in name of curtailing wasteful spending whether there is any or not. It didn't take long did it? That's how it is. You do a great job, you do it more efficiently, and then you get budget cuts because of your non-existent wastefulness. Could have been worse. The governor of another Midwestern state wanted to know why university faculty couldn't teach 5 courses a term like high school teachers?  No need to try and explain that our job is to teach students to learn for themselves, and that means doing history, art, and science, and to be a scholar, someone who can apprentice young scholars, takes time outside the classroom. But then again one of our missions is to "train people for the work force of Lincolnland".  Yes, train, not educate.  Sit, speak, roll-over, heel, beg, that's training. And our politicians of all flavors don't seem to appreciate the difference between education and training. This is a good time to be retired.