The Office of the Dean of the Faculty has reduced the temporary teaching budget by $450,000 this fiscal year as part of the University’s efforts to reduce the structural deficit.
The cuts to temporary teaching funds bring the Dean of the Faculty budget almost halfway to its $1 million reduction goal, which was announced in the University’s deficit reduction action plan released Sept. 10.
Temporary teaching funds are used to hire adjunct or visiting faculty members to stand in for faculty members on leave. Prior to this cut, these funds made up $6 million of the $140 million Dean of the Faculty annual budget, said Dean of the Faculty Kevin McLaughlin P’12.
When the Deficit Reduction Working Group formed last fall, McLaughlin knew there was a strong possibility that he would be asked to find ways to cut down on his budget, he said. To find the necessary savings, his office focused specifically on the temporary teaching budget because of their larger control over that than over other elements of the budget, he said.
The process of determining temporary teaching fund allocations begins in February of each year, when the Office of the Dean of the Faculty calculates the anticipated amount of funding needed to cover each department’s faculty leaves for the following fall semester.
Once department chairs have been presented with the proposed amount of funding, they have the opportunity to make appeals to the dean of the faculty if they feel their department’s financial needs will not be adequately met.
“It’s always a conversation” between the departments and the dean’s office, said Jeri Debrohun, chair of the Department of Classics.
The Deficit Reduction Working Group’s May recommendations asked the Office of the Dean of the Faculty to produce $1 million in savings over the next two to three years. The office will ask departments to be judicious about what courses they would like to offer again next fiscal year despite the normal faculty member being on leave, McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin informed departments in fall 2014 that budget cuts would likely be necessary, he said. Beginning in December, he worked with the departments to find ways to “save some money in that budgeting process that wouldn’t have an ill effect on the concentrations” by identifying non-essential courses, he said.
All courses that were proposed to be taught by adjuncts and were not concentration requirements “got a closer look,” McLaughlin said. Enrollment history and curricular importance were taken into account when assessing these “non-essential” courses, McLaughlin added.
“If there’s a class that has five students in it, does it have to be taught every year or every semester?” asked Provost Richard Locke P’17, who co-chaired the Deficit Reduction Working Group and helped produce the final action plan. “The answer to that question is sometimes yes, it does have to be taught every year because it’s important for the curriculum. And other times, it doesn’t,” he said.
The goal was “to fund all of the essential courses that were requested and to fund as many of the non-essential courses that the departments thought were important,” McLaughlin said.
Ultimately, the departments decided which courses to offer given the amount of temporary teaching funds provided, McLaughlin said. “We gave them a budget, and they managed it,” he added.
Debrohun said the most important thing is that departments are “able to teach the classes that we need to teach and offer the kinds of things that our students need to get.”
“It’s never been the case in my experience that we haven’t been able to do that, and there’s nothing about the new formula or discussions around it that looks to me as though it’s really going to be problematic for our department,” she said.
But not all faculty members share Debrohun’s confidence that the budget cuts can be implemented without affecting the University’s ability to provide the same quality of education.
“We are already far from able to hire enough temporary instructors to cover courses left uncovered by faculty sabbaticals,” wrote Luther Spoehr, senior lecturer in education and history, in an email to The Herald.
“The proposed cuts in the University’s budget for such temporary instructors will make it even more difficult to sustain the number and quality of undergraduate courses,” he added.
In the coming year, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will look more closely at long-term commitments to visiting faculty members to meet the $1 million request, McLaughlin said.
“We are very much focused on the money,” he said. “We’d rather not do this, but we’ve been told that we have to find $1 million.”
