Our response is here. We don't want to take up room on the blog at the moment since it's more important to deal with the verification issue (check for your "I Voted" icon) in the Faculty Poll (see "Voting Problems" below).
The Shelton-Hay op-ed in the Star is here. Please help amplify or refine our response by adding your comments below. Remember that our readers include people from within the University and outside.
Also check out Renee Schafer Horton's 9/24 Tucson Citizen report here. One of our readers says below "She's doing better reporting for free than those who are getting paid."
And here for the perceptive, incisive commentary of Evan Lisull in the Desert Lamp. Evan's commentary is sometimes hard to penetrate, sometimes brilliant - but we always enjoy reading in his posts things we can't say - or haven't thought of yet!
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I think their editorial only reinforces how OUT OF TOUCH they are with their own faculty, staff and students.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that they are taking such a whiny defensive posture in the public media is a sad statement... why not invest that time engaging your faculty instead of begging the public to protect you???
Looks to me like they are afraid for their jobs?
Shelton and Hay's op ed.
ReplyDeleteThey clearly seem to have "consulted with" confused with "talking at."
I have never once had any sense at all that the Provost was truly engaged in consultation in any encounter I have ever had with her or any public format I have ever seen her in. Has anyone ever had a different experience?
A few points about recent postings—
ReplyDeleteAs many of us know, a basic rule of rhetorical strategy: never ask a question until you are thoroughly prepared for the answer. This is clearly pertinent to the issue of the current faculty poll. For this, and several other reasons, WE SHOULD BE VERY CAREFUL ABOUT HOW MANY EGGS WE PUT IN THIS BASKET. The results are quite likely to be ambiguous at least in some terms, and will therefore be subjected to interpretation and manipulation. I can’t prejudge how the poll will turn out, but I can try to reiterate the fact that even if it produces clear-cut results about the present administration and their actions, these results deal with only one specific manifestation of a much more systemic set of problems.
A minor point: if the poll is truly anonymous and confidential, how will anyone which colleges replies have come from unless someone actually includes that information in the comments section?
The rally and other events on our campus today were developed in solidarity with a much larger action taking place in California to protest recent assaults (including budgetary) on higher education there. Notably, one of the most central issues leading to the call for UC (and supporting) walkouts, was the UC administration’s effort to conceal the effects of budget cuts by ignoring a unanimous faculty governance call to have furloughs taken on instructional days. This position coincides with my earlier call, which I repeat here, to make manifest in Arizona the cumulative and damaging effects of decades of budget cuts. To continue to allow legislators to escape paying a political price for these actions is to invite more of the same. No one who claims to be truly concerned about the present and future of the UA could possibly object to creative efforts to mobilize our most central constituencies: our students and their parents. We should direct our collective wisdom in this direction. I would also say that rather than impeding such efforts, our “leaders” should long ago have taken the lead in fostering agitation to change our political climate. Rather than acceding year after to year to cuts, and wringing their hands about the inevitably uneducable legislature, they should have been much more proactive in producing and deploying effective political resistance to these policies. If they HAVE tried, they have failed repeatedly. It’s time to give other educators a chance.
Please check out Renee Schafer Horton's Godblogging for today, 9/24. As one of her readers says, she's doing better reporting for free than those who are paid to report on the UA.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be a great absentee from the shelton-hay's list of consulted groups and constituencies: the faculty at large... while several of the groups they mentioned are faculty populated (senate, c-11 etc) there has not been another town hall with them present and all of the faculty since the one at Gallagher Theatre last year... or has it?
ReplyDeleteanother such forum in the next few days would do wonders for the open communication they claim to be embracing...
Great post, Marv.
ReplyDeleteSo is there anything planned for the next faculty forum?
Second Faculty Forum with Faculty Governance Leadership
October 1, 2009 4:00 -5:30 p.m. Family and Consumer Sciences 202
While I support the position of the people running this blog, there is one issue that I believe has become a red herring--transparency. My problems with Shelton's criteria for distributing differential cuts is that the metric used is unrelated to excellence (revenue generation) and is not faithfully applied in any case (Eller and Law). My criticisms of Shelton's plans would be no different if he had devised the plan with complete transparency.
ReplyDeleteI bring this up because Shelton and Hays' recent opinion piece argues (falsely I might add) that the faculty were consulted. Our focus on transparency has allowed for Shelton and Hay to redirect the argument away from the core problem--a lousy system for allocating cuts--to a lesser topic.
I fully agree that more transparency and cooperation would have led to a better plan, but we should be honest. If Shelton had come up with a good plan without faculty consultation we would not be having this conversation on this blog.
Do not let Shelton and Hay sidestep the core issues by fighting over peripheral issues.
I gotta say, Renee's latest blog entry is the best coverage of the current issues at the U of A I have seen. Heck, she even bothers to call people and interview them and see what they think.
ReplyDeleteToo bad the Provost and President don't do that.
Marvs points are quite important and quite wise.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the poll and its results are likely to raise more questions than answers. On one side, If there is a lack of confidence, then it can be chalked up to a few disgruntled colleges who got burned. Or if few vote, there is Nixon's "silent majority" all over again. OR some in facutly governance appear to be walking a tightrope. Will they really make a statement that the President or Provost (or both) should go? Or will they be more likely to say..."gosh...there really is dissatsifaction...maybe we can talk to them some more and build a process for next time"...even though no one will trust it. These are just a few outcomes of this poll or potential results...and I didn't even get into the things like "oh there is a self selection bias" etc etc. And then, it could even be that a majority of those polled actually think they are doing a good job. What then?
Last, Marv's point on political mobilization is solid. I was impressed with the hard hitting nature and public nature of how the cuts are hurting us. Very impressed. But why now and why so damned late? Why not last year? Why weren't faculty leaders listening when so many were telling them that we need to push back and mobilize politically? Now we aer doing it, fine, but many have communicated this to both Robert and Meredith...and to faculty governance. We wasted a lot of time and effort with this transformation biz.
Last, and most important, why do the differential cuts at all? They keep saying they all favored it but what a massive management and political blunder to do it now. It has fractured us and pitted college versus college. Good for them if we are fighting but remember....it was the decision to implement the cuts and in this fashion that has divided this campus.
Our President could have unified us long ago. He could have been stronger, we could have put our effort into showing the pain of the cuts openly..long ago. If everyone had shared them equally...again...we might be all fighting the legislature instead of half fighting them.
This has been circulating the campus this afternoon and was sent to us. It's been posted with names removed, although, we have verified that the student allegedly arrested is a student at the UA. It's an interesting story and a rather frightening glimpse of the "higher ups" if it did occur as reported.
ReplyDeleteTUCSON A University of Arizona graduate student was arrested and charged with "criminal damage" and "disturbing an educational institution" for using sidewalk chalk today at a pro-education rally on campus.
More than 150 faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students gathered for a noontime rally at the university to protest cuts to public education in the State of Arizona. As members of the U of A marching band played "Bear Down Arizona", demonstrators held signs and made chalk outlines of "bodies" in front of the administration building, with slogans like "Death by a Million Cuts", "Edu-cide", and "Stop Student Sacrifice".
Name removed, a first-year master's student, was arrested by police as he was leaving the rally. Police told name removed that the order to arrest him came "from higher up."
Said name removed "the administration has said that they want people to get involved and dialogue concerning the budget situation. But now they are penalizing me for speaking out. And all I did was to use sidewalk chalk."
The rally, organized by Arizona for Education, was part of a university-wide day of action in support of education that also included teach-ins and other educational events. Last year, the university took a $77 Million cut and is expected to take a cut between $18 and $25 Million this year. The day of action was organized in support of the state-wide walkouts organized today throughout the University of California system, where campuses are also facing dramatic budget cuts.
Arizona for Education is a coalition of students, faculty and staff as well as members of the Tucson community concerned about cuts to university education spending.
As of 2 pm all chalk had been removed from the sidewalks in front of the university administration building.
--
c'mon, he should have never been arrested for this petty thing... I have seen poetry written in chalk all over Modern Languages and other campus sidewalks before, the little sheltered and spoil greeks do this all the time and they are never even cited for vandalizing UA property, so this arrest speaks volumes about how INSECURE AND UNCONFIDENT (ON THEMSELVES) our current administration is/feels/acts with regards to genuine dissent... I saw the chalk this morning and the last thing on my mind was to call the cops, the question is who called the UA police about this? and why?... WHO were those "higher ups" who disliked this expression of disagreement with the current situation...
ReplyDeleteshameful indeed...
In the interest of avoiding needless controversy over a non-issue, we have removed a comment that, in connection with the arrest of a student for use of chalk on a sidewalk, referred - perhaps a little too glibly - to a proposed "state Senate bill allowing secured firearms in cars on campus" discussed in today's Wildcat. Here's the link:
ReplyDeletehttp://wildcat.arizona.edu/news/asua-wavers-on-guns-wrc-personnel-1.528359
The comment was misunderstood, and before this gets out of hand we thought it better to avoid having to deal with more outraged responses to that comment, when the outrage would more properly be directed against whomever ordered the arrest of a graduate student chalking for the UA, in protest against the legislature's budget cuts -- which is just exactly what President Shelton in his op-ed piece this morning encouraged all of us to be doing, though maybe not with chalk in front of his tower....
I have posted at other times about the authoritarian nature of this administration (and the general apathy of the times in which we live). Many people were not at a meeting between staff/faculty and the administration early in the summer. When we left the meeting (which was not well attended), I was surprised to see a small army of cops waiting outside--ready for what? The administration has had higher expectations of our outrage than we have.
ReplyDeleteThe poorly attended protest today was quickly followed by hundreds and hundreds of sorority and frat students going about their business as usual on the mall. One colleague said, I guess we work at the University of Apathy.
So I don't know what dismays me more: the student arrested for chalking or the fact that the attendance at the protest was so paltry. I think we need to talk to our friends and colleagues and try to convince them that it is time to wake up a little.
I would like to give Shelton the benefit of the doubt on the issue of the student being arrested, and if I am right he will correct the situation within 24 hours. But even if I am right, this event shows us that there are extreme elements within the administration who are willing to and even eager, it seems to me, to stifle any open exchange of ideas, any challenge (however peaceful) to authority, and the simple right to free speech. Today's event is yet another sign of how elements in the central administration think of the UA as a corporation--the protection of the bottom line in the corporation becomes the only goal of the institution. Dissent and even the exchange of ideas cannot be valued in such a culture. It is not an accident that the noncorporate elements have been shut out of the "Transformation."
The solution? Many people have been supportive of Lynn Nadel's idea of having a faculty forum to talk about the mission of the university. Frankly, I think such an idea is naive, though clearly Lynn has good intentions. When I mention it to my colleagues, they laugh and say, What's the point? We (the faculty in SBS, COH, ARTS) can talk among ourselves until we are blue in the face. We can be smart. We can be RIGHT. It will not matter unless we have leverage. The players escaping harm in the current "Transformation" are doing well because they have leverage: hard science, professional schools, football and sports. These elements have money and or powerful support. The rest of us have no voice in what happens because we have no leverage, no power, no reason (except REASON) for them to listen to us. I don't know how we go about having leverage except what I know from my east coast private university education. In those places, parents, alumni, students, and the culture at large insisted on the importance of the Arts, Liberal Arts, and Social Sciences. In other words, the people with money, the people who became lawyers and business people, had often been English or History majors, and had come to believe in the fundamental value of the liberal arts education. I took these values as a given when I started teaching here; now I see that the powers that be want us to sit in rooms of 1000 students and deliver information rather than teach the value of independent thought. It is our duty to fight against these forces. I don't know how exactly except by continuing to make our voices heard--sometimes in the form of protest.
What a bonehead move by someone. And this wasn't just a quick decision by our finest. The way the story reads, there was a long period of time before the call early in the morning and the event. Someone made a concsious decision to order the arrest, then send officers to the rally to look for them. THAT is disturbing.
ReplyDeleteThe result of this stifles speech, dissent, and sends a message to our students that they'd just better "play ball." or more simply "watch what you do".
I can't imagine this coming from our President though...I can't imagine he would want this type of attention to the campus...at this time...and during the ABOR meetings he is attending in Flag. If it did...
If you haven't seen Evan Lisull's commentary on the Shelton-Hay editorial, it is definitely worth reading. We've provided the link at the head of this post, but here it is again:
ReplyDeletehttp://desertlamp.com/2009/09/24/combination-of-the-two/
Evan notes that the Chronicle of Higher Education picked up Renee Horton's story on the Faculty Poll. Here's the Chronicle link:
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Online-Poll-at-U-of-Arizona/8198/
I want to comment on the following from Sandra's recent post:
ReplyDelete"We (the faculty in SBS, COH, ARTS) can talk among ourselves until we are blue in the face. We can be smart. We can be RIGHT. It will not matter unless we have leverage. The players escaping harm in the current "Transformation" are doing well because they have leverage."
I agree with it almost completely - but NO ONE is escaping harm here, not even those who got 2% cuts this year. Remember that this is on top of many other cuts, including a 17% cut in ICR returns to Colleges, which had a very big effect on hard science.
But, the issue of leverage is absolutely right. So, the question then is how do the folks in these colleges, or any others who feel without power, gain leverage? There are many answers to this question I'm sure, but my starting point, naive though it might be, is to start at the bottom. If we can get those with leverage within the UA to support those without leverage, because they agree that the arts, humanities and social sciences, for example, are an essential part of what we do, and that there is much excellence at the US in these areas, then we have broadened the base. The Forums I proposed are an attempt to build a broad base of values we can all agree on, that can then be used going forward. It is my attempt to bridge the gap between the supposed "haves" and "have-nots" to form a common front. This, combined with wise, transparent leadership would put us in a much better position as we face what is ahead, and as we try our best to change the culture not only of this university but also of the state.
Here I agree with Marv, simply changing our leadership without also doing something to collectively define what the UA should be would likely get us nowhere. Since we know things have to change, and we know more cuts are coming and that we have to figure out how to both generate more revenue and make sure our resources are spent wisely, we have to come together to agree on our core values.
Any solution that fails to also engage directly in determining who and what we want to be is no solution at all. It's just a prescription for further discord and disarray. The hard work of determining what we want to be could indeed be a waste of time, and will certainly be hard whether useful or not, but I don't see that we have a choice.
Lynn Nadel
I just heard on the radio that Jacob Miller, "the guy with the chalk," is facing 6 months in jail or a $2500. fine (or was it both?). This is absurd, embarrassing, outrageous. Shelton should have picked up the phone yesterday and ordered that the charges be dropped. The longer he ignores the issue, the worse he looks. And he's looking pretty bad. Worse and worse as the publicity waves wash across the campus, the city, state, and next it's going to be on national news, that's how ridiculous and outrageous it is. I do feel sorry for Jacob, and his family, and friends, for what they've had to go through. In the long run, he may be remembered as "the guy with the chalk who set off the huge backlash at the University of Arizona that brought down the President in the midst of a faculty vote of confidence..."
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, if the magnitude of the poll glitches turns out to warrant extending the voting time by adding in one additional day next week, the President ought to be thinking about how to save his disintegrating image pronto. Pick up the phone, Bob. Do something. Any normal person in that position would, under the circumstances, have shown some leadership qualities. Or at least some semblance of being awake. (Don't tell me nobody told him in Flagstaff, between yesterday and today, what was going on in front of his Tower.) But he's once again risen above it. Really looks bad. Especially after all the smiling reassurances he gave the graduate students a day or two before. O Arizona...
Hey, no wonder we've got a budget crisis! $1000. to wash off some chalk drawings! That's what Facilities Management said it would cost. I remember a post on this website talking about problems in Facilities Management, and saying someone should look into them. OK, here it is - Sept. 4, under "Welcome to the Forum," last two comments. (You know, this site could really use an index. The "search blog" box only searches posts, not comments.) Well, what do you know: a Facilities Management employee complaining about cover-ups by "Al and Chris" - is that the same Chris mentioned in the Wildcat story? "Associate Director of Facilities Management Chris Kopach said he was contacted by the University of Arizona Police Department and asked to assign maintenance personnel to wash up the chalk drawings. The process cost about $1,000, Kopach said. Many of the drawings were washed away by the time the rally began, at about 12:15 p.m."
ReplyDeleteWow, where did that $1000. go, Chris??
What makes you think that Shelton and Hay don't know exactly what happened to Jacob Miller?
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it sends a very chilling message to graduate students who might want to protest anything at this university.
Will Miller be allowed to continue on as a grad student at the U of A? Will this end any funding he might have? End his career?
They worked on these chalk drawings for several hours... any reason a U of A police officer, or central administrator, couldn't have wandered by and said, hey, got a permit to do that from the Dean of Students? No? Well, cease and desist. Or, hey, only draw on the sidewalk.
Would have solved the entire issue instead of this retaliation after the fact.... wait, is there a pattern here?
For Lynn Nadel's comment above: Yes, I agree with what you say. We have all been hurt in every college, though not all to the same extent.
ReplyDeleteBut to your larger point: I am happy to hear you acknowledge the importance of leverage. And I do agree that convincing our friends in the hard sciences that we are important on the soft side is a way to gain leverage. I have friends and relatives in the hard sciences, people who win large grants, who don't need convincing. In fact, a few of them are sad to say they can no longer send their children to our university because it isn't possible (or soon won't be possible) to get a liberal arts education here. However, even those people say that though they are happy to recognize our significance, they will not support us to the extent that they compromise their own circumstances. Fair enough. So my argument to you is this: in an environment of scarce resources, which is likely to dominate our campus for years and years, it may be easy to convince people to support us in theory but not in practice. COH, ARTS, and SBS will be cut because they can be cut without upsetting a powerful constituency and because it seems like an expeditious way to balance the books. The hope is that as Arizona becomes increasingly sophisticated, educated and urban that the larger community will realize that students need to think and write and make arguments if they are to succeed in business and law and other professions.
I think one point we could make to the central administration now is that they need to protect the quality of education on the softer side of campus if they want to continue to attract students who are asked to pay higher and higher tuition. The central administration currently seems more invested in covering up the reality about the erosion of quality. Again, I understand that they are in survival mode, but someone should point out to them that surviving will require that we continue to attract out of state students.
Many of my students from out of state have asked me why they should pay private school tuition to sit in enormous classes and never meet a professor. Their parents are asking why they should pay for their child to go to another state only to have them take half their classes at a community college. I am sure that the central administration knows this and laments it. But I am not sure to what extent they understand to what that the current equation of differential cuts threatens the survival and viability of the institution.
I know, as everyone does, that differential cuts are necessary. However, as many people have pointed out, differential cuts are not possible WITHIN in COH. It is too late for that. According to the philosophy, cuts should be made within colleges to spare the strong programs, but by this point the cuts have been so deep that cuts have to be made in a way that best preserves the college's most basic functions. In other words, with this cut, there is no one to answer the phones. With the next cut you are firing professors.
The complaint from our side is that the central admin seems to have little awareness of this reality, especially when they blithely talk about differential cuts within colleges preserving quality programs while they simultaneously announce money to be spent on stadiums, trolley lines, new scientists, and other sums of grant money to be controlled by the provost's office.
Was there any real discussion of the ratio of the differential cuts with the colleges? Was there any discussion of how the cuts would be implemented in order to preserve quality programs in the colleges sustaining the heavier cuts? No. Our dean was given marching orders and then her job was threatened. No shared governance, no communication, no cooperation and in the end, very little information.
That's the story of why we are where we are now, I think. I wish it were not the case. I am happy to see Lynn, Marv and other campus leaders stepping up to fill what seems like a vacuum in leadership.
Sandra,
ReplyDeleteThank you for this comment. Lynn, I'm looking forward to your response.
Sandra makes the case for "vital balance" - and the corollary: morbid imbalance entailing the 'inevitable slide to mediocrity' (to coin a phrase), as strongly and concisely as I've seen it done yet. Not special pleading for CLAS (COH + ARTS + SBS), just a cogent summary of compelling arguments based on facts and reality.
Sandra, I hope you will be there in person, as I will be, at the Oct 1 meeting, to continue this discussion with Lynn, and as many of our supporters, in theory and fact, as possible.
To those of our colleagues lately expressing doubt, confusion and pessimism, let me point out that it is people like Sandra that allow us to say "This is why we're still in the game, and still have reason to hope." Next will be to formulate specific elements of a plan to bring us back from the brink. It can be done.
EBH
I think we are all missing an important point here as well. We cannot cut our way to a future for this university.
ReplyDeleteThis is a supposedly large group of the best and brightest, including our central administration. The only way to have a prosperous future is to bring in more money. Why isn't central administration spending as much time on generating revenue as they do on cuts, cuts, cuts? Sure, they talk about grants, fund raising, etc. But what are they really doing? Finding creative ways to add tuition paying students that create a positive balance? REALLY fund raising instead of just talking about it, which is all I've seen in my 12 years here. There MUST be more creative ways to counter this situation than cut, cut, cut.
On Sandra's points. Right on. And I would also agree that there is no reason that those in the 7% cut colleges and the those in the 2% colleges should not be unified. From what I heard, this was a political decision too. The protection of the Sciences, Eller, Law and others had an element of "divide and conquer to it". I heard this even from one faculty leader. The assumption was that those who got 2% would not challenge the differentials, and that they might even defend them because...well...they were winners. But I don't believe that is true.
ReplyDeleteThe truth here is that the process of selecting the differentials, like so many many decisions that have happened since our Provost arrived (like the utter waste of time of "transformation"), have been done in a hidden fashion and in an autocratic one. The pattern of decision making of our Provost has affected this entire campus. There have been no winners really, when they intentionally or not, divide us.
That is what these differential cuts, especially now, have done. It was wrongly done, poorly planned, and the intended or unintended consequences politically was to pit us against each other rather than pitting us all against the legislature and Governor.
Remember folks. If it happened to COA, COH, and SBS it can happen to you too! Lynn makes an excellent point. It actually DID happen to you in the hard sciences last year with a snap decision to take a larger slice of indirect costs...and AGAIN without any discussion of the plan to those colleges most affected.
We HAVE to be unified. I don't believe that they expected us to be. But we can be unified in that fact that this pattern of decision-making by our Provost (and with consent of the President) has affected us all and has done so to the point that there is no trust left on campus.
Without that trust in our leadership, how can we possibly get behind them next year when even more difficult decisions come?
"Was there any real discussion of the ratio of the differential cuts with the colleges? Was there any discussion of how the cuts would be implemented in order to preserve quality programs in the colleges sustaining the heavier cuts? No. Our dean was given marching orders and then her job was threatened. No shared governance, no communication, no cooperation and in the end, very little information."
ReplyDeleteSandra's point above is right on. No there was not such a discussion. The theory was to pass that to the Deans and there was also an assumption, or excuse, that tuition flow model would give these colleges more money. Problem. When asked about when that would occur, it was reported EARLIEST 2011. Others said 5 years from now.
In the meantime I want you to think of this. There is no way to differentially pass on 7% in a college without harming...seriously harming...excellent programs in those colleges. The infrastructure is COA, SBS, and COH is already bare bones. How can we raise money, publish our great discoveries, show off our students without having excellent staff to do that? How can programs like sociology and anthropology not get hit without completely eliminating other departments or firing tenured/tenure track faculty?
sallygradstudent also has a commentary on the editorial published in the Daily Star by Shelton and Hay: http://sallygradstudent.blogspot.com/2009/09/well-shame-on-us.html
ReplyDeleteMany good points in the posts today -- I've just returned after 8 days away to 443 emails and a phd defense on monday that I must prepare for, amongst other things. In all this tumult life and our day jobs go on.
ReplyDeleteOf the points made today, the theme seems to be one of acceptance that we are in (financial and other) trouble, but despair at the choices made to date to address the troubles.
Fund-raising -- it is typically said that you cannot fund-raise out of a budget crisis. This has long been an area of weakness at the UA. The new leadership at the Foundation is doing an excellent job of turning the situation around, but that is a long-term project and not likely to make a vast difference in the next 1-3 years. That's sad, but true. Unlike many of peers, our endowment is pathetically low and plays little role in funding our operations. Perhaps this will change down the road, but there is no magic bullet here. I know for a fact that the President spends a lot of time fund-raising, as do the Deans. This is hard work, and harder still in the current economic climate. Our weaknesses here are definitely not the fault of the current administration, who have tried hard to make things better.
On tuition flow -- this is a big unknown, as I've said before. Can it make a difference -- maybe. When can it make a difference -- there are varied stories here. But ultimately the tuition flow will go to those areas we choose to mount serious instructional programs in. We still have to make choices about which programs will be allowed to do the teaching and hence benefit from tuition revenues. We obviously need all the basics, but that doesn't fully constrain our choices here -- I don't believe we've had anything like a serious discussion about this part of the story.
On the ability of any college to deal with a 7% cut. Its clear that none can -- and that is why it has always been the case that the impact of such "cuts" was going to be ameliorated by short-term "bridging" mechanisms. Ultimately such cuts mean the loss of faculty, but with bridging this could be handled by attrition. This does not mean that I agree with shrinking one College or another. As I've said already, SPBAC had no input into to specific cut levels.
On unifying all faculty around a common strategy -- this is still our best hope going forward.
Sorry to be so brief -- those emails beckon. The next few days are going to raise all kinds of new issues I suspect, perhaps changing the kinds of conversations we need to be having.
Lynn Nadel