CSUN University News Clippings

Response to USA Today editorial: Cuts hurt education quality

(March 30, 2009)

By Gary Rhoades

Budget-cutting measures being pursued in higher education are often based on faulty premises and insufficient information. These measures too quickly cut to institutions’ educational core, unnecessarily compromising quality and productivity.

To many people, it makes sense that faculty should be major targets for savings. They share the widespread beliefs that higher education has high labor costs and faculty are the principal labor cost driver. They reason that to achieve major savings, you address the major costs.

But the reasoning is faulty, based on an inaccurate view of higher education costs and faculty. Tenure-track faculty often represent less than a quarter of institutional employees (and much less in community colleges) and of total institutional costs. Moreover, faculty costs have not been rising significantly. What has been rising is the use of less costly contingent faculty. Finally, faculty salary increases have been well below tuition increases and salary increases for senior administrators. The growing costs in the academy lie outside the academic core.

Current choices are frequently being made without careful analysis and deliberation. Faculty and other campus community members often have insufficient access to information about finances, even when administrators call for extraordinary measures given financial duress. Often, there is insufficient consultation with faculty or other constituencies, and insufficient consideration of savings options provided by the very professionals who understand best how the institution works and who can identify strategies for achieving efficiencies without undercutting quality and productivity.

Finally, current measures too often cut to the core not of institutional costs, but of educational quality and productivity. Faculty are not just labor costs; they are intellectual capital. They generate value for the organization and society. They do not just cost money, they produce revenue.

The common aims of trimming waste or unneeded academic programs ignore the realities: We are hitting vital organs while spending on matters peripheral to the core educational function. Our objective should be to pursue measures that reduce costs and protect our core, not unduly compromising the quality, production and revenue generation to which faculty are central.

Gary Rhoades is general secretary of the American Association of University Professors.

Publication: USA Today