I write today to address the plan to eliminate individual academic departments in favor of the “business office model.” As a member of the union leadership, the community should be aware of the fact that we have asked repeatedly over the summer if this model, outlined in meetings between the departments and the budget committee, were slated for implementation. We were told that these ideas were “merely contingency plans, in case the economy got worse.”
Sure, Human Resources reiterated the university’s right to eliminate positions if no longer necessary, as workload was reduced. To that point, we have repeatedly argued against the assertion that new technology and systems are more efficient, requiring less manpower to accomplish the tasks at hand. Those who take credit for these implementations portray them as efficiencies; those of us on the ground know better.
There has not been an implementation over the last five years that has saved us time. We have been struggling for some time to accomplish the tasks that have been systematically decentralized onto the department offices. Imagine our surprise in learning that the administration now believes that this is where the budget crisis can be eased—by cutting staff dramatically. We have long been struggling to stretch our budgets to meet the needs of the students and faculty, negotiating every purchase and identifying real efficiencies, but now we are told that our department offices will be disassembled, in favor of centralized business offices.
These offices will be staffed by “pools” of “cross-trained’ staff, at lower numbers. The intention to reduce staff was clear from these department meetings, and there was originally no intention to offer the union staff a voluntary separation package, as was offered to managerial staff. We are grateful that the administration conceded to our suggestion that providing a pathway for those who are poised to leave, before pursuing targeted layoffs of those who want to stay, as this approach was more humane and logical. The union was behind the initiative to subsequently reorganize staff in smart, sustainable ways. But the implementation of the business office model was never presented to the union leadership or membership; we learned of it through the document distributed to the Natural Sciences and Math Departments’ Listserve.
The document states: “In anticipation of the need for additional rounds of budget cuts, the administration over the summer initiated an exercise in which academic departments and programs were asked to…discuss how they might respond to a 25% cut in their University budgets. On the basis of this exercise, the Departmental Review Committee (DRC), headed by VPAA Joe Bruno, has identified three potential strategies for addressing Wesleyan’s budget crunch….The first involves implementation of a ‘central business office’ model of administration in which several academic departments and/or programs are served by a common administrative staff.”
In attending the luncheon for the NSM division on Friday, September 25, we first heard that two strategies for budget savings had already been decided: reduced financial aid for transfer students, and the implementation of the business office model.
This model would fundamentally change the relationship between the remaining staff and the other constituencies that we have traditionally served. It is most distressing to learn that an administration that voices the commitment that “student services will not be affected” can support the elimination of positions and offices that are on the front line of student service at Wesleyan. The administrative staff would be converted to cogs in a wheel, cross-trained and therefore interchangeable, with “floaters” who can step in to serve in the busiest of times. The problems lie in the disregard for the expertise that the staff brings to these department offices. When serving everyone, in multiple departments, no one is expert, and no one is well-served. There is a serious risk of losing part of the culture that makesWesleyan better than other schools that utilize business offices rather than department offices with expertise and commitment to their own faculty, majors and graduate students. This plan proposes disassembling a model that has served Wesleyan and its students and faculty well over all these years, in favor of a model that has too often proved to be problematic for the students and faculty that work in those environments. Reversing this course would be slow, even as the economy improved.
Once these experts are gone, regenerating the model of departmental expertise would take years, if the institution had the stomach to admit the mistake. Exit polls of student satisfaction would surely change in tone, and parents and prospective parents would no longer be able to reach people in individual departments who are capable of answering their questions. A pool of reduced staff that reports to multiple chairs and dozens and dozens of faculty cannot hope to provide the services that are currently provided, and that fundamentally changes the nature of the Wesleyan student experience.
Lest my comments be seen as self-important and self-serving, I would like to provide a larger context for this view of the implementation, which should, at this point, more rightly be a discussion. My earliest memories took place on this campus. From the age of three, I was living in graduate student housing on Cross Street, while my father completed his graduate work at Wesleyan. I was there when he processed in1964, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave the commencement address. I have been a resident of Middletown because of his education at Wesleyan, and later my sister also obtained her graduate degree at Wes. Whether I remain at Wesleyan as a worker or not, I will remain an observer of the campus, wondering whether the Wesleyan that I have always loved and respected still exists, or whether it has been replaced by a business, like so many other academic institutions. I thought we were different. I still believe that there are good reasons why we want to be different.
Although the union cannot seem to garner the respect from the administration to discuss these models in meaningful ways, I will continue to hope that the administration will honestly discuss these models, at least, with the faculty, before announcing drastic measures as foregone conclusions.
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