This story at Inside Higher Education is notable for several reasons.
1. It may help force administrations to declare financial exigency before firing tenured professors. The argument here is to provide a high barrier for administrators to clear before they can act in so serious a manner, rather than using budget crises as pretexts for micro-managing and even indulging personal grievances.
While the union and arbitrator did not contest the idea that Florida State faced deep budget cuts, the 83-page ruling repeatedly notes patterns of the university failing to meet obligations to which it had committed itself. University officials used the layoff process to "manipulate" decisions "to arbitrarily select who got laid off," at times due to "personal judgment and relationships," and not established criteria, Sergent writes.
2. It illustrates the vulnerability of non-tenured faculty.
The arbitrator, Stanley H. Sergent, a Florida lawyer, did not back all of the union's grievances, and largely found that the university was within its rights to eliminate various non-tenure-track positions.
3. It confirms the partiality of the typical admin argument in favor of grant-generating departments:
the arbitrator touches on an issue that has angered many faculty members in traditional liberal arts departments in this era of budget cuts: the idea that their departments are somehow evaluated as less financially viable than others that attract outside grants. The arbitrator uses anthropology -- the target of cuts at Florida State -- to challenge this thinking by noting, as many faculty members have, that its tuition revenue makes it financially strong (running a surplus in fact).
The finding compares anthropology (subject to deep cuts) with meteorology (which was protected), applying the administration's stated goal of focusing on departments with high costs. Anthropology's cost per degree awarded is $33,343, compared to more than $50,000 per meteorology degree. And anthropology's net tuition earned exceeds that of 14 of the 17 departments in arts and sciences at the university. "It made no sense to eliminate anthropology from a budget standpoint," the arbitrator writes.
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