They Will Keep Themselves

The announced layoffs hit the faculty hard. Among the employees to be laid off, 88 percent are faculty and only 12 percent are staff. This proportion is much different than the one offered by Provost Hickey when he said the sky was falling. At that time, the distribution of layoffs would have been 63 percent faculty and 37 percent staff.

Now, it is true that Hickey has said that the administrative budget will be cut by 3.1 percent or 3.7 million and presumably this means more staff cuts. However, no specifics have been offered. Here’s my prediction: Hickey is lying. Hickey probably enjoyed cutting programs that didn’t earn (i.e., produce a lot of student credit hours), but he will not want to cut his own people (i.e., useless high level administrators).