FACULTY TO BE AXED BECAUSE OF CASH?

by Po

The April 1st memmorandum from President Richard Greene to the Core faculty was a response to their memo to him regarding the Associate faculty. It contained an apology for misleading references in his President's Report to the Board of Trustees. Greene insists that nothing in his report to the Board "suggested that the quality of instruction that associate faculty provide is less than excellent," and that he did not "represent them as second-class."

There were few sighs of relief, however. Several disaffected Associate faculty had begun to hold their own open meeting simultaneous to the Faculty Meetings. Several Core members seemed frustrated at being miscast as both the "Real Faculty" and overly concerned about their own job security. Everyone directly involved seems quite talked-out on the topic.

The five Associate Faculty members that are meeting separately from the full faculty meetings did not feel fully supported by the Core faculty in several efforts to establish solidarity among the Faculty as a whole. Failing that, these members think it is more constructive for them to hold open meetings to address curricular concerns for next Fall and generate their own proposal for consideration to address the Board's directive to phase out the Associate Faculty Model.

The board directive, upholding the Core faculty's recommendation in 1995 to phase out the Associate Faculty Model gradually in favor of an unified faculty, requires Richard Greene and the Faculty to collaborate on a proposal that is to be presented at the June meeting of the Board of Trustees. If there is no proposal or if it does not meet the Board's approval, the Board will establish its own plan.

The aggravated rift between Associate and Core Faculty is ironic in light of the fact that the purpose of phasing out the Associate Faculty Model was to eliminate this dividing line in favor of a better system of determining seniority, workload, and administrative duties among all the faculty. While the lack of solidarity seems to be a complication, several faculty members have been focusing on the motives of president Greene to combine the board directive within renewed emphasis on personnel cuts in the upcoming budget.

"What nobody seems to be asking," said Mark Greenberg, "is how he moved from such glorious projections (of fiscal prosperity) to the current moves to downsize." This assertion is crystallized by the $773,000 budget shortfall of last fall that was noted in Greene's memorandum to the Core Faculty. "...CEC (College Executive Committee) and I did all we could to cut everything except people," writes Greene. "Non-personnel costs were cut well into the bone. Next year, to cover inflationary costs and provide, I hope, some increase in salaries, CEC and I see no choice but the extraordinarily painful one of reducing personnel and additional non-personnel cuts."

However, there seems to be a lack of solidarity within the CEC, as well. During a lunch in the cafeteria this past week, Richard Greene burst into a meeting that to CEC members were having with Richard Schramm and accused them of divulging restricted CEC information. Richard Schramm is part-time Core faculty, facilitates business group studies here and for the Goddard Business Institute, and is not a member of the College Executive Committee.

Schramm wrote a letter to the CEC on March 27th contesting Greene's financial analysis of Goddard in his Jan. 23, 1996 report to the Board of Trustees and offers an alternate analysis. Schramm argues that Greene's conclusions are based on faulty premises and urges the CEC to take another look at Goddard's recent financial history before it plots the future.

Greene notes Schramm's alternative analysis in his memorandum to the Faculty but remarks "As we move forward with the budget debate this spring, I hope we do not become mired in analyses of financial data, appropriate base years, and comparisons of educational expenses and other institutions." This desire, just inches away from a previous paragraph in the same memorandum insisting to the faculty "as important as the issues of quality and governance (of the faculty) are, we must not allow them, at this time, to secure the pressing issue of costs." This plea for emphasis is followed by a brief restatement of the explosive cost increases that Greene established in his Jan. report to the Board -- the very conclusions that Schramm's letter to the CEC questions.

This circular reasoning makes it unclear to whether the race to the June meeting of the Board of Trustees is a proposal for a balanced and effective Faculty model or a simply a cheaper Faculty model. However, it's very clear that when presented with numbers and analysis, president Greene would rather invoke vision plans to try to avoid those sticky problems of debate. Inversely, it's clear too that the President prefers to use figures and data, no matter how questioned, to downplay plans and vision that he sees as insignificant. After all is said and done, the bottom line is what counts the most. And if the President is wrong about that, then he might send a memo apologizing to a smaller faculty.