Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 22, 1990 TAG: 9007220242
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES and NEAL THOMPSON
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
Having trimmed $9 million from the school's budget this year - including 267 vacant jobs - officials now face the distasteful task of looking for more programs and jobs to jettison.
And that could mean as many as 135 layoffs at a time when the word "recession" is already making its way back into newspaper headlines.
It's not tenured faculty and other professors under contract who are threatened with layoffs, officials acknowledge. It's Tech's "classified" workers - the secretaries, dining hall workers and maintenance people - who may be in danger.
Last month, state officials ordered Tech and other state agencies to prepare plans showing how they would trim their spending plans an additional 1 percent, 3 percent and 5 percent.
Officials here hope the second round will hit areas in the state budget untouched by the first round - such as aid to localities, entitlement programs and the Department of Corrections. If not, Tech is prepared to seek permission to levy a $48 tuition surcharge and other user fees on students.
"There's no way we could handle a 5 percent cut - or even a 3 percent cut this time - without affecting personnel," said James Buffer, dean of the College of Education. Other administrators agree.
On campus, officials foresee a reversal of positive trends and new programs that faculty and administrators have spent years building.
A hallmark of President James McComas' administration has been increased attention to Tech's undergraduate experience - smaller classes and more frequent contact between faculty and students.
The pared budgets likely will scuttle those plans. In freshman mathematics, for example, seven sections of 40-student classes will be replaced with two sections of 136 students. Second-year mathematics will go from 13 sections of 40 students to four sections of 120 students.
Undergraduate courses in the College of Business will be limited to majors, an official said. English writing classes will be larger, and fewer assignments will be graded. Generally, it will be more difficult for students to dabble in disciplines outside their majors.
Asian language courses, growing in importance to American students as the world becomes more interdependent, will be taught three days a week instead of five. If the university is asked to cut substantially more in the second round, those classes could be eliminated.
There's more, much more:
Fourteen custodial positions - about 10 percent of the total crew - will remain vacant because of a hiring freeze. Restrooms, residence halls and classrooms will continue to be cleaned regularly, but daily office cleaning has been reduced to twice a week.
Twenty percent of the animal science department's livestock herds, used for teaching and research, will be sold because the department lost 35 percent of its funding for animal feed.
Some student jobs and graduate assistantships have been frozen, pinching students who need extra money, departments that need the help, and the university, which needs to attract graduate students to share teaching loads and bolster research efforts.
In the business school, some departments have already decided they are unable to admit any doctoral students this fall.
At the same time, the education school's vocational and technical education department sent letters to seven would-be doctoral students saying "we could not offer them financial assistance at this time," Buffer said.
A newcomer to the ranks of Tech deans, Buffer also has lost professors in community college administration and marketing education. Those - and other positions like them across the university that were vacant when the budget ax fell - likely will disappear permanently.
"At this point we have eliminated vacant positions. I take these reductions as permanent reductions," Provost Fred Carlisle said in an interview. "I will be surprised if they are restored as such."
Top officials and department heads worry that eliminating vacancies and curtailing graduate assistantships will slow the ascent of rising faculty stars who depend on graduate students to carry part of their teaching load so they can build a reputation through research and writing.
Worse, the frustration of dwindling research support and increased teaching loads likely will make young faculty vulnerable to offers from better-financed schools, officials point out. Such academic raiding unravels departments' talent-building programs and makes already competitive minority faculty recruitment doubly difficult.
The cutbacks also have made university-paid travel to professional conferences - traditionally the times when academics show their stuff and rub shoulders with more accomplished senior colleagues - virtually impossible. Yet, some deans and department heads said faculty are determined to attend the meetings even if they have to pay their own way.
Eliminated vacancies means increased teaching loads and, ultimately, reduced faculty-student interaction, officials said. And that runs counter to what McComas, Carlisle and others are trying to do.
To counteract what may become a more dire situation if a second round of state budget cuts hits higher education, top officials might ask qualified administrative faculty - deans and vice presidents, for example - to teach one course a year.
"It would affect what people could do administratively, but, then, the question is, `What's more important?' " Carlisle said.
The provost already has contacted the English department about teaching a course next spring, and Minnis Ridenour, executive vice president and chief business officer, is slated to teach a class in public finance this fall.
No matter how they try, administrators say they cannot insulate students from the sting of the reductions.
Department heads such as Dick Frahm in animal science and Robert Cannell in crop and soil environmental sciences worry about having the money to pay phone bills, buy office supplies and even make copies of necessary student handouts.
"Down her in the trenches, this is what we're faced with," Frahm said. "I don't know how we're going to get through the year, but right now it looks very discouraging."
Campus police protection will be hampered as the 29-officer department - at its smallest point in years - begins to patrol campus on foot instead of in their maroon-and-white cars, Officer Leigh Collins said. The move saves money but limits the range and availability of officers on duty.
The department also has stopped printing many of the crime-prevention posters and pamphlets that warn students of various hazards and safety precautions.
"There's not a lot we can cut out. Police service is not optional," she said. "If we lost jobs, I could very well wind up on the street. And that could hurt the efectiveness of investigations asnd crime prevention.
"Right now we're just kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop."
Newman Library is considering trimming the hours it stays open - always a volatile issue with students. The library also expects delays in returning books to the shelves because the ranks of student workers will be reduced.
Faculty, too, will feel the bite at the library, which spends $2.5 million on journals, some costing as much as $1,000 a year. In the past decade, escalating costs have forced the university to subscribe to 19,000 of the 120,000 scholarly journals currently being published.
"They need to be on the cutting edge, but we just can't subscribe," said paul Gherman, director of libraries. "It's having a serious impact on the research at the university."
by CNB