Fighting the Cuts at UVM

The following is a lightly edited transcript of a talk given for the CVDSA Webinar, “Fund Vermont’s Future: Join the Fight for Public Education” May 6 2020

After endless messages thanking us for our hard work and dedication during these challenging times, last week the administration at the University of Vermont announced budget cut plans that show nothing but callous disrespect for the lives and work of faculty.

The cuts are billed as reasonable “shared sacrifice” in face of inevitable looming crisis: as my dean said, “these measures will impact nearly every member of our community in some way.”

But nothing about this plan is fair or reasonable or equitable. Like the worst of regressive taxation, it protects the university’s wealth, while imposing undue hardship on those who earn the least. It would inflict great harm on educational quality, because it targets faculty—award winning, experienced, beloved faculty— who teach multiple sections of courses that are essential to students. For example, in my department, English, we would lose more than 20 course sections next year. And even on their terms, it makes no financial sense, because the positions being cut are so low paid, relatively little money will be saved

It is very clear that the impact of the cuts will not be evenly felt. Our dean and some other top administrators will “take an 8.3% reduction in salary.” This is in line with an earlier announcement that the University President would forego his pay for the month of April. President Garimella’s “generous” sacrifice is on a base salary of $480,000—plus stipend and benefits. My dean’s salary is $270,000, plus a stipend of an unpublished amount. At the same time, all Non-Tenure Track faculty—typically lecturers who teach four courses a semester—are slated for an involuntary reduction in their workload to 75 percent.

Now I want to take a moment to read from yesterday’s Burlington Free Press, quoting President Garimella: "The university has not imposed any pay cuts on any faculty," he said, explaining this is the time of year when each college assigns workload based on anticipated need. "It's a question of change in FTE (full-time equivalency), which is, you know, the amount of time they teach. It's their workload and it's not a pay cut."… However, he acknowledged reduced workloads will correlate with less pay.

In case there’s any confusion: when your workload is reduced, so is your pay. So, to be crystal clear, this will mean is a 25 percent pay cut for lecturers. And this would bring the average lecturer’s salary in the college of arts and sciences down to below $43,000.

So, after this “shared sacrifice,” lecturers will be below a livable wage, pushing many of them and their children into food and housing insecurity, while the president will be making more than ten times their salary and the dean more than five times. And at the same time the budget plan imposes a hiring freeze on staff and part time faculty. As a result, non-teaching staff, many of whom already earn well below livable wage, will face further uncertainty and precarity.

Part time professors are a vital sector of the university who routinely teach essential courses for little compensation, keep programs running and ensure continuity for students. Part timers are paid between $6000 and $7000 per course, without benefits, and contingent on enrollment. So, the savings for the university here are paltry. As one of my colleagues wrote on our union discussion list: “If you think of the budget as a container of large boulders, they are frantically picking out the pieces of gravel.”

The Rutgers University faculty union came up with the perfect name for this approach to budget uncertainty: “Maximum pain for minimum gain.” While the cuts hit non tenure track and part timers the hardest, they are bad for all faculty. First, because they mean that tenure track faculty will take up the slack and work more for less.

Second, because they will have a devastating impact on the university as a whole. For example, the administration plans to take away course releases and cut stipends held by faculty who run programs. Those programs include Jewish Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Sexuality, Gender and Women’s Studies. So much for the university’s commitment to equity and diversity.

And third, because these cuts are just the beginning; more are coming, as can be seen in other universities, such as Ohio State. As a faculty member there put it: “we are canaries in a very toxic mine. Many other schools are probably going to go through this.” If we accept the logic of these cuts now, it will be harder for us to stave off worse attacks in the future.

Although the pandemic is the catalyst for these measures, they are part of a far longer pattern, and in that way are something of a wish list for the administration. The faculty union, United Academics, has documented consistent underfunding of education, and along with it squeezing of faculty at all levels, in favor of administrative bloat, marketing and branding, expensive amenities, and any number of boondoggle initiatives.  Their “budgetary crises” are really a question of misplaced priorities.

And this continues to be the case even in the context of a genuine crisis for higher education. The university is a microcosm of the broader capitalist system: the staff and faculty who do the most, struggle to make ends meet, while board members and the president and a phalanx of vice presidents—and no one is quite sure what they even do—rake in six figure salaries. The university has a reported endowment of $467.7 million, yet they are eliminating part time faculty who make less than $6000 per course. As a petition against the cuts launched by students puts it “the university apparently has enough money to pay millions in branding and consultants, but no money for its students or faculty.”

The logic of austerity is that there is not enough to go around, so we are forced to compete with each other for the crumbs, rather than demanding more access to the wealth that is there. And that logic constantly pits us one against the other: Tenure Track against Non-Tenure Track; full time against part time; and on a bigger scale, K-12 education against state colleges against the University of Vermont.

We have everything to gain by standing in solidarity with each other to defend public education at all levels. For all these reasons and more, we at the University of Vermont have just launched a public campaign against the cuts. Inspired by the faculty, staff and students of the Vermont State Colleges, we refuse to accept that “there is no alternative.”  There were 55 people at our first meeting, and we are planning a car protest to coincide with the next Board of Trustees meeting. We don’t know what the future holds, but we know that if we do nothing, we will all lose, but if we fight back, we might win.