If their budget numbers are true, it demonstrates serious mismanagement.
When I look at their actual numbers, his comments don't make sense: https://provost.wvu.edu/files/d/bf3ef02f-e90a-4e43-a316-d295...
They somehow have 18000+ credit hours to their department in a year, but only 61 enrolled students in fall 2022 which, means an average student enrolled was taking 310 credits? Or ~150ish if the 2022 credit hours is for both fall & spring?
What I think is happening, is that most universities allow you to meet your "foreign languages requirement" by showing your High School transcripts, and then you get those credits applied to your transcript. That means you actually make $0 from those credits. The later part of the spreadsheet clearly shows how impossible this is - they did not make $6.7M with 61 students' tuition. Clearly the tuition is just a dumb excel formula multiplying by the credits.
So either they're somehow the most expensive foreign language school in the world, with 1 instructor per 2 students...
Or they're a wildly expensive department that almost no one major's with, and their research grants don't cover their millions in losses to the university.
At my alma mater, the Philosophy department had something like 10 majors, but the whole department was kept afloat by the Nursing College's requirement for their students to take an ethics class. The philosophy professors would teach a few high-level philosophy courses to tiny classes, and then several massive ethics seminars with hundreds of nursing students.
Later on, the writer mentions an ideological split/decision on the chairperson's part. I wish they would delve into that more. Do the administrative heads feel that using outsourced labor will be more profitable?
If they think investment in another department will bring a higher ROI it makes sense.
That's like saying "I don't want a free PS5, because I think I'd play my Nintendo Switch more often".
I'm having a hard time processing your logic here.
Let's just do numbers here:
* Option A: you have 1mUSD to invest into Department X.
* Option B: you have 1.2mUSD to invest into Department X and you get Department Y for free.
Option A makes zero sense, logically.
If anything, it's going to absorb more opportunity cost ramping the department down than to let it continue operating. About the only way your argument would make sense is if they desperately needed the physical resources (offices, desks, etc); but considering they closed down other unprofitable departments, there are plenty available.
The department costs were $5,846,146 in 2022. They had net revenues of $801,468. A 13.71 ROI. They served a student population of 61. The student population has been consistently shrinking over time. Compare this for example to the Department of Psychology which had costs of $6,485,775 and net revenue of $1,724,536 for an ROI of 26.59. This while serving a student population of 774 which has been consistently increasing over time.
If they believe they can replicate the higher ROI while serving more students by switching the funding to another department they should do so.
Presumably the idea is something like, if we axe the department, we dump 16 tenure-track and 32 total FTEs and something like 60 students lose their program: good trade. You just write off the linguistics and TESOL programs completely along with the handful of foreign language majors, and you figure that you can give out uhhhh... Duolingo credits to the students in other programs that cared about their foreign language/lit classes and keep them around.
Of course you're abandoning the pretense of really being a university and offering well-rounded education and broad opportunities and all that... but at least you can keep all the administrators.
Tiny programs with not a lot of student interest did not make the cut.
Only if you view the function of management as being to maximize employment at the firm, which the people hiring the managers generally do not.
however, to me, management not recognizing that head count is unrealistic is still a management problem.
No, in fact, I think “overhiring” is mostly based on another misapprehension of management’s function. Hiring rapidly when conditions are favorable and firing rapidly when conditions change isn’t “overhiring” and then corrections, its two different sides of the near-optimal-as-possible management of headcount int the context of capitalism.
Is it bad for workers? Sure, but there’s a reason it’s called “capitalism” and not “laborism”.
Obviously, management makes mistakes. But rapid reductions in staff are not particularly a sign of that.