Dartblog

The 75 professors writing to President Kim had six specific suggestions about cost savings. Let’s look at them individually:

I - Put all construction projects on hold until we have raised sufficient funds to cover annual maintenance costs. The college could think about asking donors if we could not divert some funds from current donations for construction projects to retaining jobs.

If I don’t miss my guess, all these projects have fully been contracted for. Stopping construction now would save little or no money — we’d still be on the hook for our contractual oblgations — but we would not get the buildings.

Asking donors to divert their naming gifts from construction to the short-term salaries of inefficient workers is an idea that would go nowhere at all. Our donors are serious, detail-oriented business executives; they recognize a poorly run operation when they see it. Asking them to subsidize the College’s bloated bureaucracy at the expense of prominent buildings bearing their names would cause them to laugh out loud, which they would continue to do as they threw you out of their office suites.

II - The College could reconsider some of its athletic programs to determine whether any of them can be cut back without harming the overall mission of the Athletic Department or causing any layoffs.

You can’t have it both ways here, folks. If you cut athletic programs, you hurt students (see: the swim team) and therefore harm the overall mission of the department. That said, our new AD, if one ever appears, will quickly see that there is almost as much fat and inefficiency in the Athletics Department bureaucracy as in the rest of the College’s administration.

III - Senior faculty, coaches, and college administrators could be asked to take pay cuts. Those with the highest salaries should be asked to take the most significant cuts.

The argument has been made that such cuts would hurt the college’s ability to recruit top employees, but we believe that talented faculty and administrators would be drawn to an institution where their colleagues have demonstrated commitment to the values of community and shared sacrifice in tough times.

The suggestion here seems to be that our very best people, the ones who can easily move to schools that pay according to merit and not according to the charitable impulse, should bear the burden. Yikes! The reason that these people are well paid is that we compete against other schools for their services. However, our lesser paid staffers are not the focus of recruiting efforts by Harvard and Yale. These latter folks should be the object of our cost-cutting efforts. They can live with lower benefits, for example, becasue even reduced Dartmouth benefits will still be much higher than those offered by other employers in the Upper Valley.

As to the question of whether lower salaries that reflect a commitment to social justice in compensation would help attract top-rank faculty to Hanover, well, if you listen carefully even now, you can still hear the laughter at this thought coming from Silsby Hall. Perhaps a New Soviet Man would be tempted by such an proposition, but not denizens of Western free-market democracies. Look around you.

IV - The college could sell off some assets to preserve jobs.

Running a college (or a business) is not far off from the way that parents prepare a family budget. Income has to be balanced with expenses. If the family’s cost of living is too high, you don’t sell the family silver to make ends meet in the hope that your income will rise before too long. This suggestion is particularly ill-founded given the current credit markets, which all but ensure that any assets that we sell today will not fetch a full price.

V - If there are to be furloughs, we suggest a two-week unpaid furlough across the board for all employees, so that the burden is distributed fairly. Medical coverage must be continued through this time, however.

Actually, from an economic standpoint this is not a bad idea. There is real dough to be saved. Let’s do the furlough in December, after students have gone home. This will be unpaid vacation for everyone, and it will count against vacation time. There is about $5M to be saved here in salaries alone per furloughed week of closing. However, if we put this idea into effect, don’t count on getting invited to Christmas at anyone’s home; you all but guarantee an unhappy labor force at the College for decades — fertile ground for unionization.

VI - The idea of closing the college from Thanksgiving through the New Year is worth pursuing, but we do not want to see this measure cost low-paid workers more than they can afford. Salary savings from this closure should come from higher-paid workers. Again, medical coverage must be continued for all during this time.

Given the prevailing wage scale in the Upper Valley, even the College’s lowest paid workers can afford an unpaid furlough period in December. Close the College for four weeks around Xmas and you could save the College $20M/year. But that’s almost a 10% pay cut for everyone. Still sound good?

Clearly none of the English scholars or historians have done much research or calculation regarding the actual execution of their ideas. If they had, they would see that it is far more prudent for the College to trim its operations down to size. If teeth-gnashing is in order over issues of social justice — and it is — we should all lament the imprudence of the outgoing adminstration in hiring legions of people who have not been working efficiently at Dartmouth.