Dartblog

After a brief pause to reduce the College’s headcount in 2010 — though to be fair, the majority of the reduction came about due to hiving off the Hanover Inn’s staff to a private business — the administration is back to its bad old ways. The number of non-faculty staff increased by 119 people in 2011 over 2010. As the Dartmouth Fact Book reports above (a composite of two editions), total staffing at the College has risen from only 2,408 people in 1999 (a figure that included Inn employees) to 3,175 employees in the fall of 2011. Try as I might, I can’t find staffing figures prior to 1999.

Given that wages and benefits are approximately 60% of the College’s annual budget, any future downturn in the financial markets will have to come out of staffing levels.

The question remains: While we added almost no students between 2010 and 2011, why did we need another 119 people on the payroll, especially given that the administration was supposedly in full cost-cutting mode? As the faculty knows, none of these new staffers are gracing any of Dartmouth’s undergraduate academic departments.