Budgets

Creating a Flexible Budget Process

Contingency budgeting is one response to economic uncertainty.

Crisis In Public Higher Education

Public education in many states is facing a crisis, with sharp budget cuts, unprecedented attacks on faculty status and rights, and swelling enrollments.

Map Tracks Coverage of Program Closures

The past three issues of Academe have focused on the impact of the financial crisis facing higher education—on organizing efforts, on the humanities, and on state support for public universities. As articles in the current issue make clear, reductions in state support are forcing public colleges and universities, in particular, to raise tuition and fees.

The Federal Budget Process

Description of the federal budgeting process.

A Day in the Life of a Public University Professor in Wisconsin

As of January 2016, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature had cut funding by $1.05 billion for K–12 public schools, $795 million for the University of Wisconsin system, and $203 million for the Wisconsin technical college system.

In a January 16, 2016, opinion piece in the New York Times, Dan Kaufman summed up the concerns of many in the state:

The Two Cultures of Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century and Their Impact on Academic Freedom

Like C.P. Snow's two cultures of the humanities and the sciences, a new bimodal view of higher education is becoming increasingly important at the start of the twenty-first century: one that sees the goal of universities as developing "the whole person" and another that sees it as largely or even exclusively in terms of job training.

Open Access to Technology: Shared Governance of the Academy’s Virtual Worlds

Information technology (IT)—hardware, software, and networks—is enormously important in the daily lives of everyone on college and university campuses. Yet decisions about academic IT are usually made by a small administrative team with almost no faculty input.

Campus Clout, Statewide Strength: Improving Shared Governance through Unionization

In 2002, the Washington State Legislature passed legislation allowing faculty at four-year state universities to unionize. The administration at my university, Western Washington University, took a dim view of the idea of a unionized faculty and launched an energetic, if fairly bumbling, campaign to convince faculty not to vote for the union. In one of their messages, administrators ominously suggested that by unionizing we would be moving from an academic and collegial shared governance model to a corporate and confrontational labor-management model.

The Eroding Foundations of Academic Freedom and Professional Integrity: Implications of the Diminishing Proportion of Tenured Faculty for Organizational Effectiveness in Higher Education

The tenure system is the predominant faculty personnel system in the vast majority of universities and colleges, but a declining proportion of faculty actually hold tenure-track appointments. The full significance of this decline is often underestimated because an appreciation of the tenure system requires an understanding not only of its contribution to academic freedom, but also of how tenure contributes to effective academic organizations.

Mergers in Higher Education

Recently, Clarkson University and Union Graduate College in New York State merged. According to a Clarkson news release, Anthony Collins, Clarkson’s president, said that the merger would “bring together two strong, stable and financially viable institutions, and . . . leverage their complementary curricula and significant resources.”

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