Manhattan Moment
The politics of campus spending
By: Charlotte Allen
Manhattan Moment Contributor
March 31, 2009
Georgetown University, like many colleges and universities hit by the current economic downturn, is in what look like dismal financial straits.
The value of Georgetown's endowment shrank 25.5 percent last year, to $833 million, the annual deficit it has been running is estimated to climb to $37.8 million this fiscal year, and donations are expected to be down. So Georgetown's president, John DiGioia, recently announced a plan to cut costs.
The nature of DiGioa's proposed cost-cutting, however—freezes on salaries, delays in filling vacant positions, and a hold on the construction of a planned science center—seem anemic in the face of the university's obvious financial problems.
That's probably because Georgetown's desire to trim its budget is running smack into the reality of campus politics, in which every program, silly, overstaffed, or non-essential as it might seem to outsiders, has an aggressive constituency ready to raise the pitchforks in its defense.
Harvard, for example, facing a projected 30 percent drop in the value of its massive endowment, announced in February it would trim the ranks of its contract janitors—not even Harvard employees—by a few dozen. The upshot? A series of student protests and on March 23, a unanimous condemnation of Harvard by the city council of Cambridge, Mass.
Private businesses might shrug off such negative publicity, but most universities are sensitive to their images as repositories of progressive values. So there is a long list of campus sacred cows that can't be nicked by the budget-cutting knife without an uproar.
One is tenured faculty. The University of Texas Medical Branch laid off 30 of its 127 faculty members, many of them tenured, after Hurricane Ike devastated its Galveston campus last year and forced the temporary closing of its main teaching hospital. The university is now being sued by a faculty union.
Other sacred cows are all those non-teaching administrators who populate the ever-growing "student services" sector of the campus economy. Nearly every campus in America has a "diversity" officer charged with implementing affirmative action and fairness to minorities.
Such positions might have made sense decades ago when African-Americans and others faced pervasive discrimination. Nowadays they're mostly opportunities for empire-building. In 2006 Georgetown made its chief diversity officer, Rosemary Kilkenny, a vice president, and in 2008 the university added on a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning Resource Center, complete with its own director. You can't eliminate or even shrink such offices without being accused of homophobia or racism.
Nor, apparently, can you get rid of the campus "sustainability" coordinator, a fixture on an ever-increasing number of campuses swept by the current "green" fad. Some universities deploy entire teams of sustainability experts (Harvard has at least 15 of them, and Georgetown's website boasts nine employees who devote themselves to sustainability issues.)
One reason universities aren't taking serious, politically unpleasant steps to cut costs—by, say, eliminating academic programs or entire administrative units--is that they seem to be counting on their financial troubles' eventually going away.
"They're saying, 'Let's try to muddle through for a year or two—we can run a budget deficit and finance it by debt," says Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University who heads the D.C.-based Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
Perhaps the economy will indeed recover quickly, or perhaps the federal government will start throwing bailout money in colleges' direction. If neither of those things happens, however, it will be interesting to see what sort of bellowing Georgetown and other universities sensitive to their liberal images are willing to endure from a horde of gored oxen on their campuses.
Charlotte Allen is a contributing editor at MindingTheCampus.com, from which this is adapted.
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