Due to a sharp increase in health care costs during the last fiscal year, the College has announced an immediately effective hiring freeze on all faculty and staff.
While it is unclear how long this freeze will last, most offers have already been made to candidates for next year’s faculty positions and the freeze will not keep departments from conducting most planned job searches. The freeze is expected to have more immediate effects for College staff. Certain administrative and janitorial positions are currently in jeopardy, particularly many support service positions. The College employs over 1000 people, and currently 68 to 70 positions are open and will remain unfilled.
“We won’t fill these positions right away. It is uncertain how long the freeze will last,” College President Nancy Dye said. She emphasized that the College, regardless of its financial situation, is being careful to protect its core educational mission. “We will go to some length to protect [it],” she said.
“We will be conducting searches for faculty this year,” Andy Evans, Vice President of Finance for the College, said. “The freeze will affect all employees, but it is unlikely it will affect faculty because we have already made offers to those who will be joining us next year,” he said.
A College budget deficit for the last fiscal year has led to the implementation of the hiring freeze. Along with a decrease in this and last year’s endowment, rising costs in health care provided as part of College employment contracts are largely reponsible for current budgetary concerns. Costs increased from approximately $5 million to $7 million in the last fiscal year, which ended on June 30, 2001. In providing health care to its employees, the college has gone over-budget and is now faced with a deficit.
“We basically have three things happening with health care [that are raising costs]. First, we had a lot of serious illnesses of people who are covered by our plan. Second, we had an increase in the overall use of services. And third, the cost of pharmaceuticals went up 25 percent, and that resulted in a 2 million dollar increase in costs from last year.”
Changes in health care are slow moving, however. “We want to make changes to health care but that doesn’t happen quickly, so we are instituting a hiring freeze on any vacancy that we have not yet filled,” Evans said. “With 50 percent of the College’s budget related to salaries and benefits, instituting a hiring freeze is the quickest and least invasive way to limit expenses.” A re-evaluation of the health care plan is scheduled for January.
“[The College] can’t run deficits. We don’t have the reserves to cover deficits. To be fiscally responsible we can’t run a deficit,” Evans said. The administration considers it necessary to halt hiring for as long as it takes to make sure the deficit will be erased.
According to Evans, the College has had hiring freezes before. “In 1995-1996, we had a hiring freeze that was tied to the structural deficit elimination of some $3 million in the operating budget. That hiring freeze lasted almost the entire academic year.”
Depending on the status of each academic department’s personnel, the hiring freeze is producing varied responses. David Orr, chair of the Environmental Studies department, was not alarmed. “This won’t effect us since our search is already underway,” he said.
Steven Volk, chair of the History department, expressed confidence that he and his colleagues would be able to make it through the hiring freeze fairly unscathed, although he did express some concern for administrative staff in his office.”
“In the most critical sense, the freeze shouldn’t effect the History department since we have two authorized searches under way (African History and Asian American History) and those will continue,” he said. “The freeze might have a slight impact if we apply for leave replacements for next year, but that is not a major issue for us since very few faculty will be on leave next year. It is our belief that our office staff (our administrative assistants) are overworked and we would have liked to get some additional help in the office, which now won’t happen, and that is a problem. But in terms of our ability to maintain and add to our curriculum, I don’t see any problems for us with the hiring freeze.”
Some departments are not as grounded and secure as History, however. The Comparative American Studies Program (CAS) is still in its formative stages. Bill Norris, Professor of Sociology, who has been involved in the CAS project since its inception, isn’t sure about the potential consequences of this hiring freeze, although President Dye assured the program’s security,
“At this point we are finishing the documents for the EPPC [Educational Plans and Policies Committee],” Norris said. “ Then our requests have to be reviewed by Educational Plans and Policies Committee and the College Faculty Counsel. It is always difficult to predict the future and so what will be the impact on CAS in a month or two is very difficult to know,” he said.
Many faculty members. in response to the announced freeze, have assumed a wait-and-see attitude. Ana Cara of the Hispanic Studies Department expressed the emotions of many department chairs and administrators around campus. “The hiring freeze does not affect us enormously...so far!”
President Dye admitted that inconveniences will be experienced by many employees of the College, due to the budget deficit and subsequent freeze.
“It is nothing to be terribly concerned about,” she said. “It will come back.”