This past fall, the interim chairman of my department of history proposed the formation of an ad hoc committee to recommend how we should deal with an anticipated budget shortfall. As with most committee work, the initial call for volunteers was greeted with a sense of passivity, to put it generously.
But because of its informal mandate, the committee that took shape turned out to be a dedicated group of people. Tellingly, most of our membership consisted of junior professors. Of the five committee members, only two had tenure, and one of the two had received her promotion just last year.
The interest that the remaining three of us, as assistant professors, brought to the table was not so much a reflection of youthful energy and a desire to check off the community-service box for our tenure files but the daunting reality that the cuts our department faced were permanent, at least for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the one senior professor on the committee pulled me aside in the mailroom one afternoon to propose that I be the chair, given that my cohort would face the effects of the cutbacks more acutely and for a longer time than faculty members like him who were nearing retirement.
In short, our participation reflected an eagerness to gain advance knowledge about how our professional lives—and, by extension, our personal lives—might be constrained by these new fiscal conditions, in the short and long term.
The central question we faced was where to make cuts. As committee members, we soon found our e-mail and office in-boxes filled with tables of numbers and percentages concerning courses offered annually, student enrollment, salary hierarchies, and the shifting sands of the departmental endowment. Only one of us had any expertise in economic history, but it quickly became clear that the solution to our committee’s predicament did not rest in fine-tuned number crunching or in nickel-and-diming the small-scale expenses such as coffee or materials in the department’s supply closet.
The answer rested instead with the basic question of community. Who are we as a department? To whom are we responsible? Where does that responsibility begin and end from professional, personal, and fiscal standpoints?
Tip O’Neill, the influential speaker of the House during the Carter and Reagan administrations, once said, “All politics is local.” That adage held true in our case as well. Here at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—unlike some institutions (the University of California system being the most glaring example)—we have not faced a catastrophic decline in resources in the wake of the Great Recession. Much of that has to do with the relative strengths of the North Carolina economy.
But, as is the case at many institutions, both public and private, we have had to confront our material weaknesses. Departmental searches have been postponed. Graduate students struggle more than ever on the job market. An undergraduate for whom I wrote a letter of recommendation to study abroad in Southeast Asia e-mailed me later to say that he could not ultimately participate for financial reasons.
Scale is always a factor in understanding and managing social change, as any historian will tell you. As historians, we worked to bring the crisis down to a level that O’Neill would have appreciated. It was decided that our department consisted of three distinct communities—faculty members, staff members, and graduate students—and that our responsibilities rested in maintaining as best we could the well-being of those three.
That meant we would not lay off staff members, we would not put further pressure on graduate students by either increasing their workload or reducing their stipends, and we would continue to aim to provide a supportive atmosphere for faculty members at all ranks, despite reductions in travel assistance, doubt for faculty raises in the next few years, and so on.
In sum, a tacit recognition surfaced that our department embraced a certain “moral economy"—to use E.P. Thompson’s famous expression for capturing the dynamics of community sentiment—that needed consideration in our budget discussions. To cut too much in one direction could generate outcry, but not cutting enough would also raise critical questions. A sense of proportion was needed. We were neither quixotic about the future nor dire pessimists about it, either.
Among the cuts we finally identified, we will have a reduced graduate-student pool, which will add to the teaching responsibilities of the department’s faculty. More dramatically, we plan to cut deeply into the number of adjunct appointments that we assign annually.
That issue became the test case for our committee’s principle of community responsibility. In the past, such fixed-term lecturers have often been recent graduates of our Ph.D. program who had yet to receive a tenure-track position elsewhere and could benefit from independent teaching experience to enhance their CV’s, in addition to the nice paycheck. Given their familiarity with our classroom environment, combined with sympathy and support from graduate mentors, such arrangements were often mutually beneficial. (Full disclosure: I, too, benefited for a time from such largess shortly after my own graduate career at another university.)
But when should such transitional arrangements end? That is not an easy question to answer.
We decided on two makeshift solutions: first, to direct money toward having graduate students teach their own courses, a lower-cost option than adjunct appointments that would still boost students’ teaching experience; and second, to direct our recent graduates toward the possibility of online teaching, which is a fast-developing program handled by a separate unit of the university.
Those weren’t perfect answers, but they were a means of cutting our budget in a manner that provided people with other employment options. Our recommendations expressed a belief in maintaining an investment in our graduate program, while giving fair notice that our sense of responsibility for graduate students ends when they finish their degree, at least from a fiscal standpoint.
Are those solutions universally applicable? No. Will they completely satisfy everyone in our department? No again. Indeed, given the continuing context in which we live and work, such measures may only provide a short-term solution.
However, one overall lesson surprised us in our move against the increased dependence on adjuncts in academe: The practice, we found, could be unpragmatic, creating misleading expectations and difficult ambiguities over responsibility within our community, and at a cost.
Fiscal crises introduce situations and feelings that create discomfort for people seeking the life of the mind—uncertainty, worry, disappointment, and vulnerability. Matters of the heart tend to interrupt intellectual pursuits that we typically follow in isolation from one another on a day-to-day basis.
But such occasions can also restore us to the broader communities to which we belong and remind us of the responsibilities that define them. We all look forward to a time when budget constraints ease. But revisiting certain “habits of the heart"—in the famous phrase of the sociologist Robert N. Bellah and his co-authors—that define our teaching and intellectual communities can be an opportunity that emerges during this period. And that kind of recognition and reflection comes at no cost.
