Making History, With Less

By Audrey Williams June

Brian Blanco for The Chronicle

Christina Hotalen, a graduate student in history at the U. of South Florida, inspects a Roman coin. Professors in the department have relied on student researchers, even undergraduates, during lean times.

One of the presentations listed on Julie Langford’s CV serves as a vivid example of how faculty members have adjusted to years of financial austerity.

Ms. Langford is an associate professor of ancient Roman history at the University of South Florida. At an academic conference in 2012, she gave a presentation called “The Other Side of the Coin: Undergraduate Research in Lean Times.” She described how students helped her build a database of Roman provincial coins; how she overcame her own reservations about what seemed like an unlikely research partnership; and how she got $30,000 of institutional money to pay for it, even as budget cuts loomed at her university.

The effects of the cuts remain, and so does her passion for research with students. Now more than ever, Ms. Langford says, it’s crucial for faculty members to embrace career-advancing work that universities can also point to as being beneficial to students.

“People are beginning to understand the power of undergraduate researchers, not just for undergraduates who get to be engaged in important work, but for faculty,” she says. In her case, she adds, the research helped her earn tenure at South Florida.

Since 2008, Florida lawmakers have stripped more than $120 million from the university’s budget, forcing the nearly two dozen faculty members in the history department to find new ways to get their jobs done.

Perhaps most in tune with that shift is Fraser Ottanelli, department chair since 2008. In recent years he has turned to what he calls “creative bookkeeping,” which boils down to reallocating funds slated for one purpose to cover another.

For instance, with money that was originally budgeted to hire instructors, he instead provided partial stipends to two graduate students whose funding had run out.

He also emptied out a “rainy-day fund” last year, he says, to reimburse faculty members for conference travel and research trips. Faculty members used to be able to count on $1,000 per academic year.

“Sometimes our money would get cut and I would have to write people and say, if you haven’t traveled yet, you can’t travel,” Mr. Ottanelli says.

Ms. Langford, who arrived at South Florida in 2005, can’t afford to crisscross the country to visit archives. “I am relying upon the kindness of these archivists and librarians,” she says, “to give me what I need.”

Meanwhile, the department is bracing itself for another change: This fall administrators want second- and third-year graduate students to teach undergraduate courses.

“We’re taking the weakest link and asking them to do more,” says Mr. Ottanelli, who is against the move. But he and his colleagues have come to accept that doing more with less is the new normal.

“I’m absolutely positive things aren’t going back to the way they were,” Mr. Ottanelli says. “I’m in a great department of people who have produced in spite of the circumstances.”

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