On April 1, Chancellor Christ announced a hiring freeze at Berkeley. Her message primarily concerned non-academic positions, but warned that open faculty searches “may receive additional scrutiny.” Departments in the midst of or planning faculty searches anxiously await more information. What will happen to next year’s FTE requests? Will our job-seeking Ph.D. students be frozen out of the academy? It might make sense to pause and take stock, but we urge the administration to resume all current searches as soon as possible, and to consult with faculty as they make financial decisions going forward.
In his March 31 post on the “Remaking the University” blog, Chris Newfield (UCSB) points out that a hiring freeze or pause has been the near-automatic response of university administrators to financial crises past and present-regardless of the actual state of the institution’s budget. As we know, UC Berkeley has only barely emerged from an operating deficit, and anticipates costs of $100 million and more. But Stanford has an endowment of $27.7 billion-yet they have also announced a pause. And that just alerts us to the absence of a financial model that would justify or explain the knee-jerk decision to freeze academic hiring.
We concur with Newfield’s assessment:
Universities have long dealt with present fiscal crises by sacrificing the future: in addition to their epic passages of deferred maintenance and the like, they have addressed chronic financial shortfalls by hiring temporary faculty rather than permanent ones or by hiring no new faculty at all. … The long-term results have been
- massive shrinking of the tenure-track job market
- destabilization of doctoral study (doing intellectual as well as personal damage)
- transformation of advanced study into precarity
- endangerment of the quality and continuity of academic disciplines
Newfield points out that the most well-regarded stimulus plans to respond to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are designed to sustain employment. Public institutions in particular can play a crucial role in countering the cycle of downturn by absorbing the unemployed. Instead of freezing in place, universities should agitate for stimulus funds. As Newfield concludes: “We can’t take another bloodbath in the academic job market. We need a New Deal for higher ed, starting with the doctoral job market.”
Celeste Langan for the Berkeley Faculty Association