A new academic year begins

I am pleasantly surprised, and relieved, at how much I have embraced by prematurely retired status, instead of constantly thinking about how things were and how life could  have been. 

"I am very disappointed that you are not working as a professor anymore," my father recently said.  "Because you don't have retirement age in American universities, I thought you would be a professor for a long time like GG" he added.  GG is his cousin, who has been a university professor for decades in Texas.

"If you are disappointed, then think about the magnitude of my disappointment," I told my father.  "Retiring this early was never in any of my plans."

But, life is what it is.  The Buddha advised us more than 2,000 years ago that our desire for something other than how things are is the root cause of suffering.  Thankfully, I do not ponder about work and life other than what they currently are, though there was the initial shock of it all that upset my mental equilibrium for a short time.

I was given my layoff notice in a Zoom call on March 30, 2021. 

Well before this layoff, almost six months prior, in manner that is typical of how I engage with the world, I authored a commentary in The Oregonian, which was published on November 4, 2020. In that commentary, I wrote:

Like many regional public universities in the United States, my university too is dealing with financial crisis that had been slowly developing and which the coronavirus accelerated.  “Our goal is to retain as many employees as possible,” noted the president in a three-page, single-spaced memo to the campus about the process of rightsizing the university.

In a couple of weeks, we will find out about the president’s plan to “align faculty resources with enrollment trends to reduce faculty expenses in academic programs.”

The regional public universities have been the ones that mostly served, and continue to serve, the vast numbers of under-privileged students.  You can easily recognize them.  Many of them have geographic identifiers like "western."  One of my first applications for a teaching job was to Southeast Missouri State University,  In California, the "CalState" campuses were designed as regional universities.

As one who has thought a lot about higher education, and has authored quite a few commentaries on it, I clearly understood that there was nothing unique about my layoff and how my former employer was going about the business of it all.  The large universities and private liberal arts colleges with money are in a league of their own.  But, not the regionals.

Today I read in the news of another regional going the same route: Declaring a financial emergency that then allows for tenured faculty to be laid off, so that the university can align its resources with what will sell in these contemporary times.  It is deja vu all over again, this time at Emporia State University in Kansas:

Ken Hush, the university’s president, told the board that for years, the university had enacted traditional budget-cutting measures like hiring freezes, spending restrictions, and voluntary retirements. It’s been “death by a thousand cuts,” Hush said. But “that doesn’t work for us anymore, either programmatically or financially.”

The university has terminated 33 positions, "the bulk coming out of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences."  Sounds familiar to me.

Even in the years before the financial problems worsened, I repeatedly suggested to the president and anybody who raised the issue that there was a simple solution to untie the Gordian Knot: Cut the spending on athletics.  The millions spent on athletic entertainment can easily be downsized and academic programs can be sustained with that money.  But, of course, American higher education is cursed with spending gazillions on athletics.

In no other country’s university system, after all, does sports play anything like the central role it does in American academic life. Men do not go to Oxford to play cricket; the Sorbonne does not field a nationally celebrated soccer team. Even in the most sports-mad countries, sports is sports and education is education. That’s a better system.

American universities are big time landlords, who earn a lot of income from their developed real estate. Country clubs Dorms, conference rooms, auditoriums, climbing walls, etc.  Some also own huge basketball and football venues for educational purposes entertainment.

These public policy decisions I don't care about anymore.  The people have spoken, and very clearly at that.  Philosophy or Geography or History are not what universities are about.  Universities exist to offer football and basketball and more, and whatever money is left will be used for the liberal arts and sciences.