The adjunct budget for 2009-2010, estimated to be about $100,000 less than last year’s, is one of many budget proposals that will come before the Board of Trustees for approval Friday.
“We never really policed ourselves that closely and now we’re forced to,” Rand Ziegler, vice president and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said. “So in some ways, it’s actually a beneficial exercise and probably something we should have been doing anyway.”
Ziegler said the 2008-2009 adjunct budget was a little more than $300,000, but was cut mid-year by about $70,000 due to university-wide budget cuts to around $233,000. The proposed adjunct budget for 2009-2010 is $210,000, but must be approved by the BOT and will be adjusted after summer and fall enrollments are confirmed.
Ziegler said $102,000 of the proposed budget is committed to a handful of super adjuncts who have been issued their contracts. Super adjuncts are part-time faculty members, and usually teach multiple courses more often than other adjuncts.
“They typically have taught for us for multiple years,” Ziegler said, and are essential to some programs.
He said other adjuncts are hired as needed, usually on a course-by-course basis.
Ziegler said he’s using the same philosophies to trim next year’s budget he used to cut this year’s, which relied on eliminating course offerings so some adjuncts wouldn’t have to be hired.
“There’s a misconception out there that any course with a small enrollment was canceled,” he said. “That’s not true.”
Ziegler said the university went through the entire spring course schedule after enrollment last fall, and department chairs were approached to decide if classes with low enrollments were necessary.
“In many cases the answer was ‘yes,’ so we left them alone,” he said.
Classes that could be offered every other year, special topics courses and courses with one student were cut instead.
“In times of plenty you can offer more courses, and you can experiment with special topics courses,” he said. “When times are tight, like anything else, you economize in other ways.”
Rob Flaherty, associate dean of CAS, said students who needed courses that were cut could opt to take an independent study.
“The course that was cut was not necessarily an adjunct course, sometimes it was a full-time person’s course,” Ziegler said, which meant moving around faculty based on their expertise, so an adjunct wasn’t hired.
Ziegler said the chemistry, physics and athletic departments don’t use adjuncts, while many others use a few and the LA series uses several and will be affected more than others by the budget cut.
“However, it doesn’t mean fewer LA courses, it just means more LA courses taught by full-time people instead of part-time,” he said.
The music department also uses a large amount of adjuncts. All of them teach private lessons, Music Department Chair John Buehler said, and classes required for most music majors.
“Students pay extra for private lessons, so that’s a revenue stream into the university,” he said.
Buehler said adjuncts needed to teach required classes will remain, although it’s possible some classes might be offered less often.
