Nerd News, Financial Apocalypse Edition: University of Tennessee's Physics Department and the Financial Meltdown

From University of Tennessee law professor and blogger Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds comes a report of tough financial times in his school's Department of Physics.

The report is bit detailed, but if you want a window into the nuts and bolts of academia's working conditions, it's a good glimpse of one department's attempt to operate in trying times. Here is a sample, and fellow nerds (especially science ones) may well cringe to read it:

So how do these budget cuts influence our department? Profoundly! We now have 25.5 FTE (Full Time Equivalent) faculty members in our department. This is two less than just a year ago, since we lost two positions as a result of the budget cuts in June. We have to go all the way back to around 1960 to find fewer faculty members in our department. We have partly compensated for this loss in FTEs by having more Joint Faculty positions with ORNL, so the 25.5 FTE correspond to 33 actual living beings!

Our department used to have a large group of lecturers and adjunct teaching staff, who would be responsible for many of our large service courses and general education courses. Over the past several years we have lost many of them and have not had any funds to replace them, so we are now down to only 3 lecturers. This has placed a strong teaching responsibility on our faculty and they have responded extremely well. Our physics faculty is now teaching more student credit hours than any other department at the university . . .

This high efficiency, however, is coming at a cost. There is no more "slack" in the system in the form of professors that can teach more courses. If we have to implement additional budget cuts, we will have to cancel classes . . .

We have also had to reduce our staff in the department. We are now operating our Electronics Workshop with only two people instead of three, and our Mechanical Workshop will now be run by only four people after the untimely death of our workshop supervisor, Jodie Millward, since we do not have any funds to replace his position. Our administrative and financial staff now consists of only five people, who manage to run a "business" with approximately 200 employees.

The financial meltdown is hitting campuses hard. The reports keep coming, so I think it's time to create a new tag: "financial meltdown on campus."

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