2025 Hiring Pause

Further detail from Stanford here: https://irds.stanford.edu/data-findings/staff-headcounts

"Methodology & Definitions Staff Headcount Staff headcounts include all regular, benefits-eligible university employees. With rare exceptions, employees must be appointed at 50% FTE (full-time equivalent) or more for at least six consecutive months in order to be eligible for benefits. The Professoriate and employees of SLAC are not included. Employees with multiple jobs are counted only in the job that is tied to their benefits, typically the one with the largest number of standard hours."

It only matters if the restricted money covers more than what it's intended for.

If you have 500M allowed to cover education and require 700M total for it, then the restriction doesn't matter at all.

I was on the faculty at several schools, private, top 10, public, top 20, etc. Staff categorically does not include graduate students and post-docs, or teaching faculty. The staff expansion problem is the main problem facing academia. There is staff for handling day-to-day functioning of a department, they are usually over-worked and under-payed. This has not expanded and is not a problem.

The main problem is staff at the dean and above level. They are nebulous and their job functions rather diffuse. My impression is that appointments in those functions are with some frequency obtained through nepotism. Furthermore the staff in those functions is often highly ideological. Their true main function seems to bully faculty so that we are constantly "put in our place". The point is to shred to pieces the old principles of shared governance. Essentially they want to make us _their_ employees. If you don't believe me, I can expand on the various interactions that I had with such staff. An extreme example of this is the expansion of staff at UC's into faculty hiring, they now pre-sift all applications for ideological compliance first and then pass on the pre-sifted packet to the faculty.

Here is the staff that I am aware of and that I had the pleasure to interact with: Staff that handles disability accommodations (a large percentage of students are now officially "disabled" and use this disability to gain advantages when taking exams) , staff that is assigned to each student to handle their academic problems or advise them on which course to take (unnecessary they can just talk to faculty), staff that is in charge of Title IX (they don't do much and those departments employ pricey lawyers), staff that handles your grant submissions (their only useful function is making the difficult budget computations for the draconian shares that the university takes for itself, they also sometimes pester faculty about irrelevant things and refuse to submit the grant unless you satisfy them). 99% of the work of that staff is busy work and could be easily cut. I am sure their salaries are all in the 100+K categories. I 'd venture to say that if they are cut faculty would be made more efficient. I have also met staff that is in charge of basically nothing, they attend an enormous amount of committees and pushes for some "change" that never materializes. It is understood these days among the faculty that anybody who wants a real salary increase (but doesn't have the chops to get an external offer) needs to become part of that staff, usually in the form of some deanlet handling some obtuse issue. You probably see the problem.

In the meantime faculty is still performing all the critical functions: we serve on admission committees for graduate students, we serve on post-doc committees, we do the faculty interviews, we do the research, we teach the classes, but our salary increases are barely matched with inflation, essentially regardless of individual performance.

By the way, there is no justification for a hiring freeze in this environment where no real hardship has materialized yet. It is also theater since most hiring has concluded by now. It will be used as a justification to give me no increase this year, I am sure, while the endowment will grow. All of course will be blamed on the bad orange man in the white house.

autodidacts existed before youtube

> Every University’s purported mission is to educate students and advance our > collective knowledge together with its students.

> That’s it.

Not if the university has a medical school. Virtually all R1 universities with medical schools have a hospital, and a large clinical practice. Most of medical school is an apprenticeship where you treat patients. Medical schools need patients, which means a lot of additional staff.

Likewise, in most fields it is no longer possible to advance knowledge just by going to the library or writing on a white board. Knowledge is advanced through experimentation, and experimental equipment and reagents cost money, and need staff to use and maintain them.

No university (and certainly no medical school), makes enough money in tuition and fees to pay for the education provided, and I seriously doubt that many universities have supported themselves solely through tuition since the beginning of the universities in the middle ages.

You are certainly correct that university deans and presidents have seen their mission shift with the increasing cost of education, and indeed faculty are writing many more grants than they did 75 years ago. So time commitments have shifted. But there is an implication that it could have been some other way -- that the money is there (or could have been there) if some other path were chosen. It is hard for me to imagine where the money might have come from.