No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Dinosaurs
enerally, higher education is a stable sector in response to economic fluctuation. But as the current mild (very mild) recovery drones along, it's becoming clear that a sufficiently extended low tide grounds all boats-even those of higher education. Private schools are seeing reduced endowment payouts. State schools are suffering massive deficits as they lose both financial aid and state treasury assistance. Families have fewer dollars for tuition payments, and donors have fewer dollars for gifts. Schools are beginning to optimize however they can-cutting travel, reducing grants, initiating or continuing hiring freezes, and cutting back on capital renewal.
These things aren't all fat, either. Cutting maintenance speeds the deleterious effect of building depreciation on the academic and research programs. Cutting financial aid changes the quality of the student body. Hiring freezes only mean that fewer people have to do more, until they burn out and quit. This isn't just trimming the fat, or doing more with less. This is cutting muscle and bone-doing less with less. But these are desperate times.
During all this fiscal vivisection, colleges & universities may say that they're not going to cut essential programs-teaching, research, student life, advising. These are the vital internal organs of the institution. Cutting into these is an admission that it may be time to pack up the school and try something else. So, many schools say that they won't cut the mandatory things-like health and safety. And this is where we diverge.
Campuses usually have very decentralized decision-making. It's one of the hallmarks of higher learning-the members of the faculty are often more responsible to themselves more than the administration. The same is true with academic departments-they are often more responsible to students than some dean or staff person. In this climate of diffused decision-making, authority, and accountability to a higher purpose, the notion of a centralized health and safety program is usually a pipedream. Responsibility for and attention to a health and safety program must often lie within the heart & mind of a faculty member, and within the pedagogic objective of a department, to bear real fruit.
Campus health and safety programs cost. They probably incur both direct and indirect costs. They certainly incur opportunity costs. Every moment the members of the faculty focus on a health and safety issue, they defocus, for
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES