To a friend whose work has come to nothing
By 
This post is just some venting about what is in the larger scheme of things a trivial issue, so you have been forewarned.
Almost 15 years ago I started pointing out in faculty meetings that the University of Colorado Law School’s financial model was heading toward what would eventually become an unsustainable place, and that we should do something about that. These warnings were ignored, and they continued to be ignored when over the last several years the campus’s central administration implemented a new financial model for the campus as a whole, which, if one bothered to think about it, made it flagrantly obvious that the law school would be in major budgetary trouble in fairly short order. You will be surprised to learn that the strategy of the dean and almost all the faculty for dealing with this was not to think about it.
So we’ve now reached the point where the law school is unable to pay raises to faculty and staff for next year out of its budget allocation, because of the new budget model. The dean had pointed out in a faculty meeting earlier this year that we at the moment didn’t have the nearly one million dollars we needed to do this, which we are required to do by university and regental rules (in other words we don’t have the institutional authority to decide we won’t pay the mandated raises.). A senior colleague who has worked at several law schools and who recently joined the faculty was understandably startled by this, and asked the dean what her plan was for dealing with this circumstance. The dean replied that her plan was to ask the provost to waive the requirements of the university’s new budget model in regard to the law school. My colleague asked if there was some sort of backup plan if that didn’t work, and the dean said no, but if you have any ideas I’d like to hear them. (I admired my colleague’s restraint when she did not in fact reply isn’t that what you’re paid half a million dollars a year to do?).
Anyway, the dean’s plan for dealing with the budget crisis went about as well as you might expect, so a couple of weeks ago I did a little informal investigating, and found out that what had happened since was that a staff person had come up with a plan for patching the hole in the budget by essentially paying the shortfall out of gift income, meaning the endowments and annual giving to the law school. As someone who has studied law school and university budgets a lot, I thought the plan was a good bit of short-term triage, although the staff person admitted candidly that that’s all it was, since we could do the same thing next year, probably, but not beyond that (most gift money is tied up with conditions for spending it, and next year we’ll have to pay all the money we owe for raises this year again, PLUS whatever new raises we will be require to pay, since these are continuing expenditures, not one time things. So this problem will get worse every year). You will also be surprised to learn that the dean signed off on all this without mentioning it to the faculty, the overwhelming majority of whom have no interest in all these boring details, and who collectively voted this past year to hire seven more full-time faculty, so that we will have 69 such people at the law school this fall, up from 43 when I started working here in 1990 (the student body is 10% larger now than it was then).
This hiring binge is one reason for the massive budget shortfall; the other is that the actual amount of tuition we collect has declined by more than 40% in real dollars over the past 15 years, mainly because we keep chasing, unsuccessfully, a higher ranking in the idiotic US News annual survey. (Cutting effective tuition is the only way for us to maintain the current GPA and test scores for our incoming classes, which are big factors in the rankings).
So the bottom line here is that the law school is effectively broke, and we’re going to have to start laying off people in the next year or two, including some of the faculty who have been paying no attention to any of this because it’s so boring. I mean this isn’t an absolute certainty, since I suppose the new provost, an economist from UT-Austin who starts her new job next month, could come in and say hey let’s increase the law school’s current subsidy from its current 106% level (functionally this means more than half the law school’s expenses are paid by the English and History and Poli Sci and Econ etc. departments, since Arts and Sciences as a whole runs a big surplus and pays for impecunious relatives like the law school). But that’s a slim chance as Lou Reed would say, so it’s far more likely that the layoffs will hit soon, at which point a bunch of people are going to announce their shock and dismay about this totally unforeseen and unforeseeable development.
The final little footnote to this story is that the outgoing provost, who enabled this situation by not paying any real attention to it over the last 15 years — the length of his tenure as provost; the longest of any current provost at an R-1 — is about to reappoint the dean to another five-year term, probably because of brilliant budgetary innovations like the “why don’t we just not ever pay our bills ever and hope the provost says that’s OK” plan that she just put forward to him this spring. The faculty to its limited credit did in fact resist this, by voting overwhelmingly against her reappointment, but faculty governance at American universities is now a complete joke, which is a different but related story for another post probably, assuming I’m not in El Salvador next month.
Bringing all this back to what has become this blog’s central theme: The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States (twice) will remain an eternal mystery.