At Wednesday’s University Senate meeting the Budget Committee presented its annual report.  The report indicates the enrollment of the university is increasing steadily but all is well in terms of the teaching mission because the administration is allocating money to hire new faculty.  Indeed, the student-to-faculty ratio has actually improved. 

 The more-than-odd matter is the administration uses a reported number of faculty to justify this claim that is fundamentally contradicted by their own published numbers. The administration claims many more faculty than its own reports indicate. There are two sources that have been published for some time: annual reports from the American Association of University Professors and the Office of Institutional Research. The two are essentially the same over time. On the SU Web page, in the center of the main page, the administration reports a much higher number, which makes things look much better. The three sets of numbers are below.     

This involves a fundamental issue of credibility. We have an administration that has variously claimed 200-240 new hires in the last several years, but the AAUP figures indicate the net increase is 45 over 3 years or 17 over 2 years. Given the steady increase in enrollment, increases that small mean the student-faculty ratio is rising and not declining.

When administrators are asked to explain the difference they get very vague and cannot provide data to explain the difference. There are two possible sources of the discrepancy. Either the administration is incompetent and can’t keep good records of who it has on payroll, or they are misrepresenting data to make things look better than they are. We deserve to know which it is.    

Jeff Stonecash

Maxwell Professor of Political Science

 

Year                       AAUP    OIRA      SU Web

1999-00                  817       822

2000-01                  825       830           882

2002-02                  827       832           927

2003-03                  853       859           938

2004-04                  856       864           938

2005-05                  873       879           958

2006-06                  858       865           973

2007-07                  881       894           977

2008-08                  896       910           993

2008-09                  934       944         1031

2010-10                  962       955         1049

2011-11                  976       981         1062

2012-12                  979                      1085

Published on February 19, 2012 at 12:00 pm