Financial Crisis FAQs

From AAUP: Most colleges and universities, and their faculties, are facing challenging financial situations. In a few cases the challenges are extraordinary. But in too many cases, administrations invoke the broader fiscal collapse in ways that exaggerate institutional conditions that are considerably less extreme. And in too many cases administrations invoke such conditions as justifications for implementing, without sufficient or any meaningful faculty participation in the decision making, a variety of measures that threaten the working conditions of faculty, academic professionals, and graduate employees. Such measures include hiring and salary freezes, furloughs, salary cuts, layoffs, nonrenewals, reduction and elimination of academic programs and colleges, revision of curricula, changes in academic policy, elimination of tenure, substantial changes in workload, and more.