Editor,
As graduate students, we are in a precarious position. We have chosen to put faith in our own abilities as scholars and researchers to pursue careers that we genuinely believe will allow us to do what we love while benefiting the world in which we live. Each one of us knows that, even in a good economy, the competitive nature of our respective fields means high risks. We know that our research will cost us, indebt us, but we hope that the institution we choose will be able to prepare us to the best of its ability to be competitive in the job market.
In the last year and a half, many graduate students have begun to seriously examine the ability of UNM to offer that competitive preparation. The departments of history, mathematics, chemistry, anthropology and others are being hit by the loss of tenure-track faculty and therefore are also losing their ability to provide diverse course offerings. The addition of 10 tenure-track faculty over the course of three years for the entire University, while certainly a valid gesture, is a relatively small step to correcting a big problem.
Over the course of the summer, UNM began a process of harvesting roll-over funds accrued by departments over years of frugal spending. For many departments, that money provided needed travel funds to students conducting research, traveling to conferences and attending job talks. With competition already fierce for most other forms of travel funding, the loss of these funds has been a severe blow. President David Schmidly stated that those funds are being held until the full extent of the economic damage to the University is made clear, at which time they "may" be released. However, they were taken before there was an economic crisis at UNM, so what was the original plan?
The same question can be asked of the faculty hiring freeze. There was a freeze before there was a national economic crisis. What was the original reason? These two examples are merely symptoms of a larger problem.
When Schmidly was hired, as he has often stated to the UNM community and in the press, he explicitly committed to the adoption of a corporate model of academic administration. This model predicates the success of administration on the creation of a third tier of bureaucracy between the level of the deans and the Office of the President. This expansive and expensive layer of vice presidents is supposed to bring in money that will then drift down to the departments. It was this very philosophy that led 90 percent of the faculty to vote against Schmidly's candidacy. It is this corporate model that is being called into question across the country in other academic institutions, in the Big Three car companies, on Wall Street, in investment banks and so on. Why, as a UNM community, would we want to accept an administrative model that has failed the nation?
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At UNM we need to be innovative. But innovation doesn't have to include enormous administrative costs. On campus we have some of the brightest and most devoted scholars New Mexico has to offer. We need to use those talents to build an administrative model that incorporates innovative changes such as the Office of Equity and Inclusion but rejects expansive bureaucracy. We need an administration that not only talks about communication and respect but shows it by putting decisions back in the hands of the deans, faculty, staff and students. We want people prioritized over parking structures, and we want academics to be at the core of the active spending policies of UNM.
Rebecca Ellis & Lucy Grinnell
UNM students
