Editor,
The title of surrealist sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick’s novel, Now Wait For Last Year, may adequately express the anxieties and disquiet of the arts and sciences faculty following their recent meeting with UNM President David Schmidly and the other members of Schmidly’s “executive cabinet.” Imagine our surprise as we listened to President Schmidly appear to cave on almost all of the demands the faculty have been making these past two years. President Schmidly could not say enough about his desire to hire more faculty — as many as possible, he noted, what with the astonishing increase in enrollment. He admitted the regents’ “harvest” of A&S funds, which had occurred more than once (and this is always important to remember) well before the economic crisis, had not been a good idea at all. He told us that he was in favor of letting A&S benefit from the money generated by our summer school, and he used the “e” word (“entrepreneurialism”) repeatedly to encourage the idea that he was ready to reward anything we did to teach, research and serve the University. Only last spring this was the very same faculty at the forefront of the resoundingly massive no-confidence votes directed at former Regents President Jamie Koch, University Chief Financial Officer David Harris, and Schmidly himself. Truly things must be ugly elsewhere in the Schmidly-verse for him to seem to love us A&S faculty so much. After all, we don’t punch people, we are amazingly productive and successful with few (indeed ever-shrinking) resources, and whatever we have done to embarrass him has never even come close to hitting the national media. In the days that have followed, faculty remember that it is very easy to make promises when the money is very far from being there to comply with them. While Jamie Koch is no longer president of the Board of Regents, he is still on the board, and still making fatuous statements (about co-governance most recently) and ready to tell whatever lies about the faculty he can get published. We still don’t know enough about how Schmidly’s administration diverted University resources away from its teaching and research mission toward the current bloated bureaucracy. That bureaucracy has not been dismantled by the current economic crisis. Meanwhile, A&S departments continue to lose faculty without replacements and whole programs deteriorate beyond repair. The students need to know the promises Schmidly made to the A&S faculty: They are above all about the shape of their educational future here at UNM. When and if there are resources available to this University, we will all remember the promises and look for results. We must be vigilant about what occurs — next year or the year after or the year after that — and whether it isn’t just like what we’ve witnessed so far. Otherwise, we will all be waiting for last year.
Les W. Field
UNM faculty
