The chairman of Faculty Senate called on the Board of Trustees to re-evaluate how the Council on University Planning and Budgets are making cuts, citing it as one reason “morale among the faculty is at its lowest level.”

“I very much wish my first address to you would be more words of hope and encouragement,” said Grant Sterling, the chair of Faculty Senate. However, the words he did have were of problems and fears the faculty were facing the midst of budget and staff cuts.

While some of the problems – pensions and state funding – were out of the board’s control, Sterling brought up a few issues faculty members were currently dealing with.

Despite no final decisions having been made by any means, there is nothing in the process of the CUPB to suggest a bulk of those cuts will come from anywhere other than academic programs of the university, he said.

“I call upon the board and the administration to send an absolutely unambiguous signal to the CUPB that further diminishing of the academic quality of the institution is intolerable, that non-academic programs must absorb the overwhelming brunt of these cuts,” he said.

President Bill Perry, however, brought up the fact that the process is a shared governance process, and to tell the CUPB which areas to cut would be “unfair” to the shared governance process.

Sterling also brought up the current enrollment woes plaguing Eastern.

As enrollments “plummet,” this leads department members to be continually concerned with the size of their class. With lower class sizes, department members are worried about the future of their programs.

Sterling then brought up the university’s response to lack of funding and lower enrollment – reduce the number of faculty.

“We have fewer faculty on campus than we did in the year 2000, and drastically fewer faculty than we had in 2007 when the enrollment decline began,” he said.

Sterling shared with the board trends he had found in areas of faculty numbers, citing that in 2000 there were 576 faculty members, and in 2007 there were 654 faculty members including chairs. In 2013, the number had decreased to 567.

Sterling also said with the 20 additional cuts Blair Lord, the provost and vice president of academic affairs, ordered last semester, the numbers next year will be lower than the present.

“Non-tenured faculty fear their positions will be terminated, whereas tenured faculty live in fear their colleagues will not be replaced and the workload will be shifted onto them,” he said.

Senior faculty also anticipate taking on a continually increasing workload until they retire and discover they have no pension to live on, while junior faculty see that conditions would probably better if they went somewhere else, Sterling added. Part of the problem, he said, also comes from faculty members looking around the university and not seeing the same problems occurring in other areas.

“For example, when our coach and his staff departed, the coach’s position and the position of his assistant coaches were immediately filled by the university,” Sterling said. “When faculty members in departments who have lost several positions over the past few years – none of which have been replaced at all – look around, it appears as though the university’s priorities don’t suggest that academics are at the top.”

Sterling’s message to the board happened the same day the board approved head football coach Kim Dameron’s five-year contract, from Jan. 11, 2014 until Dec. 31, 2018.

However, it was not just the athletic department that contributes to the problem, Sterling said. It also has to do with the number of administrator positions.

“As our student enrollment has plummeted since 2007, the number of administrative positions has increased, not decreased, and certainly has increased substantially relative to either the number of students and the number of faculty on campus,” he said.

In 2007 there were 290 positions Sterling said were administrators. Those positions were split between 28 under the administration and 262 members under “other professionals.”

In 2013 there were 23 administration positions and 285 “other professionals,” totaling 308 administration and other professionals.

Perry said some of the positions classified as administrative and other professional are there because of additional requirements placed on the university. However, he said through the program analysis, it could come up that some of the positions are no longer necessary.

“But that’s going to require we go through the program analysis,” he said.

The board also approved no increases for student fees for the next year. This was possible by shifting money around from different areas.

Textbook Rental Service, the Shuttle Bus and Campus Improvement will have decreases that will be shifted into the other areas. Grant-in-Aid, Student Activity, Student Publications, Concert, Martin Luther King Jr. University Union Operations and Lantz-O’Brien Operations all have increases from the decreased areas.

The next Board of Trustees meeting will be April 25.

Bob Galuski can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].