200 more students - impact on housing and dining?

Corbett
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:57:17 +0000

The exact number of cuts for non-tenure faculty is not clear. That is semantically stated as something like, “the cuts in place for this year will be continued next year”, but I haven’t seen how big the cuts for this year were.

Recommendation 3 in the PDF report indicates that funding for visiting profs should be cut by the equivalent of 3 positions between 2011 and 2012.

This cut is apparently projected to save $333,000. This number comes from the table on p. 13: it indicates that $605,000 will be saved on visiting faculty in 2011, and that the savings will increase to $938,000 in 2012.

So the implication is that each visiting prof costs ~ $111,000 per year (presumably this figure includes benefits as well as salary). Since the total savings on visiting faculty in 2012 are projected at $938,000, this seems to imply that there will be ~ 8.5 fewer visiting prof positions at that time.

So even if three tenure-track profs are added, there may be fewer faculty bodies on campus in 2012. Some fraction of the tenure-track faculty will be away from campus on leave every year (in fact, Recommendation 4 of the report leaves the funding for faculty leave untouched). But in the future, there may be fewer visiting profs available to stand in for them. In fact, the current Amherst [url=https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/dean_faculty/fph/procedures/visitorrequest]webpage[/url] on visiting faculty notes:

Replacements for faculty members on sabbatic leaves or leaves of absence will not be automatic. Visitors may be requested but funding for replacements is EXTREMELY limited.