The Simpsons meet Avatar

Why I like Alan Grayson!

The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is at it again!

On November 4, 2010, the faculty and staff at UL/Lafayette received an email that included this (my emphasis in bold):

Program Review and Budget Reduction Planning
Drs. Steve Landry and Carolyn Bruder are currently holding a second round of meetings with the academic deans to provide additional feedback regarding the deans’ original budget reduction plans and to elicit their responses to program review data.  Following these meetings, the President will receive from Academic Affairs the initial recommendations for budget reductions and program elimination, prioritization, and reorganization.  Should the President determine that some program closures must be initiated in response to the mid-year state budget reductions, campus leaders will meet with academic administrators, faculty, and students in the affected programs to explain the criteria that were considered in formulating a program elimination recommendation and to discuss the proposal with program constituents.  Mid-year budget reductions from the state should be announced before the semester break that begins in December.

Really?  You're going to tell people that they will no longer have a job in January just before Christmas break?

And the most important reason that they may get away with it: faculty at ULL, and indeed throughout the Louisiana system, have no faculty union.  Here in Florida, when Florida State University fired some 21 faculty, including well-known anthropologist Dean Falk, the union, United Faculty of Florida, was able to force them to hire all these faculty back. The reason: FSU administrators did not follow the procedures for termination specified in the collective bargaining agreement, which is the contract between faculty and the school's managerial elite.

Not only do ULL faculty not have a collective bargaining agreement; they also, as of today, continue to work the fall semester without having signed any contract at all! [Added Nov 13: One has to wonder whether being late with contracts is a deliberate strategy; that would be even more evil than I expected.]

Here's a suggestion for any ULL administrators that might read this: If you want to cut your budget, end the football program.  You've already canned Philosophy; "football" is not spelled with "ph."  Wait, wait: maybe you should consider closing the school of Business Administration; after all, it's graduates from those schools who have put us in this mess we're in now.

(For my thoughts on other mischief perpetrated by ULL, go here and here.)