A Methodological Approach to Selective Cutbacks

Abstract

Budget cuts have become less and less a news item as postsecondary institutions around the world have increasingly become targets of local and national governments trying to patch up faltering economies. In a survey of European universities conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), participating institutions were unanimous in deploring both the regression of consumable financial means and the budget decline, worsened by an overproportional increase in personnel costs (Bender & Henning, 1980). At the United Kingdom's forty-five universities, some administrators in the spring of 1981 were privately toying with the idea of asking faculty members to take voluntary pay cuts to avoid massive layoffs (Walker, 1981). The situation was not less severe in North American institutions. Many American legislatures had forced universities to operate with huge deficits and to declare a state of financial emergency (Magarrell, 1981; Watkins, 1981). Canadian provincial and federal governments also were being accused of having added colleges and universities to their "hit list" (Winter, 1981).