Hiring and Firing Bytes

• Dartmouth College will cut 38 staff members this week, and a similar number in April, as part of an effort to trim its budget by $100-million, according to The Boston Globe and The Chronicle. Last year the college laid off 72 staff members, though 24 were rehired, the Globe writes. More than 100 workers also opted to retire early, The Chronicle notes.

• Skidmore College won't be firing employees this Louis Vuitton Odeon PM year, after all, The Saratogian reports. As recently as December 2009, the possibility of 30 to 70 layoffs had seemed likely, since college officials were projecting an 8-percent revenue shortfall in the 2011 fiscal year. However, thanks to a hiring freeze, more early retirements than expected, and other cost-containment measures, not to mention a favorable endowment bounce at the end of 2009, the college's financial picture is improving, Philip A. Glotzbach, Skidmore's president, said.

• The College of William and Mary may eliminate a policy that automatically awards big pay increases to professors on the verge of retiring, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports: "The policy essentially pulls retiring faculty out of the merit evaluation process and gives them an automatic 8 percent raise in their second-to-last year at the college and a 7 percent raise in their final year." Michael Halleran, the college's provost, told the newspaper that the policy was established decades ago as an early-retirement incentive, but it has since become the norm. A faculty proposal would discontinue the large automatic raises by 2015 and put the savings back into the raise pool; retiring workers would Chanel Black Large totestill get raises based on the average increase of all raises awarded that year, the Times-Dispatch writes.

I recently ran across a great quotation from the late Bill Lane, who was a longtime professor at Western Kentucky University: "Never despise your own gift and never covet another." This caused me to ponder something I see repeatedly: discipline envy.

A sense of envy that can so easily turn into rank jealousy finds fertile ground in the "perks" of other academic disciplines, whether they occur in the form. of greater institutional support, higher pay, lower teaching loads, elevated prestige, public approbation, or any other boon. As one humanities professor told me, "Every time I hear about the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] initiatives from our governor or our institution's president, I just want to scream. It's a slap in the face to the rest of us."

Likewise, it's easy to envy our nonacademic Wedding Tiaras counterparts in professions like law, medicine, business, and government. I've heard more than one professor lament, "I'm so much smarter than my friend who became a lawyer/dentist /marketer, but I make a third the salary for my efforts and achievements."

What "perks" of your discipline do you hear people in other disciplines lament? What is the reality about those perks?

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