Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Furloughs etc.

Interesting situation out West. Here the college has suspended retiremement contributions resulting in a 5% pay cut. Other colleges and corporations have taken identical measures to balance budgets. I took a quick glance at the MLA job list last night. At the moment there are about 75 postings in Spanish. If memory serves, there were at least twice that many last year at this time. More listings will trickle in, but I'll be surprised if there are more than half as many as there has been in recent years. The list usually reaches a couple hundred postings.

4 comments:

Traductor said...

Question: do we trust the news reports that the economy is in the first phases of a recovery, and if so, how long will it take academic budgets to reflect that?

Mike said...

About as long as it takes state gov. budgets to reflect that.

Dave said...

I think we might get a health bill before we see any raises.

Kent said...

I'm a bit of a conspiracy theorist with regard to the CA higher education budget, in that I see an underlying erosion of support for publicly-funded higher ed for twenty years, and this crisis will just contribute to the slow ratcheting down of expectations and possibilities in both systems.

I hope I'm wrong.

I must say that my colleagues who have been around at least 20 years are more sanguine than I about the budget returning.