Cuts should be decided by most informed, experienced

I remember last year when it seemed as though Vassar's endowment was imploding. There were constant e-mails about the financial health of the College, about classes and staff being cut and about the need to cut back discretionary spending wherever possible. Students and alums complained about random cuts with which they had a personal problem. It is all very well for students and alumnae/i to express their concerns with how the College is run, but it is best to take a step back before becoming too involved in someone else's life.

The basic issue with staffing any institution in a recession is that it is politically more problematic to decrease wages than to lay off staff. Perhaps this is because even if every staffer's faith in their job security is undermined by layoffs, the actual monetary harm only falls on a few people, whereas reductions in pay affects everyone. Of course, the few people who are laid off are hurt pretty badly. Losing a job is not just a loss of remuneration: it is also a loss of social status. But, as a group, workers tend to prefer layoffs to widespread minor harm in the form of pay cuts. How should we students and alumnae/i react to this?

Intervention is tempting. Presumably there are two motivations: actually caring about the welfare of those who are laid off and wanting to be a hero. The problem with the first motivation is that it interferes with the collective bargaining process that staff members undertake through their union and ignores their preference for focusing the damage on a few individuals. The problem with the second motivation is that it is condescending.

Although it is truly awful that some hard-working people will lose their jobs, Vassar's staffers are adults who can bargain for their own jobs. Besides examining the motivation behind our impulse to intervene, maybe we should also look at the information behind that impulse. Students and professors observe the day-to-day working of the College in a way that administrators cannot. Thus when there are staff cuts, student feedback is useful in determining the impact on the College's educational mission. However, students are also less able to appreciate the rationale behind shifting budget allocations because their noses are too close to the ground and because they are not intimately acquainted with the College's finances. This is not simply because students lack information, but also because they lack the financial experience to be able to process that information. 

General lack of financial experience is precisely the reason that the College's financial decisions are kept behind closed doors. Although we might think that having access to information about the College's investments and budgeting would help students make more informed decisions about issues like staff cuts, it could well do the opposite. The danger is that students will be overwhelmed juggling too many variables.

This is not at all to say that Vassar should not care about cutting staff members, but just that we have to recognize some cuts are necessary and the call is best made by administrators who are informed and experienced. It is a difficult decision to lay off someone who will likely find it hard to find new employment in the current economic climate. However, the school has taken steps to ease this difficulty with a plan to aid laid off workers in finding other employment and to provide access to temp work. This is not only a feel-good solution: it also provides a sense of security to other staffers, and can be used as a benefit to attract staffers to Vassar without having to pay higher wages. Of course, whether these benefits are actually worth it is another question that only the administration can duly answer.

—Rob Woodward is a graduate of the Class of 2009.