United Campus Workers of Mississippi condemns the recently announced restructuring plan at Delta State University. This is a tragedy for the individual employees who will lose their jobs, for the students whose university is gradually being converted into a workforce training center, and for the campus community that will be forced to adjust on a dime, mourn lost colleagues, and bite their nails in anticipation of an uncertain future. But we also need to see this as part of a larger and longer-planned attack on universities in the United States. Politicians rant about preparing students for a global workforce and cut funding so that schools have to increase their tuition, then treat it as a natural fact that students just aren’t enrolling in liberal arts courses that would enrich their educations but don’t have obvious employment tracks. Universities and state governments continually raise administrators’ salaries but treat salary freezes and job cuts for staff and faculty as unavoidable. Administrators work behind the scenes to make decisions that faculty and staff are then forced to adjust to. Administrators will surely say, “Our hands are tied. We’re just responding to facts like declining enrollment.”
To this we reply:
-The legislature’s hands are not tied. For all their hand-wringing over “brain drain,” they have been perfectly happy to shift the burden of funding Mississippi universities to tuition dollars and to approve obscene salaries for upper-level administrators.
-Administrators who are responsible for managing university budgets are rarely the ones held accountable to make sacrifices for the institutions they drive into the ground. President Ennis makes $320,000 per year and lives in a university-owned home, yet the administrative salary savings he proposed all come from cutting administrative positions rather than proposing reductions to his own salary.
-When difficult decisions need to be made, the decision process and communications should be more democratic and transparent.
Mississippians, and especially state university workers, must unite to reject this rising tide of unnecessary austerity and fight for more democratic workplaces. Solidarity to our colleagues at Delta State. And to the legislators, board members, and administrators who have brought Delta State to this precipice: shame.
United Campus Workers of Mississippi 