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	"Cutting, Firing and Eliminating" Reporter Sarah Gardner's "Reporter's Notebook,"

" Nebraska is one of those places that, like Rodney Dangerfield, doesn’t “get no respect,” at least from the national media. I could tell it had been a while since somebody had flown in to report a story when the obliging young lady behind the airport rental car desk interrogated me enthusiastically about my visit. “You guys in California are actually going to broadcast something about the University of Nebraska? Wow!”

Unfortunately, this story isn’t the kind of national attention the university desires. Folks there have enough trouble convincing outsiders that there’s more to “UNL” than their beloved “Cornhuskers” football team. So, they’re not thrilled that the national headline from Lincoln this spring screamed something like “UNL Firing Tenured Faculty” -- yet, the university’s soft-spoken university chancellor Harvey Perlman says his back is up against the wall. A state budget crisis has already forced him to make deep cuts in administrative staff and non-tenured faculty. Now, he insists, he has no choice but to eliminate some programs led by tenured professors. On this tight-knit campus, the chancellor knows he’s testing the goodwill he’s built up with faculty over the past few years. In thanking the outgoing Senate Faculty president recently, Perlman remarked that he always liked how the professor had introduced him with quotes from Shakespeare. Now, he joked nervously, he’ll probably be introduced with quotes from Machiavelli.

All this cutting, firing and eliminating has divided the UNL faculty. At a recent Senate Faculty meeting, one of the tenured professors who’s losing his job angrily took to the microphone to accuse the UNL administration of “the use of secret documents in the termination of tenured faculty,” and called on the Senate to take a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Harvey Perlman. The vote was put off, but it wouldn’t have passed. A recent informal vote by the faculty showed overwhelming support for him. And, when the Senate did vote on a resolution urging the chancellor to put a moratorium on dismissing more tenured faculty, it failed -- by a narrow margin. When I asked entomologist Brett Ratcliffe, one of the eight professors who received a termination letter, why more of his colleagues hadn’t come to his defense, he replied tartly, “They don’t think this could ever happen to them.” Ratcliffe, by the way, was the winner of the University’s 2001 Outstanding Research and Creativity Award.

So far, Nebraska has cut eight tenured positions, but if state legislators vote for deep budget cuts in the next few weeks, the university will likely cut more programs -- and that means more layoffs of tenured faculty. Nebraska risks censure, however, by the American Association of University Professors. That’s partly why the school is currently trying to help the eight faculty members get back on their feet again, either by rehiring them in other departments, offering them a generous retirement package or money for “retraining.” (The female professor offered “retraining,” a single mom who had sued the university for gender discrimination in the ‘90s, rejected the offer, according to her colleagues)

The decision to rehire some of the professors, including Ratcliffe the entomologist, has softened the blow, but it’s clear damage has been done. Universities aren’t like corporations, where executives are often judged on quarterly output and profits and aren’t surprised if they get axed in a company downsizing. Professors often like to think of their places of employment as “home” and their colleagues and the administration as “family.” So, when Dad kicks you out of the house, it hurts. Patricia Freeman, a zoologist, said it was several weeks before she could stomach opening up her official letter of termination.

Anthropologist Tom Myers, who’s negotiating an early retirement with UNL after his job was cut, bitterly talked to me of the increasing corporate influence on academia. He lamented universities’ decisions to rely more on short-term contracts, part-time lecturers and other non-tenured faculty. The shift to the “business model” led by “failed executives rather than academics,” lamented Myers, is a “long-term trend that is absolutely disastrous for education in this country.” It’s one that currently makes sense, however, to cost-cutting administrators caught between parents angry at rising tuitions and the need to quickly hire more teachers to meet rising enrollments. UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman, a former tenured law professor, told me he supports tenure and wants the school to formally decide what percentage of its faculty should be awarded that coveted status -- and try to stick to it. But with his budget under attack right now, he says, that kind of decision will have to wait."

--Sarah Gardner