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“We looked at all kinds of options for us when we began this process,” FAS Dean Michael D. Smith says when asked if the administration had ever considered merging or scaling back smaller departments.
Such considerations arose in the minds of worried faculty members who recognized that sprawling departments like Economics possess a distinct advantage over smaller units when making their cases for funding.
For example, Slavic Languages and Literatures currently lists 20 faculty on its website. It had only nine concentrators in 2008. In stark contrast, Economics had a student-faculty ratio of 20 to 1 in 2006, and resorted to cancelling its junior seminars because of a dearth of staffing.
“There always has been pressure for departments that have a large influx of students to have more faculty,” says Wilt Idema, chair of East Asian languages and civilizations, which had 40 concentrators in 2008. “If I were the chair of economics...
Since faculty salaries are a considerable investment for FAS, the likes of the Celtic department have less recourse for claiming the additional dollar if budgetary streamlining is driven purely by efficiency and practicality.