Academic freedom and tenure--University of the District of Columbia: Massive terminations of faculty appointments

Academe, May/Jun 1998 by Steiner, Peter O, Bergmann, Barbara R, Poston, Muriel E

As noted above, UDC is an entity of the government of the District of Columbia, and many of its problems derive from that fact. The District government has been notorious for its imprudent practices, among them: running large deficits, handling fiscal matters in a loose and profligate way, overstaffing, relying on favoritism in personnel matters, renting unneeded buildings at inflated rents from politically influential landlords, and awarding contracts on a noncompetitive basis. The university has suffered from these practices in two ways. First, the weakening and collapse of the District's financial situation in 1996 meant that the city's vitally needed appropriation to the university was cut nearly in half with no change in its articulated mission nor any initial decrease in its student population. Second, successive university administrations (and, as noted earlier, the turnover in the presidency over the institution's twenty-year history has been great) were reported as having engaged in many of these same imprudent practices in running the institution, partly, some have suggested, at the behest of the city's political leadership. An appropriation that was originally sufficient, perhaps even more than ample, to maintain the operation of the university and to provide decent salaries and benefits for faculty and administrative staff, would turn out to be inadequate. By 1996, the appropriation had become far less than the university's base budget. As soon as the university was no longer allowed to run deficits, it was plunged into a cost-reducing crisis.

A major factor in UDC's financial difficulties, by virtually all accounts, was the excessive size of the administration. This situation dates in part from the formation of the university, when little attempt was made, either at the start or subsequently, to consolidate the administrations of the constituent predecessor institutions, and thus to reduce redundancies. Indeed, the size of the administration continued to expand year by year. The political leadership of the District of Columbia seems to have considered the nonfaculty positions in the administration of UDC to be appropriate places for employment of friends, political allies, and individuals in the District government who had to be moved out of their existing positions for one reason or another.

Another complicating factor in the financial difficulties of UDC relates to the law school that the university had been compelled to incorporate into its budget. The law school was originally a private institution (Antioch Law School). In 1986, after it had run into financial difficulties and was faced with closure, the District government took it over as the D.C. School of Law, committed to serving the legal needs of low-income D.C. residents and providing an affordable legal education to minorities. It continued to run at a large deficit, costing several million dollars a year. In 1995, the school was moved to UDC's main campus and merged with the university. The move was intended to reduce the cost of the law school to the District by eliminating $1 million in rental fees and to remove the school as a separate line item in the city's budget. But it also meant an additional, and far from negligible, financial drain on UDC's already overburdened budget.