Save Tulane Engineering

[gadfly]

Based on what went down at the University Senate Meeting, here is my opinion on this restructuring:

It looks like Cowen is moving away from using purely financial resoning for the cuts, but instead calling it "strategic". Could this mean someone in the administration finally figured out how much it really costs to keep Engineeirng?

According to the end of Side A, here is what made the decision to cut Engineering "strategic" and not "financial"

-What department would "no longer be needed"? I assume Cowen meant in terms of what is needed in post-Katrina NOLA

-"Could those students be in departments where there are higher margins?" The "margins" Cowen is reffering to are financial, and I assume this means the profit margin here. I base this on the context of the answer, which deals with deeming some departments "in the black".

The questioner kept at it, and finally, sounds like Cowen got pissed and said this:

-"We were advised that it would be best not to Cherry-Pick facultyin the institution...And therefore the way to do it was to make decisions about certain departments or areas that the University would not be in anymore and therefore all faculty in that area, regardless of their status would be terminated. Therefore there could be no question that youve selected an untentured faculty member over a tenured faculty member. Youre deciding not to be in those particular areas. That is strategic."

Upon further questioning, Cowen now calls the decision "both financial and strategic".

Im sorry, but how is that strategic? Cowen's reasoning is flawed here: he says that "Cherry-Picking" faculty would be wrong based on status, and thus it made more sense to cut an entire department, but from the way he stated this thought process, it seems like they ALREADY HAD CERTAIN DEPARTMENTS IN MIND. I get a strong vibe that the decision to pull Tulane out of the Engineering arena was already made, and this Cherry Picking logic was concocted after the fact.

On another note, I was under the impression that faculty with tenure WERE, infact given precedence over others when it came to lay-offs. If this is "bad" as Cowen's advisors told him, then we better let all those Assistant, Associate, and Visiting Professors know their hard work is not going to get them any job security. Its like people working to get US citizenship, only to find out they can be deported anyway.

The end of Side A sounds like Cowen is giving a lecture to his kids about fiscal responsibilty. He is quite literally chastizing us in that meeting, claiming we dont know how to add or subtract numbers and figure out how much stuff will cost.

Here is my opinion, as the third in my family to attend Tulane, and as someone who has lived in this city since 4th grade:

Cowen's claim that this disaster required "quick decisions" and that we came "this close" to losing our school simply cannot be correct. Tulane is huge, we are filthy rich, by far the largest private employer the area. If schools like Loyola, Xavier and UNO can re-open, without cutting progams, why cant we?

Cowen says that anyone who stayed in the city for the past few months will see how dire the situation is. Im not sure what he is reffering to here, because if it is the lact of population (New Orleans has a fraction of the people it had pre-Katrina) is it, it doesnt make sense.

I recall that 5/7 students at Tulane are not from the NOLA area. Im not too informed, but I dont think Katrina hit places like Brooklyn, or Houston, or California, or whereever else we get students. Our kids were going to be coming back, and we knew it. We were going to have that revenue of (overpriced BTW) $30k while schools like UNO, Loyola, and Xavier had to deal with the very real possibility that their student body would not return because they lost their homes, or their families lost their jobs. Aside from the primarily minimum-wage minority staff we hire, Tulane has always been an island in this city. I say this from experience: I would never come to this campus if it were not for me being a student here.

What is the real reason behind cutting Engineering? Because its becoming clear it was not finanical, or in the intrest of the future of this city.

[jmikowski]

I'm not sure if it is in there...as I haven't listened to the sound files. But I was physically at the meeting, sitting directly behind Cowen. Does the sound file catch the Senator from the B-School listing how the cuts there were in fact "Cherry Picking." That is the departments that lost people there, had tenured faculty cut while junior faculty were left alone. Funny how it was not a problem to "Cherry Pick" faculty in the B-School but in Engineering they just had to cut whole departments.

I know for a fact, that an alternative plan was offered to Cowen and Lefton, involving cuts from all the engineering and science departments and it was shot down. Those cuts would have been "strategic" allowing for no department closures and maintaining tenured faculty.
_________________
- Justin Mikowski
Computer Engineering '07
"Non sibi Sed Suis" -Not for one's self but for one's people.

[angryengineer]

Of course the decision is strategic, even if there was a financial basis, if he had made the decision on purely financial means we would have lost the art department since it sucks up huge amounts of money and doesn't really make any. (I am NOT suggesting this as an alternative. No department at this school should be cut entirely.)

The idea that by cutting the departments he was hurting fewer overall students than if every department lost say 10% of its budget and was then left to figure out how to make that happen, is true enough, but Utilitarianism (the philosophy behind such an idea) is a little outmoded in this day and age, in fact it is rather unethical if you really want to get down to its philisophical base.