Changing a bulb at SEMO

By Ed Williams

Those involved in solving the financial plight at Southeast Missouri State University, which was described in the Oct. 1 Southeast Missourian, need to direct their attention toward hidden costs as well as the obvious direct costs.

By way of illustration, in addition to the direct cost of paying a person to climb a ladder and replace the burned-out bulb are the hidden costs for paying another person to hold the ladder and for paying the purchasing agent who obtained the ladder. Actually, two purchasing agents might be involved, inasmuch as ladders and light bulbs may be on separate accounts.

I submit that using a historical perspective could prove to be helpful in solving the university's seemingly ongoing financial problem. Specifically, I recommend selecting data points at 25-year intervals on a time continuum for the last 100 years. This would provide five reference points: 2002, 1977, 1952, 1927 and 1902.

For each of these five years, calculate the total salary of the teaching faculty. Similarly, determine the total salary of the administration (defined for this purpose as non-teaching employees). Compute the total salary of the administrators as a percentage of the total salary of the teaching faculty.

Would you expect the computed percentages for these five data points to be approximately the same? To me, the university administrators represent the hidden costs and are analogous to the ladder holder and purchasing agent(s) in the previous example.

In the spring of my first year of employment in what then was the Science Department at the university, I was give a reduced teaching load of one class as compensation for serving as the coach of the baseball team. Hidden costs in this first year of resurrecting a baseball program at the university included paying others to schedule opponents and umpires and to buy uniforms and equipment, as I was not involved in these matters.

As I recall, the team's record that first year was about 50-50. To obtain a more favorable win-loss record, it is logical to hire a full-time coach instead of a faculty member whose primary responsibility is to his academic discipline.

But improving a win-loss record has associated costs. Teams with losing records also want to improve and may decide to hire a full-time coach and perhaps an assistant coach as well. So for schools with winning records the next step may be to hire an assistant coach for pitching and another assistant for hitting.

Where does it end?

Suppose we do a study similar to the one for the ratio of teaching faculty to administrators using the same five data points. This time we will calculate the total salary of the coaches (those who don't consider themselves academic faculty) and express it as a percentage of the total salary of the teaching faculty. Would you expect these five computed percentages over 100 years to be virtually the same?

After examining what these computed percentages reveal, those charged with correcting the university's financial problem would be in a much better position to decide the extent to which the academic area should suffer faculty termination and program retrenchment.

Removing the cabooses on railroad trains will not eliminate damages caused by rear-end train collisions. Similarly, the contemplated plan, according to the newspaper article, to eliminate two or three disciplines that now have the fewest majors will do very little to correct the university's financial problems over the long term, in my opinion.

Ed Williams of Cape Girardeau is professor emeritus of geosciences at Southeast Missouri State University.