The University Proposes Cutting Staffing and Costs by Twenty Percent

The University Proposes Cutting Staffing and Costs by Twenty Percent is the administrative mandate that transforms budget rumors at West Central Pennsylvania University into a concrete institutional crisis. Dickie Pope tells William Henry Devereaux, Jr. that campus executives must prepare a systemwide plan for reducing staff and costs by twenty percent, even though there is no guarantee the plan will be implemented. The proposal makes a seemingly technical exercise in resource allocation a test of political allegiance: Devereaux is invited to help decide what his department can lose, while being assured that administrators above him will bear the blame.

Origins and Budget Anxiety

The possibility of faculty cuts takes shape against a conspicuous sign of university investment. On the walk to the student center, Devereaux passes the enormous excavation for a new Technical Careers building. Its groundbreaking ceremony has been delayed until later that afternoon because a congressman fell while getting off his charter plane and broke his ankle. The hole is already dug, leaving organizers to find a camera angle for the symbolic first shovelful that will not show the excavation itself.

The construction seems to contradict the rumors that tenured professors may be purged in the name of financial hardship. Devereaux reasons that administrators would hardly spend millions on a new facility in the same year they planned to fire faculty for lack of money. Yet the hole does not reassure him. He remembers that a previous excavation produced an unexpected replica of his own house, and imagines that the current pit could be less a foundation for a building than a mass grave for faculty. The opposed readings of the same site—evidence of institutional favor and a possible warning of institutional violence—give the budget rumors their unsettled force.

The university’s budget chain helps explain why uncertainty persists. Dickie reports that he lacks a budget because Jacob Rose lacks one, and that the shortfall runs upward through the chancellor to a legislature that has delayed action. The chancellor expects a budget early the following week; Dickie says he expects his own by the end of that same week. Devereaux answers with the arithmetic of his public duck-killing threat: at one duck a day, a delay of several days would mean killing four or five. Dickie laughs, but Devereaux does not. The exchange places a comic protest beside the real absence of operating funds.

The Mandate and Its Rationale

Dickie distinguishes the order to draft a plan from a final decision to carry it out. The chancellor has given every campus executive officer a systemwide mandate: reduce staff and costs across the curriculum by twenty percent. Whether the legislature’s eventual budget will make implementation necessary remains unknown, but producing a plan is compulsory. In Dickie’s account, the proposal is therefore both contingent and already consequential: no one yet knows whether cuts will happen, but the university is being organized around the possibility.

He frames the mandate as a response to demographic and economic change. The baby-boom generation is no longer supplying the same student numbers, he argues, and colleges that survive the decade will have to become leaner and more efficient. Devereaux’s brief question about whether education itself can be made efficient exposes the tension beneath that managerial vocabulary. Dickie treats efficiency as a practical condition of institutional survival; the exchange leaves open what happens to teaching and academic work when cost reduction becomes the measure of survival.

Devereaux’s Proposed Role

Dickie asks Devereaux not to name individuals for dismissal. Instead, he proposes that Devereaux supply criteria for identifying which people are indispensable to the English department’s mission. Dickie would consult the academic deans, make recommendations based on that advice, and pass them to the university president, whose recommendations would go to the chancellor. Devereaux recognizes that the entire process would rest on his judgment even if the formal decisions belonged to others.

The offer draws on Devereaux’s reputation as a respected teacher and published author, and on his reported description of the English department as full of burnouts. Dickie presents the invitation as a chance to shape a department of which the university could be proud. He also promises political insulation: the cuts, if they occur, will appear to have been imposed from above, leaving administrators to take the criticism while Devereaux avoids being cast as the person responsible. His description of the plan’s beneficiaries extends from the institution and students to taxpayers, with the elimination of supposedly unproductive staff presented as a shared gain.

That reassurance does not remove the moral burden; it relocates it. Devereaux would not make the official decisions, but his criteria could determine who is treated as essential and who becomes expendable. Dickie’s careful division between advice and execution offers a way to participate without appearing to choose victims. The proposal’s institutional procedure thus doubles as an effort to recruit Devereaux and manage his sense of responsibility.

Political Pressure and Consequences

The offer unfolds alongside competing attempts to secure Devereaux’s allegiance. Herbert Schonberg says the union wants Devereaux on its side, in part because the English department has more votes than any other department and might rally behind him. He reports having spoken with Teddy Barnes and June Barnes, who have sided with Paul Rourke and Finny, and makes clear that Devereaux’s department and friends may already be aligned against him. Herbert asks him to declare whether he will join the union’s fight or make common cause with Dickie; neutrality, he warns, would leave him friendless.

Other exchanges show how the budget struggle entangles departmental loyalty with personal leverage. Billy Quigley threatens to vote with Finny and a Jesuit opponent in an effort to force Devereaux to act on his behalf, while the budget delay also provides the backdrop to Devereaux’s duck threat. The threatened violence is explicitly treated in class as comic rather than serious, but its public performance has already made Devereaux a figure in the campus dispute. Herbert later reports that a strike vote is planned for the week before the term ends, with the stated purpose of preventing seniors from graduating—a measure intended to give faculty leverage over the university.

The later outcome does not establish that the proposed twenty-percent plan was fully implemented. It does show that its stakes persist: after Dickie Pope is dismissed and Jacob Rose becomes chief executive, faculty vote overwhelmingly against a strike, despite the union’s position and the interests of faculty, including Finny, who would be directly affected by the following year’s budget cuts. The proposal’s significance lies in this unresolved passage from mandate to consequence. A plan presented as a possibly avoidable exercise in efficiency helps reorder alliances, threaten jobs, and put the university’s educational mission into conflict with the demand to reduce costs.