The budget-cutting proposals emanating from Cutler Hall ignore insights that even a summary scrutiny of the only comparable financial crisis — produced by the enrollment downturn of the early 1970s — easily reveals.
By that decade, a recognizable version of the Ohio University of today had emerged under the leadership of presidents John Calhoun Baker and Vernon Roger Alden, 1945–1969.
During those years — and at an accelerated pace in the 1960s — OU became a modern comprehensive institution with its current array of colleges (apart from the College of Health and Human Services), a rapidly expanded faculty, a growing emphasis on research and publication, enlarged MA and fledgling PhD programs, external grant money, regional campuses, a pioneering physics accelerator, a beefed-up ICA and most visibly, a student body that ultimately doubled in size in less than a decade to the then Athens campus record of 19,314 in 1970.
The resulting decline to 12,184 students by 1975 created an enormous budgetary gap and, at times, near panic. The solutions adopted speak to what, today, is being put forward as well as to what might now be adopted but, instead, is being quietly avoided.
Then as now, the academic area could not escape cuts. They were huge and painful in the early 1970s, and given the faculty demographics of the day, they necessarily assumed forms different from those of the just-released plan.
But everything was fair game for possible reductions. There were then no privileged areas, none where faculty effort to initiate a discussion encountered a tight-lipped administrative rebuff.
Hard though it might be to believe, given the campus climate of recent years, the ICA budget was cut, protests notwithstanding. As for the central OU administration, it figured little in budget-paring talk.
Why? Because as developed during the Baker and Alden eras to handle a peak enrollment not that different from the Athens campus enrollment of the past few years, it was streamlined, spare and comparatively small.
The corporate model, with its vast array of officers atop and alongside the colleges, was then in its infancy. Full-blown, it is very much with us today, its possible cutting in today’s budget crisis seemingly, like the ICA budget, a taboo topic.
To protect ICA and the corporate model requires no official or public declaration by Cutler Hall. It can be done, as it has been so far, simply by instituting a plan of personnel cuts that calls for deeper cuts in the academic area than otherwise would be necessary.
Everyone involved in the budget-cutting moves of the early 1970s, as I was, acquired indelible memories of that wrenching process. (It was for me, inevitably, the low point of what, for the most part, has been an enjoyable half-century of association with OU.)
The documentary sources for that period, reflecting a still unequaled degree of administrative accessibility and transparency, are rich and rewarding, and many of them are easily accessible.
Anyone interested in sampling might begin by comparing, say, the profile of OU administrators that can be found from the 1970 OU directory with that exhibited in the current directory.
Or, to pick another favorite source, consult the very detailed indexes of The Post (1971–1975) that, used with the actual issues of the paper, provide a running account of the budget-cutting struggle in those crisis-filled years.
Bruce Steiner is a professor emeritus and was associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences form 1972 to 1977.
