What are the faculty to make of recent division meetings and budget presentations in which claims
were made that the college is in dire straits, financially?

In several divisions, deans announced that tightened budgets would necessitate cutting Xeroxing, and at least one dean urged faculty to purchase their own toner cartridges. Also, in at least one division, faculty were warned of a desperate need for belt tightening, due to burdensome faculty retirement costs and increases in health insurance fees.

At a September Academic Senate meeting, the presenter spoke gravely of a “doubling” of STRS costs as though the increases will happen this year.

Tragically, student tutors and aides have been cut drastically in instruction, labs, and the library. Thus low paying jobs for student workers were lost, which also undermines student success. Now there is an attempt to hire back some tutors, but the semester is half over! Substitute instructors are frowned upon. Class sizes have risen, in some cases, dramatically. However, these cost cutting measures were not necessary at all!

Lost in the minutiae of budget details and lengthy presentations, there stands a $16 million dollar “Projected Ending Balance” (PCC Budget 2016-17). The budget surplus exposes the disparity between the rhetoric and the reality.

Why the alarmist misrepresentation of the college’s actual fiscal status? Wasn’t there to be a new transparency? Shouldn’t we expect a more honest and factual presentation of budget issues?