Economy woes

It's now been a year since the flood. As I look out my window, I can see cars driving over a bridge that was closed a year ago. Most of the flood damage has been fixed but there are still businesses that have remained closed. The University took a pretty big hit last year also. Several buildings are still closed. One of them, Hancher Auditorium, is going to be rebuilt elsewhere. The problem is that there is no money to rebuild anything. The State Board of Regents projects a shortfall of over 130 million dollars for next year. That means job cuts. Two weeks ago, Iowa City was named as the city with the lowest unemployment rate in the nation. Two days after the government released those data, the University announced that it was going to be cutting 200 jobs. At first the cuts were going to be kept within the hospital but now they will be shared by the College of Medicine (my employer). The first two job cuts have already been announced. Two senior nursing administrators have been laid off. A lot of the positions here at the hospital are covered by two unions which will make it nearly impossible for any of the nurses or support staff (clerks, maintainance, etc...) to lose their jobs. However, researchers are not covered under any union contract. I am not sure whether to be worried or not. I probably shouldn't be since I am paid out of grants and not the University's general fund but you can never be sure what administrators are thinking. Their decisions don't always make a lot of long term sense. A lot of the upper-mid level administrators treat their positions as stepping stones to bigger and better things. This means that they generally aren't here for the long term and as such they make decisions that look good (i.e. saving money) in the short term. They want to be able to point to a reduction in costs while department X was under their purview. Unfortunately, while they move on to their supposed bigger and better thing, the rest of us are left here to clean up the mess they caused. I really hope our current batch of administrators have the foresight to do things the right way.

On the bright side, it looks like we just got the NIH grant we applied for a couple of months ago. That will give us 5 years of financial stability in the lab. The fact that we have money in the lab is very comforting and provides us all with a little more security. The University will probably be a little more hesitant to lay off employees that are bringing in significant amounts of money.