The Chronicle reports that Councilor Marjorie Decker is not amused with her subjects over at MIT. Commissar Decker and the City Council issued a fiat in April ordering MIT “to halt layoffs and any cuts in hours, salary or benefits for employees.” MIT however faced a budget shortfall, and was forced to cut $125 million of spending, of which 10 percent came from job layoffs. The Chronicle quotes MIT Human Resources director Alison Alden: “Layoffs were a last resort at MIT. We worked very hard to avoid this.”
Ms. Decker wasn’t having any excuses: “What we said to you, to MIT, was ‘Don’t contribute to the destabilization of families in our community.’ And we got zero response…For me, that is just an incredible level of arrogance that not only does the council not matter, but this question of really who they impact doesn’t matter.” This is a classic case of projection; Councilor Decker herself exhibits a level of arrogance one might expect to find in the nomenklatura of a totalitarian society. “How dare you disobey me?” she appears to be asking. “Don’t you know who you’re messing with here?”
Decker went public with a threat summarized in the Chronicle headline, that she will, “Ignore MIT until it respects workers.” No doubt MIT’s feelings won’t be hurt if the City Council ignores them, but Decker’s threat entails more than ignorance; she announced that she will vote against any permits or licenses that MIT applies for. By announcing that votes on a license will not be decided by the merits of the application but by an unrelated human resources issue, Councilor Decker offers MIT the opportunity for a slam-dunk lawsuit.
Ms. Decker’s temper tantrum raises two questions. For one, is there ever a situation when Decker might admit to the necessity of laying off employees, or is every (union) job a lifetime sinecure? Personally I interpreted MIT’s decision to cut costs to meet its budget, rather than passing along these costs to the parents of students, as a sign of fiscal responsibility. One has the sense that colleges are not subject to market forces, with little restraint on spending. An elite school like MIT can raise its tuition arbitrarily and still fill its freshman class many times over.
Educational bureaucracies, like every bureaucracy without budget constraints, become bloated with numerous levels of mid-level administrative assistants, deputy administrators, diversity engineers, Office of Women’s Affairs sub-directors, and multicultural coordinators. In the last ten years, for instance, Dartmouth College added 1,000 new non-faculty employees— a 42 percent increase. Dartmouth currently employs 3,250 staff and 605 professors, or around 6.4 staff for every professor. MIT employs 9,475 non-faculty staff and 1,025 faculty members (professors of all ranks), a ratio of nine administrators for every teacher. Harvard has a lower 5.4 ratio (15,271 staff and 2,804 professors). MIT is a major research center, so it stands to reason that it would have a higher percentage of non-teaching staff. Nevertheless, it seems that in unfavorable economic times, any of these institutions could reduce their staff without detracting from their educational excellence, which rests primarily on the excellence of their professors. Somehow fifty years ago these institutions seemed to do just fine with a fraction of their current workforce.
I have no doubt that many families are feeling pain from MIT’s layoffs, but millions of workers in the private sector are also looking at bleak futures. Should we not expect the education industry to share the nation’s economic hardships? Why should MIT staff (and public sector employees) be immune from the consequences of the Obama Administration’s destructive economic policies?
The second question is one of jurisdiction. According to the City website, the City Council “authorizes public improvements and expenditures, adopts regulations and ordinances, levies taxes, controls the finances and property taxes of the City, and performs many related legislative tasks.”
Where in the world does the City Council think it has jurisdiction over the internal human resource decisions of a private institution like MIT? (Which by the way, according to the Chronicle, pays $78 million in taxes to Cambridge, 12 percent of the city’s tax base.)
The Cambridge City Council appears to be taking lessons from the Obama Administration, which has unilaterally assumed the power to regulate private corporations through unelected pay czars and vast new regulatory bodies. When our President thinks it’s within his power to fire the CEO of General Motors, the lower echelons get ideas. Bad ideas.
Peter Wilson is Secretary of the Cambridge Republican City Committee.