By Elizabeth Hale
During his State of the State address in January, Gov. Greg Abbott announced plans of a hiring freeze for institutions for higher education and most state agencies in Texas. Texas Tech faculty and staff in certain departments may be affected, depending on where funds for their salaries come from.
Dennis Patterson, department chairperson and professor of political science, explained the jobs being put in jeopardy are state funded positions.
“There are different ways we earn money here in our department,” Patterson said. “One way is we get a state contribution based on our weighted student credit hours. We also derive funds from what we call tuition and fees but it’s really more tuition, and that’s what we call our local money. There’s also donations and contributions, and then there’s research grants. Anything that’s paid out of state money is affected by the hiring freeze.”
Texas Tech Administration Building. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Patterson said he thought the announcement of the freeze could have been handled better by the state, and a heads up would have prevented some of the issues his department is having to deal with today.
“The hiring freeze will be on this summer so our summer classes we’re going to have put people up who are already hired like faculty,” Patterson said, “But that’s going to raise our cost as opposed to hiring graduate part-time instructors. If we can’t hire them, that’s going to raise our cost in the summer, so while the hiring freeze is designed to manage cost a little better and get a hand on what we’re doing here at the university, it’s actually going to end up raising costs.”
When Abbott announced the hiring freeze, he said it should free up about $200 million of the current budget.
“Just as families have to balance needs versus wants, so do we,” Abbott said. “And that process doesn’t start on the next budget that you’re working on, it starts now. It starts today.”
Patterson said summer classes might be affected because funding for graduate students may not be available because of the freeze. He also noted that departments that rely heavily on doctoral students might have a hard time finding funding because of the freeze.
“In this college, Arts and Sciences, if you’re going to continue to train graduate students in the summer, this is a time when graduate students do a lot of research and work in their labs and do other things that they also need to be registered for. Which means that they need some source of funding,” Patterson said. “That’s going to make it harder.”
Janet Coquelin, the managing director of human resources at the Texas Tech University Health Science Center, said while they do have 93 positions that can no longer be filled because of the hiring freeze, students from Tech are still able to find jobs at the Health Science Center.
“We have some positions we call ‘pulled positions’ and those would be student positions, recurrent staff. They’re very casual positions,” Coquelin said. “They just can’t be on state appropriated funds when they’re hired.”
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