Quote Originally Posted by noise View Post
...... librarians are considered academic staff....... Comparatively speaking, in academics, WSU is lean.
You better get that foot wound taken care of.

I'll grant you that the 25 FTE's in the School of Library and Information Sciences are academic staff, but really - the librarians in the WSU University Libraries business unit are also academic staff? I'll also grant you that there are operational differences between a public library and a university library but can they really require 4.8 times more total employees to serve comparable numbers of customers?

The assertion that "librarians are considered academic staff" sounds like the HRM equivalent of grade inflation to me and just more evidence that benchmarking is needed in the back-office and support operations of our state universities, whose administrators and apologists think they have the unquestionable right to be exempt from both cuts in their state appropriations and criticism of the way they run their business. There is waste everywhere - both in "Corporate America" and in the the halls of academia - and in a competitive marketplace [[and don't kid yourself that academia is exempt from competition), only the least-cost providers will prevail over the long run.