Business trends of the past forty years now catch up with Academia

From Behind closed doors, University creates controversial buyout plan by Madison Hahamy and Rose Horowitch.  It seems lazy to point out that academics are complaining about suffering from something that 80% of Americans have experienced directly or indirectly and which has been common in business since at least the 1980s - Buyouts and RIFs.  

In competitive markets, and particularly when there is a disjoint owing to new competitors, new technology, new regulations, changed patent protection or any of a number of events, business enterprises find themselves with a mismatch between their historical workforce structure and the structure needed to remain competitive.

Sometimes it is simply, but very painfully, a matter or reducing the workforce and working harder.  Usually it is an even more painful transition where you need to reduce the workforce and change the skill mix of those remaining, sometimes by firing and replacing them if they are unable to make the skills transition.

All of it is tragic, painful, . . . and necessary.  Few companies can remain uncompetitive for long.

If you don't experience any of this, it is easy to end up with a different mindset than those who experience it with some frequency.

And that is what has happened in academia.  The number of college/universities have exploded in the past forty years.  Federal/State and Local funding has exploded in the past forty years.  Number of students attending has exploded.  Tenured academics, particularly those who are not especially productive or effective, have had a sweet deal compared to everyone else in America.

Now they are being exposed to the same dynamics of the autoworker in the 1980s in the midwest.  The same dynamics as the low skilled worker competing with cheaper foreign labor.  The same dynamics of falling income and rising costs.

And like everyone else, they don't like it.  But it is hard not to see unpleasant petulant special pleading.