Departments slash budgets for outside lecturers

“While there will be some small enrollment classes that are taught by visiting lecturers that will be canceled, there will be no impact on our core academic mission,” Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said in an e-mail, adding that he “does not foresee any cut back in the number or quality of public lectures” departments host. Still, many departments must keep the cost of honoraria, lodging, food and travel expenses as low as possible.

“Departments have been given overall budget targets, and what they propose for how they reach the targets is up to them,” University spokeswoman Cass Cliatt ’96 said. She added that the University has restricted the funds available for hiring visiting faculty members.

The Department of French and Italian has cut its lecture budget by roughly 40 percent, department chair Sarah Kay said, adding that though her department has not yet compiled a list of speakers for this semester, the cuts will heavily impact its seminar series program.

“We may end up with fewer invitations to visiting lecturers this year, but then we are also hosting a major international conference on Italian Futurism which will run through several days in October,” she explained.

The astrophysics department has cut its lecture budget by 8 percent, department chair David Spergel said, adding that it will host more local speakers to defray travel and lodging costs.

“This will probably mean one West Coast or European speaker is replaced by a speaker from the East Coast,” Spergel said in an e-mail.

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures will cut its lecture budget in half this year, acting department chair Michael Wachtel said in an e-mail, adding that “the caliber [of the lectures] will be the same.”

“In our field, people generally don’t come for the money anyway,” he explained.

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Other department chairs also said they thought guests would understand their financial situation. “Invited speakers appreciate the changed circumstances of invitations,” Kay explained, adding, “Other universities have been hit in the same way as Princeton.”

Greater damage to the University’s visiting lecture programs may arrive in a few months as other cuts begin to kick in, said Council of the Humanities executive director Carol Rigolot who is also a member of The Daily Princetonian’s Board of Trustees.

“We will be affected in the same way as all departments and programs,” Rigolot said of the council. “The fellows who are coming this year were appointed last October, before the fiscal difficulties, so the number [of fellows this year] is equivalent to past years. We will begin to see a reduction next year, although we hope to keep the program as close as possible to its normal level.”

A few departments, however, will escape with their programs relatively unscathed. The molecular biology website says that the department will still have 30 professors from across the United States and Europe coming to give public lectures until next June.

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While many departments will face the challenge of maintaining their visiting faculty and lecturer programs, some department heads claimed that a temporary decrease in these programs may actually benefit the academic life of the University.

“I personally think that if departments hold fewer lectures, it will be a plus for the University intellectually, because we will be able to hear talks in other departments,” Wachtel said. “In the past, we had so many Russia-area talks that I never had time to attend anything else.”