Out at the Great Desert University, our business manager says our July 2 paychecks have already been processed, and so they should be issued on Thursday, come what may. So that shoos the wolf away from the door for another two weeks.
What will happen over the next fortnight remains to be seen. BizMan says she hasn’t heard anything about the university shutting down. Second summer session begins on July 6 and runs five weeks, so presumably they will at least try to keep the classrooms open. By far the majority of the university’s employees, however, are not in the classrooms. So I suppose we can expect to see bathrooms go uncleaned, landscaping go unwatered, trash go uncollected, computers and computer network go untended, perps and derelicts go unmolested by the campus cops, funding go untended, journals go unedited, paperwork go unpushed. Perhaps, we might say, business go unmanaged.
Given the legislators’ vendetta against education and in specific against higher education, if state departments are, in their words, “ratcheted down,” I’m sure GDU will bear the brunt of the ratcheting. And since our office serves the institution’s teaching mission only undirectly (through vocational training and mentoring of graduate students), we’ll likely be among the first to shut down.
So, even though I’m mighty happy to get this week’s paycheck (assuming it really does materialize), my expectations for the future remain low.