With the turn of the new year, I continued the pace. I have read similar stories about academics unable to find jobs and some seem to blame themselves for not having anything to offer academia. Yet, academia is full of tenured dead wood who produce nothing and carry their sorry carcasses from class to class and collect a salary while boring their students to death. Regardless of what one thinks of corporations, universities behave very much the same way these days, only with a key difference. The corporation is a profit seeking entity and it gets taxed accordingly.
Universities are non-profit, but they behave like a profit maximizer.
The major area of cost reduction, of course, is the faculty. This figure seems to understate the true situation. In order to survive, a part-time lecturer must teach numerous courses. And I expect to have 5 this summer and 7 or 8 in the fall as well. Because part timers are such a large part of the labor pool of academia, the labor market is split into two parts.