On Launching into Exigency Planning.

Amid the growing numbers of articles and reports dealing with financial exigency, there are relatively few analyses of faculty and administrative attempts to develop a policy of faculty layoffs in the event of exigency [1-6, 8, 10, 11, 12-15]. Although several authors, associations, and councils have issued detailed guidelines, they have usually qualified their statements with the advice that each institution should tailor a policy to its own missions, history, and programmatic needs. While helpful to a point, such national guidelines do not speak to the potential pitfalls awaiting an exigency task force, nor do they deal very much with what might be called the "dynamics" of exigency planning: the attitudes within and outside an exigency task force, the interaction of the task force with the rest of the faculty and administration, the need for "support networks" of important individuals or groups, the assumptions by which a task force is likely to plan, the timing of certain actions by a task force, and the perceptions of such a planning process by those for whom the planning is being done. This article discusses such dynamics, drawing upon the experience of a task force on contingency planning at Bowling Green State University that was formed in 1974 to develop procedures for faculty layoffs in the event of exigency. While some of the task force's experiences are peculiar to the institution, it is the author's contention that many of the dynamics surrounding their efforts are worth discussing because they are likely to appear elsewhere, at least in comparable institutions.