Operation Bake Sale.

The word on the street... er, in the hallways... is that TA funding at my R1 school is about to take a hit. Not. Good. How can it be, you ask? I mean, didn't they give me an appointment letter guaranteeing a certain level of funding for four years? Well, yes.

Kinda.

Because there was fine print. And that fine print said that the entire deal was dependent on availability of funds. Students and faculty can say all they want at interview day about how everyone is funded, and they do - with perhaps the best of intentions. But students and faculty are not in charge of the cash flow.

Who is? Good question.

I have googled my heart out and I can't find straight answers on how everything works. I've heard people say that the state of North Carolina has something like a two-billion dollar deficit. I've also been told that it's a "balanced budget" state. Those two don't seem to gel, but we'll go with it for now. So, at least I've heard, because it's a balanced budget state, when funding runs out in certain budgets, funding just stops. They don't allocate funds or make it work - they just stop when the money's out. This policy meant that one year, proffessors who were supposed to be paid in June had to wait until July for that paycheck because the money was out and they had to wait until the next fiscal year to pay everyone. Good thing the money didn't run out in February or something, I guess.

So we have meetings and talk and fearmongering and some anxiety around these parts. We lovingly call it Operation Bake Sale, because... well... if everything goes wrong we can always sell cookies to fund our educations, right? At first we were being facetious but then someone mentioned that grad students at another school were faced with funding cuts and they started selling cupcakes. They made a good deal of money before the faculty realized that they were spending all their time making cupcakes and not doing research. Then the faculty found a way to fund them again. So, let's bake.