Try to call any professor in the University of Oklahoma's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and you're bound to be disappointed. For the past several years, the department has been looking for ways to trim costs in response to several rounds of budget cuts. As the department's budget continues to shrink, administrators tried to identify the cuts that students would feel the least. One solution they found, said department Director Randa Shehab, was pulling telephones out of faculty offices. “It's been a little bit of a learning process,” she said. The department removed faculty members' phones in January. The move saved about 30 percent of the department's maintenance and operations budget, Shehab said, which is normally devoted to things like copiers, paper and classroom supplies. Since then, Shehab said, faculty members have been scrambling to find alternate ways to communicate with their contacts. In general, she said, email and cellphones are a serviceable replacement. But when research partners in private industry or other institutions try to call, she said, they often wind up confused.
http://newsok.com/in-the-face-of-shrinking-budget-university-of-oklahoma-department-pulls-out-faculty-phones/article/3675824
