“We’ve really moved forward with restraint,” Jack Finney, vice provost for faculty affairs, told Tech’s board of visitors earlier this week . “We had asked for all new hires to take a pause until we better understood the budget situation.” So far, Tech and Radford University have avoided the kinds of layoffs that have struck other industries as the pandemic turmoils the economy. Hiring has slowed, and both universities are trimming the budgets as they face shortfalls. Still, the universities have added millions onto their payrolls over the period of a state-mandated “hiring freeze,” and spending at Tech led a couple board members this week to question whether the university can’t do more — and should have done more before the pandemic — to trim costs.
