Joseph Morrow is hoping he will have the “fastest finger.”

Morrow, who just decided to become an international affairs major, will get on OASIS at 7 a.m. Wednesday in hopes of landing a seat in the introductory class he needs to get started in international affairs. At this time, any students who haven’t yet been able to register for the course will have their chance.

But Morrow, a freshman from Peachtree City, isn’t very optimistic.

“I’ve heard from a few people that I shouldn’t count on it,” he said.

And his case isn’t unique.

With close to 700 students in the major and only 24 courses offered this fall, some students are having trouble getting the courses they need to graduate, said Christopher Allen, undergraduate coordinator for international affairs.

“We don’t have as many faculty as we had two years ago,” Allen said. “And it’s getting much harder to deal with.”

Thomas Lauth, dean of the School of Public and International Affairs, said the problem applied to the political science major as well.

Overall, SPIA has lost seven tenured and tenure-track faculty members since the start of the budget crisis – about 13 percent of their total faculty resources. With one faculty member typically teaching four courses, the effects are significant, Lauth said.

Though the school has been able to hire some temporary replacement teachers, Lauth stressed the limited nature of that solution.

“We were able to hire some temporary teaching to partially – and I emphasize partially – offset the loss that we had by having to relinquish tenured and tenure-track faculty,” he said.

In international affairs, just nine courses were taught by tenured and tenure-track professors this semester, Allen said.

“It’s now possible for students to actually go through their entire undergraduate career without having a full-time faculty member,” he said. “Most of the time that doesn’t happen, but if people get into courses late and there aren’t enough courses available taught by regular faculty, they will have graduate teaching assistants; they will have adjunct faculty; they will have temporary faculty.”

Courtney Foster, a junior from Greensboro, N.C., won’t have any full professors next semester in her major courses.

“I know that next semester all of mine are going to be taught by graduate students or temporary faculty,” Foster said. “That makes me kind of nervous because I know that the better quality of classes come from the [full-time] professors.”

Allen said this type of situation is not ideal.

“In a normal world, when we’re not dealing with a crazy budget crisis like this, we can have many, many more of our courses – particularly the upper level ones – taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty,” he said. “But we’re doing the best we can with the resources that we have.”

Lauth offered a similar sentiment.

“We’re doing everything we possibly can to try to mitigate the problem,” he said.

And though SPIA has hired one professor through funds from an endowment, the school has not been able to use any state money to cover its faculty losses.

Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Arnett Mace said decisions about hiring depend on how the deans of the schools and colleges have allocated their resources.

“It depends on whether or not the actual units have the resources to provide the salaries as well as any start up costs they might need to provide,” Mace said. “There is no fixed formula as to whether they do or do not [hire].”

For example, in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Dean Garnett Stokes is working on faculty recruitment for some of the departments in her college.

But she said she would probably only be able to find the resources to fill less than one-third of the positions being proposed.

When determining which departments will be permitted to hire, Stokes said one of the factors she looks at is which areas have suffered the greatest number of losses in recent years.

But most of her departments are feeling the budget crunch.

“The reality is that there isn’t a department in this college that wouldn’t benefit from recruitment,” Stokes said.

For a school like SPIA – in which close to 90 percent of the budget is in faculty, staff and graduate assistants – the money for recruitment simply isn’t there.

Lauth said relinquishing faculty salaries was really the only way the school could meet its portion of the University’s budget reduction.

“When it comes to budget cutting, you have to give up what you have,” he said. “And if a very high proportion of your budget is in personnel and people, then that’s the only way you can meet the budget target.”

He said there is not much else he can do.

“This shortfall that we’re having isn’t the result of things over which we have very much control,” Lauth said. “It’s a national recession, and Georgia is affected by the national recession.”