Berkeley Bureaucracy

Justin Lahart of the WSJ:

Job Market for Economists Turns ... Dismal - WSJ.com: The dismal economy has claimed yet another victim: jobs for the economists who study it. Columbia University's economics department, for example, isn't making any new hires this year. That's in stark contrast to last year, when Columbia poached eight economics professors from other schools, and hired one economist out of graduate school. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amherst College and the University of Minnesota all have suspended their searches for economics professors. And Harvard University has gotten permission to hire just one person -- only after "many rounds of negotiation," according to Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, who is handling recruiting this year. Typically, Harvard hires two or three economics professors out of graduate school...

Calling EVCP George Breslauer: give us in Economics two (or four!) extra junior slots and we could do really, really well on the buy side of this year's job market. Really, really well. And the same applies to every single other department.

I know that from California Hall's perspective cutting back on junior faculty hiring this year is bureaucratically easy, but it is a substantively enormously stupid move for the university.