With recent cuts to higher education-funding from the state government and national economic instability, now is not an easy time to be a university official in charge of balancing the budget, especially such a tight one.

The UM System Board of Curators has had to make difficult decisions, which include raising in-state tuition by 3 percent and out-of-state tuition by 7.5 percent, and now MU officials have made the difficult decision of cutting 50 jobs from the university, which include 20 tenure-track positions.

Although we’d hope there would be some other area of the university budget to cut to help balance the budget and avoid such a negative action, we hope the cuts to possible faculty positions will be the healthiest cuts to possibly make, based on legitimate criterion that will yield positive effects.

The densely complex issue of tenure aside, the university’s decision of which jobs to cut should follow an organized, researched plan and strict standards, especially when it comes to cutting faculty positions.

MU should investigate to see what universities in similar situations have done and which courses of action have succeeded or failed, while mirroring the successful ones in the least financially burdensome way possible.

Contacting the Deans of individual schools and colleges would be beneficial in gathering trusted information on which professors perform with the highest quality. Although student evaluations are less trustworthy and sometimes more subjective, they should also be taken into consideration.

Some small classes that can be consolidated into larger ones to help ease the process. Although it might be difficult to judge a professor’s performance based on test scores, material from each professor’s test can be compared to the material from daily lecture to see if the professor is teaching the most important content to the best of his or her ability.

When it comes to the hiring process, the university needs to begin to evaluate professors based on more than their capacity to conduct research or the extent of the knowledge of their field. While those areas are important, it is vital to examine the employment history and previous teaching-related duties of the individual to determine if the person has the demeanor required to be an effective communicator of the material. We’ve all had the professors who are extremely intelligent and gifted at what they do, so much so they’ve forgotten how to explain the simpler aspects of the field to students.

These kinds of cuts have deep consequences. In order to cause as little pain as possible, it is absolutely important that cuts to possible faculty positions are well decided. Otherwise they will only hurt us further.