An acronym for “Full-Time Equivalent.” A notion borrowed from government accounting statistics, and of considerable, rising importance to UNIVERSITY governance, the FTE represents a unit in the calculation of labor: one FTE is equal to the full-time work of a single individual within a given time range (generally a semester or nine-month “year” in the academic setting). The size and power of a department or program at a university is often measured in FTEs, which provide a metric for comparison across the academic human resource pool. From an administrative perspective, FTEs enable the division of faculty members among different institutional entities. A single individual—for instance, a philosopher—may be tallied as “half an FTE in the Philosophy department” and “half an FTE in the new Center for Human and Non-Human Ethics and Small Animal Welfare.” That latter program may, under certain circumstances, “loan” its portion of the philosopher’s FTE to the “Program in Irish Studies.” Departmental chairs and deans spend considerable time apportioning FTEs and managing FTE “budgets” (NB: in the reductive if clarificatory terms of the Finance Office, an FTE amounts to a sum of money). While one might dismiss the FTE as mere administralia, the birth and death of academic programs is inextricable from contestation over FTEs. A new program or center that does not control any FTEs must perpetually solicit faculty time/labor from other campus entities for teaching and/or programming. Administrative control over a body of FTEs can be understood as a valuable proxy for discipline formation within the modern university.