A widespread panic erupted at this week’s faculty meeting upon hearing that there is a 6% probability that national funding agencies (NIH, NSF, & DARPA) will be cutting their funds by $10 million in 2018 as part of sequester negotiations.

“It was absolute chaos,” said Anna Fisher, “I’d never seen such a thing before. We immediately started preparing for the worst without reading the full announcement.”

“In making our decision about how seriously to consider this event we used an alpha of 0.05,” reported Brian MacWhinney as he boarded up the windows to his office in anticipation of impending armageddon, “So a 6% chance falls outside our confidence bounds, meaning we must consider this a plausible event.”

“Look, I realize that this is a low likelihood of happening,” says Mike Scheier, “But given that it could dramatically affect the department if it does occur I think it warrants a serious discussion.” Scheier then proceeded to walk into his office, light a cigar and begin working on his memoires in anticipation not being Department Head when the financial doomsday may-or-may-not occur.

Others doubted the wisdom of taking such an unprobable event seriously.

“They’ve got it all backwards. They’re rejecting the wrong null hypothesis!” says Mike Tarr, “We should get worried when the chance of it not happening is less than 5%, not when there’s still a 94% chance it wont!”

“Seriously,” said David Creswell, “can’t we all just chill and meditate on this for a while?”

After the panic subsided at the meeting, several faculty members were reported to have run to their offices and signed up with Monster.com and asked colleagues for feedback on their revising resumes.