Where will the budget scalpel cut deepest?
I have been trying to follow the announcements of university budget cutbacks in response to the pressures being created by the ongoing recession. Several weeks ago I commented on the Harvard-Yale-Princeton statements, but of course many other institutions have been even more hard-hit. Two recent examples come from Dartmouth and the University of Connecticut.
Dartmouth is a reasonably well-endowed private college — though functionally it is a university, since it maintains both a medical school and a business school. But Dartmouth’s impressive endowment ($3.76-billion) is small relative to its operating budget — still it provides about 35 percent of the annual expenses of the collegiate part of the operation. The College has said that it would decrease its institution-wide budget (of $700-million) by $72-million between this year and 2011. The College, like most elite institutions, is promising not to reduce tenure-track positions, and to maintain its undergraduate financial-aid program. Core programs in the library will be protected, and study-abroad programs will be maintained. But faculty and staff salaries will be frozen this year, faculty searches will be postponed for three years, and several construction projects will be deferred. There will be layoffs and reductions in hours for college staff.
UConn is a fairly large public institution with a very small endowment ($338-million), so that it is quite dependent upon state support. The University has just announced that it expects that state funding levels will be reduced by 9.2 percent in FY 2010 and 13.1 percent in FY 2011 (apart from the University’s medical center). The University has promised to protect financial aid, program quality, and accessibility. It has also noted that the governor of Connecticut is proposing legislation that would require public institutions of higher education to obtain state approval to fill positions — thus for the first time limiting its capacity to be self-determining in this respect. There are no further details at this point, but one can imagine the pressure that such severe cuts in state support will place on university operations. Simultaneously maintaining accessibility (which I take to mean refraining from excessive tuition increases while providing sufficient levels of financial aid) and program quality will not be easy.
Some of the trends for the next few years seem clear. Institutions will try to protect existing faculty while deferring the creation of new positions. They will try to be affordable to their base student clientele. They will protect selected portions of program and institutional service, though these will differ from institution to institution — how many universities will protect the library? Faculty compensation will be frozen or restrained. Staff size will be cut. New construction will be deferred or canceled. And this is only the beginning. It seems clear that educational units will be cut, educational services will be trimmed, and younger scholars will find it very hard to find jobs. But will we also find that the less obviously “useful” parts of the university (let’s face it, the arts and humanities) will suffer disproportionately? I fear that will be so.
(Brainstorm photo illustration incorporating an image by Flickr user Brave Sir Robin)
