The Signal

Issue date: 3/3/10 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: John Sumser

This regular column will track, and attempt to clarify, available information about the university's plans to address a potential budget shortfall in the next fiscal year.

• As of now, there are 61 days until the budget planning deadline suggested by President Hamid Shirvani.

• Shirvani maintains that administrators have no existing plan in place to determine how we should make academic cuts that aim to balance the 2010-2011 budget

• Individual colleges (the Deans) have been charged with proposing a variety of possible scenarios to make academic cuts that aim to balance the budget

• College of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Dean Carolyn Stefanco characterized the process in HSS as a task of the college Budget and Planning Committee, which should work in consultation with the chairs of HSS departments; no outcomes or work product of this committee have yet been made public.

When speaking to HSS faculty, President Shirvani said that this campus had to cut its budget by three and a half million dollars and that the deadline for saying how these cuts would be made is the beginning of May. The first working day in May is the 3rd, so that is the deadline I will use in tracking the decision-making process over the next nine weeks.

Shirvani said that he has no plan for closing the deficit. He will, he said, rely on the faculty, using existing governance groups and accepted processes, to make recommendations about the academic side of the budget. According to Shrivani, because staffing and operating expenses are already at minimal levels, the bulk of budget reduction scenarios must come from the academic side. He would follow these recommendations, he said, as long as they fulfilled his three criteria: avoided "horizontal" cuts, met the budget demands, and preserved the "core liberal arts." If the faculty are unable to create a budget that meets these criteria, Shirvani said he would be compelled to do so himself.

[Some definitions: A "horizontal" cut is the effort to reduce the budget by cutting funds by an equal percentage across departments. Horizontal cuts can be seen as a problem because earlier horizontal reductions put some programs in a position where further cuts would destroy them. Current budget demands are a vague, floating target. A "liberal arts" curriculum is one that provides a broad education as opposed to a curriculum focused on professional or vocational education.]

Continued...

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