coe-staff: College of Education Budget Reduction Priorities and Processes

Fri Mar 22 10:10:15 PDT 2019

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students,

I write today to provide you information about how our college will address the short-term, 2.5% budget cut required of us over the course of the next two years. President Schill's recent message to the university community provides the background underlying the need for these budget reductions, and the overarching strategy that we will pursue. I will not reiterate the details of his message here, but I have appended his message as reminder.

As I mentioned at our quarterly faculty and staff meeting last Friday, we are now better prepared to make wise budgetary decisions. Our financial data systems are much improved, which helped us balance our budget this year. Early this year we engaged in stronger enrollment planning, which allowed us to identify academic program areas with potential for growth. And, we have better information from our faculty about their priorities.

I am keenly aware, however, that none of our prior operational improvements will make these budget cuts easy. We are, after all, going to have to make some cuts that will affect jobs and people. For this reason, I assure you that everyone in our college is conducting this work with great care.

How much does a 2.5% budget cut represent? It's about a half million dollars. Following the lead of President Schill, we will prioritize course instruction over all other priorities. We will leave vacancies unfilled whenever possible and share personnel resources across the college. We will prioritize full-time over part-time faculty and staff, and search for every possible non-personnel cost saving. In fact, we are continuously engaged in the process of rigorously evaluating the merits of every new request for faculty, staff, supplies, travel, or other expenditures.

I am also well aware of the appearance of disconnect that is created by hiring new faculty in the face of budget cuts. We cannot, however, reach our highest aspirations as a major research university without continuing to bring new faculty to campus to challenge our ideas, create new academic disciplines and programs, and provide new role models for our students. This routine addition of new people with new ideas creates the inherent value of attending a research university. We anticipate having a total of six new career-track and tenure-track faculty members join us in the fall. These new hires will both broaden and deepen our student's educational experience.

Our budgetary decision-making is not unlike that of many families who are simultaneously cutting expenses and yet strategically investing in their children's futures by sending them to our university. Our budgetary decisions are similarly focused on investing in the long-term - enhancing our status as one of the leading colleges of education in the world while also remaining fiscally accountable to our students and all stakeholders.

While our work with faculty, staff, our university administration, Dean's Student Advisory Board, and college associate deans and department heads is ongoing, we will be intensifying our efforts in the coming days and weeks by consulting with as many of these groups as possible. This intensive consultation has improved our decision-making in the past, and I am confident that it will do so again.

As always, we will meet this current financial challenge by remaining focused on making decisions that ensure our long-term success. I am grateful for your insights and efforts that continue to make our extraordinary achievements possible.

Regards,

Randy

C Offices of the President, Provost, Communications, Budget and Planning, Human Resources
R.W. Kamphaus, Ph.D. | Professor and Dean
randyk at uoregon.edu<mailto:randyk at uoregon.edu> |
HEDCO 130
1215 University of Oregon | Eugene, OR 97403
[COE logo]

<https://t.e2ma.net/click/4grbhb/wir20g/wyfomp>

[A Message from President Schill]<https://t.e2ma.net/click/4grbhb/wir20g/crgomp>

Dear Colleagues,
On March 5, I wrote to let you know that the University of Oregon's budget situation is becoming more challenging<https://t.e2ma.net/click/4grbhb/wir20g/sjhomp> and it is imperative we move forward with efforts to reduce the UO's annual operating costs. Since then, I have met with a variety of campus stakeholders to receive advice and guidance. Those meetings have been extremely useful in shaping our next steps, including helping identify priorities and principles to guide us. We all have a shared goal of ensuring the institution maintains a strong, upward trajectory even as we grapple with state funding challenges and decreases in international enrollment.
Based on analysis by Vice President for Finance and Administration Jamie Moffitt and her team, we must reduce about $11 million in annual recurring expenditures from the education and general budget. I have provided the provost and vice presidents with cost-reduction goals for their units and asked them to develop plans for achieving those savings. We will prioritize our core academic and research activities; therefore, I have set higher savings targets for administrative units than I have for schools and colleges. Administrative functions will be subject to a 3 percent budget reduction, and decreases for schools and colleges will be in aggregate no more than 2.5 percent. The provost's office will do everything possible to ensure that the changes in our schools and colleges have as little negative impact as possible on academic activities and programs, including career faculty and staff members.
Each vice president will have discretion for how best to deliver savings within their units, but I have asked them to consider some guiding principles and priorities, including:

  *   AFFORDABILITY-We must not step back from our commitment to making the UO accessible to first-generation, underrepresented, and lower-income students. We will shield PathwayOregon and Diversity Excellence Scholarships from cuts.
  *   STUDENT SUCCESS-To the fullest extent possible, units across campus should prioritize funding for efforts that support student success programs. Ensuring that we provide students with tutoring, mentoring, and advising are at the core of a great educational institution. Ultimately, this will help us to maintain affordability by enabling students to persist and graduate on time. We will also protect our student success investments in Tykeson Hall and the new advisors that are being hired to bring our student-to-advisor ratio closer to the national average.
  *   CAMPUS SAFETY-We will protect our law enforcement and Title IX (prevention and enforcement) initiatives from budget cuts because we must provide a safe campus environment for students, the faculty and staff, and the broader community. Related programs and positions should be prioritized by individual units as they contemplate budget-reduction plans.
  *   REVENUE GENERATION-Initiatives and programs that generate revenue should be priorities that vice presidents weigh in their budget-reduction considerations. For this reason, frontline fundraisers and student recruiters will be protected. In addition, programs and efforts that support enrollment growth goals should be similarly prioritized.
Given that nearly 80 percent of our education and general budget pays salaries, it is impossible to achieve savings without affecting jobs. The UO already runs a very lean operation after decades of state disinvestment, and our staffing levels are below most of our peer institutions nationally. That means that many of our units will have to consider difficult decisions that may affect the level of service provided to the campus community. In some cases, we may need to stop doing things that are not aligned with the priorities I have identified or the UO's teaching, research, and service mission.
I will meet with and review the provost and vice presidents' planned budget reductions. While I am not going to mandate a hiring freeze, to the extent reasonable, I have asked vice presidents to consider whether savings can be achieved by leaving open positions vacant or through attrition. In cases where it is necessary to move forward with workforce reductions, plans must be reviewed and approved by Human Resources and the Office of the General Counsel. In close coordination with Human Resources professionals across campus, we will diligently work to ensure that colleagues who are affected by budget reductions are offered a full range of support services and treated with the utmost dignity and respect.
We are entering a challenging period, but the hurdles we face are not insurmountable. We will continue to forcefully make the case in Salem that the state's public higher-education system needs a consistent and stable funding model that does not continually look to Oregon's students and families to fill gaps in public support. The UO will continue to pursue a growth strategy that seeks to stabilize revenue swings by carefully and modestly increasing nonresident undergraduate enrollment over the next few years. And we will continue to leverage donor support to invest in academic initiatives-such as the Knight Campus<https://t.e2ma.net/click/4grbhb/wir20g/8biomp>, the Presidential Science Initiative<https://t.e2ma.net/click/4grbhb/wir20g/o4iomp> and the Humanities Fellowship Program<https://t.e2ma.net/click/4grbhb/wir20g/4wjomp>-that expand and strengthen our world-class academic and research programs. By working together, the UO can and will come out of these budget challenges stronger and with a clear focus on our very bright shared future.
I thank each and every one of you for all you do to make the University of Oregon a special place.
Sincerely,
Michael H. Schill
President and Professor of Law

Office of the President, 1226 University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-1226
P: 541-346-3036

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