One of the university’s major tools for cutting the budget is to eliminate vacant faculty and staff positions, according to recently released budget information. This tactic avoids painful and messy layoffs, but administrators know it’s not a panacea.
Although eliminating vacant positions is the preferred method, removing positions doesn’t help the university’s staffing shortage and can hurt the university’s ability to cover unforeseen expenses. Staffers are being asked to take on completely new tasks, faculty can’t get help with basic paperwork, and as for new initiatives, they’ll just have to wait, administrators said.
“That’s tremendously emotional, if someone loses their job. [This method] is not as painful, but it causes a lot of its own issues,” Wiseman said. “I mean, we’re managing, but we could be managing so much better.”
Many of the university’s 13 colleges have cut vacant positions — which open when faculty and staff retire or move on — to help close the $28.8 million gap in academic affairs funding. For example, the information studies college cut $50,000 from its budget using the technique, and the behavioral and social sciences college trimmed three empty staff positions, saving $165,000, according to John Townshend, dean of BSOS.
The university is already severely understaffed, administrators said.
Compared to the university’s peer institutions — University of Michigan; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of California, Los Angeles; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of California, Berkeley — the university has about half as many staff members per student, university President Dan Mote said. For example, the Office of Student Financial Aid is about one -fourth the size of the same office at University of California, Berkeley, Provost Nariman Farvardin said.
BSOS has lost key staffers responsible for helping faculty fill out paperwork for research grants, Townshend said. Faculty members must do the time-consuming paperwork themselves, giving them less time to spend on writing proposals. This delay, Townshend said, has resulted in less research money for the college. And with an increased emphasis on raising research dollars, Townshend said, the college is at a loss.
“If you’re doing one thing, you can’t be doing another,” he said. “I could never give you a dollar amount for how much it’s cost us.”
Traditionally, when there are vacant positions, the university funnels money that would support those positions into a pool reserved for one-time costs. But if vacant positions are eliminated, the university loses that money altogether. Mote said the one-time money can help pay for everything from phone bills to opening new class sections and is critical to supporting the university’s academic units. Farvardin added the one-time funds have also been used to provide financial aid to students.
“The major con from the [academic] unit’s point of view is that if there’s a position there without somebody essentially using the resources on it, the unit can use those resources for hiring student assistants, buying supplies and the like,” Mote said. “The operating budgets for our units are very small, very tight. … So, it’s a real loss.”
University colleges and departments have felt the squeeze during the first weeks of the semester.
On the first day of classes, professors in the education college ran into typical technological glitches, Dean Donna Wiseman said. But without enough staff to help the faculty members, classes were disrupted.
Norma Allewell, the dean of the chemical and life sciences college, said her faculty are strained from teaching extra classes, leaving less time for lucrative, reputation-building research. Plus, she said her college has grown dramatically, with a ratio of about 30 students in the college to one professor. That’s more than double the ratio for the rest of the university, according to Allewell.
“As student demand has grown, we need to keep pace, but the budget cuts make that difficult,” she said.
And the problem isn’t limited to the colleges. Vice President for Administrative Affairs Ann Wylie said staff members in her department have been overworked as they try to cover for missing staffers, causing morale issues.
“This is not a situation that you can sustain,” Wylie said.
“If the position is a crucial position, sometimes you can deal with the loss of that position in the short term,” Farvardin added. “But longer term, this is going to cause a disruption.”
cox@umdbk.com, cwells@umdbk.com
