While students spent winter break adorning trees with baubles and tinsel, administrators trimmed the University’s money tree by $8.1 million, continuing a pattern of the University being seared with midyear budget cuts since January 2009.
Administrators have cut funding for 60 University positions, 40 of which were vacant positions the University eliminated. The other 20 positions will now be funded by athletics budgets or private source funding.
Chancellor Michael Martin and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Jack Hamilton divided the cut between academic and non-academic units. Academic units took a $2.5 million cut each, and non-academic units took a $3.2 million cut. Non-academic units are comprised mostly of Facility Services but also include advising and support areas.
Even after this cut stretches through the University, there is a dangling chance that this semester’s financial setbacks are not over.
The University asked the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget for an $8 million budget adjustment to account for increased enrollment numbers, but it has not yet been voted on. If the committee denies the adjustment, the University’s midyear cut would essentially be doubled to $16 million. Jason Droddy, director of external affairs, said while the University was hoping to have the budget adjustment granted last month, he expects it to pass soon.
“It’s like golf,” he said. “You’ll get to the 18th hole eventually, maybe just not in four hours.”
Martin agreed, saying increased enrollment stemming from additional students and higher retention rates means the University is on track with the Legislature’s requests.
In the wider scope of the upcoming year, though, Martin and Droddy hinted that higher education funding could be on the upswing as “good friends” of the University assume positions in the Legislature chairing the House and Senate finance and education committees.
“Hopefully, we’ll have a platform or a stage from which to make our case,” Martin said.
But if the national economy continues to lag, the state economy will sputter and could lead toward state revenues falling short once again. Those short revenues would mean more budget cuts.
“The end will be near when we stop getting these cuts,” Hamilton said. “The economy in the state has to be stabilized.”
Hamilton said he hopes the national economy’s recent upswing will strike the state’s economy, and he hopes to see a “plateau” by then.
“If we can maintain the state appropriation right where it is, we’ll have a fighting chance to come out a little bit better,” Droddy said.
Robert Kuhn, associate vice chancellor of Budget and Planning, said midyear cuts are approached with temporary measures that may be different if the cut becomes permanent.
“A budget is a commitment of resources,” Kuhn said. “When you have a midyear cut, you’re breaking or violating this commitment.”
Kuhn said midyear cuts are especially difficult to navigate and distribute.
“You don’t have degrees of freedom or flexibility to spread that out over a 12-month period,” he said.
Martin said his approach when weighing what to cut comes from protecting the University’s academic core, as defined by three criteria: which programs are central to building other programs, which programs are unique to the University and which programs can easily be re-grown.
“History tends to suggest that maybe your one-time cut becomes recurring,” Martin said. “You don’t want to kill something you can’t revive.”
If this $8.1 million cut becomes permanent, Martin said it will force the University to consider more mergers and consolidations, and it “narrows the bandwidth of programs we can put on the ground.”
The concrete impacts of the cut come from “salary savings,” according to Kuhn. That means when departments have money set aside to fill vacant positions, they instead utilize that money to spend on equipment, instructors, travel expenses and the like. A midyear cut snatches away not only the position meant to be filled in the future, but also any benefits the department was reaping before the position was filled.
After state revenue projections trickled in sparser amounts than anticipated in late December, Gov. Bobby Jindal pressed a $50 million cut onto higher education, the only sector of the state economy that is not constitutionally protected from cuts, aside from health care. The LSU System, which comprises more units than the state’s other higher education governing boards, split its approximately $21 million cut by 5.1 percent to each unit, except for the LSU Baton Rouge campus, which took a 5.3 percent hit and Pennington Biomedical Center, which took a 2.6 percent reduction.
The University’s cut absorbed part of the slash toward Pennington Biomedical Research Center, so the University was cut an additional $340,503.
“The system believes that Pennington needs help,” Hamilton said.
On Jan. 8, University alumni and donors James Carville and W. Henson Moore, last year’s commencement speaker, wrote a guest column to The Times-Picayune about the rocky funding system in which the University has found itself trapped.
“LSU has already cut programs, consolidated colleges and departments and reduced administration,” they wrote. “In the last two years, the number of faculty members has declined by approximately 10 percent. LSU faculty have not had a pay raise in three years while all but two Southeastern Conference schools had one this year alone. This is no way to retain faculty, let alone recruit them.”
Kuhn said if the faculty do not receive a pay raise in the next year, it will mark the first time in 30 years the faculty have gone four years without pay raises.
In order for faculty to receive pay raises, Hamilton said the state must change the University’s budget, either by letting administrators increase tuition by more than 10 percent, as the LA GRAD Act dictates, or by hiking state appropriations to the University.
 
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Contact Andrea Gallo at [email protected]