TIGER TV ONLINE REPORTER

Thursday night at the Systems board meeting, the proposed budget plan for the 2009-2010 school year will be reviewed by a board of advisors and Chancellor Mike Martin is confident it will be approved.

The budget plan for this year, as proposed, is around $22 million less than last year but according to Martin it could have been much worse. The original plan for 2009-2010 was about $73 – $78 million less than last year. The plan was readjusted though after receiving a stimulus package from the state for the school around April and slightly raising tuition.

“The budget was reduced only to a point that we can protect the academic core of the University and the quality of the student experience,” Martin said.

Much of the money that was cut was a reduction in support for certain programs funded by the University. Some of these programs include the LSU press, the Louisiana Art and Science museum, the rural life museum and the Southern Review.

“We hope to strongly encourage those programs to find other areas of revenue rather than a direct payment from the University,” Martin said.

Another way to reduce the budget for the year was to eliminate various faculty and staff positions and faculty lines.

“We had to think what can we prune before sawing away from the trunk of the tree,” Martin said.

Every college has also taken a budget cut according to Martin. Each college’s budget was reduced three to five percent according to how great each college’s need for money was.

“Its more expensive to do physics than it is to history,” Martin explained.

Once the initial cut was made in each college Martin said he let the colleges decide how they would administer their funds.

Martin said that although the cut seems dramatic it was the best they could do for the University.

“We tried to cut things that would have the least direct impact on the student experience,” Martin said. “I don’t think we could have done it any other way.”