The University will take an $8.1 million budget cut in the upcoming days after the state’s budget deficit demanded the LSU System as a whole slash nearly $21 million from its general fund, according to an LSU System Board of Supervisors news release.
 
The LSU System Board of Supervisors separated the cuts to the system by ordering a nearly 5 percent cut from each unit, according to its midyear cut breakdown. Since the University has the largest general fund pool in the system, that 5 percent cut hits the University deeper than the other units with an $8,128,355 revised reduction.
 
University administrators must now determine how to implement this cut on University programs and submit their budget reduction plans to the Louisiana Board of Regents by Dec. 29.
 
“While our institutions have absorbed reductions of approximately $191 million over the past three years, we understand that those cuts, although painful, could have been much deeper and more destructive were it not for the determination of the governor and Legislature to diminish the impact on our faculty, students, staff, and patients,” said LSU System President John Lombardi in the release. “In the interim, the LSU Institutions will operate effectively, reducing costs where necessary. We know that these reductions, although significantly less than anticipated, will nonetheless require careful management to ensure that LSU’s institutions can continue to provide high quality services to the people of Louisiana.”
In the past few days, Chancellor Michael Martin and Director of External Affairs Jason Droddy have hinted at the University taking a midyear cut, though they did not reveal the weight of the cut.
Droddy said Wednesday that if the state found itself in a budget deficit, the LSU System would “not be spared,” while Martin sent a broadcast e-mail telling students it was “likely” that the University would receive some form of a midyear slash.
Commissioner of Higher Education Jim Purcell told college system leaders to defend their academic missions while creating efficiencies, the Associated Press reported.
“As you have done in the past, I anticipate you will protect your core mission in the short-term and seek long-term strategies for efficient delivery of services whenever possible,” Purcell told college system leaders, the Associated Press reported.
While the University has taken several rounds of budget cuts over the past few years, it has used tuition hikes to compensate for shortages from state funds. But while the University receives more authority to raise tuition from the LA Grad Act 2.0, that additional tuition money is already going toward filling the University’s shrunken operating budget that was outlined in August.
Last year when the University was faced with the prospect of a large midyear cut, administrators sent termination letters to instructors, no longer ensuring their jobs with the University for more than a semester-by-semester basis. But Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Jack Hamilton recently gave University deans the authority to extend their instructors’ contracts and stop issuing termination notices for their instructors.
Hamilton said when he made the decision that if the University would take a midyear cut, they would find another way to compensate for it other than laying off instructors.
Martin and Droddy also said if the University was spared from a midyear cut, they would make giving faculty additional compensation after four years without pay raises a top priority. That may not be able to happen now that the University must under go an $8 million cut.
Throughout the past semester, administrators said they were preparing in case of a midyear cut scenario.
“Recent history suggests that it’s not out of the question that we would get a midyear cut as has happened in the past,” Martin said in August. “So one of the things we’re doing, while celebrating the success we had, is preparing just in case we face a midyear cut.”
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Contact Andrea Gallo at [email protected]