The university announced the introduction of a 100-member Strategic Scenario Planning Group to offer President Seidel and the Board of Trustees plans to specifically address the budget crisis. The university is moving to phase two of budget cuts, which will cut academic programs and faculty positions.
President Seidel said, “If you were to completely eliminate the colleges of law and education, no faculty no staff just shut them down to zero, that’s only $10 million dollars.”
The group’s aim is to address the budget cuts facing the university that could intensify in the coming years. The legislator is already discussing moving to phase three of budget cuts, requiring an additional $10 million to be cut from the university. This year the group is refreshing their budget goals set in 2017.
The team is co-chaired by President Seidel and Provost Anne Alexander and has faculty and staff members across several departments. The group established four teams, all with different planning initiatives to present to university leadership. The four teams are the Digital Pillar Team, the Entrepreneurial-Innovation Pillar Team, the Inclusivity Pillar Team, and the Interdisciplinary Pillar Team.
The Strategic Scenario Planning Group purpose is to identify programs the university needs and can do without. They are determining this with several metrics, including profitability of departments, department output in terms of academics and number of students enrolled.
Each pillar is formulating lists of criteria for programs that should be removed and how they should be weighted against each other. For instance, how does a program with 2000 students compare to a program that has $1,000,000 in research funds?
Rudiger Michalak, professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy and member of the group, said, “This is scary stuff, we are talking about departments possibly not being here in September.”
President Seidel said the university is not going to cut program budgets across the board. Instead he wants to be strategic in keeping needed funding to accelerate high-enrollment programs and completely stop unprofitable ones.
“We are going to stop doing some programs to preserve excellence in other programs. No one will be happy with that but at least its strategic.”
Each group meets at least once per week and are working towards presenting draft plans in mid-March. The pillar team reports will be finalized by the end of April and the Strategic Scenario Planning and portfolio review groups will be finalizing their work slightly earlier.
The Strategic Scenario Planning Group has plans to also address issues besides budget reductions as well, including inclusivity after the racist events that transpired at a Black History Month event.
The group hopes to include as much student, faculty and staff input as possible.
Provost Anne Alexander, co-chair of the group, said, “Part of our charge is to bring in as much feedback from external partners, students, faculty, and staff through a listening tour, as well as to evaluate our academic portfolio to investigate how we might need to change it to modernize it and right-size it.”
