Dollars and sense

The economic downturn is affecting universities across the nation, and Texas A&M is also being forced to plan for the worst.

With University President R. Bowen Loftin’s statement July 20, 2010 that the University is preparing for a $60 million budget reallocation affecting approximately 485 jobs, the overall feeling around campus is an uneasy one.

University’s plan

For the biennial budget of 2012-2013, the Texas Legislature has asked institutions of higher learning to prepare a preliminary plan of the budget if a 10 percent budget cut passes in the legislature.

“The state has asked for 5 percent increments to come up with what we need to do. We have a 5 percent plan, and we have a 10 percent plan,” said Konrad Johnson, student body vice president and senior finance major.

Texas A&M has asked each department and auxiliary to submit preliminary plans of how each department would cut 10 percent of spending.

The 10 percent budget cut is not a choice coming from the University but from the legislature and will affect all public institutions of higher learning.

“All types of businesses, people and industries have to change or modify the way their daily business is run due to the state of the economy,” said state Rep. Fred Brown. “It is not an easy task but one that is necessary to continue.”

State money is allocated toward specific areas of the University.

“Eighty-nine percent goes to paying people directly on our faculty and our staff, 6 percent funds scholarships and 5 percent funds operations, mostly utilities,” Loftin said.

Loftin said that because so much of state funding goes to faculty, the University could not avoid such a large cut in that area.

Faculty and staff cuts that have been planned include 275 vacant positions and 210 filled positions.

“The basis of [the] cuts will mostly be unfilled positions, and hopefully the University will be able to get by without having people lose their jobs,” Brown said.

Colleges across the campus are preparing plans to handle the cuts, and most hits will be taken in the nontenured faculty and graduate teaching assistant areas, said Joseph Newton, dean of the College of Science.

“What we have been doing is getting each college and each division, going through and planning what they would do to cut their budget by 10 percent,” said Jacob Robinson, student body president and senior leadership studies major.

If a 10 percent budget cut is passed, $39 million will be asked back from the state, and $21 million will be gathered by the University to reallocate to departments that will be cut the most, totaling $60 million in planned budget cuts.

“Here is the problem. If you look at your university, you have your services and you have your academics. Now academics comprise, say 80 percent of what a university is, and state money goes primarily to academics. So if you pull $39 million out of academics, then you have a sudden drop in academics,” Johnson said. “Your other services that run on their own still have their $21 million. We are trying to figure out a way to balance the scales so that we can remain strong as a whole.”

Administration and student government officials said these plans are only preliminary and will not take effect until fiscal year 2012.

“Right now all this is saying is this is what Texas A&M would do if we were asked to cut the budget by X amount. So that’s all this is,” Robinson said.

Although some departments have already been told which staff members will be let go. The department of continuing education will have to cut five staff members, two of which are retiring, by Aug. 31, 2010.

“I think we owe people the ability to tell them as soon as we know,” Loftin said. “We should be able to begin to identify specific staff positions we are going to be able to reduce to meet budget requirements, there is no game to be had to wait a whole year to be told about that.”

Cuts will affect students

If the budget cuts are passed, students will notice a decrease in the faculty-to-student ratio.

“They will be in a couple of areas; the most important area is instructional. We will do everything we can to maintain the highest-quality instructional environment for the students,” Loftin said. “But because we are going to have to lose some people, that means a little larger class size and that always has an impact on the students.”

Other differences students will notice are changes in access to student services and tangible items. Many student worker positions will be eliminated, and hours for the Student Recreation Center and Open Access Labs will be reduced.

“We have fewer staff people to help with advising, fewer staff people to help with student affairs. Some of the tangible things like toilet paper in residence halls may be a problem here. You will have to chip in to make a difference on yourselves if you live on campus,” Loftin said.

However, deans said they will try to maintain student options for courses in their colleges.

“Our first goal is not to lower how many students, how many seats will be available in the courses. But because the number of the faculty will go down, the size of the classes will go up,” said Newton.

Although the University will be cutting faculty, Loftin said he plans to maintain student enrollment.

“We don’t have a lot of capacity to increase our enrollment a lot. I don’t want to decrease it though, so I don’t anticipate having any fewer students coming to the campus,” Loftin said.

Some areas will be affected more than others, but the goal is to minimize the impact on the students and maintain high quality of education, said the deans.