| Throughout
fall semester, President Michael F. Adams and Provost Arnett Mace
held a series of meetings with small groups of faculty to discuss
issues of concern and to offer an administrative perspective. Out
of those meetings came a request by the faculty for more regular
communication from the senior administration. This article in
Columns is one of a series addressing
administrative goals and priorities.
Tuition rates for the 2004–05 academic year have yet not been
set by the board of regents, pending final approval of the fiscal
year ’05 state budget. Gov. Sonny Perdue is planning to call
a special session of the General Assembly to complete work on the
budget. Whatever the outcome of the special session, university
administrators expect a tuition increase.
“Given the cumulative effect of the budget cuts of the past
two years, the university is faced with a difficult equation if
we are to maintain the quality that the students, faculty and staff
here have worked very hard to build,” says President Michael
F. Adams. “With declining state revenues, tuition is one of
the revenue streams available to maintain that quality.”
Adams and Provost Arnett C. Mace have pledged that the majority
of the revenue produced by a tuition increase would be used to fill
some of the approximately 230 vacant faculty positions, with the
remainder targeted to other university needs.
The state portion of the university’s
budget, which accounts for approximately 35.5 percent of the
total UGA budget and is predominantly personnel, has been cut some
$50 million from the baseline fiscal year 2002 budget, or 11.4 percent.
If the additional cuts that have been proposed by the state for
fiscal year 2005 are enacted during the special session of the legislature,
cuts to the university’s state budget will reach $70 million,
or 19.3 percent.
In response to these cuts, the senior administration of the university
has taken a number of actions. In February 2002, a hiring slowdown
was approved by the university cabinet, requiring the signature
of a senior vice president before a department can hire to fill
a vacant position. To date, this hiring slowdown has resulted in
vacancies in more than 200 faculty positions and also in some 450
staff positions.
Many faculty have been asked to increase their teaching loads
and to teach more students than usual in some classes. Department
heads have been asked to find ways to save on office supplies and
travel budgets.
Staff have been asked to do more with less, pitching in where there
were vacancies that could not be filled.
“There can be no doubt that every person at the University
of Georgia feels the impact of the reductions in the state budget,
whether through increased teaching loads, increased work loads because
of vacancies in departments, or the scarcity of office supplies
and other necessities of daily life,” says Adams. “I
am grateful for the way in which UGA people have responded to this
challenge.”
Despite these and other efforts, what senior administrators had
predicted would be necessary (if the state maintained its position
on additional budget cuts for fiscal year 2005) became a reality
on April 8, when 47 university employees were notified that they
would be laid off, effective June 30.
Partly in response to the necessity for cutting the budget, and
partly in response to a shift in mission in certain UGA departments,
the layoffs were concentrated in the College of Agricultural and
Environmental Sciences and the division of Public Service and Outreach. |
