MU budget includes large department cuts

The University of Missouri will shift $25 million in its fiscal 2020 budget to focus on scholarships, research and employee pay.

The university said in a news release that it will dedicate $10.5 million from other areas for employee performance and promotion raises, $9.6 million for scholarships and $4.6 million for research support.

The budget was released at noon Friday and top university leaders fielded questions from reporters at a news conference in Jesse Hall ahead of the release.

“Those reallocations are really building on our strengths, thinking about how we move forward as an institution,” Chancellor Alexander Cartwright said. “How we commit to supporting our faculty and staff, ensuring that our students have the support and mechanisms as they need to make college affordable as possible and really thinking about what we want to be doing as an institution in terms of moving our research forward.”

The reallocation will result in budget reductions across the university. The highest reductions include the Office of Advancement at 10.78 percent, the Office of the Chancellor at 10.32 percent and the Office of the Provost at 9.86 percent, the university said in a news release.

Vice Chancellor for Finance and Chief Financial Officer Rhonda Gibler said the decision was not easy for the university.

“When we reallocate, it’s us having to make really difficult decisions about how we move to an even grater good, not how do we cut something that wasn’t important before,” Gibler said.

MU officials say most of the reductions will be absorbed through attrition, not filling open positions or other department actions. Gibler said they don’t expect a large number of layoffs because of the shift of funds.

“We do have layoffs from time to time at the university as decisions are made about the right endeavor to be involved in. We don’t expect through this specific relocation process to foster a tremendous number of additional layoffs,” Gibler said. “But it is important that each of the pieces of our organization continue to evaluate, are they doing the right things in the best possible way for our constituents, and if they’re not, sometimes that means you’ll make adjustments.”

University officials have had meetings with each department to talk about the budget cuts and how they will reduce their costs. The decisions about the individual budgets are up to the specific departments.

The Office of the Chancellor is taking a large cut, and Cartwright said he hopes his office can be an example.

“We’re showing people that this is the way we want us to all be thinking, is how do we become as efficient as possible, and then reallocate those resources into the core mission of the university around education, research and engagement,” Cartwright said.

Other notable cuts include the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at 7.82 percent, the College of Medicine at 7.70 percent, the finance division at 7.62 percent and Human Resources Services at 7.52 percent.

The chair of the fiscal committee of the MU Faculty Council, John Middleton, said it will ultimately be up to each unit to decide where the cuts will come from. “There have been a series of meeting with the unit leaders to figure out where those cuts will have to be made within the individual units,” Middleton said. “I think we will probably learn over the coming weeks where that’s going to have an impact, but it’s really difficult to say right now where those impacts are going to be.”

Johannes Strobel, a member of the Faculty Council and professor in the College of Education, said the College of Education will probably not lay off any faculty, but will not replace members who have left,

“That of course has impacts on either classes we can offer, it has impacts on grants that we can write,” he said.

The College of Education will face about a 5 percent decrease, which Strobel said is not as much as it has been in the past years. Not hiring new staff reduces class variety and means the college loses out on an additional perspective and another person who can write research grants, he said.

“If you look a a single faculty member they often times can bring in more than their own salary in grants,” Strobel said.

He mentioned the college might have to hire more temporary adjunct professors, who in turn do not write as many grants. Strobel also said they could see an increase in class sizes.

MU officials said affordability is on the rise, saying more than 80 percent of students experienced a decrease in the cost of education at MU.

“For the upcoming year, we will continue to make changes to our budget that focus on supporting our priorities of affordability, research success and employee recognition,” Chancellor Alexander Cartwright said in the release.

The university said it will continue to monitor how problems with the state’s fiscal health will affect the budget. The Missouri General Assembly is in session but is yet to pass the budget that funds state higher education institutions.