4/25/2011

Dear SUNY New Paltz Community:

Cabinet and I would like to share today the budget plan for 2011-12 that we have developed in the face of great adversity imposed by state budget cuts.  As the plan is realized, we believe it will achieve the necessary adjustments in our economy while preserving programs and protecting current full-time employees.  The plan emphasizes approaches such as attrition, consolidation and reorganization, more-effective use of all-funds budgeting, and reduced allocation for energy and non-personnel expenses.  All this will require serious changes in how we do business. The most regrettable consequences of the plan are reduced employment of adjunct faculty and a reduction in our full-time workforce through attrition.

These changes will require shifting a larger proportion of teaching responsibilities to full-time faculty through a number of strategies.  While we do this, it will be imperative that students not lose their ability to complete their studies in a timely manner.   To achieve this objective, section sizes of some courses may increase and more courses will be taught by full-time faculty.  But the plan lets us fulfill our commitment to provide access to high-quality educational opportunities, serves our students well, maintains enrollments and tuition revenue, and supports our fiscal health.  It is also consistent with our long-term priority of building the ranks of full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty.   While achieving the plan will require considerable discipline and change, it provides a pathway for continuing the high quality of our educational offerings and remaining on our extremely positive upward trajectory.  Certainly our recent Middle States re-accreditation site visit has affirmed the many reasons we have for pride in the College and all that we do.  We must remain unflinching in our commitment to sustain and grow that quality and focus.

We hope that you will view this plan in light of the broad range of more serious and damaging outcomes that might have resulted from addressing a budget reduction of $6.3 million this year, on top of $6 million in cuts begun in 2008-09.  No plan for budget reductions of this magnitude can be without pain.  We understand that there will be a tendency to criticize the process, the outcome, or those responsible for the decisions.  We hope there is also recognition that our circumstance is driven by the most severe state and national economic downturn in many decades.  These economic forces are imposing difficult fiscal constraints and requiring major decisions at public colleges and universities throughout the United States (see, for example, today’s The Chronicle of Higher Education article about UNC Greensboro).

With that brief overview, I will now share a more-detailed review of our process and our most important considerations, before sharing specifics of the plan.  The College budget and budgeting are complex, and I ask your patience with the length of the remaining document; reading it in full will help you understand the process and outcome.

Process and Priorities. We have been committed to clear, honest, and direct communication about our budget, and are grateful to have heard from many of you (directly as well as indirectly through perceptions you shared with the Middle States site-visit team members) that you appreciate those efforts.  In turn, other members of the Cabinet and I have appreciated your willingness to ask questions, raise concerns and objections in respectful and civil dialogue, and contribute your ideas for adjusting our budget.  This has been a very difficult process and a challenging year, and I am thankful that to date our sense of community has remained strong.  As I wrote to you recently, I hope that with the announcement of this budget plan we can turn our attention to the positive steps that we must take to sustain quality, vitality, and positive energy as we move into a different future.

This entire year, we have been following a plan to identify new and increased revenues and reduce spending to achieve the goal of a balanced and sustainable budget in light of serious budget cuts.  We solicited and received many ideas and suggestions from the community, and listened to your concerns and values.  The resulting plan relies heavily on that broad input. We will continue to explore additional, viable ideas in the future as a way of strengthening our fiscal health.

All avenues for adjusting our budget were evaluated relative to the criteria and principles spelled out in our process.   We paid particular attention to protecting programs, maintaining educational opportunities for students, minimizing impact on our current workforce (particularly honoring tenure and permanent employment status), and sustaining enrollment and tuition revenue.  We proceeded mindful that a viable plan needs to maintain adequate cash balances to allow us to transition to a reduced economy, to support some of the adjustments we must make to do our work differently, to permit the most critical of our future investments, and to be able to respond to emergencies.

No Program Elimination. We heard the concerns of the community not to eliminate programs and their personnel, and are relieved that we are able to substantially meet our budget-reduction target without taking such action, protecting much of what we do well.  We analyzed data on program costs and tuition revenues, which led us to the conclusion that the negative impacts on the campus of program elimination at this time would outweigh the cost savings.  In some cases, we considered the relationship between programs, recognizing that the elimination of a graduate program (for example), while in itself perhaps fiscally advantageous, would reduce enrollment and tuition revenue in a linked undergraduate program.  The outcome of keeping all programs means that we must find ways to economize in how we offer them.

Strategy and Opportunity. The plan we outline below is a combination of strategic choice and of “opportunity.”  A major category of “opportunity” includes decisions not to fill many position vacancies created by retirement and resignation, thereby reducing our expenditures.  This is one way that the plan could achieve our budget goals while honoring the feedback that we received to protect current employees as much as possible, a principle that we value as well.  In many administrative and support areas, we have consolidated and reorganized services to adjust to the elimination of such positions; other such changes are still being planned.    Our aim in such reorganization is not to have each of us simply do more work, but instead to seek efficiencies in our work (through use of technology, for example) and in some cases to make difficult decisions not to continue doing things that we have been able to afford in the past.  In a number of instances, we determined that certain units simply could not do their job without replacement of a vacant position.  In many such cases, we still realized savings because the position was replaced at a lower salary.  In other cases, it was determined that the FTE appointment of a current employee needed to be increased to partially replace a resignation or retirement.

But we must not mistake the reality that these changes, along with reductions in adjunct faculty hiring, will result in an ongoing reduction in our workforce — even though they protect current full-time employees.   We expect to have about 45 fewer employees (excluding adjuncts and other contingent employees) when the plan is realized, unavoidably diminishing our contribution to the regional and New York economies.   While we have developed a plan that protects current full-time employees, we have been clear all year that we could not achieve a reduction of the required magnitude without affecting our payroll.

Instructional and Non-Instructional Cuts. Consistent with our mission and values, we have focused our budget reduction on non-instructional areas – about 69% of the cuts.   In the budget-reduction plan implemented in 2009-10, 61% of the cuts were in non-instructional areas.  Some may believe that we should have gone further this year to protect instruction.  I remind everyone that our core academic mission rests solidly on a broad array of critical support and non-instructional functions.  Employees in many non-instructional areas in administration, business offices, student support areas, facilities, athletics, and other areas — including many secretaries — have already felt the impact of changing work and demands resulting from the loss of colleagues and co-workers through this year’s early retirement, on top of the 2009-10 budget plan implementation.  Some balance to assure that critical support areas remain strong was essential in this year’s planning.

As we move ahead, we will continue to evaluate our staffing levels relative to other institutions, national benchmarks, and across New Paltz units, and make adjustments in allocating our human resources as warranted, but with careful consideration to assuring that we can sustain all key functions and operations.  For the record, the most significant staffing disparity relative to external benchmarks is understaffing in executive areas.

Continuing Uncertainties. We have been clear that our target of a $6.3 million budget reduction is an estimate, and that we face and will continue to face uncertainties at many levels.  SUNY leadership is considering multiple budget allocation models for the coming year; a probable plan and the one that would most severely impact New Paltz would result in a budget reduction of $6.3 million.  In this model, state-operated campuses would in effect contribute to partial restoration of hospital subsidies cut in the governor’s budget and partially restored by the legislature.  Unfortunately, we will not know the allocation model chosen until the end of May, and we cannot wait until then to announce our plan and continue with its implementation.  If a different allocation model is chosen that results in a smaller budget reduction than we have planned, we will be able to invest in some of our most critical needs.  Those will be guided by our vision points, by suggestions of the recent Middle States review team, and by our ongoing planning.

Comprehensive-college presidents and chief business officers continue to lobby SUNY administrators for an allocation model that will minimize harm to our campuses, while also recognizing the many competing demands for resources across the complex SUNY system. Uncertainty remains about approaches to be taken to implement the strategic plan for SUNY, the funding-allocation methodology to be developed for the longer term, and, of course, the direction of the national and state economies.  We are mindful that forecasts for state revenues are improving, but also aware that it will be some time before those have substantial impact on state budgets, or on revenue increases to SUNY.

Many of us – SUNY leaders, campus presidents, faculty, staff, and students, employee unions, and other supporters of public higher education – have worked and are continuing to work for restoration of funding for SUNY and for a rational tuition policy.  But until those efforts bear fruit, we must proceed with implementing a sustainable budget plan that aligns expenditures with dramatically reduced revenues.

Realization of the Plan. As a final note of introduction, we may take some comfort in the knowledge that a significant part of our plan can be readily in place on July 1, as a result of actions such as early retirements, consolidation of services, and others already taken this year.  Some changes, such as increasing section sizes for courses scheduled in rooms with additional capacity, have already been implemented for the fall 2011 semester.   Others, such as savings from anticipated retirements that will not be replaced, may require several years to be realized.  During the summer and fall, we will need to plan how to equitably and most effectively adjust teaching loads of tenured/tenure-track faculty to replace the loss of adjunct instruction. The subsequent plan will be phased in during spring and fall 2012 semesters.  As we have explained, the deans and the provost will be using cash balances in their accounts to maintain course availability and support professional development needs or other one-time expenses during this transition.

The Plan. The elements of our plan are presented below in general order of increasing difficulty and impact.  All figures are rounded to the nearest thousand dollars. The “SUM” shown with each element of the plan is the cumulative budget reduction at that point in the presentation.  The decisions we have made have not been easy.  We must remember that this is a plan, not an outcome, and it will require discipline in effecting the various elements.

Maximize Use of All Funds & Additional Fee Revenues (Plan: $1,363,000). The locus of the governor’s and legislature’s cuts is our “core instructional budget,” which is supported by taxpayer dollars and tuition.  This is the budget against which we must reduce expenditures.   In addition to this budget, the College’s total operating budget includes revenues predominately generated from fees that the institution collects in support of specific activities and programs.  Examples of these operations that generate fees or other revenue include summer programs, residence halls, athletics, student health care, course fees and common application fees.

As with our core instructional budget, early retirements and careful scrutiny of expenditures in revenue-generating programs have given us flexibility to make intentional and appropriate choices to re-align expenses with those revenues.    Such “all funds” budgeting allows us to direct expenditures from the core instructional budget to these different funding sources, thereby contributing to a reduction in the core instructional budget.  In addition, we have taken these steps with recognition that they diminish the capacity of these other-funded programs to accrue cash balances for programmatic and strategic improvements, which also are (and have been) properly supported by these fee revenues.

Another element of this part of the plan is to implement several new fees. We will request new fees in several courses where the student retains an end product from coursework (costume design), where a special service is provided (private music lessons), and where special costs (travel to off-campus sites) are incurred.

Throughout our evaluation of our all-funds budget, we have remained true to the principle we have shared this year that these funds need to be used for the purposes for which they were generated, and not re-directed to support instructional programs.

Utilities (Plan: $800,000, SUM = $2,163,000). For each of the past several years, we have not fully spent the budget allocated for energy.  With some discomfort as we see energy prices climb, we have decided to reduce this allocation in our budget.  We are doing so conservatively – that is, reducing the allocation by an amount less than the under-expenditure in each of the past several years.   This under-expenditure has been one of the sources of renewing our cash balances, and this budgetary action removes that source of generating cash balances in the future.

Consolidate and Reorganize Services (Plan: $1,794,000, SUM = $3,957,000). This item in the budget plan includes multiple separate actions, including not filling over 40 vacant positions or anticipated vacancies, many created through the Early Retirement Incentive program.  Such staffing losses have driven adjustments in the work assignments and expectations of remaining employees (e.g., one secretary rather than two now supporting two Vice Presidents; a secretary in CRREO also supporting work in Institutional Research and Planning) or work simply not being done (e.g., reduced publicity for department-level initiatives to maximize resources for college-wide initiatives).  In other cases of consolidation and reorganization (24 actions, representing a savings of $254,000), vacated positions were filled but at a lower salary.   A small part of the total savings in this category represent reduced hours of operation in the Dorsky Museum (August) and the library, and one voluntary conversion of an employee from a 12- to 10-month appointment.

Faculty Attrition (known) and Faculty Hires (Plan: $220,000 net, SUM = $4,177,000). A number of faculty retired this year, primarily through the Early Retirement Incentive program, generating permanent salary savings.  At the same time, we made the decision to proceed this year with 11 searches for new faculty who will join us next year.  These were prioritized from among the 30 position requests brought forward by the deans.   The savings shown here is the difference between the salary total of the retiring faculty and that anticipated for the new hires; because starting salaries for new assistant professors are significantly lower than for those who are retiring, we can achieve further savings or we can hire more faculty than we lose through retirement.

Other than Personal Services (OTPS) Reductions (Plan: $223,000, SUM = $4,440,000). Budget reduction proposals from some of the deans and from several other units included modest decrease in OTPS expenditures totaling $73,000.  Our plan includes another $150,000 in OTPS expense reductions, to be allocated to the campus in proportion to OTPS budget allocations, with specific details to be determined (e.g., allocate cuts to departments, or to broader organizational units like Schools or Vice Presidential Divisions).

Increased Vacancy Savings (Plan:  $200,000, SUM = $4,600,000). This category is an increase of $200,000 in the targeted annual “frictional savings” — applicable to non-instructional positions only.  This is the salary that we save by delaying (in recent years, by 90 days) hires to fill vacant positions, summed over all vacant positions at the College each year.    This brings our total annual frictional savings target to $450,000.  To achieve this target, we will be increasingly unlikely to approve requests to waive the 90-day hiring freeze.

Academic Program Realignment and Reconfiguration, Faculty and Staff Attrition (Plan: $788,000; SUM = $5,388,000).

Computer Science and Mathematics – reconfigured staffing. The computer science graduate and undergraduate programs (which support other programs as well) can be delivered with fewer faculty, at least at current enrollment levels.  Several computer science faculty are educated as mathematicians at the doctoral level, and some regularly teach in Mathematics; one of these faculty teaches in yet another department, even though enrollment pressures there do not warrant such additional staffing.   Several mathematics faculty retired this year, and we may anticipate further retirements in both departments in the near future.  While we are not planning a return to a historical combined Mathematics-Computer Science Department, we have an unusual opportunity to economize in this area – and minimize involuntary personnel impacts of our overall budget reduction – by reassigning some computer science faculty to teach in mathematics, and by not replacing some anticipated forthcoming retirements and resignations.

These changes must not be interpreted as deviating from the need for strong programs in mathematics, which are key to the blend of liberal arts/sciences and professional programs that are part of our core mission as a comprehensive public institution.  Such contributions include mathematics teacher education; mathematics instruction for engineering, physical sciences, and business students; general education; and, of course, the mathematics major.  The mathematics faculty are evaluating their curricular offerings to enhance the program’s contributions to these areas, in advance of next year’s regular program review.

Educational Administration – Program restructuring, shifts in funding sources. Some offerings in Educational Administration are taught as contract courses that generate special fees.  This revenue source will be used instead of the state budget to cover salaries of some of the faculty in the program, a special case of “all funds” budgeting ($106,000).  In addition, SUNY and the State of New York are insisting on strict adherence to state policies that preclude hiring retired individuals earning a New York public pension for full-time tenure-track faculty positions.  For this reason, we may not be able to continue the current form of faculty staffing for this program.  This change may drive restructuring program staffing and delivery, but the fiscal implications of such changes will be subject to further analysis.

Future Attrition. We will achieve our final confirmed budget reduction goal through further attrition of faculty and staff positions created by retirement or resignation.  We will more strictly enforce the policy that Cabinet review and approve every faculty and staff vacancy.

Reduced Reliance on Adjunct Instruction (Plan:  $903,000, SUM = $6,291,000). This is one of the most difficult and painful parts of the plan.  It eliminates continued employment for many part-time instructors, some of whom have served the institution and our students well for years, and its implementation will require increased teaching effort by the tenured/tenure-track faculty if we are to sustain enrollment and tuition revenue – as we must do.  We deeply regret that our fiscal challenges require these impacts on the lives and livelihoods of people who have been integral members of our community, and we recognize the loss of key benefits that have been so important to many of these employees and their families.

It is well known that we asked the deans to come forward with proposals to reduce adjunct expenditures by 50%; the intention of this request was not to eliminate half of our adjunct costs but instead to generate a range of alternatives for consideration.  The proposals we received were for considerably smaller reductions than that, and this element of the plan was reduced even further by the exclusion of a proposed change in the Composition program that raised serious academic concerns.  The ultimate $903,000 expenditure reduction in the plan constitutes about 29% of our current adjunct instructional budget, and represents the remainder of the deans’ proposals.  Appropriately, each dean has taken different approaches to reducing adjunct expenditures, based upon discussion with department chairs and in recognition of the different academic needs and patterns of adjunct employment in each school.  As noted above, we will continue to use cash balances to support the transition to a new budget plan with reduced reliance on adjunct faculty.

This action is a negative consequence of our affirmative goal and priority of increasing (or at least in the current climate, of sustaining as much as possible) numbers of full-time faculty, in recognition of the value that tenured/tenure-track faculty bring to students in and out of the classroom.  It is also an outgrowth of our decision not to eliminate programs.  We took this course to preserve full-time faculty positions, and as a result of our judgment, noted above, that the loss of tuition revenue in most instances would fuel further reductions in full-time faculty lines.  This would threaten the quality and diversity of academic programs at New Paltz.

In the face of these actions, the only way that we can continue to serve the same number of students is for remaining full-time faculty – on average, not in a simple one-size-fits-all, across-the-board approach – to teach more students. Over the next several months, we will develop standards for teaching loads of faculty, based on analysis of data for the past two years (During this time, our enrollments have been relatively steady, and we have seen generally growing satisfaction among students with course availability.).  This will be a complex effort, to be undertaken by the deans, the interim provost (because of the clear academic implications), the Enrollment Management VP (because there are enrollment implications of the outcome), and the Administration and Finance VP (because of the obvious fiscal implications); I will guide and assist as warranted.  We will rely on perspective and insight from records and registration and advising personnel.  We will provide full opportunity for faculty consultation and input, within the framework that assigning faculty workload is an administrative responsibility.  We will hold an open forum before the end of spring semester to hear faculty views and gather ideas on how we do this.

As noted, our approach will not be to create a single mold within which each and every faculty member must fit.  Instead, we would seek to develop a student-credit-hour or student FTE “target” for each  department (and perhaps clusters of departments in broad subject-matter areas), with “sub-targets” for majors courses, general education courses, and courses that support other programs.  Such an approach would give deans and department chairs latitude to make decisions about the best way to fulfill departmental teaching expectations.  That might include different decisions about increasing section sizes, including creating large sections of some courses to “subsidize” very small enrollments in others. Currently, 75% of our classes enroll fewer than 30 students, 38% fewer than 20.  Thus, we have some latitude to adjust class sizes while still providing a high-quality education.

In such an approach, chairs (in coordination with the dean) may tailor individual faculty teaching assignments to meet the departmental target while taking into account varying faculty circumstances and strengths.  A tenured faculty member whose research productivity has lagged or who is not carrying a fair-share service load may be assigned additional courses to teach.  A pre-tenure faculty member may be granted a lower assignment at key times to support progress towards tenure and promotion to associate professor.  Such shifts will help assure equity in overall workload, and have already been implemented in some units.

One goal of such an effort would be to begin addressing inequities in teaching load and workload across the College.  We will not achieve full equity in a short time because of the many factors that affect load, but we can make progress toward this goal.  As I have written elsewhere, we need to couple these changes with a re-evaluation of our standards for faculty performance and our reward systems, efforts that I believe are needed in any event.  I want to be clear, as I have written and said before, that high-quality research and scholarship must remain a clear expectation of faculty, even though our fiscal constraints demand that we calibrate the balance of teaching and research differently.

Defined standards for faculty teaching/workloads would also provide a clearer and more rational standard for allocating funding for adjunct instruction to departments.  By identifying real teaching needs that verifiably cannot be met by regular faculty, we can begin to address another dimension of inequity in faculty teaching loads across the College.  To be clear, we will continue to employ and value the contributions of many adjunct faculty, but the levels of such employment must be different than they have been.

With more-limited instructional resources and shifts in demands on faculty, faculty and departments should carefully consider the array of courses offered each semester and year, prioritizing those that are most essential for students and their programs and scrutinizing those that are taught “because we want to.”  I suspect that over time we, like other institutions, have fallen prey to the notion that maximum choice in course offerings is best for students.  That principle may be educationally questionable under any circumstance.  Particularly under our current fiscal constraints we must be careful about the balance between student choice and faculty teaching load/workload, because of implications for the number of course preparations faculty teach in a semester, a year, or a two-year cycle – a key element of faculty workload and teaching load.  Such changes may also enhance course scheduling, student academic planning, and advising.

I wrote to you recently about the interest among chairs and many faculty of converting from a 3- to a 4-credit standard course model.  This is a complex undertaking that would require reducing the number of courses we offer and “re-packaging” our curricula at many levels (e.g., a current 120 credit degree program of 40 courses would change to only 30 courses).  Such a conversion would thus require different thinking about curricular integration and would need to give careful consideration to implications for transfer students, the structure of general education, and heavy credit demands in professional programs.  But it would offer the advantage of allowing faculty teaching loads to include fewer preparations.  As noted in this month’s report to the faculty, we will form a task force to work next year to evaluate such conversion and its many implications.

Conclusion. This plan, coming on top of the previous $6 million reduction, clearly has significant consequences for our institution, our future workforce, and our economic role in the region.  We believe it is the best combination of changes and responses among the alternatives available to us, prepared in strict accord with the constraints, criteria, and priorities that we established as a community to guide our decision making. The plan will allow us to meet student needs for instruction, places expenditures more fully where revenues are generated, avoids program elimination, and sustains employment for current full-time employees.  It puts us in a sound fiscal position for an uncertain future.  As above, the plan will require change in the way that we do our work, and we will rely on the collective creativity, energy, and positive good will of the community to sustain our quality and upward trajectory. As we emerge from the planning process that has occupied so much of our attention and energy this year, we must continue to focus on the many strengths, assets, and opportunities that we have built and will continue to build.

Consistent with the open process and dialogue we have tried to maintain this year, we have scheduled an open forum to clarify elements of this plan as we move ahead with remaining implementation.  This session will be held at 3:30-5:00 p.m. on April 28 in LC 100.

Donald P. Christian
Interim President