Editor’s note: This commentary is by Julie Roberts, of Richmond, who is a professor of linguistics and the president of United Academics, the faculty union at the University of Vermont.
According to the University of Vermont administration, the university faces a critical budget shortfall, which, depending on which communication you read, may or may not be intimately related to the pandemic. When faced with a dilemma and promoting a solution that is potentially damaging to the community, it is common to claim that “hard choices must be made.” The latest version of the well-worn “tough choices” trope was seen in this week’s defense of the administration by spokesperson Enrique Corredera in response to UVM faculty member and state Sen. Phil Baruth’s pointed criticism of faculty layoffs.
We’ve seen this argument before, for example, in a statewide commentary from Trustee Shap Smith, “The decisions ahead will be difficult. The final choices may look different than the initial proposals. But, inaction is not an option,” and publisher Emerson Lynn, “What doesn’t work? Doing nothing. Pretending the problems don’t exist.”
It is a false premise that the only actionable option is to proceed with President Suresh Garimella’s plan, which is to close departments, lay off faculty, and impose austerity rules that remove the liberal arts lifeblood from our state’s flagship land grant university.
Of course there are other options. Those solutions would actually be tough choices for the administration, as they would require executive administrators giving up more than what has been demanded from their employees and walking back their fiscally irresponsible policies. It would also be a sign of real leadership.
I offer four potential solutions by way of example:
Reign in inflated executive administrator pay. The combined base pay of 130 executive administrators is $20 million. The combined base pay of more than 700 faculty doing the teaching and research of the University is $70 million. Some quick division shows the extravagance in those executive administrator salaries.
Corredera notes that administrators took a 3.3% pay cut on top of a 5% cut. What he doesn’t report is that those cuts were optional, and that many of those executive administrators also received raises and/or tens of thousands of dollars of “additional compensation” and bonuses. Corredera doesn’t note, of course, the quarter of a million dollar salary of the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the president’s $480,000 salary plus additional pay and deferred compensation, or the more than 30 other executive administrators pulling in over $200,000 a year.
So, one way to realize vast savings is to reduce the number of high-paid executive administrators, “right size” the pay of executive administrators, and freeze raises and bonuses for executive administrators for as long as there is a hiring freeze for faculty and staff. This is, after all, small-population Vermont, without the revenue base to sustain huge public salaries.
2. Increase financial aid for Vermont students, paid for by the activities of the UVM Foundation. UVM’s admittedly high tuition has remained static for the past two years and may remain so for the foreseeable future. While President Garimella’s tuition freeze is good PR and popular with students and their parents, it does not solve the problem of UVM’s still-high tuition and budget shortfall. Another solution would be to increase financial aid, particularly based on the needs of Vermonters, paid for by the activities of the UVM Foundation, to keep periodic modest tuition increases at a minimum but still keep our institution viable.
3. Examine and potentially reimagine tuition and costs. Some courses of study, including many but not all professional programs, cost more to run than others. They often have accrediting bodies, who may require that classes be smaller, labs or internships be offered, higher salaries be paid, and so on. These programs often also offer students a clear path to a well-paid career. Some universities have dealt with this discrepancy by charging differential tuition, with students attending these more expensive programs paying more. UVM has always chosen a different path, one that subsidizes these programs with tuition money from other units such as Arts and Sciences, but, with changing times, reconsideration may be in order.
4. The last and perhaps most effective solution to UVM’s budget mismanagement is to eliminate UVM’s disastrous Incentive Based Budgeting system. In this model, undergraduate colleges are required to divert the funds they receive through tuition into a pool for redistribution throughout the university.
Departments in the College of Arts and Sciences do not suffer from low enrollment. Even those that are slated for removal because they have fewer majors serve large numbers of undergraduate students by teaching fully-enrolled, sizable classes, some with over 100 students. The college, in fact, brings in enough tuition dollars to support itself, but 10% of that income flows out and is redistributed to other programs, some of which do not serve undergraduates at all. Having units that make money support those that need help is a common and not inappropriate business model, but then having that same unit shoulder the burden of a pandemic and nationally declining student population is neither the only nor the best solution.
There are creative solutions to this budget shortfall: solutions that will invest in our university, and strengthen it as an equitable institution of learning and growth. It’s not that the UVM board of trustees have a choice to walk or not walk down one predestined path. Rather, several members have already decided on a harmful path of austerity, and are selling their decision as the hard, but only, choice. For the sake of thriving public higher education in Vermont, we should all be thinking more creatively and courageously.
