Updated at 4:47 p.m.
Vermont State University will cut 33 administrative and staff positions, the latest in a series of steps intended to rein in spending at the public university, officials announced Friday.
The wide-ranging cuts will eliminate positions across a range of university functions, including advising, admissions, financial aid, communication and events, according to a report released Friday morning. The cuts would save roughly $3.1 million annually, the report said.
“This is a hard process for all, but it’s especially difficult for impacted staff,” VTSU interim president Mike Smith said in a Friday morning press release. “These team members have given innumerable contributions over their years of service to VTSU and I want to thank and honor our colleagues for their work.”
The Vermont State Colleges board of trustees approved the cuts at a meeting on Tuesday.
Twenty-one of the cuts affect positions at the “executive, management, or supervisory level,” according to the report. The cuts include the elimination of four associate deans of students, two communications positions and the assistant vice presidents of admissions and of workforce, community and economic development.
Jobs will also be eliminated for staff who work in the president’s office, manage events and conferences, and oversee financial aid and enrollment.
Six of the positions slated for elimination are currently vacant, and staff in two other positions are planning to retire. The other 25 cuts are expected to be achieved through “buyouts and reductions in force,” according to the report. Most of the affected staff received layoff notices on Thursday, the report said.
Layoffs will take place at different times depending on the position, school officials said. Some are scheduled for December, others at the beginning of 2024 and others at the end of the 2023-24 school year.
In Friday’s report, Smith said that VTSU was “approximately 20% overstaffed” compared to other equivalent universities, citing the ratio of full-time staff to students.
Smith’s term as interim president concludes at the end of October. David Bergh, a former VTSU administrator and president of the now-shuttered Cazenovia College in New York state, will succeed him.
Union leaders at VTSU expressed frustration and disappointment with the cuts, saying they had hoped the reductions would target more high-level administrator positions.
“We had low morale before,” said Amy Miller, co-president of the state colleges’ United Professionals union, which is slated to lose 10 members in the cuts. “And I would just say it’s just devastating.”
She compared the relationship between staff and the administration to an unhappy marriage. “You stick it out for the kids — meaning our students,” she said.
The staff reductions follow a slate of cuts to academic programs and faculty positions that Smith unveiled earlier this month, which would eliminate 10 degree programs and up to 33 faculty positions. The university is offering buyouts to faculty in an attempt to avoid layoffs.
The deadline for faculty to choose that option was Friday afternoon. In an interview, Smith said there had been “a lot of interest in the buyout program,” but he declined to provide an estimate of how many faculty had opted in.
Friday’s report also recommends trimming retirement benefits and adding VTSU staff to the state employees’ health care plan to save money. The plan will also cut the shared services budget, which covers functions shared between VTSU and the Community College of Vermont, such as information technology.
The cost-cutting measures are an attempt to put Vermont State University — an institution created through the merger of Castleton University, Northern Vermont University and Vermont Technical College — on a firmer financial footing.
Years of declining enrollment and low levels of state funding left the member universities struggling to make ends meet. In the spring of 2020, after administrators sent students home amid the Covid-19 pandemic, many Vermonters feared that campuses would shutter for good.
To avert that outcome, the Vermont Legislature poured millions of dollars into the system, but tasked the institutions with shoring up their financial positions.
The merger, which took effect in July, was an attempt to do just that. But there is more work to be done, officials say: VTSU ended its most recent fiscal year with a $22 million structural deficit, and the Legislature ordered the system to trim $5 million a year from that debt. That set the scene for this month’s cuts.
The trimming has not been without controversy. Staff, students and faculty have pushed back since Smith outlined his recommended cuts to academic programs.
Steve Howard, president of the Vermont State Employees’ Association, which counts four members among the positions being cut, reiterated calls for the state colleges to eliminate the chancellor’s office instead of staff positions that work closely with students on campus.
The cuts are “really crazy,” Howard said in an interview. “I think what we need is the Legislature, the governor and the administration to just take a pause on the cuts (and) reevaluate the massive investment Vermont taxpayers have made.”
But administrators have maintained that the trimming is necessary for the institution’s survival.
“This is a difficult choice. We know change is difficult,” Rep. Lynn Dickinson, R-St. Albans Town and the chair of the state colleges board of trustees, said at Tuesday’s meeting. “I think I speak for the board that we all appreciate and really value the administration, the staff and all of the students. And that we really want to make sure that they all understand that we realize the difficulty this creates for many of them.”
