Save money: cut costs at MUN

Premier Dwight Ball wants the public to suggest ways and means to help extricate us from our looming financial disaster. So, as a concerned taxpayer, I am suggesting the following whereby the province can save tens of millions of dollars.

Memorial University must be downsized.

First, to set a good example for what’s to follow, bring the salary of MUN president Gary Kachanoski in line with other universities MUN’s size. Currently, Kachanoski makes a salary roughly $100,000 more than the president of Canada’s largest university, the University of Toronto, and by July he will be making $483,276.

The second tax saver would be closing Grenfell campus in Corner Brook. With a student body of a little over a thousand, they could easily be accommodated at the St. John’s campus, and most of Grenfell’s roughly 235 administrative staff and about 150 academic staff positions could be let go, saving the taxpayer millions of dollars. The buildings could be sold off, earning money and saving maintenance costs for the taxpayer.

The Harlow campus in England could and should also be let go.

A third tax saver would be cutting back the number of staff at the St. John’s campus. According to the auditor general, in the past decade MUN saw a 23 per cent increase in staff, but only a five per cent increase in the number of students.

The fourth recommendation for savings would be to reduce the graduate offerings. According to Kent Decker, the university’s vice-president of finance, “The effort to educate a grad student is about five or six times (that of educating) an undergrad.”

There are 121 senior administrators, not including professors, at MUN that make between $100,000 and $200,000.

Decker has said, “I think it unlikely that we will reduce salaries…”

Therefore, the fifth recommendation is to cut back or get rid of nonessential positions and programs in general.