Looming cuts are concern at UH
Some faculty say athletic budget may be too high
The math is hard to crack — even for career academics.
The University of Houston saw an increase in state funding this year, but President Renu Khator asked academic departments to trim their budgets by 2.5 percent. Non-academic divisions must cut 3.5 percent.
For some, these figures come as a relief. Khator told departments in April to prepare for sharper declines, as state lawmakers anticipated steep reductions to higher education funding.
But other faculty wonder how long cuts can be sustained as UH strives to compete with the state’s top research universities, Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin. Some professors interviewed by the Houston Chronicle expressed the perennial concern that UH spends too much money on athletics — this year, that figure was about $25 million including student fees and institutional support.
“We’ve already gone through how many years of repeated cutting and trimming?” said Eric Bittner, a
chemistry professor. “And we’re already a tight ship to begin with.”
UH’s operating budget for the 2016 fiscal year was $1.2 billion, with 65 percent of that money going to student access and success.
UH says the process is in its early stages and department by department budgetary changes will vary. Some money will flow back into academics, UH spokesman Mike Rosen said. The system’s regents vote on the fiscal year’s budget next month.
Rosen said the Permanent University Fund, a state-owned investment that gives billions to UTAustin and Texas A&M, makes competition with the universities more difficult and that nationally competitive athletics programs help UH pursue “overall excellence.” ‘A harder look’
Khator said in a June email to faculty that even though UH would receive about 3 percent more money from state lawmakers, department budgets will not increase because the university’s base funding did not change — even though the university’s enrollment has grown over the last two years.
Instead, UH’s funding growth came from two one-time payments, one of which will support the College of Pharmacy. Rosen said UH has not yet determined how it will distribute the second payment, which amounts to $10.6 million. The Legislature did not designate that funding to a particular UH program.
“In a nutshell, the university received no increase in base funding and the only new money received is for one-time use only,” Khator wrote to faculty, pledging to reallocate the budget reductions to invest in employee wages required by a federal mandate, fill open positions and fund graduate fellowships.
The process of doing more with less, Rosen said, “forces us to take a harder look at how we allocate the resources to achieve the priorities of educating students, accommodating growth that we continue to experience and contributing to the skilled workforce.” Pressure on efficiency
Campuses increasingly encourage efficient operations even if they receive revenue increases from their state governments, said Robert Kelchen, who studies higher education finance and accountability policies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
Part of that messaging is political, he said. State governments nationwide and in Texas have criticized what they perceive as bloat in university administrations.
“There’s a pressure to become more efficient and become more accountable,” he said. “But most colleges are realizing that they’re probably not getting large increases in revenue (in the future). They have to plan for a future where they’re getting the same amount of money or less.”
At UH, the faculty senate expects to talk to administrators at an August meeting, said faculty senate president-elect Dan O’Connor, who leads the Health and Human Performance Department.
O’Connor said his department planned to scale back spending on infrastructure and equipment for a new program, which he declined to identify. He said no current students would be impacted from the planned reductions.
This summer, faculty have asked senate leadership where the university’s money will be spent and how the cuts could impact student learning, like in previous years, he said.
“It’s not about my parking space or something; it’s about the basic core thing that we do,” O’Connor said. “We want to make sure we can deliver a quality educational experience.” Student ‘bottleneck’
UH’s history department planned to reduce graduate student funding to meet the 2.5 percent goal, but department leaders later realized they could reallocate savings from faculty leaves of absence to that division, chair Philip Howard said.
Cutting teaching positions — which the 5 percent reduction would have required — would mean eliminating classes that hundreds of undergraduates take, Howard said.
“It would have caused somewhat of a bottleneck for undergraduates, who need these American history courses to graduate,” he said. “Two percent for history did not carry the same consequences.”
Higher education funding allocations to state universities were bigger than many Texas university officials expected earlier in the session, but UH is by no means alone statewide in requiring academic departments to make cuts.
The University of Texas at Austin said it would cut about 2 percent of its core budget, or $20 million in spending.
“There are tough decisions to make, but we will make them thoughtfully and with the best interests of the university and our community in mind,” UT-Austin President Greg Fenves wrote in an email to faculty.