Budget cuts cause universities across state to cut faculty

In 2011, Indiana public universities, including IU and Purdue University, faced state-funding budget cuts. The cuts resulted in a 3-percent decrease in funding for Purdue and a 5.5-percent reduction in funds for IU. These cuts led to increased tuition for some schools and staff firings at others.

For IU, those cuts included a decrease of 483 staff and faculty, said Neil Theobald, vice president and chief financial officer for IU.

“This year’s budget cut for IU-Bloomington was $10.4 million, or 5.5 percent,” Theobald said in an email. “In response, IU implemented an early retirement program. Today, IU employs 483 fewer faculty and staff than it did in January 2011. About one-half of this decrease is among IU-Bloomington employees.”

Thomas Gieryn, vice provost of faculty and academic affairs for IU-Bloomington, said the cuts in the past year were almost exclusively in clerical and support staff on campus, rather than faculty members such as professors.

“I can assure you that the vast majority of the people who took early retirement were support staff,” Gieryn said. “If you look just at tenure and tenure track, we’ve got an increase in 14 faculty, from 1,442 to 1,456.”

Theobald said many of the staff who left chose to take the early retirement plan, and that it was “voluntary, so it was not targeted by school.”

The early retirement plan they both reference is a new plan available to IU employees.

Al Diaz, executive vice president for business and finance and the treasurer for Purdue, said Purdue also has a new, optional early retirement plan available to employees.

“About 400 people decided to take it,” Diaz said.

He said Purdue worked with IU on the early retirement plans, and he believes them to be similar.

At IU, the plan is called the Early Retirement Incentive Plan. It offers financial and health care benefit incentives for University employees to retire earlier, therefore saving the University money.

Another step Purdue has taken to reduce costs is curtailing hiring until further notice, Diaz said.

“We simply said, ‘OK, you can’t hire for the next six months,’” Diaz said.

All of this is an attempt to keep student tuition down, he said. Purdue’s tuition has increased due to the state budget cuts, but many new programs are in place to help create new revenue for the school and aid students in meeting the new raised tuition.

One of these is the Decadal Funding Plan, which is aimed at increasing revenue for the school beyond tuition and state funding by cutting costs and increasing research commercialization, among other methods, according to the plan’s website.

Another initiative at Purdue is the move toward trimesters, which would allow students to finish school more quickly and cheaply.

Unlike Purdue, IU has actually hired new faculty this school year, Gieryn said.

“From last year to this year, we hired 73 new people,” he said. “We had 71 resignations or retirements or deaths. ... We certainly had some faculty who took early retirement, but their numbers were so small that they were offset by the hires.”

Diaz said what makes the cuts so hard on Purdue this time around is that they followed a previous round of even more severe cuts.

“This budget cut ... came on the heels of the 8-percent budget cut we faced last biennium,” he said. “It puts us back to a decade ago.”