University Assessing Budget Cut

Over the past few years SUNY schools, including the University at Albany, have been no strangers to budget cuts. This year is no different.

On August 12 the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York approved an overall cut of $170 million for the 2010-11 academic year.

UAlbany alone will face an $11.9 million budget cut during this time period.

University President George Philip isn't overly concerned, however, and believes UAlbany can still offer a high level of education to current and prospective students.

"We're trying to deal with the enormous cuts," Philip said. "We're trying to make them as transparent to the students as we possibly can because we are committed to giving [students] the best educational experience we possibly can."

One important area the cuts won't affect is the construction taking place throughout the campus as that is funded by another source.

"The construction is capital money. It's not operating money," Philip said.

"The capital money basically is money that is borrowed.

"The capital program at the university is continuing, so the Dutch Quad renovations are part of our capital allocation. The School of Business construction is part of our capital allocation. The improvements to the Campus Center and, ultimately, the expansion of the Campus Center is also part of that."

He added that the construction of the new 500-room dormitory will also continue as planned.

However, budget cuts are never good news and expectedly the school will have to determine what will have to be paused or eliminated.

"We are making an assessment of those programs which are important for the university to continue investing into," Philip said. "And the possibility exists that there are some programs that might not be viable in the long term, so we need to selectively invest in areas of strength."

One area that isn't crucial at this time is the formerly proposed "Project 2010" which included the construction of a new football stadium.

"The football stadium has not been funded. That was something that was not part of our capital allocations," Philip said.

That doesn't mean that all sports related programs are going to be stopped, though.

"What we hope to do, however, is to make improvements to the existing facilities," he said. "For example, our track is not a regulation track, so our team is not able to have competitions on campus. We're going to start making investments into the existing infrastructure which is basically repairs and upgrades, but we are not going to be in the position right now to spend  $50 million on a new stadium."

The biggest area of concern is with the faculty as several classes are already being offered on a limited basis such as in only one semester of the school year.

Part of the effort to ensure this will not become a larger problem included the school actively seeking relief from the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act which would allow the universities in the SUNY system eliminate numerous over regulations on contracting and would create more than 2,200 faculty positions and 7,000 staff positions.

   "Clearly we have fewer people on campus today because we've met a lot of attrition," the president said. "That's been going on for the last two years as a result of budget cuts, so there have been vacancies that have not been filled."

   He added that UAlbany will most likely continue to have "a limited ability to fill vacancies," and the school will have to "tactically" find ways to target the necessary people to fill positions in the areas with great shortages.

  "[You can] have a department where there's 20 people and they're down six people, and there's another one with 20 people and they're down nobody," he said. "That's because attrition is not exactly a smart way to go about producing the work force, but so far we've been trying to do it without forced attrition."

   At the same time Philip doesn't believe that having a smaller amount of incoming freshman is necessarily a bad thing.

   "I think that this year the number of incoming freshman has been slightly reduced," he said. "We've reduced our enrollment targets and the result of that has been, both last year and this year, a very high quality incoming freshman classes because we've been more selective.

   "I think academic quality of the incoming classes will continue to improve. I don't see us [greatly] reducing enrollment more than we've already done   . . . The overall numbers here on campus have not declined although the incoming classes are smaller."

   It certainly won't take long to see how much these cuts will affect UAlbany. Students hope that they will be as invisible as the school is trying to make them.