UNC departments to receive details for budget cuts

In an effort to cope with both immediate and looming state funding cuts, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Bruce Carney has instructed vice chancellors and deans to go to the brink.

Inflicting pain — but not “critical” pain — on all units, Carney said the instructions will likely lead to layoffs, fewer course offerings, higher student-teacher ratios and a paring of academic programs and support services as the University returns 3.5 percent — or about $17 million — of this year’s state funding and braces for a $3.7 billion state budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year.

“We’ve run out of options. If we go deeper it’s going to be very devastating to the instructional mission of the University,” Carney said. “I took as much as I thought I could,” he added.

The affected deans and vice chancellors could not be reached for comment late Thursday afternoon when the University granted a public records request for the instructions Carney sent Jan. 14. Those top officials met with Carney in hour-long meetings to determine the depth of the cuts.

Chancellor Holden Thorp implemented a permanent campus-wide cut of 5 percent earlier this month after Gov. Bev Perdue called on all state agencies to cut an additional 2.5 percent from their budgets, a decision that UNC-system president Thomas Ross and his predecessor, Erskine Bowles, endorsed. The 2.5 percent cut was made in addition to an added cut of 1 percent in August.

“We have to come up with that money,” Carney said. “That’s why we’re announcing cuts for next year now. They can start getting that money in-hand.”

To return 3.5 percent by the March deadline, Carney has instructed a cut of $4,202,912 to academic affairs, a unit that comprises the College of Arts and Sciences, graduate school and all non-medical professional schools. The College will bear the brunt of that cut by slashing slightly more than $2 million from its budget.

As the destination for the majority of the student body, the College will also take on about half of the $6 million that a 5 percent state budget cut would necessitate.

The health affairs schools, ranging from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health to the School of Medicine, will absorb a slightly larger cut of $4,598,632 for the added cuts and $6,569,474 for the projected 5 percent cut.

And the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, whose roles stretch from undergraduate admissions to the University’s diversity and multicultural affairs, must undertake cuts of $2,603,137 and $3,718,766.

Without the relief funding that has accompanied past enrollment and tuition increases, Carney said even the minimum 5 percent cut would force academic units to offer fewer credit hours. Eyeing the end of federal stimulus funds and state sales tax, Carney expressed doubt that an enrollment increase would come again in the 2011-12 fiscal year, adding that the University will likely experience a tuition increase reminiscent of the one approved for this year, which exceeded UNC-system cap of 6.5 percent.

Carney said alternative forms of funding will leave financial aid untouched. With the economy slowly rebounding, he added that the strain on financial aid will soon ease.

Carney, who has overseen the University’s projects for state budget cuts of 5, 10 and 15 percent, said he began preparing for the 2011-12 in response to the magnitude of the budget shortfall and Republican takeover of both houses of the N.C. General Assembly for the first time since the Reconstruction era.

“Their message has been very clear,” he said. “They’re going to cut deeply to solve these big problems they’ve got and then we’ll go forward.”

Tenure and tenure-track faculty will be largely exempt from the layoffs, jeopardizing the futures of some fixed-term faculty whose contracts are up for renewal.

“Some contracts probably won’t be renewed, and that has implications for credit hours directly,” he said. “If the money goes away, they can’t fill the positions. They’re lost.”

In his Jan. 10 budget update, Thorp wrote that he did not expect to see tenured faculty eliminated as part of the cuts, nor did he anticipate canceling fixed-term faculty contracts mid-term or changing tenure decisions because of the cuts.

Carney said he will meet today with his counterparts at Duke University and N.C. State University, a school that recently announced it would eliminate or merge programs and possibly schools in an effort to root out duplications and respond to cuts.

Carney said it would be difficult to find redundancy at UNC, citing the caliber of the University’s programs.

Contact the University Editor at university@dailytarheel.com.