UA News

The UA president and provost sent a message to the UA campus community outlining steps the University will take to respond to a $57 million budget cut.

University of Arizona President Robert N. Shelton and Provost Meredith Hay sent a message to the UA campus community today outlining steps the University will take to respond to the $57 million budget cut mandated for the current budget year.

The $57 million cut is the UA's share of the $141.5 million cut to the Arizona university system voted on by the Legislature and signed into law Saturday by Gov. Jan Brewer. It comes in addition to a $20 million the cut the UA already had absorbed at the beginning of the fiscal year, which began July 1, 2008.

A complete list of budget impacts on the UA is attached.

Personnel

The UA cuts will force the elimination of approximately 600 positions through attrition, unfilled vacancies and layoffs in this fiscal year, and a mandatory five-day furlough for all UA employees on state and locally allocated funds next fiscal year, which begins July 1, 2009.

Academic offerings

The number of academic colleges will shrink from 16 to 13, and the UA will carry out a significant reduction or elimination of outreach and community-based activities and mergers or consolidations of academic and administrative units.

Public outreach

Funding will be severely reduced for outreach programs including the Arizona State Museum, UA Museum of Art, UApresents, the Flandrau Science Center, the UA Mineral Museum and a significant portion of outreach and extension operations across the state. These will result in curtailment of public access to campus programs starting later this spring.

"By imposing an additional 5 percent cut that all deans and vice presidents have been directed to implement, we will balance the books at the close of the fiscal year," Shelton and Hay said in their campus memo. "But as we said at the beginning, this budget crisis must be addressed as a two-year challenge, and there is simply no way to bring about the needed reductions without a furlough in the 2009-10 year."

The UA has been preparing for additional reductions in its state appropriation since the beginning of the fiscal year, but will now need to make further cuts to meet the magnitude of the budget reductions Arizona legislators have imposed on higher education.

"Let us first note that when we began this fiscal year in July 2008, we were already anticipating a mid-year cut (though certainly not of this magnitude)," Shelton and Hay stated in their campus memo. "In the fall, we implemented what we believe were prudent, measured and fiscally necessary steps to reduce costs at the University. These efforts included a funds sweep and a very strict hiring freeze, which we continue to enforce. Combined with a 5 percent reduction in operating budgets across the University, the steps that were initiated 6 months ago have positioned us to approach the current significant cut in a coherent fashion."

To read the entire campus memo, visit President Shelton's Web site.