Pictured Above: Here’s how the USF administration summarizes the $36.7 million budget cuts for 2021-2022. Source: Slide presented to trustees on Friday.
Courtesy of USF
The USF administration expects no layoffs of permanent faculty members in the fiscal year that begins July 1, but the COVID-19 budget crisis will still ripple through virtually every fabric of the university’s three campuses.
That was the forecast delivered to a Board of Trustees task force Friday as the administration prepares to recommend cuts of $36.7 million during the 2021-2022 year to the full board on Tuesday.
To handle a sharp decline in state revenue, the administration expects that some vacant faculty positions will go unfilled and some temporary visiting instructors, adjunct instructors and graduate teaching assistants will lose their jobs.
And that means that “this will likely return us to higher student-faculty ratios across USF and therefore larger classes and higher instructional workloads for some faculty,” Provost Ralph Wilcox said.
Since the possibility of catastrophic cuts became apparent last spring, some faculty members have reacted with consternation and sharp criticism of what they call the administration’s hasty, secretive planning.
The presentation Friday showed proposed cuts ranging from 1.8 percent to 15 percent in state-appropriated revenue in the colleges across the three campuses in 2021-2022.
While the administration expects no layoffs of permanent faculty members, some professors will have bigger classes and “higher instructional workloads,” Wilcox said.
The administration intends to “protect” the “most research-active and research-intensive faculty members” from bigger workloads and classes, Wilcox said.
Those burdens will be put on faculty who “are not as productive” and “who are hired in classifications, in particular instructors, that have little or limited research expectations.”
Meanwhile, the student-faculty ratio, which is now 21-to-1, is expected to grow higher, Wilcox said.
Around the university, confusion about the timeline and particulars of the crisis has abounded. The timetable presented to trustees on Friday breaks down like this:
** In the current fiscal year (2020-2021), which ends June 30, there already has been a 6 percent reduction – or about $26 million – in state-appropriated revenue.
This includes a freeze in hiring, salary increases and university-related travel and salary reductions for senior leadership, starting with a 15 percent cut for President Steve Currall (whose base salary is $575,000).
** In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, which begins July 1, the trustees will be asked Tuesday to make an 8.5 percent cut in state-appropriated revenue, or $36.7 million.
** In the year after that (2022-2023), a proposed cut has been shown (prior to Friday) of at least 10 percent.
It is the cuts projected for the third year that have drawn the most scrutiny from faculty leaders, who contend that the steep reductions have not been justified and involve what the USF Faculty Senate Executive Committee has called “apparent financial mismanagement.”
A schedule presented to the trustees shows that, during its strategic planning this semester, the administration will “inform/refine” budget targets for 2022-2023, with a vote to approve that plan scheduled for the trustees on June 8.
The recommended $36.7 million reduction in the upcoming fiscal year includes $3,157,154 from the St. Petersburg campus; $24,848,998 from the Tampa campus; $1,894,086 from Sarasota-Manatee; and $6,894,057 from USF Health (which has colleges of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health).
Cuts to the academic colleges – $13,376,261 – were shown as part of the total reductions from Tampa, and include $5,969,860 from Arts and Sciences; $2,841,331 from Education; $1,746,278 from Business; and $312, 572 from Marine Science.
Trustee Les Muma said he is worried about the student-faculty ratio in the Muma College of Business. He asked what ratio is required of the university to become a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).
Wilcox said that the “median for AAU public institutions is 16-to-1” and the business college is “about 33-to-1 as of last fall” but is “coming down” through careful management.
“So we have some work to do here,” Wilcox said.
Gaining membership in the AAU, which describes itself as an organization of the country’s most distinguished universities, is a top priority of the trustees and administration. There are 65 AAU universities now.
Trustee Tim Boaz, a professor who is president of the USF Faculty Senate, asked if adjunct instructors, part-timers who teach a lot of USF’s classes, are included when calculating a student-faculty ratio.
“It’s full-time faculty, and each adjunct faculty member counts as one-third of an FTE (full-time equivalent),” Wilcox said.
“This may work out to be comparable in terms of a metric,” Boaz said. “But I think the student-to-faculty ratio doesn’t capture the whole story as it pertains to students.
“I think one thing that’s really important . . . is that students like having small classes. Every student is going to end up landing in some large-enrollment classes, and as long as we can make sure that they get that experience of having a sufficient number of small classes where they get more individual attention from the faculty member, I think that’s the critical issue with regard to their experience of class size.”
