By Dennis O’Neil
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Blaine Hudson shook his head. $830,000. That was how much had to be cut from the A & S budget for the 2008-09 school year. Hudson had seen budget problems in the past, but these were going to be difficult to solve.
“It got pretty scary there for a minute when Gov. Beshear got into office,” Hudson said. “It started to look like the bottom was going to fall out on the state budget. Hopefully we won’t have to make any more major changes, but really you never know.”
Hudson isn’t alone, though. Many deans across the University of Louisville have been asked to make major budget cuts for the 2008-09 school year, with numbers as high as $136,000 in Student Affairs and $314,000 in the College of Business as examples. In making these cuts, some of the deans say they have tried to minimize their impact on students as much as possible.
Hudson said most of the A & S cuts were made to the operating budgets of departments, focusing mainly on things like travel and equipment. Cuts were also made to funding in the dean’s office. He said this allowed them to avoid any cuts to faculty and staff positions.
“We probably cut more in the dean’s office than we did in the actual departments,” Hudson said. “A big chunk came out of the operating expenses budget. Another came out of lecture lump sum funding. We didn’t want to cut any staff or faculty, not permanent faculty anyway, and we still haven’t had to.”
The same cannot be said for Student Affairs where, according to Dean of Students Mike Mardis, they achieved the cut by eliminating two staff positions in Commuter Student Services. Mardis also said that CSS no longer formally exists and its responsibilities will now be overseen by others in the Student Affairs department.
“By centralizing the cuts in one area [of Student Affairs], we made it so that it didn’t impact every area,” Mardis said. “We are also trying to look at off campus student services from a more global perspective; what are other ways in which we can meet the specific needs of off campus students?”
According to Mardis, the CSS facility in Davidson Hall will still remain open, but to all students. Student Activities Director Tim Moore said that he is currently working with the Student Government Association to improve that facility as well as identify other services to offer for off campus students.
“There are a range of things that hopefully we can identify to offer,” Moore said. “We want to explore how we can help students with off campus housing. We want to get the Off Campus Student Association back up and active. So there are a variety of different things that we want to offer that hopefully people will start to notice.”
Staff positions were also affected in the College of Business where, according to Dean R. Charles Moyer, a position in the Economics Department had to remain unfilled for lack of funding. Moyer also said that he had to pull money from the COB’s Labor Management Center, forcing them to rely on their own endowments for funding.
Despite the cut, Moyer sees this as more of a positive than a negative, as he thinks the cut will force the center to become more self-sufficient.
“I’ve thought there were greater possibilities for the Labor Management Center for a long time and I think they will be the better for it,” Moyer said. “Every now and then a little budget scare isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it forces you to make tough decisions that you wouldn’t be able to make if there was money lying around.”
From their perspective though, Mardis and Moore see budget cuts as crippling to the university’s forward progress.
“We’d much rather be sitting around thinking about how we can most positively impact students,” Moore said, with Mardis adding “any cut to higher education is a negative.”
Some in the student body said that they have already seen the impact of the cuts in their own departments.
“I know some people who couldn’t take the class that they wanted because it got cancelled,” senior art major Hank Knight said. “I think the overall quality of education will stay the same, but the fact that people no longer have as many options as before is really sad.”
“I feel like the value of my tuition is going down,” freshman finance Mike Krejci said. “Hopefully my education won’t suffer, but some of the other benefits of being a student here might.”
