KU Faculty Lament Budget Cuts, Fear For KU's AAU Future
On any given day, take a stroll through the University of Kansas’s newly constructed Central District. If you happen to be someone who equates appearances with worth, you will likely be astonished by the wealth that these buildings exude; their tall glass window panes glimmer brightly in the daylight, and untarnished brick raises their walls strong and high above the campus hills. The buildings will inspire in you an appreciation for the wealth that KU possesses.
But you will be mistaken.
Over the past five years, the University of Kansas has fallen into an undeniable financial crisis, due in large part to the massive building campaign that spawned the Burge Union and the Integrated Science Building. While the construction was touted by former Provost Jeffrey Vitter as a necessary process of Changing For Excellence, the campaign depleted the University’s monetary reserves and sent it into a downward spiral of debt.
“From about $75 million in reserves, we had about $11 million when I started, and we were on-pace to overspend about $20 million last year,” says Carl Lejuez, the current Interim Provost of the University, who took up the grave responsibility of handling KU’s debt crisis upon his arrival at KU in 2018.
Along with the overspending, financial support for KU by the state of Kansas has continually fallen, covering a mere 18% of the operating budget for the 2019 fiscal year.
Such desperate numbers require desperate solutions, and so administration implemented a $20 million budget cut for 2019: 6% of the operating budget. While the cuts further anger KU students who voice concerns of neglect for building maintenance, several KU faculty are disheartened by what they perceive as continuing neglect of adequate compensation for KU professors and associate professors.
“I haven’t gotten a salary raise in ten years,” says Dr. Kirk McClure, Professor of Urban Planning and president of KU’s Faculty Senate.
When the 2019 operating budget was released a year ago, Dr. McClure sent out a survey to all KU faculty members to measure their discontent with the budget’s exclusion of salary increase funds. Only 107 faculty responded, but according to McClure, all of them agreed that the cuts were ill-designed.
“The only people who disagreed with me were those who said, ‘you’re not fighting back hard enough.’”
In light of the budget cuts, KU administration in August 2018 began offering lump-sum payments to tenured faculty over the age of 62 who would be willing to retire. This Voluntary Separation Incentive Program, or VSIP, is designed to shrink down the size of KU’s faculty and allow more funds to be available for compensating younger, dedicated professors and associate professors.
“We have to get a bit smaller so that we can use those resources to help the people who are here,” Interim Provost Lejuez says.
Yet for some faculty, the inclusion of VSIP makes another looming issue for KU much more prominent: exclusion from the AAU.
According to Dr. Ron Barrett-Gonzalez, Professor of Aerospace Engineering and member of KU’s Planning and Resource Committee, membership in the Association of American Universities is “an indication of institutional health.”
AAU members, such as the University of Kansas, Purdue, and UNC at Chapel Hill are mainly evaluated upon a ratio of academic productivity by faculty – textbooks authored, research studies published in journals, etc. – over the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty at their institution. The more productivity and fewer faculty that a university has, the better.
The hope of the VSIP implementation, according to Dr. McClure, is to eliminate less productive faculty members and thereby increase KU’s productivity ratio.
“I think that tenure-track faculty are very important, but we are evaluated [by the AAU differently if we have fewer of them,” Interim Provost Lejuez says.
However, based upon those faculty members who have taken the VSIP offer, it seems that the program is backfiring.
Both Dr. McClure and Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez report witnessing especially productive tenured faculty leaving their respective departments out of discontent with their salaries, effectively lowering KU’s productivity ratio.
For Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez, this spells certain doom for the AAU status of KU and will bring about grave consequences.
“Our graduates fan out, and they provide the economic strength and stability for the entire state of Kansas,” he says. If KU falls out of the AAU, Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez believes that degrees from KU will hold less value and influence, effectively reducing the potential earnings that KU graduates could expect in their careers and discouraging high-quality students from attending KU in the first place.
But he claims that there is a potential solution.
“It’s going to take an injection of cash from the alumni.”
By encouraging more donations from KU alumni towards academics rather than athletics, Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez hopes that the university can recover from its financial crisis and maintain its status as an AAU-worthy school. But until then, KU will continue to suffer.
“Once we lose our AAU membership, then the alumni will certainly be hurt in ways that are far more severe than not making the Elite Eight in March Madness.”
But you will be mistaken.
Over the past five years, the University of Kansas has fallen into an undeniable financial crisis, due in large part to the massive building campaign that spawned the Burge Union and the Integrated Science Building. While the construction was touted by former Provost Jeffrey Vitter as a necessary process of Changing For Excellence, the campaign depleted the University’s monetary reserves and sent it into a downward spiral of debt.
“From about $75 million in reserves, we had about $11 million when I started, and we were on-pace to overspend about $20 million last year,” says Carl Lejuez, the current Interim Provost of the University, who took up the grave responsibility of handling KU’s debt crisis upon his arrival at KU in 2018.
Along with the overspending, financial support for KU by the state of Kansas has continually fallen, covering a mere 18% of the operating budget for the 2019 fiscal year.
Such desperate numbers require desperate solutions, and so administration implemented a $20 million budget cut for 2019: 6% of the operating budget. While the cuts further anger KU students who voice concerns of neglect for building maintenance, several KU faculty are disheartened by what they perceive as continuing neglect of adequate compensation for KU professors and associate professors.
“I haven’t gotten a salary raise in ten years,” says Dr. Kirk McClure, Professor of Urban Planning and president of KU’s Faculty Senate.
When the 2019 operating budget was released a year ago, Dr. McClure sent out a survey to all KU faculty members to measure their discontent with the budget’s exclusion of salary increase funds. Only 107 faculty responded, but according to McClure, all of them agreed that the cuts were ill-designed.
“The only people who disagreed with me were those who said, ‘you’re not fighting back hard enough.’”
In light of the budget cuts, KU administration in August 2018 began offering lump-sum payments to tenured faculty over the age of 62 who would be willing to retire. This Voluntary Separation Incentive Program, or VSIP, is designed to shrink down the size of KU’s faculty and allow more funds to be available for compensating younger, dedicated professors and associate professors.
“We have to get a bit smaller so that we can use those resources to help the people who are here,” Interim Provost Lejuez says.
Yet for some faculty, the inclusion of VSIP makes another looming issue for KU much more prominent: exclusion from the AAU.
According to Dr. Ron Barrett-Gonzalez, Professor of Aerospace Engineering and member of KU’s Planning and Resource Committee, membership in the Association of American Universities is “an indication of institutional health.”
AAU members, such as the University of Kansas, Purdue, and UNC at Chapel Hill are mainly evaluated upon a ratio of academic productivity by faculty – textbooks authored, research studies published in journals, etc. – over the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty at their institution. The more productivity and fewer faculty that a university has, the better.
The hope of the VSIP implementation, according to Dr. McClure, is to eliminate less productive faculty members and thereby increase KU’s productivity ratio.
“I think that tenure-track faculty are very important, but we are evaluated [by the AAU differently if we have fewer of them,” Interim Provost Lejuez says.
However, based upon those faculty members who have taken the VSIP offer, it seems that the program is backfiring.
Both Dr. McClure and Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez report witnessing especially productive tenured faculty leaving their respective departments out of discontent with their salaries, effectively lowering KU’s productivity ratio.
For Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez, this spells certain doom for the AAU status of KU and will bring about grave consequences.
“Our graduates fan out, and they provide the economic strength and stability for the entire state of Kansas,” he says. If KU falls out of the AAU, Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez believes that degrees from KU will hold less value and influence, effectively reducing the potential earnings that KU graduates could expect in their careers and discouraging high-quality students from attending KU in the first place.
But he claims that there is a potential solution.
“It’s going to take an injection of cash from the alumni.”
By encouraging more donations from KU alumni towards academics rather than athletics, Dr. Barrett-Gonzalez hopes that the university can recover from its financial crisis and maintain its status as an AAU-worthy school. But until then, KU will continue to suffer.
“Once we lose our AAU membership, then the alumni will certainly be hurt in ways that are far more severe than not making the Elite Eight in March Madness.”