CARL LAM
Senior Staff Writer
It’s a difficult time to be an adjunct professor on campus. Amidst the campus there is continued uncertainty of whether they’ll be returning in the Fall. There is one specific ingredient that is contributing to the fiscal commotion — money.
The SUNY system requested $82.2 million from the state for support but didn’t see even a tenth of that amount. The 64-campus system only received $7.6 million, a far cry from the amount they had initially planned for. This problem is not just unique to our campus as it affects everyone from Buffalo to Stony Brook.
In President Horvath’s budget presentation, she outlined the priorities for the coming fiscal year. The plan is to ensure that students have full access to the necessary classes and services, avoiding layoffs, evaluating new hires, engaging the campus in new financial realities and committing to collaboration.
That lack of funding from the state has created a shortfall in funding of over $7.7 million, which was calculated by the amount the university projects to bring in subtracted by the amount that the university is projected to spend. This creates a negative amount, which then can be considered the shortfall.
There is a little glimmer of positive news considering that the university will be able to offset $7.7 million amount with savings from fees and utility savings. This will leave the university with just under $6 million, which can be considered the adjusted shortfall.
Essentially, the university is $6 million short on funds. The enrollment in the past five years has declined by 300 students, which is significant for a campus of Fredonia’s size. Transfer and graduate student enrollment has also decreased since the number of high school graduates across New York State keeps shrinking.
The division of Academic Affairs has a budget just over $32.5 million, which is the largest part of the university’s budget. Approximately $10.3 million is set aside for non-instructional salaries and $20.7 million for salaries of professors and teaching faculty.
Within that figure of $20.7 million, 80 percent of that is money that’s set aside for tenure track faculty and the remaining 20 percent is for contingent faculty. Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Dr. Terry Brown said without more students, the funding also takes a hit.
“As our enrollments decline, the variable cost in our budget is our contingent faculty,” she said. “Our contingent faculty are hired contingent on enrollment and funding. As we see a decrease in our enrollment and revenues, we have to make an adjustment and reduction on the side of our contingent faculty.”
Some may wonder why contingent faculty are taking the brunt of the hit, but Brown said she’s been monitoring what’s been going on nationwide.
“I’m offering another way to go, which is to hold those faculty lines to focus on recruitment and retention of students and shifting the primary responsibility of teaching across the curriculum to our tenure track faculty,” Brown said.
When students sign up for courses, the credit hours count toward a faculty member’s total of student credit hours. For example, if a student took a three-credit course and the class size was 25, the instructor would generate 75 student credit hours.
In Brown’s presentation to department chairs, it was noted that the contingent and tenure track faculty are generating almost the same amount of student credit hours. The numbers are hard to dispute since tenure track faculty generated 76,993 student credit hours while contingent faculty generated 77,052. This data was based on the enrollment in classes from Spring and Fall 2013.
Brown said she’s trying to avoid what some campuses are doing by reducing the number of full-time faculty and shifting almost exclusively to contingent faculty.
“I have been reading and studying what has been happening in higher education and that is unsustainable to continue to cut faculty lines while adding contingent faculty at a low cost,” Brown said. “It’s simply unsustainable and it’s not in keeping with our values.”
Some are wondering why this is just now taking place. The cost of adjunct professors has significantly increased from $2.9 million to $4.4 million while enrollment has decreased. If nothing were to change for the coming years, in terms of staffing, the cuts in the future would be drastic.
“What I’m saying is that the urgency is now because we don’t want to spend all the emergency savings, which is already minimal,” she said.
The use of the emergency savings is a move that no educational institution wants to consider, but the forecast for the next four academic school years packs a powerful punch in direct layoffs if nothing is done now.
Fredonia’s emergency savings can only last two academic years before those funds go dry. Even with those deficits being slightly offset, the shortfall in the 2015-2016 academic year would mean over $1.4 million in layoffs, $4.2 million in layoffs for the 2016-2017 academic year and $4.3 million in layoffs during the 2017-2018 academic year.
That totals to almost $10 million in direct layoffs if nothing changes, and that’s not an option Brown is willing to explore.
“If we continue with the status quo, it is not affordable,” Brown said. “If we don’t do anything, we will be forced to lay off people who are already here.”
Brown has been working on a plan that goes back to the simple concept of more money and less spending.
“What I’m proposing is that we focus, for the next two years, on the recruitment and retention of our students so that we generate more revenue through tuition and we decrease our expenditures by scrutinizing administrative costs and costs of instruction,” she said.
United University Professions (UUP) President Dr. Ziya Arnavut cited the state for putting higher education on the back burner.
“This is all happening because we are not getting enough support from the state. The cost of education is going and state support has been going down,” Arnavut said. “There’s a crisis, yet politicians are not taking higher education into account as much as they do with K-12.”
As union president, Arnavut fights for his members in matters related to the union. However, there’s one catch with the contingent faculty that he doesn’t agree with.
“Unfortunately, with the contract that we have, we don’t have many rights for the part-timers to protect them,” Arnavut said. “I asked the union’s central president, ‘how do we have two memberships [with] a member that I can defend and another member I cannot defend?’ It’s not right for us and it’s not right for them because if I am a member, I should be able to defend them equally well.”
He is aware that this doesn’t benefit the university’s long term mission but finds that contractual language has prevented them from doing more.
“Unfortunately for part-timers, we cannot do that due to the contract and the language. So they are easy targets to lay off when there’s a need,” he said. “From day one, I said that this isn’t right and the system created some problems because they saw this as a cheap solution. But in the long term, this is hurting the whole system.”
Arnavut is looking at this situation with a positive outlook on what can be done to save jobs.
“We are hoping nobody will be laid off, but the reality is that some will be. I am confident that the president, vice president and administration will try their best and I trust them that they’ll do the right thing,” he said.
That optimism is reflected by Brown as well who said that the universities that will thrive in the near future are those that will be able to work together.
“Those universities are going to come up with the solutions that are necessary. I believe that SUNY Fredonia is one of those rare institutions with the culture of working together that will make it possible for us to find the solutions,” Brown said. Brown recognizes the challenges that contingent faculty face and is working to make their job better in the future.
“I built that in our plan that we, in two years, have a clear pathway for promotion of the adjuncts and that we’re paying them at a minimum of $1000 per credit,” Brown said. “I am deeply appreciative of what our contingent faculty do here to help our students learn in teaching our students. I know that we have a lot of work to do to address their concerns.”