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Hiring, purchasing moratorium continues indefinitely
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“I believe this plan, made possible because of the thoughtful contributions of senior leadership and our many university constituents, will help to lessen the brunt of this impending budgetary reduction.”
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Read the Strategic Financial Advisory Committee’s specific recommendations.
The moratorium on new hiring and purchases of more than $5,000 will continue “until further notice” as part of UB’s response to anticipated cuts in state funding.
Provost Satish K. Tripathi announced the indefinite extension of the moratorium in an email Monday updating the university community on the status of the financial situation. The moratorium was instituted Aug. 6 after UB received word that state funding to SUNY would be cut by an additional 7 percent—on top of a 3 percent cut enacted in June.
Tripathi noted that UB had expected, but did not receive, guidance from the SUNY Board of Trustees regarding the budget when the group met in September.
“As our university’s chief academic and budget officer, I believe we cannot sit idly by and wait for SUNY’s declaration regarding the budget,” Tripathi said. “For the sake of our education and research mission, and of our UB 2020 vision, I believe our university community must proactively address this budgetary reality.”
The Strategic Financial Advisory Committee, a university-wide group charged with advising UB’s senior leadership on how to deal with the expected budget cuts, has issued a series of recommendations on how to cut costs, both in the short term and long term, Tripathi said.
The group has identified a number of strategies to cut costs immediately: among them are developing a comprehensive energy-conservation plan, looking at the subsidies provided to various research centers and assessing the impact of reducing service levels, such as hours of operation, in some units.
The group’s long-term cost-reduction recommendations include exploring opportunities to restructure academic programs, departments, units or schools; share resources via mergers, consolidations, clusters and other opportunities; and consolidate some campus services and functions.
The panel also suggested numerous revenue-generating opportunities. Among them are increasing the endowment and fund raising at all levels, identifying and removing barriers to collaborations and partnerships with outside enterprises and leasing campus space and facilities to external users.
Tripathi noted that the process to determine UB’s response to the state budget crisis—which has included input from numerous campus constituencies, in addition to the Strategic Financial Advisory Committee—has found that there is a “remarkable consensus across the university about the core principles that should shape our response to these financial circumstances.” At the most fundamental level, he said, all constituencies have agreed that “the momentum for UB 2020 must be preserved and enhanced by the decisions made in the next weeks and months.”
Tripathi explained that the strategic financial plan that is being developed by UB’s senior leadership will take “four parallel courses of action.” They are the generation of new revenues from both existing and new sources; judicious management of university expenses that improves the quality of services and achieves “real dollar” savings; strategic budget reductions made in a highly differentiated way consistent with the defining principles; and the prudent utilization of central fund reserves for key university initiatives.
“While the realities of our current budget situation will make it difficult to fully mitigate the tremendous impact that a budget reduction of this magnitude will have on our university mission and vision, the strategic financial plan we are developing will, I believe, put us in a better position to respond to this unsettling financial situation,” he said.
“I believe this plan, made possible because of the thoughtful contributions of senior leadership and our many university constituents, will help to lessen the brunt of this impending budgetary reduction,” he said. “As we all know, it is impossible to predict the actual length and depth of this economic crisis. But through this process we have, to the degree possible, taken charge of our financial destiny.”
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