Staff members of the McCombs School of Business were notified last week in an e-mail that jobs will be reduced by 5 percent in the coming months. Out of a staff of about 300, that could mean 15 staff positions are eliminated.
As colleges across the University focus on recruiting and retaining top faculty members despite a tighter budget, they are forced to make difficult decisions on where to make cuts. McCombs is the latest school to announce significant cuts. The Liberal Arts school was also forced to recently eliminate instructor positions.
“We don’t want to stand still or not try to improve the school, even in tough budgetary times,” said Tom Gilligan, dean of the business school, in an interview Friday.
The school will notify faculty being laid off within the next two months and the cuts will be final Jan. 31. No decisions have been made on what positions will be eliminated, but Human Resources Director Del Watson will soon meet with department heads in the school to discuss the cuts.
Gilligan must reallocate $1.9 million in the budget to pay for new faculty salaries over the next three academic years. The number of new faculty hired will depend on how many professors can be recruited with those funds.
He said he will also create a fund to pay for merit pay raises for faculty and staff.
State funding for the University rose only slightly during the legislative session, but as the effects of the economic recession have set in, the business school has lost money from lower enrollment in executive education programs and lower returns from endowments invested in the stock market.
Because UT endowments are paid out over 12 quarters, the school faces a flat budget for the next three academic years.
But the staff eliminations will only meet half the savings Gilligan wants to identify. After the layoffs are made, the school will make more cuts to the budget. That could include automating some office tasks and cutting student services, he said.
Regardless of what cuts must be made, Gilligan said he is determined to expand the school’s faculty over the next three years.
Ed Cannon, administrative assistant in the accounting department, said employees in his department immediately began calculating how many staffers might be affected.
“You feel concern — significant concern — [and] worry,” Cannon said.
Staff Council Chairman Benjamin Bond, a training specialist in the school, said the announcement created some anxiety among staff members last week.
“There’s a lot of questions about the time line and the process,” he said.
Each department within the school has been given a number of positions to eliminate, Bond said. But because department directors are responsible for choosing what jobs are eliminated, the criteria could vary between departments, he said.
Bond said that cutting staff positions to pay for new faculty salaries could mean fewer resources to support the faculty’s pursuit of teaching and research.
“Part of retaining quality faculty is having a good support staff help them with their daily functions to get things done,” he said. “There’s more faculty sharing smaller numbers of staff.”
