 "Photo: Sara Young/The Daily Texan")
Despite his confidence in the security of his position, Texas State Employees Union organizer James Rubarth-Lay lost his job as a senior software analyst for UT’s Information Technology Services during a round of layoffs in late October.
Although he thought he would recover and find another job, he said there aren’t any openings that match his skill set or salary requirements in Austin. Soon, he’s going to have to start accepting unemployment checks.
Rubarth-Lay was one of six speakers at the Union’s teach-in held on campus Tuesday.
The goal of the forum was to educate students and staff about the University budget situation and to put a face on some of the recent cuts that have been made across the school.
Thomas Palaima, a classics professor and member of the Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets, opened the forum by giving a brief presentation about the budget. Palaima said the budget situation was worse than he or anyone else had initially expected.
“This is a perfect storm,” Palaima said.
Impact on students
The speakers at the forum discussed budget reallocations and explained to the 50 students and staff who attended how the changes could affect them. During the event, a petition was circulated that called for a stop to any further layoffs within the University.
Psychology sophomore Caroline Taylor said she told most of her friends about the cuts, but they either don’t know about them or don’t care.
“It’s kind of frustrating because students should care,” Taylor said. “It’s hard to get a good undergraduate education with fewer classes and fewer teachers.”
Anne Lewis, a lecturer in the Department of Radio-Television-Film, questioned the need to reduce the size of UT’s teaching staff. She said that in order to make an impact on where the cuts are coming from, faculty and staff need to be fully included in the decision-making process.
“What happened in Liberal Arts and with these petitions gives me a lot of hope,” Lewis said.
She referred to a proposal to cut the number of required foreign language hours in the College of Liberal Arts last month that was withdrawn by Dean Randy Diehl after faculty outcry against the idea.
Lewis said lecturers in the College of Communication can make a maximum of $26,000 a year and essentially have to reapply for their jobs every semester.
“We need job security,” Lewis said. “We need equal pay for equal work, we need health benefits and we need the basics that every worker in this country needs.”
Anthropology graduate student Mohan Ambikaipaker said the cuts would be detrimental to graduate students, as well as undergraduates and lecturers. The budget cuts in the College of Liberal Arts could reduce the size of the incoming graduate student class by up to 25 percent.
After a brief question-and-answer session, audience members were asked to gather in smaller groups around the auditorium to discuss possible solutions for the situation.
Away from a corner dedicated to a possible undergraduate coalition, Lewis said that when asked by their department chair, radio-television-film staffers refused to choose 12 staff-taught production classes to be cut from the curriculum in the coming year.
Following the Money
In front of a crowd of about 60 students, staff and faculty, Palaima gave credit to administrators for their handling of University money.
“I think that they’re trying to do their best in a very difficult situation,” Palaima said. “And the fact that the situation isn’t worse than it is is to the credit of people like [Vice President and Chief Financial Officer] Kevin Hegarty, who were very fiscally conservative when other institutions were really spending money like mad.”
The flow from endowment money to UT institutions depends on how investments of the Permanent University Fund performed in recent years. The policy put in place by the UT System Board of Regents averages how much the endowments handled by the UT Investment Management Company returned over the past 12 quarters. It then extracts 4.75 percent from those returns to create a given year’s funding pool — the Available University Fund.
This money is divided between the A&M and UT systems, with two-thirds allocated to UT.
Of the UT System money, at least 45 percent goes to UT-Austin for “academic excellence,” which entails library upkeep and improvement, special academic programs and research. Mary Knight, director of the Budget Office for UT-Austin, said some salaries, both partial and whole, rely on these funds.
The UT Investment Management Company is charged with investing endowment funds to produce greater returns for the A&M and UT Systems. A recently released annual financial audit showed a loss of about $1.5 billion between August 2008 and August 2009. The loss of nearly 15 percent of the endowment’s value is far less severe than the losses faced by many other universities but may exert a lasting impact on how much money is distributed.
Knight said that the newest figures from the UT System predict money from the Permanent University Fund will continue to decline and is expected to drop to $145 million in the 2011-2012 fiscal year. The drop represents a $20 million decrease in the fund’s value since 2008. Knight added it was important to take into account potential changes in the market — good or bad — when looking ahead.
“We can’t base a recurring budget on something that may not be there in a few years,” she said.
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