As cuts loom, Lombardi vows to preserve quality

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

ith a potentially significant decline in state support looming in the coming fiscal year, Chancellor John Lombardi assured the Faculty Senate March 27 that his administration is committed to maintaining the quality of the core of the University. Lombardi indicated that while the current fiscal state of the commonwealth would likely necessitate some "pain," he believes that the University can continue to be strong in teaching and research.

     "We're looking at some serious kind of conversation about a budget reduction we expect sometime in April," Lombardi said. "Exactly how much that will be we can't estimate at this point.

     "The President's Office is working very hard to try and get a fix on this and at the same time to make a very strong case for what the University and its campuses require to be able to continue the kind of high quality performance that has characterized our service to the commonwealth. How successful that effort will be depends a great deal on how difficult the [budgetary] problem is that the Legislature faces."

     Describing the Legislature as "on the fast track," Lombardi said he anticipated at least a general indication of the size of the Uni-versity's state appropriation by the end of April.

     "Any kinds of adjustments we need to make, the more time we have to make them, the more effectively and the more expeditiously we can make them with the least damage to the institution," he said. "In all reality, we have to anticipate that we will share in the kind of pain that is being talked about and likely to be distributed across the commonwealth."

     Lombardi said he has a "pretty tight focus" on maintaining the campus's commitment to its students, whom, he pointed out, have been covering some of the appropriations shortfall by paying higher fees.

     "Now our job is to persuade our legislators they need to do their part to help match the kind of support and commitment that our students have already shown. Unless there's some unimaginable catastrophe in the financial realm, we expect to maintain the quality of the academic programs. We expect to maintain the core activity that we have imagined that we're going to do in the area of maintenance and construction in order to keep this campus from falling apart around us. We expect to maintain the commitments that we have made to stay with our research programs in terms of matching and the like.

     "What a lot of people don't recognize is that this system and this institution in particular have already taken a sequence of significant reductions and shrinkages and activities that actually extend back far longer than the immediate two years of crisis. That is, we took a big hit for the retirement process, the money of which was sucked up in budget reduction instead of being used to reinvigorate our enterprise. We took another hit mid-year last year.

     "But in addition, over the past...decade or so, the University has been trying to keep body and soul together by robbing Peter to pay Paul, and so we have not done the kind of maintenance everybody wanted to do; we haven't done the kind of construction and renovation we've wanted to do. ... We are now faced with a whole series of those kinds of things that we must do - all of which takes the fat out of the system, if there were any fat.

     "There ... is ... no ... fat. Consequently, reductions of scales that have been talked about in various places, will change the campuses ... in fundamental ways. How they will change them depends a lot on how much it is.

      "The way we would proceed, of course, is to start at the outside of the enterprise because our primary priority is to sustain the teaching and research enterprise of the University," he said. "And so we would begin looking at things where we have subsidies and support out in the countryside, out in programs and activities which, while highly valuable, may not actually be supportive of the core mission of teaching and research, and then work through that process until we have arrived at the number that allows us to continue these core programs that define the University."

     Lombardi also noted that, although the Legislature is unlikely to be receptive to addressing unfunded employee contracts this year, he is committed to continuing to raise the issue so that, as funds become available, the problem will be addressed.

     "Whatever happens, at this University, we are going to maintain the core of teaching and research at the highest level," he said. "What we do, we're gonna do perfectly well; ... we're gonna do at nationally competitive levels, in part because we owe it to our faculty and in part because we owe it to the students who are paying the bill. So whatever the news that's delivered to us, when we then come back to you with the adjustments we have to make and we go through the process of consultation that is mandated and is appropriate through this council and its various subcommittees, we will be speaking to that priority, those academic imperatives, to coin a phrase, that are at the center of what we do."

     Lombardi reiterated that even substantial and severe cuts would not be the downfall of the campus.

     "Everything's not gonna fall apart. We have a plan and we have a system, and we have the capacity in this institution to guarantee that the stuff that we're continuing on with here in the center of our academic mission is gonna be first rate, it's gonna continue, the students are gonna be supported, the classes will be there, the seats will be there, they will be taught well, the faculty will be supported in their teaching and their research enterprise."