Student Forum: FY02 Budget and Implications of Mid-Year Fee Increase

Campus Center
December 18, 2001

I want to thank all of us for coming here tonight. We have come because something radical, something extreme has happened, and we need to know and discuss together what has happened. Why are we where we are? What has caused us to announce a fee increase in the middle of the year hardly six weeks before the spring semester fees are due? How are students and their families supposed to manage this substantial financial dislocation? Is this the kind of behavior that suggests that the University cares about its students and other members of its family?

These are among the questions I know we will be exploring tonight, with the hope that when we leave tonight’s discussion, we will be clearer about the facts and understand better the process whereby the additional fee of $495 might be managed by the students and by the campus for this coming Spring semester.

But first, I really do want to explain a little bit about why we are where we are at this moment: the fiscal year begins July 1 in any given year. Typically, the State would have approved the year’s budget prior to the beginning of the fiscal year. This year that did not happen. It did not happen until nearly half way into the fiscal year. But the university—like other departments and units of the state—still needed to meet the payroll and we needed to provide for the delivery of quality educational opportunities for our students.

Each week of the delayed budget, however, the situation became alarmingly worse. The campus went from anticipating a very modest increase to hoping for at least level-funding. What we finally got in late November was a mid-year $25 million budget cut to the base of the budget—gone…not just for this coming semester, but GONE. But operationally, the campus has needed to carry on with the delivery of the curriculum, with attention to infrastructure, and with the ongoing general support for the student experience on campus. Monies were being spent, commitments were being made.

The ultimate depth and scope of the cuts to the FY02 budget came as such a surprise to almost everyone that the leadership of the University knew it needed to do something—many things, actually—to save costs in the current year, to generate revenues, while also preserving the core educational experience for our students. The impact to the Amherst campus, all totaled, is $15 million dollars for the current fiscal year—the year we are half way through. We couldn’t just allow the campus to "run out of money and send everyone home." Working together—the trustees of the university with the president’s office and with the leadership of the five campuses—we are trying to accomplish an outcome for the university that ensures some strength and vitality, given the economic circumstances right now and for the foreseeable future.

This is how we came to be where we are—and the timing couldn’t be worse: this is exam time…at the end of a semester like none other in our memories; we need to be anticipating more time with families for healing and just being together—not time for more struggles and challenges. But this additional mid-year fee of $495 threatens to pose just such an intrusion on this needed and longed-for time of release and reprieve. I hope some of tonight’s discussion with its facts and description of processes will lessen the negative impact on how we will be spending our time of respite and renewal between semesters.

I have received email messages from some of you wondering what the next steps are going to be. We are here tonight to try and respond to these very real concerns. Thanks for listening to the how-we-came-to-be-where-we-are. Now let’s get to the facts and the processes.