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Straumanis
explains plans to stabilize college budget
Antioch College will cut eight staff positions at the
beginning of the next academic year in an attempt to balance the college’s
budget, President Joan Straumanis announced several weeks ago at a closed
meeting of the college community.
The proposed cuts were recommended by the Budget
Stabilization Committee—a group of Antioch University and College
administrators and a few faculty—that was mandated by the university
Board of Trustees to find ways for the college to present a balanced budget
for the 2004–05 academic year. Currently, the college has a deficit
of about $1.1 million.
“The board believed that the number of employees
we have is not commensurate with the number of students,” Straumanis
said last week. No academic positions were among the cuts, Straumanis said,
because “we tried to look at the positions which would have the least
impact directly on students.”
The layoffs will affect a variety of departments.
Three of the five current support staff for the college’s five academic
departments will be laid off, along with one professional staff person in
the office of admissions and financial aid, one administrative and one support
position in the co-op department and two dispatch positions in the campus
security department, which will be replaced by technology.
None of the layoffs has to do with job performance,
Straumanis said, and all whose positions have been cut will continue to
work until the end of the current academic year.
Since the announcement, some college faculty have
expressed concern about the effect of the cuts on the school’s functioning
and about the decision-making process involved.
“I think the effect will be dramatic,”
said Ann Filemyr, associate professor of communications, whose academic
area is losing its support person. Filemyr noted that the two remaining
support people will have to serve academic areas in several different buildings
and will not be as accessible for student needs.
In the co-op department, which will decline from
six faculty and two clerical positions to five faculty and one clerical
position, already hardworking faculty and staff will take on more work,
said Tom Haugsby, the director of the center for cooperative education.
The department works with all of the school’s approximately 650 students
to arrange co-op jobs, and the more than 100 students assigned to the laid-off
faculty member will be redistributed among remaining co-op faculty.
“It will be very hard for us, with fewer people,
to manage the volume of work with the attention of detail demanded of us,”
said Haugsby. But he said that he believes the remaining faculty is strong
enough to handle the additional demands. “I’m lucky to be in
the company of people who believe in what they’re doing and want to
do it well,” he said.
While the office of admissions and financial aid
will have to do “some serious planning and regrouping” to deal
with the increased workload on fewer staff, staff members will handle the
increased demand adequately, said the office’s director, Michael Thorp,
who is also a member of the Budget Stabilization Committee.
With the layoff of one admissions position and two
other people leaving their jobs, the current staff of 18 will be reduced
to 15 next year, said Thorp, who added, “if we can keep those 15 for
another year in their positions” he believes the department can fulfill
its mission of recruiting between 180 and 200 new students for the following
spring.
While the cuts will create initial difficulties,
Thorp said that he is hopeful about Antioch’s future, noting that
the admissions office this spring has received 2 percent more applications
than last year and first-year admissions have risen 16 percent over the
past four years.
“I think from this point forward the college
will be in good shape,” Thorp said. “The enrollment is up, the
faculty is rock solid and the financial giving is up. As I look at the total
institutional health I remain optimistic about Antioch’s future.”
Some faculty expressed concern at the decision-making
process involved in the recent cuts, which were determined by the Budget
Stabilization Committee without input from the college’s governing
body, AdCil, or AdCil’s budget committee.
“My sense is that many of the decisions could
be shared and brought to the attention of the college’s governing
bodies,” said college faculty member Hassan Rahmanian. The recent
announcements have left faculty with “a lot of uncertainties and ambiguities
in front of us,” he said. “I’m concerned that morale is
so low, including my own.”
Faculty member Andrzej Bloch, who also serves on
the Budget Stabilization Committee, acknowledged that some on campus were
distressed by the recent announcements and by the process.
“Any budget cuts, any layoffs are very difficult
to deal with. It’s always painful,” he said.
Bloch also said that he understood the concern some
have expressed about the lack of involvement by college governing bodies
in the budget cutting decisions. He added, “But AdCil and the budget
committee had 20 years to balance the budget” and hadn’t done
so.
The financial problems at Antioch need to be placed
in a larger context, Bloch said.
“The problems Antioch faces is a problem happening
all over higher education right now,” he said. “Even the most
lucrative and rich colleges are cutting budgets. This is a national problem
and we are small and vulnerable.”
At the Feb. 20 community meeting at which she announced
that Antioch would be eliminating positions, Straumanis said, she declined
to identify the names of those whose positions were cut, citing a desire
to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Last week Straumanis again declined to name those
whose jobs are affected, stating that because of union rules it is not clear
yet who will be affected, since seven of the jobs are union positions and
laid-off union members with seniority have the option of moving into a different
job, thus bumping a union employee with less seniority. The college is currently
identifying which laid-off employees will choose to take a different job,
a process that will take several weeks, Suzette Castonguay, the Antioch
University human resources director, said.
Along with the layoffs, the college has initiated
a hiring freeze, which means that about seven employees who plan to leave
this year or who have already left will not be replaced, bringing the total
reduction in staff to about 15 for next year, Straumanis said.
The staff reductions will save the college about
$480,000, according to Antioch University Vice Chancellor Glenn Watts.
Straumanis also said that the Budget Stabilization
Committee has recommended that the college discontinue giving stipends to
co-op students. The recommendation has not been finalized, she said. The
elimination of stipends would be part of the college’s cost-cutting
measure of offering more limited financial aid packages to students in the
future.
Students first responded to the announcement of
stipend cuts with alarm and concern, said Straumanis, although she noted
the negative feedback from students has lessened, perhaps, she said, because
the college will continue to offer loans for the financial needs of students
on co-op.
If college enrollment stays flat or increases in
the next year, “there are no other layoffs anticipated,” Straumanis
said.
Last month, Straumanis also announced that Antioch
College has hired a new comptroller, Deborah Caraway, who currently serves
as the college’s director of business operations. Caraway will serve
both positions in the future, Straumanis said.
“We need someone keeping a special eye on the
college budget,” Straumanis said. She described Caraway as “wonderfully
qualified” for the position.
Many in the college community said that the college
needed its own comptroller when Antioch discovered several months ago that
its deficit had unexpectedly increased to $1.1 million, a problem some felt
was linked to the consolidation of comptroller activities at the Antioch
University level.
“We have felt that consolidation of all business
services did not give the kind and degree of attention to the college budget
that it needs,” Straumanis said.
—Diane Chiddister |
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