March 25
March 25, 2009
Vernal Oliver Sr.
March 27, 2009The state’s higher education system will face a $219 million shortfall for the 2009-10 fiscal year; however, the impact to local institutions is yet to be determined.
Fletcher Technical Community College and Nicholls State University officials said Gov. Bobby Jindal took a different approach in the development of the state’s operational budget.
Instead of assigning cuts to each institution, Jindal turned over control of the state’s higher education allocation to the Board of Regents. The board will be charged with designing a formula to disperse the funds based on how each institution ranks among its foes.
Presently, Fletcher Chancellor F. Travis Lavigne Jr. said no formula exists, giving local higher education institutions no bearings to base their upcoming budgets on.
“Not having the reduction figures puts the colleges in an unusual position, but we have until July 1 to submit our budget to the Board of Regents,” Lavigne said. “In some ways this may be a positive thing for Fletcher because the formula will be based on performance, and we are in good standing.”
Despite having a multitude of mathematical unknowns, Nicholls State University’s administration is moving ahead to prepare a budget based on a minimum cut of 15.8 percent, which was handed down from the Louisiana Division of Administration earlier this year.
“Nicholls has yet to be told how the cuts will impact the university,” said Nicholls President Stephen Hulbert. “But we are continuing to plan our budget based on the minimum cut that was proposed earlier this year. Along with the 4.6 percent mid-year cut Nicholls faced coming into 2009, that is over a 20 percent cut.”
The LDA’s maximum cut was 28.5 percent.
Hulbert said that higher education administrators were asked to prepare financial planning strategies for the LDA to determine where cuts will be made.
Nicholls officials looked at the entire finances for the university and put the academic programs that included the major programs that generate the most credit hours for students first.
“We wanted to protect the academic core, so we looked at the university in terms of all its current student support services, student activities, academic support services and academic programs,” the university president said. “We are trying to identify those activities that we could reduce if we are forced to.”
Hulbert believes that the university has done everything that the Board of Regents’ master plan required to make Nicholls one of the top universities in the state, though he admits that the administration was very evasive concerning what details it provided to the LDA.
Both Hulbert and Lavigne are fearful that the cuts will set the state’s higher education system back decades. In a release, Hulbert stated that higher education officials in Baton Rouge are no longer saying that the cuts will be manageable, as they previously thought in December.
Sally Clausen, commissioner of education for Louisiana, said, “This is a serious, serious amount of dollars to cut. We’ll have to look at programs, positions and other things to see what we have to do to live with this amount of cuts.”
Donnie Vandal, deputy commission of higher education who heads the finances for the Board of Regents, was a little more detailed about what higher education is facing with the additional cuts.
“These cuts are of such magnitude that they can’t be handled by freezing expenses or cutting expenses like travel, little projects and library purchases,” Vandal said.
Depsite the cuts, Hulbert’s main concern is the stability of Nicholls, its faculty, staff and students.
“Obviously, when you say that you are going to put the students first and make sure that the university remains productive you have to think about reality. With cuts of this magnitude, there are going to be dramatic changes to the institution. The students, faculty and staff will be affected,” Hulbert added.
The university president is confident that Nicholls will continue to be a strong institution.
“Nicholls has never been a well-funded university,” he said. “This faculty has had some academically strong departments with less funding. We know how to get along. The people who are on this faculty and staff are committed to living in the area because they love what they do.”
