The proposed $60 million worth of cuts in the Texas A&M budget may increase class sizes and decrease course availability, officials said Wednesday. That's largely because of 195 faculty positions that will be lost if the cuts are carried through as proposed. Meetings began Wednesday to discuss how to handle the reductions and minimize their consequences on the quality of an A&M education. Officials said they must get creative to reduce the harm. "Any loss of faculty positions will affect class size and scheduling, but we will do everything possible to see that the impact on our students is minimized," said Mark Hussey, vice chancellor and dean of agriculture and life sciences, in an e-mail. The curtailments will come after A&M spent much of the last decade working to increase its faculty size. In documents submitted to the university that were released Tuesday following an open records request from The Eagle, leaders of each academic college presented a dire picture. That picture included the following: • The Mays Business School reported the potential loss of 200 class sections and the downsizing of a summer teaching program that helps students graduate on time. • The College of Education and Human Development reported possible cuts of 70 class sections, many of which will come from the summer months. • The College of Architecture said it expects to increase class sizes, while the College of Science predicted that "individual attention to students will be reduced." • The Bush School of Government and Public Service said its "ability to offer specialized instruction might be impaired," and that the cuts won’t allow it to expand the scope and size of its certificate programs. Many administrators overseeing the colleges also expressed concern that they will have a harder time attracting graduate students and professors if they are forced to cut graduate assistantships. The plans aren’t final. A&M President R. Bowen Loftin asked each academic college to identify where the cuts would be made in anticipation of funding shortfalls from state government, as well as to clear up room for merit pay and strategic spending. In all, 485 positions will be eliminated. The cuts laid out by the colleges identified 103 non-tenure track positions and 92 tenured jobs that could be lost. The non-tenure track positions are held by lecturers, who are usually lesser-paid. Officials said those lecturers often handle introductory or lower-level classes, which tend to have more students and don’t require as much advanced knowledge as the upper-level courses. Cuts set program back When former President Robert Gates arrived in 2002, he heavily promoted a faculty reinvestment program that brought 450 new professor jobs to the university. During that time, more than 900 professors were hired to fill the new roles and replace vacated ones. Gates said then that the goal was to rebuild the depleted faculty and reduce the student-to-teacher ratio, which had grown to a number that he found unacceptable, 22-to-1. By 2009, each of those hires had been put in place, and the student-to-teacher ratio had dropped to around 19-to-1. University administrators had hoped to lower that number to near those of other benchmark schools that had 16-to-1 ratios, but that seems unlikely now. Instead, administrators are looking for ways to minimize the possible damage of losing nearly 200 teaching positions. "We fundamentally have to think about how we are going to change," said Interim Provost Karan Watson. "We are going to have to think more creatively about how we are going to deliver the top product to our students." If the reductions proposed by A&M’s academic colleges are carried out, the faculty’s numbers will return to around the 2007 level, Watson said. But A&M has added about 2,000 students since then, she added. No reductions in enrollment are anticipated as part of the cutbacks. Such cuts would be counter-productive, Watson said, because they would result in a loss of tuition dollars and funding from the state. A task force is looking at A&M’s future strategy with enrollment. Their findings will be presented in the next few weeks, Watson said. "We want to teach the same number of students," said Joe Newton, dean of the College of Science. "We don’t want to eliminate opportunities for students to take classes both because that is the right thing to do and, if we do, the university will lose money and the next biennium have another cut."
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