There may be no merit raises next year for faculty and staff at Texas A&M University, and layoffs are a possibility under state-mandated reductions officials are bracing for.
Texas A&M Interim President R. Bowen Loftin and Interim Provost Karan Watson gave each college and division instructions about how to plan for the 5 percent reduction in state funding.
The cut amounts to roughly $28 million over the biennium -- the two-year period that began Sept. 1.
"We must do what we can to protect our core mission of teaching, research and service," Loftin said in a memo to his deans and vice presidents dated Jan. 22.
A series of conversations are occurring on campus about how to plan for the reduction, and an official described the process as "fluid."
Loftin has said suggestions for where the cuts can be made may be e-mailed to him at president@tamu.edu.
The university has until Feb. 15 to submit proposals for reductions to the Texas A&M System Offices and the Legislative Budget Board. The colleges and divisions have until Monday to submit proposals to the president's office.
The cuts are not across the board, and each college and division has been given a target goal. The Eagle has filed an open-records request for the information.
Joe Newton, dean of the College of Science, said his college is using various strategies, including delaying hiring for vacant positions, to reduce its roughly $49 million yearly budget by about $1 million each of the two years.
"We're hopeful that when things turn around, we'll be able to fill them again," he said. "We will do all that we can to not hurt direct instruction. That's always the goal. It gets harder and harder."
No merit raises
Fiscal year 2010's raises have been given out, but if the cuts are enacted, there won't be any in fiscal year 2011, Loftin wrote in the memo.
The merit raise pool is calculated by taking 2 percent of all faculty and non-faculty salaries, which total $562 million this year. Eliminating the pool would avoid roughly $11 million in expenses.
In June, Loftin's first month as interim president, he announced that he would scale back the merit raise pool from 3 percent of all faculty and non-faculty salaries to 2 percent, along with eliminating them for non-faculty employees making more than $175,000.
The pool's elimination next year would especially hit staff hard because they generally make less than faculty members, said Marty Loudder, an accounting professor and associate dean in the Mays Business School. But, she added, there could also be an impact on faculty quality.
"If you can't keep up with what [other] schools are doing in that particular area, some of your more productive faculty may find homes elsewhere," she said. "But another thing is a lot of schools are suffering, so they probably wouldn't be able to give much in terms of raises either."
Texas A&M System Chancellor Mike McKinney, the head of the 11-university A&M System, has said that faculty members at Texas A&M don't get paid as much as peers.
Last year, the average salary of a Texas A&M professor was nearly $117,000, compared with $126,000 for the university's peers, according to data from Texas A&M's Office of Institutional Studies.
Robert Bednarz, speaker of the Faculty Senate, said faculty members who have been at the university longer are more understanding of the possibility of going without raises because they realize that it's the easiest thing to cut.
Faculty and non-faculty salaries, wages and benefits account for more than 60 percent of the university's nearly $1.23 billion in expenses.
Shared services
Students and faculty have asked Loftin whether shared services -- the Board of Regents-driven plan to combine functions to save money and realize efficiencies -- will soften the cuts.
The plan emphasized combining administrative duties between Texas A&M Univer-sity and the A&M System offices, which are also in Coll-ege Station.
The plan, borne amid suspicion, was announced at a regents meeting the same day in June that Elsa Murano, who had complained about the A&M System encroaching on the flagship campus, had resigned as the university's 23rd president.
"I sure wish that some of the money identified from shared services would be used to satisfy this," Bednarz said. "I think if any amount of that could be credited, it would at least give people some reassurance that the shared services initiative was bearing fruit. ... If we just went through the exercise and we don't see the benefit, people will ask again why we went through the process."
A series of teams were formed to figure out where savings could be made. The teams identified some $16.7 million in savings, but it doesn't appear that the savings have been implemented, and won't have an impact on the budget cuts.
"We just started, officially, shared services actions. We are not there yet. We're working to get those things done," Loftin said at a tuition hearing, after Memorial Student Center President Stephanie Burns said there was a perception on campus that Texas A&M had already "paid its dues" in terms of budget reductions. "It will take some time to figure it out."
Students fare well
Texas A&M students are largely shielded from the financial pinch.
McKinney instructed Lof-tin and the other presidents within the system at a Decem-ber regents meeting to plan for a tuition increase of no more than 3.95 percent and as little as zero.
The purpose, officials said, was to keep tuition affordable for students and families.
A tuition increase of 1 percent amounts to roughly $1.3 million a year in revenue, so even the maximum that regents would consider under the current plan would make no more than a dent in offsetting the state-mandated cut.
Loftin also instructed administrators not to decre-ase the number of semester credit hours available to students. Class sizes could get bigger to avoid that. A drop in semester credit hours, one official said, would create a funding "double whammy" since the state formulates university funding based on that figure.
Other instructions and key points from Loftin's memo include:
* All faculty and staff searches under way need approval by the dean or vice president before they are completed. Vacancies must remain unfilled unless justification is approved by a dean or vice president.
* Decisions to lay off faculty or staff should only be made if the action is financially required to maintain the core mission of the unit.
* The auxiliary departments -- such as Transpor-tation Services, which handles parking issues -- should not raise current rates without approval from the respective vice president.
* The budgets of the Environmental, Health and Safety and police departments won't be reduced.
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