Kentucky’s New Budget Carries Big Consequences for Public Colleges

Kentucky’s General Assembly passed a state budget Monday night, sending it to Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, for approval. The document has big ramifications for the state’s public colleges, including millions of dollars in funding reductions and a measure that strips tenured professors of their job protections in the event of financial emergencies.

Overall, the budget cuts base appropriations to public colleges by 6.25 percent over the next two years. The cut at the University of Kentucky is projected to be as high as $16 million, according to a statement from the institution. At the University of Louisville it will be about $8.3 million, a spokeswoman says.

The most controversial higher-ed provision in the budget has been language that allows governing boards to fire tenured faculty in the event of program elimination. The measure was added by State Sen. Chris McDaniel, a Republican, in the later stages of the drafting process. (McDaniel said he had consulted college leaders across the state before inserting the language but declined to name them. The two largest colleges in the state — Kentucky and Louisville — subsequently told The Courier-Journal that their leaders had not talked to McDaniel.)

“This goes right to the heart of academic freedom,” Patti Minter, a Western Kentucky University history professor, told the Lexington Herald Leader, “but it should concern every single person in the commonwealth.”

Jay Blanton, a spokesman for the University of Kentucky, underlined in a statement the institution’s commitment to academic freedom, noting “the shared commitment we have to tenure as an important value on our campus” and a “commitment to free, transparent and deep intellectual inquiry.”

In a letter to the campus, the University of Kentucky’s leaders wrote that they were developing a financial strategy “to take even greater control of our financial future,” which they said did not include cuts in programs or payroll.

Instead, the university says it will “seek new areas of growth and opportunity.”

The budget effectively cuts all state funding — which was previously valued at $672,000 — for the University Press of Kentucky, which serves all of the public and some of the private colleges in the state.

The press has rebounded from previous annual declines and has reached sales of $1.8 million, a near-full recovery after a downturn in the publishing industry during the recession, a spokesman told The Chronicle. The press uses funds from the state to pay the salaries of about seven of its 17 employees. Revenue from sales also factors into the operating budget.

The fate of the press is unclear, but the university says it will examine partnerships with other institutions in an effort to sustain it.

Robert M. Farley, a senior lecturer at the University of Kentucky and a member of the press’s editorial board, said earlier drafts of the budget bill had language that could have even blocked the press from seeking out discretionary funds from other universities. “They basically said, ‘we won’t fund the press, and you can’t either.’”

‘Hostile’ to Higher Ed

Farley said the pending cuts show that the state government has been “hostile” to higher education. “What Governor Bevin has really wanted out of higher education is very clear deliverables in terms of students who are job capable when they are getting out of school,” Farley said, “hopefully in something that is fairly technical. During the campaign he made fun of people who had done humanities degrees and so forth — what I suspect is that’s why it is on the chopping block, because it doesn’t fit with this understanding of what higher education is supposed to be.”

The final budget does not restore a $500-million fund that could have fixed old university buildings around the state, but it does add money for some programs at the University of Kentucky. That includes $20 million in state bonds in the next two years for health-related research affecting Kentuckians. A new research building for such studies is scheduled to open in August.

The budget establishes a performance-based funding pool that public colleges can access, says William Payne, vice president for finance and administration with the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education. He says a sample distribution run using last year’s data concluded that the University of Kentucky could receive between $8 million and $10 million from a pool of $31 million ($24.1 million of which is earmarked for eight four-year public colleges, the remaining $6.9 million for the Kentucky Community and Technical College system).

In the University of Kentucky’s case, even with the performance-based funding, the proposed budget would yield a net loss, according to officials.

Other state universities will also be eligible to draw from the fund. Payne says the University of Louisville, based on current data, may be eligible for up to $1.1 million, but he adds that new data will be available by the end of April, and those numbers may change slightly.

Planning for Bad News

Any cuts in state funding will be difficult for the University of Louisville, but the institution has been planning for bad news since lawmakers began drafting the budget, said Dale B. Billingsley, the university’s acting provost, in a statement.

“While disappointed, we began planning for this possibility many months ago and, as such, are ready to begin finalizing our budget,” the statement says, “which will be presented to our Board of Trustees at the May meeting. We recognize that Kentucky lawmakers faced some tough economic decisions and appreciate their hard work.”

The University of Kentucky’s spokesman says the institution has time to plan next steps.

“President Capilouto and his leadership team have known for some time that our model for education is facing the same disruptions that other industries and other sectors of the economy have faced,” reads the statement from Jay Blanton, the spokesman.

“The idea, as President Capilouto communicated to the campus, is not to simply cut our way to progress. We can’t do that,” the statement continues. “We must objectively examine new ways to grow to achieve our mission for the state.”