Days before University of Connecticut students finished fall classes, and one week after department heads had submitted their budgets for the coming fiscal year, troubling news began to seep out among faculty and staff members.
The president had informed the Faculty Senate that the university was facing a projected $70-million deficit in 2025, as the state sharply reduced its funding allocation. UConn would need to drastically cut its budget.
The administration’s proposal to confront the shortfall was sweeping: The university would reduce the operating budget of all units — schools, colleges, administration, and institutional support — by 15 percent over five years. (The University of Connecticut has several campuses, with most operations concentrated at the flagship in Storrs.)
UConn’s leaders have assured faculty that they are conscious of and concerned about the effects of such cuts, but the proposed plan is moving forward.
Frustration with both university and government leaders has erupted, resulting in a faculty-union protest and an open letter with over 300 signatures. Faculty told The Chronicle they felt the 15-percent plan came together without proper transparency or consultation.
“All the department heads were like, ‘This is not possible,’ said Jennifer Terni, department head of UConn’s literatures, cultures, and languages program. “We were literally looking at each other going, ‘That’s more than our entire discretionary spending, in every department.’” Terni and other department heads who spoke with The Chronicle said the plan would particularly harm graduate education — perhaps even shuttering some programs.
To several professors, the proposed reduction was alarmingly reminiscent of West Virginia University’s extensive financial cuts last year, in which 10 undergraduate and 18 graduate programs were shuttered to address a $45-million budget deficit.
At West Virginia, nearly all of the university’s foreign-language programs were axed (students can still take some courses as electives), and 143 faculty positions were eliminated. Students vehemently protested the decisions, and faculty passed a 797-100 no-confidence resolution against the president, E. Gordon Gee.
Administrators also drew comparisons with other institutions. “We are not the only university confronting this kind of challenge,” said Anne D’Alleva, UConn’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, at a town hall last week, mentioning Pennsylvania State University and the City University of New York as other examples. The University of Arizona, another public flagship, announced cuts of up to 15 percent across the board this week as officials deal with the fallout of overspending and financial miscalculations.
There is one significant way that UConn’s plan differs from West Virginia’s, said Bradley Simpson, an associate professor and director of the graduate program in UConn’s history department.
“It isn’t just like in West Virginia, where this has been a hatchet job on the humanities and social sciences,” Simpson said. “This would be, across every unit, equal cuts.”
‘A Sense of Fear’
UConn’s troubles trace back to diminishing federal Covid-19 relief funding. The state government had been using the one-time funding infusion to prop up public colleges since 2020, but that bucket was getting smaller — dropping by $47.3 million in 2025 and fully disappearing by fiscal year 2026. The state, projected to be $30 million over its spending cap in fiscal year 2025, said it would not backfill that gap.
Last year, Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, told Connecticut’s public colleges to prepare for significant cuts in the 2023-25 state budget. Higher-ed leaders fought back. UConn President Radenka Maric threatened to pull the university’s athletic events out of Hartford’s XL Center. Even bigger issues loomed at the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, a system of public-regional campuses that’s separate from UConn; it has forecasted more than 650 layoffs.
There is no one magic bullet.
After last-minute negotiations, public higher ed in Connecticut got a one-time infusion for the 2024 fiscal year — described by the governor as a stopgap to dull the blow of forthcoming cuts in the 2025 fiscal year. Now 2025 is looming, and colleges must prepare accordingly.
UConn officials have filed a request with the legislature for the $47 million in federal funds they’ll be losing in 2025, according to Jeff Geoghegan, UConn’s chief financial officer.
Geoghegan said in an interview with The Chronicle that the specifics of the budget reduction will be left to the deans of the university’s individual schools because of the distinct sizes and operations of each unit.
The university’s main goal, he said, is to increase and find new sources of revenue to offset the drop in state support — primarily by increasing student enrollment and tuition.
But at a town hall last week, Maric said “it is unreasonable to assume that [a] tuition increase can fill a budget gap that we have of this size.”
The cuts in funding to the schools, colleges, and administration are just “one of the levers that we are looking at to reduce expenditures,” Geoghegan said.
“There is no one magic bullet,” he said. “We’re just looking at all of the levers we can do and working on all of them over the next five years.”
Chris Collibee, a spokesperson for the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, said in a statement to The Chronicle that the one-time federal funding provided during the pandemic “was never intended to result in increased ongoing state support.”
“Over the last few years, the state has allocated over $1 billion in supplemental state funding to assist our public higher-education units transition from one-time federal pandemic funding to an ongoing, sustainable level of state funding,” Collibee wrote. “The university has a variety of ways to manage costs or increase revenue without increased state support.”
Geoghegan said the administration is “committed to keeping everybody apprised of the situation.” He emphasized that the numbers presented in the proposed plan are “more than likely” to change as they move through the budget process over the next five months.
This is going to cripple the university.
Still, faculty are raising alarms, saying that a 15-percent reduction poses an existential threat to graduate education and assistantships in several colleges.
In the history department, the graduate program accounts for only 3.8 percent of the operating budget, said Simpson. So even if it was eliminated, the department would still need to cut an additional 11 percent.
“There’s just a sense of fear and loss of morale” among graduate students, said Grace Easterly, president of UConn’s graduate-student union and a Ph.D. student in the history department.
“As grad students, we really care about this institution, and we really care about the students that we teach,” Easterly said. “I think that it’s really concerning to hear that this plan could result in potentially the loss of grad instruction in some of our departments.”
Asked directly about the effects of the plan on graduate students at last week’s town hall, D’Alleva, the provost, deferred to the schools’ deans.
“That is one place where deans and department heads take the lead in terms of allocating and supporting graduate programs,” D’Alleva said. “Those are localized decisions.”
But according to Terni, what the university is contending with “is not a cut where you make choices. This is everything,” she said. “This is going to cripple the university.”
“For all the department heads, at the beginning of the semester, the rug has just been pulled out from underneath us,” added Terni. “We’re having to figure out what we’re going to do with the little or no funds we have. How do we salvage the absolute minimum?”
