Faculty leaders at the University of Southern Maine balked in March when President Theodora J. Kalikow announced a plan to fire a dozen tenured and tenure-track professors, dismiss 35 staff members, and eliminate four academic programs to help cover part of a $14-million budget shortfall.
A month later she stunned her faculty critics by abruptly reversing course and telling them that, if they could find $1.26-million in savings by the end of May, she would spare the faculty jobs and perhaps the programs but not the staff positions.
“I took a hell of a chance,” Ms. Kalikow said last week in an interview. But “what if they could actually come up with something? Wouldn’t it be too bad if we never knew?”
A Faculty Senate committee accepted the challenge, identifying nearly $5-million in potential savings, nearly four times what the president had sought. Much of that sum came from voluntary faculty retirements, but two of the most substantial cuts were aimed squarely at administrators’ pay.
Ms. Kalikow said those suggestions were unlikely to gain purchase, and the possibility of cuts in programs still hovers. She and other top administrators have been reviewing the faculty proposal and are scheduled to respond to it this week.
Like many institutions in the Northeast and Midwest in particular, Southern Maine has been gut-punched by a combination of tuition freezes, falling high-school graduation rates, and flat financial support from the state. Ms. Kalikow said that when she became interim president there, in 2012, immediately upon retiring after 18 years as president of the University of Maine at Farmington, “the state of the university’s finances was not good, but it’s gotten a lot worse since.” Enrollments have continued to decline, and a contract settlement with union employees came with a higher price tag than had been projected.
Maine’s population is centered in the southern part of the state, and faculty members have suggested that the state’s financing of their institution is undersized, given its economic importance. Southern Maine’s three campuses supply graduates to the health-care and financial-services industries and the nonprofit and small-business sectors. Ms. Kalikow said a committee had been formed to explore restructuring the institution as a “metropolitan university” for busy, nontraditional students, a proposal that her critics see as a move away from the liberal arts.
Indeed, she acknowledged that, as administrators explored cuts in the face of the university’s projected $14-million deficit in the 2015 fiscal year, the ax fell hardest on the arts and sciences. But Ms. Kalikow argued that those disciplines had the lowest faculty-to-student ratios and that the cuts she proposed in March were intended to align faculty staffing with student demand.
In addition to the job cuts, the graduate program in American and New England studies was to be eliminated, as were majors in geosciences and in recreation and leisure studies on the Portland and Gorham campuses, and in arts and humanities at the university’s Lewiston-Auburn College.
Students protested outside the provost’s office in Portland, and angry faculty members warned that the proposed cuts threatened to cause irreparable harm to the university. Eliminating recreation and leisure studies, they argued, made no sense in a state with an aging population that desperately needs workers trained in therapeutic recreation.
Ms. Kalikow reversed her decision on that program because “all of the sudden people said, There’s got to be another thing we can do,” she said. “They were inspired to do it in a way they hadn’t done before.”
Voluntary Retirements
But faculty critics said the turnabout suggested the proposed cuts had not been carried out as scientifically as administrators were claiming.
Jerry LaSala Jr., chairman of the Faculty Senate, said that when the president invited him and his colleagues to find $1.26-million in potential savings, they exceeded that sum to show their commitment to working together with administrators to resolve Southern Maine’s crisis. “We know this is going to come back next year,” he said.
President Kalikow, asked how she felt about the faculty’s $5-million in potential savings, replied: “That’s what they claim to have found.”
The biggest share—$2.1-million—was in voluntary faculty retirements.
“Many of our colleagues have been truly generous as they elected to retire early to save the jobs of the younger faculty who are the future of this institution,” said a letter accompanying the faculty budget proposal. “There were also savings to be found through voluntary separations as faculty members have decided to leave the institution for various reasons.”
Tara Coste, vice chairwoman of the Faculty Senate, said the guiding principle behind the proposed cuts was to insulate the students to the greatest extent possible. Thus the faculty committee suggested that Southern Maine could save $45,000 on its $340,000 annual cellphone budget by making many administrators (but not employees such as public-safety personnel) pay for their own phones.
The most controversial proposals were for a 20-percent spending reduction on nonunion administrators who earn more than $80,000, through attrition, retrenchment, or salary cuts (a savings of $1.2-million), and a 10-percent spending reduction on administrators earning $60,000 to $80,000 (a savings of $400,000).
Mr. LaSala complained that at Southern Maine, as at many universities, vice provosts and assistant and associate deans have proliferated in recent years, while the ranks of key staff members have been cut to the bone.
“One of the things the faculty has been trying to do is not save faculty by throwing staff under the bus,” he said. “Especially the staff that have front-line contact with the students, people in admissions, administrative assistants in the departments, the registrar’s office. Those are the people who help the university run on a day-to-day basis. We want to keep them around.”
Soon, Another Search for Cuts
President Kalikow countered that she had eliminated many administrative positions over the last two years and that she expected to continue to do so. “But telling everybody that makes over $80,000 a year that they’re going to get a salary reduction is probably not in the cards,” she said.
Mr. LaSala said that, while collective-bargaining agreements forbid similar reductions for top-paid faculty members, the proposal given to Ms. Kalikow suggested voluntary pay cuts for anyone whose salary exceeds the average for a full professor.
Of Southern Maine’s $14-million shortfall, the university has trimmed $4.5-million through staff layoffs, attrition, cutting operating expenses, and limiting deferred-maintenance payments. The University of Maine system contributed $7-million in budget-stabilization funds, though trustees have yet to rule whether that sum will be treated as a gift or as a loan that, presumably, would have to be repaid. That left Southern Maine administrators and faculty members to find the remaining $2.5-million.
If Ms. Kalikow rejects the faculty’s proposals, the three academic programs could go back onto the chopping block, Mr. LaSala said, putting seven faculty positions at risk as early as December.
Southern Maine’s 2015 budget plan must be sent to the system office by June 16, and Ms. Kalikow has no plans for a vacation this summer. A deficit of $12.5-million is projected for 2016, and the search for cuts starts anew on July 1.
