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Silber addresses BU's budget
By Brian Fitzgerald
Referring to budget reductions and reallocations that will take place
at BU over the next two to three years - including the elimination of
as many as 450 positions - Chancellor John Silber said that "there
is no crisis" as the University tightens its fiscal belt.
He said that the changes are prompted by "a need to reduce redundancy
in faculty and the administration in order to sustain adequate budget
surpluses to support capital projects to which we are committed. There
is no risk of an operating deficit; rather, our concern is to ensure an
adequate surplus.
"There will be no reduction in the quality of programs offered by
Boston University as a result of these cuts," said Silber in an interview
on September 3. "It's a matter of removing waste. This is not a crisis,
but only a minor adjustment." He said that a balanced budget and
an adequate operating surplus can be achieved through natural attrition,
retirement, and other cost-saving measures.
Silber first discussed the reasons for reductions in a two-hour meeting
with deans and department heads on August 30. However, correcting a September
2 Boston Globe story claiming that he had ruled out merit pay raises for
faculty in 2003, Silber said, "I didn't rule it out. We may very
well be able to implement a salary increase later in the fiscal year.
I pointed out at the meeting that a raise was not ruled out on principle.
It's simplysomething I can't be sure of until we find out how effectively
we can increase our efficiency and reduce the excesses."
Responding to the newspaper's report that 130 full-time faculty positions
will be cut, he said that this assertion is inaccurate. "I don't
know the exact number of faculty that would be involved but I think 50
or so will be all," he said.
Silber pointed out that about 450 employees have been added at BU in the
past four years - and 1,200 in the past decade - while student enrollment
has remained constant at about 29,000.
"We have gone though a period of expansion in the number of employees
without an increase in the number of students," he said. "Consequently,
we need to trim back. If you stop to think, we have a total of about 8,000
employees, and cutting 450 is a pretty small item. A cutback of 5 percent
of staff is not an excessive number, but it generates a very substantial
savings and enables us to generate those budget surpluses on which we
rely in the completion of our capital projects."
Silber said that he wants sufficient budget surpluses in the next few
years to contribute to an ambitious and necessary building program planned
for the Charles River Campus. "Over the past 30 years we have spent
$1.3 billion on construction," he said, "and we plan about $1.3
billion in construction in the next 10 years."
The budget situation is a far cry from the way it was when Silber became
president in 1971. The operating budget was then $71 million, and he discovered
on October 31 of that year that the University had an $8.8 million deficit,
13 percent of its operating budget. "This year, I'm concerned about
a matter of $15 million to $20 million in an operating budget of $1.4
billion," he said. "This is clearly manageable. It's a reduction
of only one
to two percent."
He added that most of the reductions will take place in academic and administrative
areas. "We have a turnover every year of a substantial number of
employees - at least 700 to 800," he said, "and consequently,
attrition could conceivably take care of most of these reductions within
a single year."
Silber explained that in the administration of any organization there
is a tendency to add extra personnel, which can eventually create redundancies.
"Every now and then you have to go through an exercise of trimming
it back based on a zero-balanced budget, in which you find out how many
of these employees are actually needed in order to do the job," he
said. "And that exercise brings us back to a reasonable level. This
is a natural cycle for every organization. It overexpands, and then it
refines its targets and gets lean and efficient - and then it becomes
overstaffed and inefficient, and once again it has to become more efficient."
6 September 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations