Dear UB Community,
As I communicated in my September letter, I believe it is important to keep our university community informed of the budgetary situation our state faces and its impact to our university. The intention of this missive is to do just that.
In my previous letter, I wrote that we had anticipated hearing from the SUNY Board of Trustees during their September quarterly meeting about the impact of the state’s dire financial situation on our university. During that meeting, the SUNY Board of Trustees did not provide any guidance regarding the budget. As our university’s chief academic and budget officer, I believe we cannot sit idly by and wait for SUNY’s declaration regarding the budget. For the sake of our education and research mission and of our UB2020 vision, I believe our university community must proactively address this budgetary reality.
With a philosophy of active engagement and with a pragmatic world view, President Simpson and I, along with our university’s senior leadership, initiated a participatory process to address our budgetary challenge. As you are already aware, I convened a University-Wide Strategic Financial Advisory Group whose charge was to define and recommend core principles to guide university action. This group was further charged with suggesting revenue generation, cost savings, and investment opportunities with the view to informing a university strategic financial plan. Through the Advisory Group’s website, we solicited feedback from the university community regarding measures to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and increase revenues. The Advisory Group has carefully examined and evaluated the over 1,200 responses from faculty, staff, and students and has incorporated appropriate suggestions in its recommendations. The Group’s recommendations may be found at http://www.buffalo.edu/ub2020/financecommittee/index.html.
Additionally, we engaged our entire university leadership team in a day-long conference to clarify our current circumstances and our options for responding to this financial context in a way that is aligned with and supportive of our UB2020 vision. In a further effort to engage broadly our university community, we have met with the Professional Staff Senate, the Faculty Senate Executive Budget Priorities Committee, and the Faculty Senate Academic Planning Committee.
From this process, I along with President Simpson and our senior leadership team learned there is remarkable consensus across the university about the core principles that should shape our response to these financial circumstances. At the most fundamental level, all constituencies agreed that the momentum for UB2020 must be preserved and enhanced by the decisions made in the next weeks and months. More specifically, there is consensus that decisions should be guided by the following principles:
While the realities of our current budget situation will make it difficult to fully mitigate the tremendous impact that a budget reduction of this magnitude will have on our university mission and vision, the strategic financial plan we are developing from the core principles described above will, I believe, put us in a better position to respond to this unsettling financial situation.
The strategic financial plan will take four parallel courses of action: the generation of new revenues; judicious management of university expenses; strategic budget reductions; and the prudent utilization of central fund reserves. With the generation of new revenues, our goal is to increase income from existing and new sources. Managing our expenses entails, in significant measure, unifying appropriate enterprise-wide and unit services with the goals of improving the quality of services and achieving “real dollar” savings. Budgetary reductions to academic units and to those units that support our academic enterprise will be made in a highly differentiated way consistent with aforementioned principles. Lastly, the university has prudently put aside some funds for key university initiatives and to give us a degree of financial security in times such as these. The central funds are not large by any measure, but will help to meet part of the reduction.
Many have asked about the status of the current hiring and purchasing moratorium. Due to this extraordinary financial situation, the moratorium will continue until further notice. As previously communicated, the hiring “time-out” is an important way for our university to preserve current degrees of financial freedom. The hiring moratorium for new personnel actions will be observed, regardless of funding source. There will necessarily be very few exceptions, limited to transactions that are critical to our academic mission, the health and safety of our university community, contractual commitments that must be honored, and sponsored program activities that are essential for the fulfillment of grant obligations. All requests for extraordinary exceptions to the moratorium must be explicitly approved by the cognizant vice president or dean, with final approval of the President or Provost.
I believe this plan, made possible because of the thoughtful contributions of senior leadership and our many university constituents, will help to lessen the brunt of this impending budgetary reduction. As we all know, it is impossible to predict the actual length and depth of this economic crisis. But through this process we have, to the degree possible, taken charge of our financial destiny. We have accomplished this through beginning to answer how we can best use our existing resources and generate additional revenues so we can manage this financial hardship and, to the extent possible, pursue our UB2020 ambitions.
As always, I thank you for your engagement, your support, and your unwavering commitment to our university’s vision of academic excellence.
Sincerely,
Satish K. Tripathi
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Last Modified: Tuesday November 03 2009