Dear University Community,
Once again we write to update you on the state of our budget. As many of you know, on Tuesday of this week, Governor Paterson directed New York State agencies to implement $500 million in current-year spending cuts to help address a current-year deficit of $2.1 billion. For SUNY, this translates to a $90 million budgetary impact. How this will directly translate to the University at Buffalo budget, to date we do not know.
To this end, SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher is convening a panel of campus presidents and business officers to provide guidance on how to implement this latest round of reductions. While we cannot, at this moment, predict the outcome of these discussions, we will continue to emphasize that today—more than ever—we must, as a nation and as a state, invest in higher education: Higher education is fundamental to our nation’s and state’s future economic growth and prosperity.
Even so, the campus will need to prepare for this latest budget reduction. Our University-Wide Strategic Financial Management Advisory Group has, and will, continue to meet. Through this faculty, staff, and student group, we have established core principles to inform a university strategic financial plan. The overarching principle is to act in ways that best maintain our long-term vision as a premier public research university. Additionally, University Senior Leadership—president, provost, vice presidents, and deans—have for some considerable time been discussing potential solutions to anticipated budget reductions. As final decisions are made concerning the reduction to our university’s budget, we will communicate to the UB community strategic parameters for this reduction.
These are challenging times indeed for our nation, state, and our university. With that said, we know unequivocally that we must preserve our core academic mission. And, together as a community of scholars and professionals, we must do all that we can to provide our students with an education that inspires and a research enterprise that illuminates the unseen, which as a whole will enrich lives today and the lives of future generations.
We wish we had better news to share. As always, we thank you for your engagement, your support, and your commitment to our university and to our shared vision of enduring academic excellence.
Sincerely,
John B. Simpson
President
Satish K. Tripathi
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
Last Modified: Tuesday November 03 2009