Cut of the Day

Metropolitan Center for Regional Studies. The director is Linda Chapin, a politician who parlayed her connections into a lucrative sinecure. The loss of this unit would have no impact on students.

Snarky Comment

Do you think Hickey could be a kind of reverse Pinocchio (i.e., whenever he lies he gets shorter)?

Suggestions for Cuts

Over the summer, I’m going to post suggestions for budget cuts. These could be a person or a unit. Because wasting money is a bad idea in even good economic times, these will be cuts that should be made even if the budget situation were better.

As of late, some readers have opened my eyes to gigantic wastes of money at UCF. So, if you want to make a case for a cut, send an email.

They Will Keep Themselves

The announced layoffs hit the faculty hard. Among the employees to be laid off, 88 percent are faculty and only 12 percent are staff. This proportion is much different than the one offered by Provost Hickey when he said the sky was falling. At that time, the distribution of layoffs would have been 63 percent faculty and 37 percent staff.

Now, it is true that Hickey has said that the administrative budget will be cut by 3.1 percent or 3.7 million and presumably this means more staff cuts. However, no specifics have been offered. Here’s my prediction: Hickey is lying. Hickey probably enjoyed cutting programs that didn’t earn (i.e., produce a lot of student credit hours), but he will not want to cut his own people (i.e., useless high level administrators).

UCF Announces a Layoff List (sort of)

Go read the article.

It is interesting that UCF is specific about which programs are likely to be cut, but they offer no details about how they plan to cut 3.7 million dollars in administrative costs.

I’ll have more thoughts later.

The Sky isn’t Falling, but it Might Rain

The Petite Provost has issued an update:

This loss of recurring state dollars will require us to move beyond the “financial belt tightening” we have performed so far and will force us to consider program eliminations and layoffs, though not of the magnitude we previously discussed when faced with a larger cut.

The Sky isn’t Falling

From the Orlando Sentinel:

The University of Central Florida estimated in April that 330 faculty and 190 staff jobs could be lost and 25 academic programs closed in the event of deep budget cuts. Those estimates were based on the possibility of budget cuts in the $57 million range. The Legislature wound up cutting $38 million in general state revenue and Lottery money, replacing it with about $31 million in stimulus money and higher tuition. The $7 million gap can be covered by university reserves, officials said.