Budget Modification: Not Okay for All

JSC is looking at a budget shortfall of $85,000 for the coming fiscal year, and those cuts, according to Acting President and Dean of Academic Affairs Dan Regan, will be spread across a variety of college divisions.

Every year around this time JSC proposes its budget for the next year beginning on July 1, marking the new fiscal year. Budget projections, according to Regan, are based on assumptions about the following year’s spending needs.

“The early budget projected higher budget levels than now seem to be reasonable, but, meanwhile, the new fall schedule already was created. So now the new budget projection needs to be a little more modest,” he said.

The budget is normally finalized by the Dean of Administration Sharron Scott and President Barbara Murphy and this next year’s budget, which Regan called “over-optimistic” needs to be scaled back by $85,000.

That may sound like a lot, but in fact even with this reduction, the new budget represents an increase over last year’s budget, according to Regan. “There is certainly nothing here that’s a major crisis,” he said.

Regan attributed the need for cuts to a variety of factors including the cost of utilities. He also cited a projected decline in freshman enrollment – the somewhat reduced number of applicants to JSC for the next academic year – which he said is due to the diminishing number of Vermont high school students filtering through the school system.

All areas of the college, including academic affairs, the president’s office, administration and college advancement, have been asked to share the fiscal pain. Academic affairs, however, has been asked to do less, according to Regan, since the leeway in that area is tight due to fixed salaries, which make up much of the college’s expenditure.

The only flexibility in this area is the sections or courses taught by part-time faculty members, who are paid on a per-course basis. Thus, every department has been asked to cut one part-time faculty section for the upcoming year.

For Chair of the Writing and Literature Department Andrea Perham, compliance will not be particularly difficult since the department has a surplus of Exposition and Analysis and College Writing courses being offered for next year.

She said there was one course still awaiting an instructor assignment so there was no problem on deciding which one to drop. She doesn’t foresee it causing a problem for students in the upcoming semesters.

Chair of the Humanities Department, Jerry Anderson, has a different perspective on this issue. “Does this mean every department should give up a course even if hurts the quality of their program, or undermines the mission of the college, or hurts our [the college’s] retention?” he said.

Although other departments, like the Writing and Literature department, had some extra “fat” in their budget and found it easy to accommodate the modifications, “Not every department is equal,” Anderson said. “Our proposed budget is our fixed course offerings, and over the years we’ve had to cut many courses and we’ve lost faculty and we feel like we [the department] are already bare bones.”

Anderson brought up this issue with his classes and asked students what they thought about it. He said, to students, this budget modification stands in “glaring opposition to the images they get around campus” such as the newly purchased brown house, which cost the college $360,000, though he said, he realizes these types of expenses come from a different budget.

“We would be glad to dig deeper in our department and make more sacrifices when we can, but at the same time I hope that the administration would know that every time we [faculty] go to a large reception with fine imported wines and micro-beer and a big spread …that costs a lot of money from Aramark, that it doesn’t send a very good image when were asking students to select from essentially 10 or more fewer part-time courses.”

(The above image is from www.piperreport.com)