By KELLY KULTYS
NEWS EDITOR
Photo by Drew Dipane/The Ram The budget freeze has affected the employment status of numerous employees with the staff and administration.
At the start of the 2013 fiscal year, Fordham University realized that it had an over $5 million deficit due to revenue shortfalls for projected budgets.
“The University budget is a ground-up process,” Frank Simio, vice president for finance, said. “Each vice president and provost, and then within the provost area each dean, is asked to submit a budget, which is largely based on what had been submitted in earlier years. That budget is then assembled and we add up all the submissions and then we [the Finance Department] work to balance the budget.”
Simio said that the budget submissions are never in balance when his office receives them, so they must make modifications and adjustments where they see fit to arrive at a properly balanced budget.
“In our case at Fordham, we do a five-year budget,” Simio said. “We do an operating budget for planning years.”
The budget is largely based on projected revenue for that fiscal year. For 2013, however, the University saw a revenue shortfall.
“[Many of] our schools missed their enrollment targets,” Simio said. “So now we have to modify our expenses to move them in line with the revenue.”
According to Simio, this caused the University to run an office $6 million budget gap out of the $500 million budget.
One of the ways the University decided to work to bring its revenue back in line was through a University-wide hiring freeze, with the exception of faculty members, meaning professors at the University.
“We want to make sure that we are able to offer all the sections that need to be offered so that our students can get their courses and get out on time,” Simio said. “But it applies to staff members — administrative staff, clerical staff, maintence staff, [etc.]”
The hiring freeze, however, is not a hard freeze, meaning any vacated job cannot be filled.
“We’re in what we can call a soft freeze, but a freeze where each of the vice presidents and the provost has the opportunity to make the argument that this is a position that needs to be filled,” Simio said. “Any position left unfilled that would negatively impact students would get filled. That’s right up there with health and safety for students.”
This does not mean that any position open that students come into contact with is automatically filled. In many cases, it is determined that other staff members can pick up the work of the vacated position.
One example of this is Fordham College Rose Hill Dean Michelle Bata (due to her husband’s new job location near Boston), who was forced to resign from her position. Bata’s main responsibility was directing the undergraduate research program, which includes research grants, the Undergraduate Research Symposium that takes place every April and the Fordham Undergraduate Research Journal published every April, corresponding with the symposium.
Dean Michael Latham, Ph.D., is unable to currently fill the position due to the freeze.
Latham said that many of Bata’s responsibilities have been divided among different staff members, including Donna Heald, associate dean of science, Kara Stone, director of Retention and Student Success, Nicole Scully, assistant to Dean Lenis and Dean Gould, who has picked up much of the clerical work and, finally, Latham himself.
Despite this, Latham said all three phases of the undergraduate research program are still running quite smoothly so the symposium will take place on time and the research journal will still make its deadline.
“We want to minimize the impact on students,” Latham said. “And our staff is very dedicated to the college and to Fordham.”
Other schools, including the graduate schools, are feeling the impact as well. David Gautschi, dean of the Graduate School of Business is worried about its implications for his school, despite the fact that he stated he did not have a complete understanding of the hiring freeze.
“Any form of budget cutting or containment that would be inacted, [sic], such as a hiring freeze, comes at a most inopportune moment for GBA in its attempts to build its prominence,” Gautschi said, via email. “GBA continues to operate on a model that was appropriate for the market realities and for the university’s strategic choices of 30 years ago. The market has changed, and GBA has changed.”
Gautschi worries that as the school continues to grow, offering new Master of Science career pathways and general management programs, any sort of freeze would hurt its progress.
“A school, such as GBA, with predominantly full-time students and a large complement of international students would need the administrative infrastructure and the faculty lines to produce, support and sustain the enrollments that the university expects of us,” Gautschi said. “The opportunity cost to the university of trying to operate a unit like GBA with its faculty and administrative resources that are tuned to an organizational concept that has been superseded by a new reality could be painfully high for the institution.”
James Hennessy, dean of the Graduate School of Education, has similar concerns about the future.
“I just learned this morning about the continuation of the freeze so have not yet worked through the implications for GSE,” Hennessy said via email. “The budget situation seems very volatile right now, with more heat than light emanating from discussion.”
Not only were schools within the University affected but also the Office of Residential Life, where the position of the assistant director for leadership and training is currently frozen.
Kim Russell, dean of Residential Life, said that many in the office have picked up different duties that the assistant director previously held. Still, Russell has a positive outlook on the situation, especially due to the strength of her staff.
“I think it’s made us a stronger department,” Russell said. “We have a pretty involved knowledge now. I’ve gotten to work a lot with the resident assistants. It’s great for me to get more involved.”
Russell also said that despite the frozen position, they were able to implement a new resident assistant hiring process for this year’s new RAs.
Right now, the university is currently preparing the 2014 budget to avoid another fiscal year like this one.
“Going forward, we start with a clean sheet each year,” Simio said. “We want to ensureour expense budget is in line with new revenue projections. We’ve revised enrollment targets based on experiences this year.”
