Boston University will be cutting between 400 and 500 jobs, including faculty positions, in a “minor budgetary adjustment,” according to Acting President and Chancellor John Silber.
The cuts will save BU approximately $25 million over the next two years, Silber informed deans and department heads in a meeting last Friday.
“We’ve added 450 new employees over the last four years without any increase in the student body,” Silber said in an interview with The Daily Free Press yesterday. “This represents a reduction of efficiency and an introduction of redundancy.
“There is a cyclical pattern in operation at every institution — they expand and become somewhat less efficient, then they have to have a budgetary exercise in which waste is cut out and they become efficient again,” he continued. “We’re at the end of a rising cycle that leads to redundancy.”
The reduction would affect five percent of BU’s 8,000 workers, Silber said. Although he said the cuts would be made mainly to streamline the University, the monetary benefits will also help with long-range projects after budget cuts this past year and the decrease of the budget surplus from $22.5 million to $17 million.
“That’s the purpose of trying to fulfill our objectives — it’s not a question of balancing the budget, we’ve done it the last 31 years, and we’ll do it this year — but a matter of generating sufficient funds to meet the demands of a very ambitious building program,” Silber said.
While many of the positions lost will be secretarial and administrative, professors are not exempt from the possibility of dismissal, according to University spokesman Kevin Carleton. However, the University is not preparing to lay off professors at present.
“We don’t know the future, but [dismissing professors] is not in our thinking or planning right now,” Carleton said.
Instead, professors will vacate their seats for more natural reasons, and their positions will not be filled, according to Silber.
“Attrition by retirement, by death … will take care of a very large number [of professors],” he said. “Every year we have a turnover of many more than 50 faculty members.”
Silber said between 50 and 60 positions were expected to be unfilled at the completion of the academic year.
If professors are dismissed, it will be due to their lack of merit, not age, according to Silber.
“There’s some people that need to retire … because they’re no longer effective,” Silber said. “We encourage retirements of relatively young people who have lost their spark.”
Professor Robert Zelnick, chairman of the journalism department in the College of Communication, said he was already working on trying to consolidate a required journalism course, currently taught by several professors, into a lecture. However, most courses would not work as lectures due to their hands-on nature, he said.
Zelnick added that hiring adjunct professors to teach classes was also a possibility, naming WBZ radio commentator David Brudnoy as a current adjunct.
“We need some adjuncts on the faculty,” Zelnick said. “It adds spice, and frankly, it’s a way to save money.”
The process of cutting back began last semester with BU’s announcement of cuts between two to four percent of the operating budget over the next two years. A result was a freeze on pay raises for professors and administrators, Silber announced during the meeting with deans and department heads.
“Until we find ways to reduce the operating budget, it will be impossible to consider salary increases for faculty and administration,” Silber said. “On the other hand … if we find before the end of the fiscal year we can make these savings, then we will offer salary increases.”
Because the school has already begun adjusting over the previous semester, Zelnick said he did not foresee any problems with the latest cut.
“I don’t anticipate carnage, bloodletting,” he said. “I think the underlying commitment of everyone to education will be honored.
“There’s nothing special about this, it’s something that just occurs periodically … we’ve gone through this exercise four to five times over the last 30 years,” he said.
Silber emphasized the particular approach to the cuts.
“There’s no fixed rules … if you had fixed rules, you wouldn’t need a human being to be president of the University, you could hire a computer or a monkey,” he said. “It has to be an exercise of judgment which treats every individual case on an individual basis.”
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