Leading the Honors Symposium’s “University in Crisis” discussion, UT Interim President Jan Simek said the university will be a “different place,” facing major changes after stimulus funding runs out, but the challenge is not insurmountable.
Simek, along with four honors students, participated in the panel discussion on Monday morning at the Baker Center’s Toyota Auditorium.
Simek said, like the University of California system, UT faces a 30-percent budget reduction of its state appropriations.
“That’s an extraordinary amount — over $112 million for the University of Tennessee alone, system-wide, and it’s upwards of $70 million to the Knoxville campus,” Simek said. “It’s almost impossible to move that amount of resource from an institution of higher education, which almost by definition has the enormous majority of its resources and people.”
Contrary to popular belief, Simek said the recent budget shortfalls are nothing new and that the university is at the end of a 10-year period of reduction of what the state provides monetarily.
He described this as the university becoming more and more a private university, where costs are provided by alumni donation, research dollars and student tuition.
“Compare your tuition at this state institution to any private institution in the state of Tennessee,” Simek said. “The contribution could be a great deal more than it is here.”
In addition, he said the process of the state reducing its portion to the university was not going to stop.
“With or without tuition increases, with or without increases in development, we are facing lower budgets no matter how we look at the process,” Simek said. “Stimulus funds have allowed us to be more gentle about the process.”
After stimulus funding runs out, Simek said the university faces great reductions in part-time faculty but that the university will not experience the same upheaval as in other states due to UT’s planning.
Still, the reductions will create a different UT with fewer sections of classes, larger classes and tighter schedules for students.
Plus, students who fail or cannot get a class will have fewer chances to do so because of less sections.
“Summer school is going to become an important aspect of how we move forward,” he said. “It’s going to offer the opportunity to take sections that you don’t get in other terms.”
Anne Buckle, member of the Provost’s and Dean of Arts and Sciences’ Student Advisory Councils and one of the honors students on the panel, said when she came to UT in 2006, she was told that the university was on the rise to becoming one of the top public universities in the nation.
“I want us to be a UNC or a UGA or a UVA, and I think we can be with the student caliber,” she said.
But she worried that lacking state resources and having to bear the burden of so much of the system’s budget cuts could negatively impact this goal.
Simek said that improving graduation rates could make the university comparable to those universities, and that is something still feasible, even with monetary reductions.
“That’s a number that doesn’t need money thrown at it to be attacked,” he said. “It’s a number that needs attention.”
Ultimately Simek said he wants to preserve the university’s ability to be comprehensive and not specialized in certain fields. He would rather the university be like the University of North Carolina than North Carolina State University.
“North Carolina is the broad-based professional school, liberal arts, business, that comprehensive institution that I think is so critical to the cultural and economic well-being of a state,” he said. “We don’t have North Carolina State in Tennessee. We don’t have Georgia Tech. We’re all of that.”
Even with the current challenges, Simek was optimistic about both his future and the university’s future.
“I’m looking forward to going back to my department and teaching students,” he said. “I don’t see my job, when I get back there, as being odious and difficult or second-rate. I believe I’m going to go back and move my department forward with the best students we’ve ever had, with the best colleges we’ve had around me. I think our future is actually quite bright.”