The Facts:
Governor Bev Perdue announced her budget plan Tuesday for the next fiscal year. The proposal would require UNC system schools to cut no more than four percent, approximately $100 million, from their budgets.
Our Opinion:
The proposed cuts would be catastrophic for the academic units at N.C. State and other public universities in North Carolina. Perdue must reconsider her proposal.
The U.S. is just beginning to recover from the worst recession in a century. The collapse of the global financial system and subsequent aftershocks left the federal government in a massive hole and significantly impacted the ability of many states to balance their budget during the last fiscal year.
North Carolina, in particular, faced major shortfalls and was forced to call for reversions from almost every state agency and department.
The cuts mandated by the state delved deep into the state’s universities and forced N.C. State to fire employees and tighten its collective belt. Entire departments and colleges have literally erased their budgets down to faculty and bare-bones staff costs. Many college deans and department heads have said they literally cannot cut anymore out of their budget without reducing faculty and course offerings.
Likewise, students are already required to pay a $200 tuition increase next year to help alleviate some of the states woes.
The message clearly hasn’t sunken in for Governor Bev Perdue, though. The struggles of students to pay additional tuition and the warning from Erskine Bowles, president of the UNC system, that the academic cores of state universities will be seriously impacted was missed by her budget plan.
The nearly $1 billion statewide cut required for next year’s budget is by no means insignificant and the whole state will definitely suffer as a result. But it is utterly ridiculous for Perdue to ignore North Carolina’s constitutional mandate toward higher education and expect the UNC system to cut another four percent out of its already beleaguered budget.
The $100 million the UNC system schools will have to account for is tantamount to a severe body blow to the University’s academic units. The UNC system general administration has indicated the cut will require the elimination of 1,200 statewide University employees, of which half will likely be faculty.
This doesn’t mean many faculty members will be fired, but it certainly means retiring teachers will not be replaced — a deadly process, which will inevitably lead to academic core damage and significantly reduced class offerings.
These cuts will permanently impact higher education across the state and make four-year graduation a practical impossibility.
Students have already borne a large burden in the cuts to state universities and increased tuition; negatively affecting NCSU and the other UNC system schools more is nothing short of catastrophic. Perdue must reevaluate these cuts and consider the important role the UNC system plays in the state’s future — this isn’t an area to fiscally suffocate.