[Plsfaculty] budgets

[Kenneth Feldmann]

The Dean met with the department Heads/Directors to discuss the upcoming
budget cuts. As you may have heard CALS is going to have to absorb a 5% cut.
Fortunately, CALS central administration is going to absorb 60% of that
budget cut. Unfortunately, they are going to do it with the salary savings
from retirements, departures, LOAs and sabbaticals. As such, these positions
will not be replaced - probably, not ever. As we have had several
departures, one LOA, one retirement and a number of sabbaticals, this hits
PLS and one or two other CALS departments disproportionately. The Dean does
expect to meet his commitment in my offer that will allow us to recruit 2-3
new faculty this fall. CALS will get us the final budget reduction numbers
in the next few days and Donna-Rae and I will process them as soon as
possible so that you can plan appropriately. Given that we are early in the
year, we should be able to continue to provide partial support for your
specialists. 

 

A couple of final comments:

 

1). In a Heads retreat last week we heard that fine arts, social sciences
and humanities are expecting 7% cuts this year and each of the next two
years. CALS admin expects 5% each of the next two years. For PLS the sky is
not falling but we need to operate differently if we want to continue to
feel a bit more affluent. 

 

2). It is becoming clear that each of you with 20% instruction appointments
are going to be expected to be responsible for 4 teaching credits, 3 if you
have undergraduates and/or graduate students in your lab. If you teach less
than this, we would like you to consider buying out that portion of your
teaching responsibilities from your grants. The salary savings will stay in
the department and allow us to hire the instructors to cover your teaching
responsibilities and may leave some funds to allow us to help continue to
partially fund your RAs. For example, if you do not want to teach at all and
you can fund two months (20%) of your academic salary from a grant (this is
beyond whatever you want to do with summer salary), I will be happy to
relieve you of your teaching responsibilities and evaluate you just for
research and service. If you want to team-teach a course with another
faculty member and buy-out one month of your academic salary, you would be
evaluated essentially at 90% Research and 10% Instruction. Of course, you
can't do that this year but as the budget continues to get reduced, we can
ensure that we will be financially stable if we begin to plan for the
future.

 

3). Finally, another way of bringing in money to the department is to offer
courses on line or outside the University. Please let me know if you are
interested in more information. 

 

Ken

 

p.s. Grant support this past year is a bit higher than the year before, more
than $10M and you have an excellent start for the coming year. 

 

Kenneth A. Feldmann

Director and Professor

School of Plant Sciences

The University of Arizona

P.O. Box 210036

Tucson, Arizona 85721

Telephone: 520.621.1945

Fax: 520.621.7186

Email:  <mailto:feldmann at cals.arizona.edu> feldmann at cals.arizona.edu

 

Visit our School website at  <http://www.cals.arizona.edu/pls>
www.cals.arizona.edu/pls

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.cals.arizona.edu/pipermail/plsfaculty/attachments/20090825/b7d55037/attachment.htm>