BUDGET FORUM

Another in a series of campus budget forums is set for next week, this one for graduate students.

The organizers said Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi and other panelists will make a presentation, then take students’ questions on the budget — and on other issues if time permits.

The forum is scheduled from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 25, in 66 Roessler Hall.

Cassandra Paul, graduate student assistant to the chancellor and the dean of Graduate Studies, asked grad students to please send question in advance to gradassistant@ucdavis.edu.

Paul added: “Pizza will be served, so arrive early to make sure you get some!”

Board of Regents: What happens to tuition and enrollment?

By Dave Jones

“Five-hundred-million dollars is enough,” says UC President Mark G. Yudof, referring to the cut that Gov. Jerry Brown proposed in January and that the Legislature subsequently approved.

UC feared Brown would propose a larger cut in his revised budget proposal. It came out May 16 without a larger cut.

But UC is not out of the woods, with Brown stating in his revised budget proposal that if he is not successful at extending certain tax increases, he will put forth an all-cuts budget — and propose taking another $500 million from UC. An additional cut of this size had been rumored, but Brown did not make it official until putting out his revised budget proposal.

UC is already dealing with the first $500 million cut. For budget planning purposes, UC Davis estimates its share of the systemwide cut at $73 million.

Today (May 20), the campus’s pain intensified, with the announcement that the MIND Institute will lose all state general fund support for the institute’s operations — nearly $2.9 million annually.

Brown’s budget revision and his warning about possibly doubling the UC reduction to $1 billion, brought this sharp response from Yudof:

“A cut of this magnitude would be unconscionable — to the university, its students and families, and to the state that it has served for nearly a century and a half,” Yudof said in a May 16 statement. “An all-cuts budget, as described by the governor, would represent a dire challenge to the university and a retreat by the state from its historic support of higher public education in California.”

Brown, who said the California State University system also would lose an additional $500 million in an all-cuts budget, agreed with Yudof on the consequences: “Reductions of this magnitude would significantly impair the universities’ critical role in training the state’s work force and encouraging innovation.”

But, Brown said, even after the Legislature approved most of the reductions that he proposed in January, and even after adjusting for better-then-expected tax revenue, “a sizable budget deficit remains” — $9.6 billion, down from $26.6 billion — and he may have no other choice but to put forth an all-cuts budget.

That is, unless Legislature sides with him on what he described as the “preferred — and responsible — alternative”: invest in California’s future by reducing state government, protecting education and public safety through tax extensions, paying down the state’s debt and adopting powerful economic incentives.

Campus budget planning

With Brown having left the UC budget alone, at least for now, UC Davis departments and units are continuing their financial planning under the scenario that Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi and Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter laid out in their budget planning letter two weeks ago.

As noted in the letter, the campus is dealing with a total shortfall of $107 million: $73 million less in state funding, plus $34 million in fixed-cost increases.

The campus will cover part of the shortfall with a carryover from this year, increased tuition (already approved by the Board of Regents) and a share of the savings from budget cuts in the UC Office of the President.

That leaves a shortfall of $68 million — which the campus is tackling with a new budget strategy, one that is more holistic and more surgical, for the good of the campus as a whole.

Out are the percentages that told the deans and vice chancellors how much to cut, but not where. This year the campus has assigned specific dollar amounts for reductions tied to efficiencies, cost cutting and revenue generation.

Read more on how the campus is crafting its new budget.

“As a whole, the plan expresses our determined refusal to allow economic adversities to diminish what we have worked so hard to build — programs that benefit the world in such profound ways,” Katehi and Hexter wrote in their budget planning letter.

“And we strongly believe that the plan — even though it responds in large part to extraordinary threats — presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for accelerating the advancement of Davis’ excellence and global impact.

“Specifically, we believe that the plan’s ambitious suite of measures will allow Davis — through strategic investments, new revenue sources and cost efficiency — to minimize the immediate negative impacts of the budget crisis on our institution and on those we serve, especially our students; to begin to lay a solid and enduring new foundation for the university’s future excellence; and to move ahead immediately in the pursuit of selected institutional goals aligned with ‘A Vision of Excellence.’”

MIND Institute funding

With UC receiving $500 million less in state funding, the UC Office of the President is reducing or eliminating state money for a number of centrally funded programs, including the MIND Institute.

Founded in 1998, the Medical Investigation of Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute is an international research center committed to the awareness, understanding, prevention, care and cure of neurodevelopmental disorders. With an initial focus on autism, the institute's research projects have since expanded to include Tourette syndrome, fragile X syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.

The cut in state funding is limited to the institute's base budget for operating support; the funds allocated to pay the annual debt service for the facility are not affected.

The campus plans to allocate $2 million in one-time money “to preserve programmatic integrity in the near-term while the program works to develop new revenues and reduce expenses,” Hexter wrote in a letter to Vice Chancellor Claire Pomeroy, chief executive officer of UC Davis Health System, vice chancellor for Human Health Sciences and dean of the School of Medicine.

The augmentation will come from the campus reserve, said Associate Vice Chancellor Kelly Ratliff, chief budget officer.

Pomeroy said the School of Medicine has made major investments in the MIND Institute this year and will identify the additional funding that will be required, with a focus on securing increased philanthropic gifts.

"To thrive — to not only preserve but to advance the pioneering work of the MIND Institute — we must inspire significant contributions from the philanthropic community," she said.

Hexter noted that the MIND Institute generates more than $20 million annually in federally funded research, has been the source of numerous breakthrough projects, does a significant amount of community outreach and has many advocates supporting the work of the institute and UC Davis.

“The state funding has played a critical role in that it supports the institute’s faculty leadership, research support, clinical operations and community outreach,” Hexter said.

‘Wholesale cutbacks’

President Yudof, in his May 16 statement, noted how California was given only one great Gold Rush. The state’s subsequent transformation into a “beacon of opportunity” has been dependent on “innovation and hard work and, most important, through the dedicated pursuit of a common good and common purpose.”

“Now is not the time,” Yudof said, “to abandon what has been the key catalyst for making California such an exceptional place — a commitment to providing, as a common good, an affordable, world-class higher education for all who earn a spot at our public universities and colleges.”

Doubling the UC cut to $1 billion, Yudof said, “would reduce the state's contribution to the university’s core funds — monies that pay professors and staff members, light the libraries, maintain the campuses, and all the rest — to roughly $2 billion.”

UC has not seen state support this low since the early 1990s, when the university enrolled 80,000 fewer students.

Yudof noted that UC has been coping with “wholesale cutbacks” in state funding for three years running, “and by now the magic bullets all have been spent.”

“What this reduction most likely would mean, as the governor noted, is the need to yet again raise tuition.”

The Board of Regents has already enacted a fee increase for 2011-12 — the latest in a five-year series. During that time, resident undergraduates have gone from paying $6,141 in 2006-07 (not counting campus-based fees) for a year of school, to $11,124 in 2011-12 — an 81 percent increase.

With an all-cuts budget, and an additional $500 million cut, UC has reported the likelihood of a fee increase exceeding 30 percent, Brown wrote in the introduction to his revised budget proposal. The same goes for the California State University system.

Yudof, in his message to UC supporters, said Brown was the one who predicted a fee increase of that magnitude.

Nevertheless, the UC president said the regents are responsible for setting tuition levels. “But I can tell you that the all-cuts budget the governor described would represent a significant challenge to UC and a retreat from the state's historic support of public higher education,” Yudof wrote.

He urged UC’s allies to send letter or make calls to legislators. “Ask them to support higher education access and affordability by saying no to more UC cuts — $500 million is enough,” Yudof said.

On the Web

More about advocating for UC

UC Davis Budget News