The following article is part one in a two-part series addressing several key issues affecting Southern University at Baton Rouge, including faculty hiring and firings, possible tuition increases and future initiatives from Chancellor Kofi Lomotey. Part two will run next Friday.
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Like several nationwide in-stitutions of high learning in the face of a recession likened to The Great Depression of 1929, Southern University is facing a lost of millions in funds.
Newly contracted Chancellor Kofi Lomotey addressed several budget reduction rumors and fears for students entering the spring semester with uneasiness about their academic futures after facing an angry Faculty Senate in last Friday’s Board of Supervisor’s meeting, where letters sent by Governor Bobby Jindal citing budget cuts mistakenly were sent to at least 100 faculty.
“Initially on December 12, we were told we had to cut $3.99 million. So, I sat down with a leadership team, including the president of the Faculty Senate, and we started talking about initially non-personnel cuts, with the understanding that there was no way we would get $4 million from non-personnel,” said Lomotey.
“Unless we stop getting toilet paper and other things like that,” he said jokingly.
“So we put a freeze on all but essential travel, all but essential supplies and all but essential hiring of new employees. At the same time, we talked about reducing the cost of summer school by reducing the number of courses or rethinking the pay structure of faculty.”
According to Lomotey, faculty can make up to two-ninths of their annual salary.
“We wanted to sit down with the faculty and rethink the summer school pay structure. We wanted to reduce IT, buy fewer computers. We started looking at employees and the first thing that I wanted to look at were temporary faculty.”
Lomotey said that major challenges given to him when he was appointed were to “upgrade the academic quality of the programs on campus,” and guide Southern towards a more research and doctoral-oriented institution.
“At the same time, I was aware that the Board (of Supervisors) told the administration years ago to not hire a large number of temporary full-time faculty, and what I found out was that we had more than 50 of them when I got here, and from the time I arrived, I knew we had to reduce that number. And so this was an opportunity to look at those whose contracts were up, and then move toward not reappointing them, after discussing them with the deans and department chairs to make sure there weren’t any unique situations that would require us keeping them on, with the understanding that we would then do searches for tenure track assistant professor positions for which they could apply.”
In regards to the rumor that those faculty who received termination letters on December 23, Lomotey said only a tenth of those people would be released, at a maximum.
“We’re still in the final stages of assessing with the deans and the chairs—only fourteen of those people’s contracts are up, we’ve already excluded four, and we had one department that only had three full-time faculty members, and they were all temporary, so those three people were kept, so it may be less than 10. It won’t be more than ten. Most of our temporary faculty’s contracts ended last May, so this is an on-going problem that we have, and we’ll have to continue to address it.”
For students who were concerned that tuition may increase in the years to come, Lotomey only can tell them: “I don’t have a crystal ball.”
The uncertainty of possible increases, according in Lomotey, are a administration-wide concern.
“As you know, that’s always a very big concern of not only the students, but Board members, to not have a desire to do it. If there is a discussion to do this, I’m sure it’ll be a very small percent, no more than five percent. But there has not been a discussion.
Student fees won’t be touched. We can’t operate in the red, it’s against the law, so we have to more closely scrutinized out expenditures for the remainder of the year.”
To address course cancel-lations Lomotey paints a grim, but in present economic times, an all too real situation.
“We can’t have courses that that don’t ‘make,’ where we don’t have enough money to pay the professor of the class. But there’s another problem that we’re trying to address in academic affairs, and that is our courses are offered every semester and they don’t need to be offered every semester. A lot of courses should be fall or spring. While courses like biology, of course needs to be offered every semester, there are others, particularly advance courses that only need to be once a semester. And we continue to offer these courses each semester with low enrollments.”
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Challenges lie ahead for SU
January 16, 2009
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