Crisis in the financial area of Southern University were made clear during an early budget meeting in January where members of the faculty expressed their feelings on recent cuts and poor money management across the system.
Diola Bagayoko, Chair of the Physics Department, expressed his concern and refused to accept Provost Shuuja’s statements about not being able to fund pay raises in salary to those obtaining a promotion.
“The Southern University System owes this campus a significant amount of money. The system knows it and the board knows it,” said Bagayoko. “Now I know of the doubling, and in some cases tripling, of salaries that happened at the system level for some ‘Johnny Come-lately’, so in light of that I categorically refuse to go with what you just said and its not your fault nor is it the Chancellor’s. It is between the system board and the faculty,” Bagayoko continued.
Bagayoko is referring to inter-institutional costs that all five campuses pay to the system to fund their budget and un-reimbursed services that this campus provided to the system office as well as other campuses (i.e. human resources, payroll, security, etc..) Bagayoko feels that if the system would reimburse the campus all of the money that its owed, administration would be able to fund pay raises. According to Flandus McClinton, Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration, all of the funds he was referring to have been repaid from the other campuses. According to McClinton he along many other members of administration worked with the president’s office on how to handle these cuts over the winter break.
” The original cut was $2,436,775 for the Baton Rouge campus, that was the cut made from the allocations given to us,” said McClinton. “We worked with the board and our cut went from the $2,436,775 to the $1,488,000.”
In addition to the recouped funds a large portion of the cuts were moved to the other campuses.
“There were additional funds from the Agriculture Center, SUSLA, and the Law Center that were provided as a part of the allocation to give us some relief,” McClinton added. “I just wanted to say that to let you know that we were negotiating with the president and trying to make sure that we recouped the cost of reimbursement.”
According to McClinton, with the other campuses giving more money the Baton Rouge campus can expect the cuts to stay the same for next year.
“Let me just say this, this is only the beginning. We have information that our cuts starting in the fall is $5.6 million,” warned McClinton. ” This is on top of the $1.488 million too.”
