UNM’s 3.4 percent budget cut for fiscal year 2011-2012 was approved in April 2010 but has only been in effect for the past three months. Now, departments across the University are starting to feel the strain.
The University’s state funding has been cut $8.5 million across main and branch campuses. UNM has lost roughly $63 million in state funding from the Legislature over the last three years, according to UNM Today.
William Stanley, chair of the political science department, said the department’s main goal is making cuts that don’t affect jobs.
“The vast majority of our budget was tied up in salaries and assistantships, so there was no way we could achieve the required cuts without hurting human beings,” he said. “We squeezed the operating budget as much as we could, which meant taking out individual faculty members’ phones, eliminating a student work-study office staff position (and) cutting conference travel.”
Stanley said graduate students are the hardest-hit staff in political science.
“The worst cut was eliminating 30 hours per week of graduate student support, which meant that two to three grad students lost their assistantships,” he said. “We also cut our part-time instructional budget, which meant we were no longer able to hire some highly qualified outside instructors who had been teaching for us for years.”
Teresa Cordova, director of community and regional planning at the architecture department, said the deans and department heads of each college and school worked together to divvy up the budget cuts. Each department did an internal evaluation and identified how much could be cut.
“We worked collaboratively to identify what amount each school or college would take,” she said. “Some took 3 percent, some 3.5 or 3.7, and we honored that amongst ourselves.”
Cordova said the architecture department was forced to cut a full professor position, reduce elective offerings and suspend its graduate certificate program in town design. She said the department gave up roughly $80,000.
“We are the smallest professional school, we have a small staff, reduced elective offerings, and everything is at a very small scale, so it has a big effect,” she said. “This was the best strategy we had for cost cutting.”
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