Waterloo: University of Waterloo’s Finances

Waterloo, March 26, 2009(Daily Bulletin): University of Waterloo’s (UW) President David Johnston and provost Dr. Amit Chakma will comment on the University’s financial situation, and answer questions, at a “Town Hall” meeting to be held April 8, aimed at staff and faculty members.

The event will come the day after the spring meeting of UW’s Board of Governors, which is expected to approve the 2009-10 operating budget and a 3 per cent cut in most spending. The budget was drafted with a further cut of 5 per cent in mind for the following year, Dr. Chakma told UW’s senate as it discussed the budget on Monday of this week.

“We have a difficult task ahead of us,” Dr. Chakma told the senate, although “Waterloo is going into this period in a relatively advantageous position,” relative to other universities.

We’ll know more about one aspect of the university’s finances a few hours from now, if the Ontario spring budget, to be presented this afternoon by Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, says anything definite about college and university grants for the year ahead. Dr. Chakma’s budget is built on the assumption that there will be no new money, but no actual cuts to the current level of grants.

As Johnston told the senate at Monday’s meeting, universities are under pressure from multiple directions. Enrolment growth has been “nearly double” what was expected; endowments and pension funds have dropped; costs keep going up at around 5 per cent a year. A recent report from the Council of Ontario Universities says the 19 institutions across the province have a total cumulative deficit of $511 million.

How does UW respond? Dr. Chakma called it a three-part program: expenditure control (being “even more conservative in filling positions” and starting projects); expenditure reduction (the 3 per cent cut); and revenue generation (new sources of income, such as full-fee programs and more international students).

One example of the austerity UW will see in the coming year: the rollover project, designed to replace out-of-date computing equipment in academic support areas, won’t get the $200,000 that would have been budgeted for this year. “That is not, at this stage, mission-critical.”

Said, Dr. Chakma: “We believe that we can manage without any layoffs, but I cannot guarantee it. . . . Lying off people is the last thing you want to do in dealing with this kind of crisis. We don’t want to lose people and wonder what happened, four or five years down the road.”

The 2009-10 budgets, as approved by the senate finance committee earlier this month, involve spending of about $435 million in the twelve months that begin May 1. That’s up from $405 million in the current year — the 3 per cent cut to departmental budgets is more than outweighed by spending increases elsewhere, including money for salary increases and new activities as the university grows.

But that new spending is narrowly targeted, Dr. Chakma reminded the senate. “Apart from an investment in the library and an investment in student support,” he said, “we are really not making any increases.”

The town hall meeting, 13 days from now, will give an opportunity for more discussion of budget prospects and the university’s position in hard times. It’s scheduled to run from 3:00 to 4:30 on Wednesday the 8th, in the Humanities Theatre.

As with the last such meeting, held in November, staff and faculty are invited to submit their questions ahead of time by e-mail, to keep the meeting moving along and to make sure the meaty issues get raised. Questions should be sent to: townhall@ uwaterloo.ca by April 2.

I’ve been asked to help by collecting the questions that are submitted, screening out anything irrelevant (so please keep the topic to UW and its affairs), combining related questions, and arranging the questions in priority order. There’s no guarantee that every question will get asked publicly, but we’ll try, and if there are too many questions for the available time, I’ll ask the top executives to provide answers through the Daily Bulletin over the days that follow.

Sources: http://www.bulletin.uwaterloo.ca