University President Jehuda Reinharz accepted a proposal made by the Special Faculty Advisory Committee to meet a budget cut target of $2.1 million for fiscal year 2010 by reducing administrative staff, reducing the hiring of adjunct faculty, increasing class sizes, reducing the number of new Ph.D. students accepted to the graduate school and increasing revenue in the graduate school, Dean of Arts and Sciences Adam Jaffe said.In October, Reinharz projected a $10 million gap in the University's $336 million fiscal year 2009 operating budget.

The reductions in staff would be accomplished via administrative layoffs and cutbacks in the number of working hours per week or per year for administrative staff. Jaffe added that other administrative staff currently on University payroll might receive their salaries from faculty research grants from the government or foundations. Jaffe said a list of potential administrative staff cuts in Arts and Sciences exists that is prioritized based on the harm the layoffs would cause to the University. In an e-mail to academic chairs Dec. 6, Jaffe wrote that "the final list [of cuts] will be developed in early January, and the actions will be communicated to the affected individuals sometime around the third week of January. Changes will be effective approximately Feb. 1." Jaffe said yesterday the list of layoffs would be finalized this week or next. "We're still looking at how we would manage without these people," he said. "Until we're sure that we can deal with the situation that we create by laying somebody off we're not going to lay them off."

Replacing the previously mandatory University Seminar program with an optional First-year Seminar and increasing the sizes of language classes will allow professors to teach other required classes and will reduce the need for adjuncts, Jaffe said. He added that he is reviewing every department's need for adjuncts: "If there are courses that really have to be taught, they will be taught, but for courses that are more optional, if we would have to hire someone from the outside to do it, we probably won't be doing it."

Jaffe explained that the proposal called for a two-year, 50-percent reduction of Ph.D. students admitted across all subject areas, which would allow the University to save money on the stipends awarded to Ph.D students. Last January, the Justice reported that about one-third of graduate students are master's students and two-thirds are doctoral students. Doctoral students generally do not pay tuition but receive stipends for living expenses. Last January, the Politics department, for example, offered doctoral students $15,500 for a nine-month Ph.D. program. The graduate school receives a large amount of its revenue from tuition by M.A. students.

The downside to this "is that we will have fewer Ph.D. students both available for teaching and research," as well as in the Ph.D. programs themselves. "They're all pretty small programs, and it makes it hard to maintain a critical mass that you need to have a successful Ph.D. program," he said. "So I'm not happy about having to do it, but in the short run it's very difficult to for us to find ways to save money."

Jaffe said that while some doctoral programs may have to be closed, the goal is to "restore the admission levels for the programs we do have to a stable level in 2012." Jaffe said he did not know which programs might be closed.

In terms of increasing revenue in the graduate school, Jaffe pointed out that the University is in the process of launching new master's programs in Global Studies, Computational Linguistics and Philosophy, as well as in Computer Science and IT Entrepreneurship. He added that the University would like to increase the size of existing M.A. programs, especially those connected to Ph.D. programs. "By [fiscal year 2012] we're hoping that the growth of those programs will help us find a sustainable level for the overall graduate school," Jaffe said.

"I think we did the best job we could to find the savings we had to find without interfering with what we do, which is hard because it's a reasonably large cut," Jaffe said.

Further cuts could still be possible, Jaffe said. "The planning for next year that we've been going through is predicated on an assumption that endowment over the course of the year, from July 2008 to June 2009, would decline by 10 percent. As of today, it's down more than that, so if there isn't a recovery, there might have to be further adjustments."

Senior Vice President for Students and Enrollment Jean Eddy and Vice President for Campus Operations Mark Collins declined to comment on specific budget proposals in their departments at this time.

In addition to SFAC, a Student Advisory Committee led by Eddy and Student Union President Jason Gray '10 is advising Reinharz on the budget crisis, Reinharz wrote in a Dec. 1 campus wide e-mail. He wrote that an Integrated Planning Committee of senior administrators, overseen by Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Peter French, is assessing the University wide implications of every budget decision. A fourth committee, the University Budget Plan Implementation Committee, composed of senior administrators as well as members of the Board of Trustees, will evaluate the suggestions of the other committee and decide on their implementation, Reinharz wrote.

In a Jan. 5 e-mail to the campus community, Reinharz wrote, "The current financial crisis must prompt us not only to reduce spending, but more importantly, reexamine our current financial and strategic foundation," he wrote.

Stressing that the University cannot "simply cut across the board," he also wrote that the "speed and intensity of this financial crisis is unprecedented, and it will require the University to respond to events in an extraordinarily abbreviated time frame.