In light of the budget and faculty cuts prompted by this year’s financial deficit, Bradley’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote a letter to The Board of Trustees, urging them to reevaluate the process of making cuts.
In the letter, AAUP requested that the board and university President Stephen Standifird reassess the timeline of cuts, spending outside of the academic department, spending on athletics and the university’s marketing.
Faculty members whose programs are up for discontinuation will have 30 days to defend the preservation of their programs based on quantitative data of program enrollment. After 30 days, the university will decide which programs will be kept.
“We will have these decisions made by the end of this semester,” Standifird said. “The reason for that is partly out of respect for my colleagues to give them an opportunity to find other options that might work best for them.”
However, according to AAUP President Ahmad Fakheri and Vice President John Nielsen, this process is moving far too quickly.
“This is an incredibly quick timeline for something that is going to be as consequential as it could be,” Nielsen said. “If we damage things it will be very hard to come back. We aren’t saying that there aren’t changes that need to be made, we are very much behind on making changes but we need to do it on a realistic timeline.”
In response to the letter’s concerns about the pace of the process, Standifird said that slowing down the schedule would only cause faculty more stress.
“The problem with the slowdown is it keeps that veil of uncertainty over the university longer and that is devastating for everybody involved,” Standifird said. “The reality is that we have the information we need to make the decision. So there really is no reason to delay making decisions because we have the information we need.”
The letter claims that Bradley administrators have overstated the percentage of the budget. AAUP declares that the $13 million deficit is actually 8.1% instead of 10% which could cost around 30 additional faculty members their positions.
Standifird replied that the university stated that the deficit was 10% to get a jump on the projected percentage if no cuts were made immediately.
“It was our estimates of where the budget would be if we didn’t make any changes given our current enrollment, given our current discount rate, given our cost structure, the university moving forward would incur about a 10% budget deficit which is why we are going after a 10% reduction,” Standifird said.
Both Fakheri and Nielsen are saddened to see the university complete another round of cuts. Back in 2019, Bradley experienced a $7 million deficit. In response, the university urged its faculty to retire, resulting in a staff decrease.
“I personally was surprised [about the faculty and budget cuts],” Fakheri said. “We’ve been through all of that pain. A lot of people left the university and so I did not expect that [to happen again].”
Fakheri and Nielsen also mentioned that when creating new programs for students, the majority of the time, there was no need to spend money on resources.
“The increase in programs was something that we were encouraged to do,” Nielsen said. “To be continuously leveraging, innovating, offering more opportunities to students and every time we created new programs overwhelmingly the majority of the time we did not need new resources to put these programs into place. Where there has been increased spending was outside the instructional area.”
Athletics was another point of contention in the letter. AAUP is requesting that the athletic department be analyzed in the same way the academic departments will be.
“Everything should be on the table,” Fakheri said. “We should not be just focusing on one-third of the budget and putting everything else aside and demanding the kind of cuts that are just going to decimate the academic side of the university.”
Standifird noted that he is working closely with Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Chris Reynolds to ensure that athletics is running effectively and efficiently.
“All of us at the beginning of this year looked at all areas to try to identify cost savings, we found some in athletics as well,” Standifird said. “We’ve executed on that and will continue to execute on that.”
The university’s marketing strategy was a big topic of discussion in the letter, and was suggested to be a reason why Bradley has difficulty recruiting enough students to balance the budget. Many universities are seeing an increase in their enrollment while Bradley is not.
The Committee on University Resources looked at the numbers and claimed that the university is going through an identity crisis. Bradley markets itself as a low cost university, but the committee finds that a hard selling point considering that Bradley is a private institution.
“You cannot sustain a private university if you are going to be charging the tuition of a public university because they are getting funding from the state,” Fakheri said. “That has to do with how we are recruiting, who we are reaching and how we are reaching and what incentives are we providing for them [students] to come here.”
Standifird agreed that the university has been dropping the ball on marketing tactics but has a plan to get things back on track.
“I actually share their concern that we have not done a sufficient job of positioning Bradley in the market the way that we should be positioned and not highlighting the strengths of the university,” Standifird said.
With all of the uncertainty regarding budget and faculty cuts, AAUP is requesting that the university consider its concerns. The association understands that changes need to be made, but they must be made in the correct way.
“Some of these changes are going to transform Bradley from what it has been into something else, and we just want to make sure that we have considered all the different ramifications of all these changes,” Fakheri said.
