A visibly agitated Chancellor Nancy Cantor defended the university’s recently presented budget plan against pockets of faculty criticism at Wednesday afternoon’s University Senate meeting in Maxwell Auditorium.

Cantor faced persistent questioning from the audience about the reasoning behind the budget decisions University Senate announced, particularly the salary freeze for employees making $50,000 or more a year.

Some faculty suggested that if the university found itself with a surplus of funds, it could put that money toward bonuses for faculty members whose salaries had been frozen. But Cantor said she couldn’t imagine being able to budget for that, and that excess money would go back into the operations budget.

Tom Sherman, a professor in the College of Visual and Performing Art’s Department of Transmedia, asked what would happen if a faculty member was asked to join another institution for a higher salary.

Vice Chancellor and Provost Eric Spina said there is nothing in place to deal with those situations.

‘As a community, we’re in this together,’ Spina said. ‘If it’s about a one-year retention issue, that’s something we’re not going to be able to deal with on that basis. This is a year that we are in this together, and it’s going to be tight.’

Some faculty members also questioned where the next cuts would be if the economy were to sink deeper.

Lou Marcoccia, SU’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, said the administration is ‘very much aware’ of what would be cut next. He declined to provide specifics, saying that announcing anything would make people concerned before action has to be taken.

Cantor said there would be more ‘scrubbing’ to the operations budget, including conferences and travel. Personnel issues would have to come back onto the table, she said. One issue that isn’t on the table yet, Cantor said, is benefits.

Jeffrey Stonecash, a member of the Senate Budget Committee and a professor of political science in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said it’s been difficult to get systematic information from the administration, and that he’s concerned about what he doesn’t know.

‘The idea that we were sitting around not giving data to the senate budget committee, I think, is something I object to,’ Cantor said. She said the administration has not fully responded to requests for that data, but that it will. It has to consider the most effective template for researching and providing that data, Cantor said.

‘We’re dealing with real people with real lives and real families, whose positions we need to thoughtfully evaluate and to cautiously eliminate,’ Cantor said. ‘Not to just knee jerk as an institution into saying, ‘We will cut this percentage of people.”

shmelike@syr.edu

Published on March 4, 2009 at 12:00 pm