The University of Massachusetts has announced that it curbed central office spending by $3.1 million this fiscal year and that additional “efficiency and effectiveness” measures will, by 2019, save the system nearly $300 million.
This increased efficiency, President Martin Meehan said at a UMass board of trustees meeting earlier this week, will allow the university to maximize the value of a UMass education.
“In instances where we can achieve efficiencies of administrative nature, that frees up funds for academic purposes,” said university spokesman Robert Connolly.
He said the cuts in spending -- which amount to layoffs, buyouts, and a salary and hiring freeze -- at the central office will not reverberate in the classroom. On the contrary, Connolly said it could have a positive impact on the impending tuition and fees increase, expected to be announced next month.
“I think every dollar we save is a dollar you don’t have to increase tuition by,” he said. “When you save money there, that’s money students and their families don’t have to come forward with.”
At the board meeting, Meehan also said UMass, through ongoing efforts, will save $293 million by the end of fiscal 2019. UMass said it will realize such savings by rethinking the way the university purchases energy and office supplies and changing its approach to borrowing money for construction and maintenance projects.
However, some worry that all the talk of efficiencies and cost-saving is a harbinger of a corporate, bottom-line-focused approach to public education.
“It’s the language of business; it’s the language of profit maximization,” said Joe Ramsey, a lecturer in English and American Studies at UMass Boston. “It’s thinking about the numbers and not the human impact.”
Ramsey, along with other advocates in faculty and staff unions, agree with UMass officials: The state should give the university system more funding. Ramsey, however, said that upper-level administrators shouldn’t be talking about increasing efficiency, they should be fighting for more state funding.
“The premise is that we have to accept less state funding, but I don’t think that’s true,” Ramsey said. “I believe it should be the job of upper administrators to resist that trend.”
While many states are contending with cuts to public education, he said, UMass should not acquiesce by “trying to do more with less.”
“To be a leader would be to creatively and aggressively mobilize people to reverse that trend,” Ramsey said.
That, Connolly said, is what Meehan and the board of trustees have indeed done.
“The university and its leaders fight hard,” he said. “We’re making the best case we can.”
Reis Thebault can be reached at reis.thebault@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @reisthebault