Record Deficits in Faculty Budget Prompt Scrutiny by Finance Officer

Concerned by the prospect of increasing budget deficits, the Faculty has begun, in the past month, to implement a series of measures intended to cut waste from the operations of Faculty Departments.

The core of the new approach--as outlined by Dean Dunlop in an October 19 Faculty meeting--consists of special monitoring of departments which substantially overrun their budgeted expenses.

"The departments don't have business officers--they're run by professors who are busy people," Robert E. Kaufmann, assistant to the Dean of the Faculty for Financial Affairs, said yesterday. "We will be collecting the data from various departments and making suggestions to them on how departments can operate more effeciently."

Among subjects of concern to Kaufmann's office will be allocation of department resources to students not concentrating in the department and the extent to which enrollment in the courses justified the expenditures proposed.

"It there are some courses with only two students, we'll do something," he said.

The Faculty's budget deficit--over $1 million in fiscal 1970-71--is projected to exceed $1.7 million in 1971-72." And with the new Science Center, plus the unresolved Radcliffe situation, the deficit for 1972-73 won't look much better," Kaufmann said.

The greatest impetus to the rising deficits, Kaufmann stated, was the increasing cost of "telephones, secretaries, lights, electricity" and financial aid to students. He said that increasing salaries of teaching assistants was not the major factor.

Richard G. Leahy, assistant dean of the Faculty for Resources and Planning, will be separately overseeing costs for the operation of Building and Grounds, the Food Services and dining hall accounts in their relationships to the Faculty.

Kaufmann stressed that his office was "trying to avoid the blanket approach" in its dealings with the various departments, taking into account changes in student enrollment, purchase of needed equipment, and development of new course offerings.

"We're not collecting data to be used to tighten financial screws on the departments," he said. "Our policy is not to rigidly hold departments to what they spent the year before."

Dunlop, in his October 19 remarks to the Faculty, suggested a number of categories in which budgets may be pared. Visiting professorships, new term appointments, departments services, and possibly some "educational programs" would suffer, he predicted.