University to institute further cuts

Correction appended

Currently facing a 23.7 percent decline in endowment value and projected $170 million budget cuts over two years, the University plans to continue making campus-wide and department-specific cost reductions, Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83 and Executive Vice President Mark Burstein said at this year's first meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) on Monday evening.

Eisgruber and Burstein noted several measures the University has already taken to cut costs, including closing the Graduate College dining hall for dinner on Saturdays and Sundays, closing Forbes dining hall on Saturdays, cutting shuttle services, eliminating seven computer clusters on campus and cutting Cafe Vivian hours.

“We are an institution that loves to eat, and I love that,” Burstein joked. “But you have to think about that in a different way when you’re trying to save $170 million.”

The University will cut the hours of other Frist Campus Center dining venues in addition to those of Viv. The long hours of certain venues are “not economical because of labor cost,” Burstein said.

The University is also planning to review travel policies, track paid leave and rethink rules about scheduling overtime hours to cut costs. These measures are in addition to department-specific plans such as changing dining options and instituting printing quotas. The University will continue to reduce the number of clusters and has plans to limit the wired network access on campus.

Though members of the community have made suggestions about how the University could change available benefits for employees, Burstein said the University will not be “changing benefits for any University employee,” but intends to “make sure employees are following regulations.” This may include verifying the eligibility of all dependents on a staff member’s benefit plan.

“A peer institution has saved $1 million going through a verification process for employee benefits,” he explained, though he added that he does not expect savings to be as significant at Princeton.

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Overall, the proposed cuts are intended to help implement a 15 percent University budget cut, while “keeping human capital” and “impacting the University community as little as possible,” Burstein said.

He added that suggestions have been pouring in from members of the community via a branch of the University website dedicated specifically to soliciting ideas for the University’s savings plans. The University has been looking for options that will be “easiest to implement,” produce the “largest savings” and be “sustainable,” he said.

The University will also be reassessing its investment strategy, evaluating every capital investment and pursuing only those opportunities that offer a five- to 10-year payback, Burstein said.

An audience member at the CPUC meeting expressed concern about the inefficiency of the heating systems currently in place in the Graduate College, but Burstein said the University was choosing the lesser of two evils by ignoring systems that are “inefficient, but just not that inefficient for us to make that investment.”

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Currently, there have been “strong showings of the budget in terms of rapid progress towards goals” that had been set for the University, Eisgruber said.

An $11 million operating budget surplus form the 2009 fiscal year, the success of the new voluntary incentivized retirement program and $2.1 million in sponsored research funding beyond budget projections have all helped offset the endowment value drop, he explained.

This progress will reduce the number of layoffs the University will make next year, Eisgruber said, though he declined to discuss the specifics of who would be laid off.

“No one knows whether this is a recovery leading to some kind of stability or are we about to go off the cliff again?” Eisgruber said. “We’re in uncharted waters.”

Correction

An earlier version of this article stated that there has been $800,000 in sponsored research funding beyond budget projections. In fact, there has been $2.1 million beyond projections.