Dr. Gold’s message to UNMC on state budget

Here is the complete text of the e-mail which Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., sent Monday to all UNMC faculty, staff and students.

Dear members of the UNMC community,

As you know, the State of Nebraska continues to face a budget shortfall, and Gov. Ricketts and the state legislators are contemplating additional cuts to the University of Nebraska budget as part of their ongoing response to this situation.

The university has already worked diligently with the Legislature to address a $46 million shortfall caused by unavoidable cost increases and legislative funding decisions made last year.

We anticipate $30 million in savings as a response to the efforts of the Budget Response Teams, and we looked to make up the shortfall with tuition increases — 5.4 percent this year and 3.2 percent next year – and a modest anticipated enrollment growth.

However, the Governor’s current proposal, which calls for an additional $11 million cut this year and an additional $23 million cut next year, has created a new and significant challenge. When we think about the next biennium, with the projected new cost increases, the challenge becomes even more serious.

In the face of these proposals, we now must turn to academic program cuts in our educational and research programs, other painful program reductions and additional tuition increases to manage the challenge created by the governor.

The bitter pill is that these cuts come at a time when we are experiencing remarkable momentum in our educational, research and clinical programs in growing our state.

After the Governor’s proposal was announced last month, University of Nebraska President Hank Bounds, Ph.D., gathered university leadership teams to begin reviewing options. Each campus was tasked with bringing forward proposals to meet the Governor’s cut.

Although there is not a complete list of proposed cuts at this time, we now can talk about some of the examples of proposals that, if the budget is cut again, will affect us here at UNMC. Please note that in none of these proposals is there a suggestion to close a campus or a college. Yet, each of the examples of proposals that might occur if the budget is indeed further reduced will have significant ramifications.

At UNMC, some of the potential impacts of the examples of the budget reductions would be:

• Fewer opportunities for young Nebraskans to become health professionals;
• Fewer health profession graduates returning to or remaining in Nebraska, thus limiting further access to health care;
• Lessening of Nebraskans chances to receive state-of-the-art medical treatments in the state, as academic medicine and clinical research declines;
• Reduced outreach to underserved rural and urban areas as UNMC retreats to its core mission delivered by the UNMC campus;
• Weakened confidence of potential business partners in the state’s ability to participate in public/private partnerships, thus diminishing momentum;
• Reduced opportunity for UNMC to discover the causes and treatments of developmental neurological disabilities in children;
• Reduced training programs that supply nurse specialists to work with Nebraska’s aging population, particularly in rural areas; and
• Reducing a new program to meet the need for forensic scientists to populate workforce in Nebraska’s crime laboratories.

Examples of UNMC’s budget response proposal include:

Changes to the tuition model within many colleges at UNMC.

• Increases in differential tuition for health profession programs
• Rebalance of non-resident tuition favoring non-resident students

Elimination of UNMC programs, degrees and concentrations:

• The Munroe-Meyer Institute’s Division of Developmental Neuroscience
• The College of Public Health’s Community-Oriented Primary Care concentration
• The College of Nursing’s gerontology clinical specialist track in its MSN program
• The College of Allied Health Professions Master of Forensic Science program

Consolidation of College of Medicine faculty and support staff.

Consolidation of UNMC didactic offsite health profession course sites:

• Nursing (Kearney, Norfolk, Scottsbluff)
• Dental hygiene (Gering/Scottsbluff)
• Allied Health (Kearney)

Elimination of UNMC research faculty, fellows and staff positions:

• College of Pharmacy (faculty, fellows and staff)
• Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center (faculty)
• College of Public Health (faculty and staff)

These are extraordinarily difficult decisions that will have a clear impact on our ability to remain affordable for Nebraskans, to educate the future workforce, to have a presence across the state, and to grow Nebraska’s economy. But we must fully prepare to respond to the will of the legislature, and we will manage the consequences.

All involved fully understand that every decision that we make will connect to opportunities for our students, faculty and staff, as well as impact the communities that we serve. The strong desire to be driven by quality and access as a core of our mission and values will be the guiding light through these changes.

I can assure you that University leadership is going to be very candid with legislators in laying out the consequences of their decisions at Wednesday’s appropriations meeting.

Even the examples of proposed cuts I’m announcing today, as well as the cuts being announced across our sister campuses, total less than the total target amounts. The choices we would have to make to reach the governor’s $34 million cut won’t get any easier going forward.

We are still early in the legislative process. We hope legislators will restore our funding next year and limit the damage to one of the state’s most important engines of economic growth and opportunity. Our voices, your voices do matter.

Thank you for all of your work for UNMC and for the people of the state of Nebraska and beyond.

Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D.
Chancellor