Three department heads said the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) will cut budgets by 19.5% over the next five years, a claim which UConn denied.
UConn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors sent an email to all union members stating that some department heads had been asked to make lists of faculty members to cut, which UConn also denied.
These cuts will hit graduate programs the hardest, according to three department heads.
Budget cuts
On March 7, AAUP President Chris Vials emailed union members about budget cuts.
“We are getting word from Department Heads across a number of schools and colleges that they have been asked to make 15% to 19% cuts over the next 4 academic years,” Vials said.
A UConn Today statement from Provost Anne D’Alleva and Chief Financial Officer Jeffery Geohegan said that there would be a 4% cut to Ledger 2 accounts in FY2026 and a 3.5% cut to Ledger 2 accounts in FY2027, but no 19.5% cut.
“Beginning last year, all units at Storrs and regionals – academic and otherwise – were told to prepare for a combined total potential budget reduction of 15% over five fiscal years, FY25 through FY29,” D’Alleva and Geohegan said. “Departments have not been told to prepare for reductions totaling 19%, as the message states.”
According to an email from a CLAS department head leaked to The Daily Campus prior to the statement, by a professor in the department who asked for anonymity, 19.5% budget cuts were requested across CLAS.
“At the CLAS Department Heads Meeting with the Dean this week, the Dean announced 19.5% cuts between now and 2029,” the department head’s email said. “Apparently last year’s cuts did not count towards the 19.5 % now being requested. We were told that it ‘represented a transfer of one-time funds to cover the unfunded salary increases.’”
Political science Department Head Oksan Bayulgen confirmed that the CLAS dean had asked for 19.5% budget cuts.
A third department head, who spoke with The Daily Campus on the condition of anonymity, confirmed the 19.5% cuts. They stated that the cuts were consistent with what the provost announced in January 2024 and the announcement of initial cuts that came out in 2023.
“I’m really unclear what the provost is trying to accomplish, because there’s no dispute and we understand why it is,” the professor said.
The professor explained where the 19.5% came from.
“Their plan is a 15% reduction over five years in permanent two ledger,” the department head said, referring to money that comes from state funds. “And in addition, a 4.5 reduction […] which is to reflect the last wage increase that we had out of the last contract agreement, which was, the state obliged the university to agree to this, but didn’t provide funding for those wage increases.”
Bayulgen said that over the past summer, they provided the dean with a list of strategic priorities in departments, or things that they really couldn’t cut.
“We went through an exercise of listing our priorities and maybe some revenue generating ideas, but these were all very collaboratively done,” Bayulgen said.
According to Bayulgen, there have been a lot of discussions about the budget cuts.
“We’ve had a lot of discussions, a lot of meetings about this,” Bayulgen said. “The dean is, I think, sensitive to- he doesn’t want to necessarily impose anything; he wants the units to come up with things based on their own priorities, their own needs- he wants us to have our own governance, our faculty governance.”
According to both Bayulgen and the leaked email, departments have until the end of April to release strategies on how to cut their budget, or the Dean’s office will come up with a plan for them.
The third department head discussed the cuts.
“There is no department in the university in which payroll is even close to 80%,” the department head said. “They’re all north of that. So, in other words, there is no one that can cut their discretionary spending that much without dismissing people.”
The department head stated that deans at different colleges were given significant control over how they’d handle it.
“Last year […] it was kind of left up to the deans of different colleges of how they’d handle it,” the department head said. “A number of colleges had reserves, and basically just ate their reserves. CLAS partly ate their reserves, partly took some reserves from departments to give us time to plan. […] But different colleges have different resources and different amounts of flexibility.”
The department head said that there was more noise out of CLAS than other colleges because other colleges had more reserves to delay the difficult cuts.
“The whole point of it was to sort of keep for another year from having to experience the really tough pain and now we’re getting the point where they’re asking us for sort of permanent reductions, or plans for reductions in our budgets,” the department head said.
The department head discussed the impact of the cuts.
“It’s still not clear to me, it may not be clear to the provost, whether they’re really trying to achieve this, or they’re trying to demonstrate they can achieve it or what,” the department head said. “The level of cuts that would be required to achieve that would be absolutely devastating to graduate and undergraduate education at UConn.”
Professor hiring
The AAUP said that some department heads had been asked to make lists of faculty to cut.
“Some Heads have been asked to provide a list of ‘positions’ that would need to be eliminated from Ledger 2 accounts to satisfy a 4% cut for FY26,” the AAUP’s email said.
Vials urged department heads not to cut staff.
“The UConn-AAUP is urging Department Heads not to comply with any demand from the administration to compile lists of faculty to be non-renewed or terminated. We also urge Department heads not to proactively create a list of positions to eliminate as well,” Vials said. “Department Heads, who are AAUP members, should not be doing the administration’s work for them.”
The UConn Today statement denied this. According to Bayulgen, CLAS department heads were not asked by the dean or provost to cut any staff. The leaked email did not mention cuts to faculty.
Bayulgen discussed a hiring freeze with exceptions in the CLAS.
“They said they are not hiring anyone in the foreseeable future, although they did caveat it by saying there might be some special occasions,” Bayulgen said. “I think they’re more open to hiring people in residence with higher teaching loads because teaching has to happen.”
A different department head said that there were rumors of a hiring freeze, but nothing was officially announced. They said that faculty hires in the CLAS had decreased significantly in recent years.
University Spokesperson Stephanie Reitz denied that there was a hiring freeze.
Graduate programs
According to Bayulgen and the leaked email, graduate programs will be heavily impacted.
“I think in many ways, the cuts will have the biggest impact on the graduate programs,” Bayulgen said. “I mean, they’ve already cut some of the university-wide fellowships to entice good students for recruitment.”
Bayulgen said that this makes recruiting graduate students and Ph.D. students harder to do.
“We can only pay for three grad students a year,” Bayulgen said. “I think that’s the limit for us, which is really sad, because it’s hard to sustain a program which such small numbers.”
The email from a department head said that graduate assistantships would make up a considerable amount of the cuts.
“For now, the College has advised us to accept the very minimum grad students we were planning on, but not to offer any contracts at this time,” the email said. “I have instructed the office to put a hold on all GA contracts for next year, including for continuing student[s]. It is clear that we are going to have to reduce the number of recruits we had been planning to accept (and, in an extreme scenario, to whit more budgetary disruption from the Federal side, it is possible that almost no GAs will be recruited next year.”
According to the department head, the 19.5% cuts cannot be made with discretionary spending. They said that a 60 to 70% reduction in the number of graduate assistants in their department was possible in the future.
“[The department] cannot meet the 19.5% number out of its discretionary spending; no one in CLAS can,” the email said. “What this does mean is that we are going to have to revolutionize the organization of [the department] and the conditions under which we teach.”