After seven months as the new leader of a rapidly expanding campus, UMass Lowell Chancellor Jacquie Moloney currently faces her toughest challenge at the university’s helm.
Moloney, as executive vice chancellor under then-Chancellor Marty Meehan, spearheaded UMass Lowell’s growth in recent years with the opening of 12 new buildings and a 48 percent enrollment increase to 17,000 students since fall 2007.
Now, four months removed from announcing a $2 million midyear budget reduction, the university is in the midst of recovery efforts to close the financial gap while keeping its eyes on continued growth.
UMass Lowell’s reduction is part of a $10.9 million midyear deficit the five-campus UMass system faces after the state Legislature did not fund salary increases for professors and staff, a contract that was bargained during former Gov. Deval Patrick’s administration.
President Meehan honored the negotiated pay increases, believing the Legislature would refund the money to the UMass system. When that didn’t happen, the UMass campuses were forced to pay for the increases from their operating budgets.
Moloney called the loss of state funding “unexpected but not shocking.”
According to Moloney, savings will be made in areas where expansion was planned but the budget no longer can afford it. She cited housekeeping, international student programs, community outreach, economic development and the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
The university will also eliminate certain vacant positions and delay hiring in other areas of the university’s operations, Moloney said.
More than 40 positions are currently frozen and 20 have been eliminated, according to Moloney.
“We expect that there may be more that we eliminate over the next year, and that will be very painful,” she said.
Moloney said the university has recovered from larger financial deficits that Meehan inherited at the start of his tenure as chancellor, and the university plans to do the same now.
“The way we closed it is we eliminated everything that was non-core mission and we focused on our students, and we’ll continue to do that,” Moloney said. “Going forward, we will not shortchange the students’ experience.”
UMass Lowell entered this fiscal year with a $2.3 million deficit in its operating budget, and the salary increases added to the financial shortfall, Moloney said.
“Our five-year budget plan originally estimated that we would have about a $2.3 million difference between revenue and expenses for this fiscal year, as we continued to grow the campus,” Moloney said. “Because we planned in advance, we were able to save money during previous fiscal years and allocate more funds to our reserves. However, these projections did not include the unexpected additional $2 million by which we must now reduce the budget. That $4 million is not a drop in the bucket for our campus or any public university.”
While making efforts to cut spending, the university continues to expand its revenue-generating repertoire to supplement the campus outside of its operating budget.
Some of the university’s biggest revenue generators are the Online and Continuing Education program; its research facilities that are leased by companies seeking to test their products; and events hosted by the Hospitality and Event Services department, Moloney said. She considers these efforts vital to closing the financial gap on a campus with ambitious expansion goals in the coming years.
“I’m pretty passionate about raising the money and generating the revenue and finding the resources,” Moloney said. “I grew up without a lot. I was expected to be resourceful; it was the best lesson my parents ever gave me. ‘If you want something, you go figure out how to get that.’ So I did, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”
Going forward, Moloney said she is optimistic that the state and UMass system will develop a funding formula to best serve all.
“Honestly, I think this is the year of the unknown,” she said. “We just got news in the governor’s budget that there is a suggested increase for 1 percent, so I’m going to take that as a positive. We were hoping for a higher number … but I think, personally, the 1 percent is a positive statement.”
This article was originally published in the Lowell Sun.