A set of actions has been finalized to reduce the University’s $10 million structural deficit in three years, wrote Provost Richard Locke and Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Barbara Chernow ’79 in a campus-wide email Thursday.
The action plan outlined in the email came after Locke and Chernow spent the summer reviewing the Deficit Reduction Working Group’s April recommendations in conjunction with the 650 community comments submitted in response to the recommendations. Before becoming provost this July, Locke co-chaired the working group.
“The greatest concern was a fear that we would erode the (faculty and staff) benefits,” Locke said, adding that he and Chernow did “exactly the opposite” by protecting benefits.
Many community members submitted comments expressing concern about the possibility of rising health insurance deductibles, particularly for “people on the lower end of the salary scale, because our benefits aren’t just for faculty — it’s faculty and staff,” Locke said.
The original set of recommendations proposed increasing employee contributions for health insurance and temporarily freezing the Tuition Aid Program, both of which were struck from the final action plan due to community concerns voiced in online comments.
Modifications to employee benefits that will go into effect during the 2015-2016 academic year include a switch in pharmacy benefit management and an increase in office visit co-pays.
“We were able to figure out creative ways of getting our deficit reduced without actually modifying people’s benefits in a fundamental way, which is important,” Locke said.
Locke presented the final action plan at Tuesday evening’s faculty meeting and said he received a positive response.
“People really appreciate that, one, we’re addressing the deficit, which is really important for our long-term financial health, and two, I think they appreciated that we were transparent about what we were going to do and that we actually listened to the community,” Locke said.
“It’s very important that we involve the community, and with Rick’s leadership, that’s what we did,” Chernow said.
The action plan also outlines cost-cutting initiatives in reducing the Dean of the Faculty budget by granting temporary teaching funds more judiciously, consolidating information and technology services, streamlining the procurement of University goods and services like office supplies and transportation, and increasing energy efficiency on campus.
The plan explicitly states that the University will consolidate positions in IT through attrition rather than layoffs. “We want Brown to be a model employer, to treat everyone in the community really well,” Locke said.
Locke and Chernow also identified streamlining procurement as another potential way to reduce spending waste. For example, the University currently holds contracts with 70 different transportation services, so “maybe if we have fewer vendors and better terms, we can still have all the transportation we need, but we can have it at a higher quality service and a cheaper rate,” Locke said.
To conduct this auditing process, the University will hire a person for a newly created position to oversee strategic sourcing in Insurance and Purchasing Services, Chernow said. “Not only are we going to save some money, but also improve services. That’s what we were interested in doing,” she added.
All of the initiatives listed in the email are already underway, Chernow said.
“We don’t want (the changes) to be a visible hit to either academics or community,” Locke said. “We just want to be doing the things that we’ve been doing smarter.”
