This seems alarming. What's really going on? Signed comments strongly preferred.
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
4 responses to “Financial crisis at U of Alberta?”
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Failure of the Alberta provincial government. While the economy is doing fine, the current government is insufficiently extracting taxes, and a month ago announced severe cuts in this year's budget. Particularly hard hit is the Advanced Education sector. In contrast to the previously promised 2% operating grant increase for 2013-14 (which still would have been insufficient to cover the four percent inflation), the government announced a 6.8% reduction, so 9% less than promised.
A major part of the operating budget of the Alberta public universities, in particular the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary, comes from the province, so these institutions are in the process of figuring out how to implement the cuts. At this point it has not yet been determined what will happen (furlough days for faculty, reduction of adjuncts and support staff, raising tuition, elimination of some programs and units, …). Two blogs run by faculty that comment on the situation at the University of Alberta:
http://whithertheuofa.blogspot.ca/
http://artssquared.wordpress.com/ -
Boom and bust funding cycles are a normal, albeit annoying, fact of life for Alberta universities as about 30% of the provincial budget comes directly from oil and gas royalties. Oil and gas prices are down and so also our provincial government's royalty receipts. Until Alberta adopts a more sensible tax regime, this pattern will continue…
We can't yet say what the budget cuts will mean for philosophy at U. Alberta. We're still waiting for a revised budget to be negotiated between our administration and the province, which will take another month. The cuts announced for U.Alberta's budget were serious (7.2% to operating) but the administration is hopeful it will be allowed to make them over at least two years, which would allow planning for mitigation strategies.
To date, our Dean & Provost have told us to proceed as normal with admissions and our academic plans for next year. This is what we are doing.
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Just in case it's not clear from the above, this affects all postsecondary institutionsin Alberta, not just the U of A. In Calgary, Mount Royal University is most hard hit, as I believe they had already been running a deficit.
At least part of the motivation seems to be to force postsecondary institutions to speed up their integration into a "Campus Alberta" system that will avoid "duplication" of programs. We can all guess what that means. See eg
A provincial group has formed to protest the budget cuts to higher eductation, the Coalition for Action on Post-Secondary Education
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The University of Calgary is probably the least hard hit of Alberta Universities because we had a balanced budget before the cuts and some reserve funds. Our Dean has asked us to cut the number of sections taught by sessional (adjunct) instructors, but we are also proceeding as normal at this point with admissions and other academic plans.
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