Since haphazard amputation is not a leadership strategy, it is time to start looking at alternatives to cutting six departments that made impressive cases to the APC and the larger university community.
Once again, thanks to the Statistics department for their way with numbers. They have developed two alternatives to these vertical cuts and created the interactive website Alternative Cost Savings for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. What I appreciate about these proposals is that they don’t take out the cuts on anyone unit. They treat us as one faculty, even though we all do different things in our different fields.
These alternatives would also apply to administrators. The table below comes from one of our colleagues in another unit, who is also better at math than I am. Here, you can see that the amount of UNL’s budget that goes towards faculty has increased 1% compared to 39% for administrators from 2017-18 to 2025-26.
Alternative One: Temporary Reduction of Retirement Contributions
The first proposed alternative to cutting the six departments proposed for elimination is modeled on the agreement reached at Indiana to avoid program closures, which reduced the university’s contribution to retirement by 1%. In the calculator, you can play around with changing the UNL contribution to employee retirement for both Tier I and II. Dropping each tier by 1% saves about $4.5 million. If UNL reduced its contributions to a 1:1 match of employee contributions, the savings would be over $13 million. Somewhere in there is the right number to provide employees with a reasonable contribution towards retirement and not cut six departments (i.e. that would total to $7 million).
The proposal is that this be enacted for five years, with the goal of getting the university back on solid financial footing so that retirement contributions could return to previous levels.
Alternative Two: Progressive Temporary Salary Reduction
Yeah, I didn’t like writing that heading either. Especially since compared to our Big10 peers, UNL faculty are underpaid.
But hear me out. The proposal is a progressive one, with those who earn the most receiving the largest reduction. Anyone earning under $65,000 would see no reduction. That means staff and lecturers would largely be unaffected by these cuts. Those earning $65,001-$100,000 would see a 5% reduction and those earning $100,001-$200,000 would see a 10% reduction, and those earning over $200,000 would see a 15% reduction.
So, my salary would be reduced from $87,806* to $83,415. And Chancellor Bennett’s salary would be reduced from $732,000 to $622,200. The total savings would be over $12 million, inclusive of athletics coaches and staff. Without althetics, that number is $7.73 million. I will leave it to you to ponder why applying this model to althetics yields a difference of $4.4 million. Or why the next largest group in terms of savings would be the 100 employees of the Law School, yielding a savings of just over $300,000.
The calculator allows you to play around with how many brackets and how big they should be, and the percent decrease for each. Again, somewhere in this sea of numbers is the right combination to get us to the $7 million needed to not cut six departments who just happened to end up on the wrong side of some bad math.
Once the university is back on solid footing, salaries should be raised back to where they were, plus annual increases owed.
Hard Choices
Although neither of these choices is ideal, I tend towards the first. But perhaps I am more a grasshopper than an ant. Either way, there are clearly other options. As a faculty, we should have a voice in exploring other options. And we should stand together as one faculty, one Nebraska.
*If you have never checked out UNL’s salary information, or the whole NU system, you really should.
