Four months ago, while facing a host of financial challenges from the federal government, Wisconsin’s flagship public university asked all schools, colleges and divisions to outline plans for slashing their budgets.
Today, those plans remain unclear in the community. University of Wisconsin-Madison administrators have declined to discuss how their cuts could affect employees and students, and have withheld records that could shed more light on what’s at risk.
Campus leaders have publicly disclosed only the overall scale of cuts, announcing in June that schools and colleges need to shrink their budgets by 5% and administrative units face a 7% cut. They’ve called the step needed “to help protect our long-term financial viability” and said layoffs should be considered “a last resort.”
University leaders expect “many of the necessary reductions can be borne by trimming non-personnel expenses, leaving some vacancies unfilled, and, in some instances, moving existing expenses to alternative funding sources,” according to a statement at the time.