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Millersville University’s first concern is always with our 8,700 students. We want to make sure that we give them a quality university experience. Faced with the prospect of continued, deep budget cuts imposed by the Commonwealth’s economic conditions, the University was forced this year to make painful decisions regarding the athletics program. During the past few years Millersville University reduced its budget by $15.5 million by eliminating or freezing more than 124 faculty and staff positions. In addition, other measures were taken including a 50% decrease in the repair and renovation budgets and deep cuts to the instructional equipment budget. Those reductions meant, for example, that for each of the past two years 18 full-time faculty positions were not filled which is equivalent to 144 sections of three-credit courses or science laboratories. Simply put, these cuts went to the core of the academic mission of the University.
From 2003-08 the University made a $6 million investment in athletics, including construction of the Carpenter Trout Athletic Training Center, major renovations to the Pucillo pool, softball field, new office areas for coaching staff and major renovations to Biemesderfer Stadium that included an all-purpose field and locker rooms. We also increased efforts to raise private scholarship dollars for student athletes. The first significant cut to athletics was $200,000, announced February 14th. That cut came following more than 18 months of careful deliberation and after the Governor announced a proposed 20% funding reduction for 2012-13 for all 14 State System universities. Key alumni, athletics donors and the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), were contacted prior to the announcement. After discussion and thoughtful consideration of the proposed reduction of sports teams by senior management (the Cabinet), there was unified support of the decision to eliminate the men’s’ track and field/cross country teams. The decision was made on the basis that the University could not continue to support 22 sports, especially with ongoing budget threats. The Cabinet does not nor is it required to take formal votes on any management decision.
A private donor interested in reinstating the men’s teams made a generous offer of $300,000, which the University had to reluctantly decline. $300,000 over three years, or even all at once, is a short-term solution that would simply delay the problems for a year. The University’s focus is on overall budget relief to address issues facing the University as a whole, not just the athletics program. While we hope that more classes and athletic programs are not cut, budgets are still threatened. We’re still dealing with the 2011 announcement when the Governor informed the State System that 5% of its current operating budget would be frozen in anticipation of an expected decline in state revenues.
We have encouraged the track and field and cross country students to join our strong intramural/club sports program that offers students competitive experiences against many highly regarded schools. To our knowledge no one has explored this as an option.
14 replies on “Budget Background”
They don’t have enough monies for track and cross. Righttttt.
Millersville spent $136,000 on Review Magazine and then sent it to alums, staff, faculty and friends of the University. I wonder how much postage was?
Why not offer it online and not hardcopy if money is so tight? To quote McCollum, Millersville can’t be everything to everyone.
In addition, $85,000 was paid to 3 speakers in the Fall. Supposedly, according to the administration, the monies were earmarked or restricted monies from donors or student fees.
But the speakers fees are found in the budget document under “Current Unrestricted and General Funds.”
The $136k spent on REVIEW could fund all three sports if they were pared down.
The $85k? Can’t Millersville find pro bono speakers? Randi Zuckerman is worth $100,000 million, she needs $28.5k from the Ville or its donors? Charles Dutton is worth 9 million, he needs $21.5k from the Ville and its donors? Bill Richardson was worth 6 million a fw years ago. He needs $40k from the Ville?
When is the University going to start caring about the students and not just their fat salaries?
They are the reason that Corbett hates us so much. His way of thinking technically is on the right track: Cut money to Universities, eliminate overpaid officials. However, administrators have all the power and say tsk, tsk, this won’t do, we’ll have to break the news to the students, they’re going to have to pay more so that I can build up my retirement fund. And then when they can’t raise their salary any higher, they just cut a program. Who cares if a couple of students a huge part of their Millersville experience?
They have been found to be much lower than the $200,000 thrown together to make it look like savings would be greater than they actually are. $120k MAX!
I don’t understand why the ‘Cabinet’ would not reinstate the Men’s X-C and T&F programs when $300K was pledged from one or more donors. That pledge could carry the programs for the next 2 to 3 years in which time a more permanent solution could be defined. Why isn’t the administration interested in providing these programs? There is no logic or caring in the statements made by the administration. This decision significantly diminishes the university’s reputation.
Why are the comments not visible? Would love to have an explanation, is this another cover-up?
And as a track and field athlete from another school, to propose that your athletes compete in intramural and club sports against other schools is a slap in the face. The level and success your athletes deserve more than going to race students who may train a few times a week and just want to have a fun time. You have athletes that win conference championships and go to national meets. You have athletes that sacrifice to represent your school. You have athletes that are proud of their teammates, push them to new levels, and bring up until this point, only positive media attention to your school. Now that the media attention is not so positive, your administration shuts down options and spins facts so it shows that your students and alumni are just not intelligent enough to understand what you are doing to them. You are treating them like children. Shame on you.
I will give your administration one positive comment. You have done one good thing; your professors and coaches have provided an education strong enough to fight back against your cover up, lies, misrepresentations, and attacks on their sport. A sport that has brought a lot of amazing things to the university.
Have the actual costs been published anywhere that show how the $200,000 is arrived at?
Won’t the school be in a worse PR battle if the actual numbers come in at half that amount?
As administrators you should be thinking of a creative way to work with that generous donor to MAKE IT WORK–or at least TRY! That is why you bureaucrats make what is frequently a SIX-FIGURE salary…Pathetic that you have an “angel” willing to help right this injustice and STILL you decline to even try. “Seize the Opportunity” indeed! More like: “Let’s Make Millersville Mediocre”
im guessing no one has read this lol
Sometimes all a problem needs is to be delayed. Who knows? Come 2013, there may be another donor. To blatantly disregard the wishes of the students and turn away an offer to alleviate the issue, if even for a year, is wrong. Plus, the offer is $300,000, which is $100,000 more than the cut is saving. You are throwing away those extra $100,000. Yet tuition will rise. Thank you Millersville. For the betterment of the students? Sure. Throwing away $100,000 will definitely make the University a better place.
I will refute a few quotes from this article to clear the situation up:
“The first significant cut to athletics was $200,000, announced February 14th. That cut came following more than 18 months of careful deliberation and after the Governor announced a proposed 20% funding reduction for 2012-13 for all 14 State System universities. Key alumni, athletics donors and the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), were contacted prior to the announcement. After discussion and thoughtful consideration of the proposed reduction of sports teams by senior management (the Cabinet), there was unified support of the decision to eliminate the men’s’ track and field/cross country teams.”
These are the lies that the Administration keeps spouting, which doesn’t surprise me because they are not creative and have no capacity to find alternate solutions to anything. The actual figures are $123,000 (only $92,000 of that being state monies, the rest is from student senate appropriations) – this has been proven upon the team’s further analysis of the situation, and the Administration has not disputed our numbers, yet they continue to use that $200k inaccuracy. The wording in this quote about the 18 months of deliberation after Corbett’s proposed cuts is preposterous. The Administration very well may have been deliberating for 18 months (albeit in secrecy from all parties involved with the teams), but Corbett’s cuts were only announced on February 7th of this year and they waited until these were announced so they could use them as a scapegoat. The MU Administration keeps trying to push the blame entirely on these PROPOSED cuts, which are not even finalized yet, rather than admitting their poor execution of this measure.
As the contact with alumni, donors, and the SAAC is concerned, these are blatant lies. As a four-year member of the SAAC, we were never ONCE consulted on any matters such as this, and the track and XC teams were certainly never mentioned. Also, pertinent alumni and donors also state that they had no idea of these cuts, as well as athletics staff.
Finally for this first quote, members of senior management have admitted that this decision was far from unanimous in their meetings, and was actually a matter of much contest, and was pushed through by a few invested Administrators (namely the President, VP of Student Affairs, and VP of Finance).
“A private donor interested in reinstating the men’s teams made a generous offer of $300,000, which the University had to reluctantly decline. $300,000 over three years, or even all at once, is a short-term solution that would simply delay the problems for a year. The University’s focus is on overall budget relief to address issues facing the University as a whole, not just the athletics program. While we hope that more classes and athletic programs are not cut, budgets are still threatened.”
Again, they bend the truth to make themselves look more reasonable. The $300,000 was offered as an immediate, one-time, on the spot payment. Period. This would fund the program as state monies are concerned for over three years, allowing all current athletes to graduate while participating. In fact, for years alumni have been trying to establish endowment funds, but Administrators qualm at this because it would be money they do not control, and they don’t want anyone impinging on their complete control of a university monies. Again, upon this proposed cut of teams, alumni and athletes not only offered this $300k immediately, but also brought forward a proposal for a department-wide Athletics Fund which would alleviate much of the fiscal pressure of athletics at MU. If you are trying to keep your head above water and save money wherever possible, how is this not a long-term solution that is feasible? Yes, athletics cannot solve the financial situation these Administrators find themselves in, but guess what? If every part of the university were willing to do what we are for our programs and foot the bill, then it would in fact be a solution to our budget problems. Unfortunately, since athletics cannot solve the major problems the Administration has created for themselves with ill-advised spending and appropriation, only the problems for athletics, the Administration would rather turn down all of this pledged money to save face and seem like they have done nothing wrong. This is the poorest mismanagement of a situation and monies I have ever been privy to, and it should alarm all who love MU that the Administration is so bull-headed and bad at their job of providing and serving the students at this university. As the last sentence of this quote insinuates, they are, in fact, thinking about cutting more programs and activities at MU; so who’s next? The Chryst writing center? Tutoring services? Counseling services? Any number of things may be on their chopping block, things that make this university a great place for learning, and it looks like they are going to try their darndest to end that legacy.
“We have encouraged the track and field and cross country students to join our strong intramural/club sports program that offers students competitive experiences against many highly regarded schools. To our knowledge no one has explored this as an option.”
The reason that no one has pursued this is that all the athletes here came to participate at the Division II level, not as a club. We are competitive, serious athletes, and those who plan to continue to run are transferring because their university has abandoned them. If this follows through, many, if not all team members will leave the university next year, which will result in the loss of students who contribute the highest number of PSAC Scholar Athletes and All-Academic Athletes of all men’s sports at the university, and are some of the best overall students at the university. This solution, while it may seem considerate, is only surficial. It actually exhibits the Administrations ineptitude and disregard toward their students’ situation and is quite condescending and offensive on a personal level.
All of these things put together, it is apparent that the Administration at Millersville is inept, inconsiderate, and just plain not able to perform to the level that the students at this university deserve. If allowed to continue in this manner, they WILL run this school into the ground and kill the prestige that Millersville has built since it’s inception. Please, contact these administrators to tell them the jig is up, that you know what they are doing, and that you will not stand for the disservices they are performing to Millersville.
Let’s face it – the McNairy administration’s first concern is the McNairy administration – particularly its reputation. Their main concern, at this point, is to avoid, at any cost, any admission that their recent decisions to cut the men’s track & field and cross country programs and their rejection of $300,000 from an alum for stopgap funding of those programs were poorly conceived, justified, marketed, and defended.
Their misrepresentation of the nature of the $300,000 offer is a case in point.
To understand why their spin is misleading, some background is needed.
When Millersville announced its decision to cut men’s indoor and outdoor track and cross country, it cited “diminishing budget dollars” and claimed that the sports could only be continued if an endowment in the millions of dollars was created to permanently fund those programs. Just days after the announcement of the cuts, concerned students-athletes, alums, and former coaches met to find creative, positive ways to address both problems.
Our fundraising efforts had two aspects – raise alumni monies for near-term funding and create an endowment for permanent long term funding. But our focus wasn’t fund raising alone. We also examined ways to cut costs – converting indoor track to a club and paring down the budgets of the remaining two sports to the bare bones. By cutting costs, we hoped to make our stopgap funding go longer and to reduce the requisite size of the endowment we would need to create.
We viewed the creation of the endowment as necessary for a simple reason – we didn’t want to be back here again in two or three years when the stopgap funding ran out. We didn’t want to kick the can down the road.
But setting up a million-dollar endowment takes some time. We not only have to raise the monies from alums and corporate donors, we have to find a law or accounting firm to set up the 501(c)(3) and to file the requisite forms with the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania and the Internal Revenue Service. This can’t happen overnight.
The $300,000 proposal was aimed at keeping outdoor track and cross going until we could put together the endowment that was the long term solution. Internally and with the administration, our position was always that the $300,000 part of the proposal was a short term solution to give us time to create the endowment. We never saw the $300,000 as a long term solution.
On March 5, we made the following proposal to the McNairy administration – turn indoor track into a club (thereby cutting funds and removing 37 male athletes for Title IX calculations), continue pared-down versions of outdoor track and cross country for a few years with the $300,000 donation we have raised and give us time to create a permanent endowment.
The administration’s counterproposal was cut all three programs, turn them into clubs, and perhaps at some future point we will reinstate them.
Their plan had two main problems. First, as they know, we can’t go out and raise monies from alums and corporations for a permanent endowment based on a vague promise that, at some unspecified date, Millersville “may” reinstate the three programs. Second, once programs die, they are seldom resurrected. To support this contention, I cited the example of UCLA’s early 90s cuts of men’s swimming and gymnastics as an example.
We asked Vice President Gerald Eckert to submit our four-part proposal to the administration for consideration. He agreed.
A week later, they refused that proposal.
The rejection of our proposal, particularly its rejection of $300,000, hasn’t played well with students, student-athletes, alums, and the general public. To quote Jimmy Fallon, “Who DOESN’T like to get free money?”
To do damage control, the administration’s PR people went to work. They had to come up with a post hoc rationalization that would make their rejection of those monies sound not just rational, but fiscally prudent.
What did they come up with?
About a week ago, Millersville spokeswoman Janet Kacskos defended the school’s rejection of those funds on the ground that “the money offered is not a solution to the budget issues facing the university as a whole.” This post hoc rationalization doesn’t even pass the giggle test.
Millersville’s press release cite projected state cuts of 5-20% from its $100-million budget as the reason for the program cuts. Such cuts would create a budgetary short-fall of between $5 million and $20 million dollars.
The McNairy administration cites these “diminishing budget dollars” as the reason for its cuts of men’s track and cross country. “The University will realize approximately $200,000 in savings,” their press release says.
Let me get this straight. Millersville rejected the $300,000 alumni offer because it doesn’t solve the multi-million dollar “budget issues facing the university as a whole.” But Millersville defends its purported $200,000 cuts despite the fact those cuts don’t solve the multi-million dollar “budget issues facing the university as a whole.”
Since neither the $300,000 offer nor the $200,000 cuts fix Millersville’s multi-million dollar budget problems as a whole, that issue is a red herring. The real issue is which proposal saves the school more money. I am not a mathematician, but last I checked, $300,000 > $200,000.
This rationalization, this effort at spin, makes no sense.
After our March 22, press conference, Millersville unveiled its other post hoc rationalization for rejecting the monies. To the media and the press and above Millersville said something like this – “$300,000 . . . is a short-term solution that would simply delay the problems for a year.
This statement is misleading – it omits any mention of the other prong of our two-pronged funding approach – the creation of an endowment. They know very well that the $300,000 part of our proposal was never advanced as a long term solution to the funding of outdoor track and cross country, let alone the budgetary problems of Millersville as a whole.
By misrepresenting the nature of the $300,000 part of our proposal and omitting any mention of the endowment part of our proposal, Millersville hopes to make their rejection of free money seem less irrational.
Sorry, smearing lipstick on that pig doesn’t turn it into a beauty queen.
Who doesn’t like to get free money? The McNairy administration.
1st: When looking for cuts, perhaps you should look at the most overpaid administrators and cut their salaries by a small difference. Slightly cutting the salary for each of the overpaid officials would make up what it actually costs to run the program, without being detrimental to the students. Don’t say that that wrecks their livelihood either because the middle class manages just fine with a lot less.
2nd: You said this was to protect the academic core, yet judging by the course offerings for next fall, you’ve made drastic cuts there as well in order to stick more money in your pockets.
3rd: You informed no one of your decision to cut the Men’s TFXC program.
4th: If you can no longer support 22 teams, why was a women’s golf program recently added? I’m not saying that that should be cut, I’m saying why did you do that if when you knew that budget cuts would be coming.
5th: You say it will save 200,000 dollars, however, you have not been able to provide the numbers to prove it.
6th: If you knew anything about track and field, you would realize that outdoor track in particular would not be able to survive as a club sport. In Europe, it would work. However, we’re in the United States and no market for club track and field exists. If you had researched properly, you would know that this is a preposterous solution. Not only that, it has been explored as an option: Indoor Track for MEN and WOMEN would be turned into a club. This way, the University which claims to be “Equal Opportunity” is not DISCRIMINATING AGAINST THE MEN.
7th: It’s about time you make your decisions based on the students, who are paying you to teach them and allow them to have opportunities so that their student activity fees don’t go to waste. Your job is about the students. Not lining your pockets. Or at least it’s supposed to be anyways.
Can the McNairy administration be any more condescending with this article? I count EIGHT lies, I mean myths. 1) MYTH: “That cut came…after the Governor announced a proposed 20% funding reduction” TRUTH: Your press release came just 7 days after Corbett’s. I doubt you assessed and took action in just 7 days. PLEASE don’t blame Gov. Corbett’s announcement for your actions. 2) MYTH: “Key alumni…were contacted prior to the announcement” TRUTH: They were? Who? No one connected with the program was contacted. Can you provide a name? It would go a long way in repairing your credibility. 3) MYTH: “SAAC…was contacted prior to the announcement” TRUTH: Really? A member of SAAC said it wasn’t true during the public comments portion of the Feb. 23rd Student Senate Meeting. Dr. Breaux, you were there. He refuted it just minutes after you said it. Were you listening? 4) MYTH: “The decision was made on the basis that the University could not continue to support 22 sports” TRUTH: They can’t? Do you know that for a fact? You never collaborated with the coaches involved to ask for a reduction in expenses. Why not? The running programs alone can be pared down significantly. Did you ask other sports? Is it fair to single out men’s running ONLY? I’m curious. Does MU football need 92 players? Did anyone look into paring that down? 5) MYTH: “A private donor… made a generous offer of $300,000, which the University had to reluctantly decline” TRUTH: Reluctantly? It was a flat out rejection with NO comment. Pres. McNairy, you couldn’t even muster the courage to speak directly with the donor or the group who offered the proposal. PLEASE don’t spin this to make it look like you care. Your insulative approach to managing has been well documented. 6) MYTH: “$300,000 over three years, or even all at once, is a short-term solution that would simply delay the problems for a year” TRUTH: Wow, you managed to fit THREE myths in one sentence. First, the programs do NOT cost $200,000/year. At most, it’s $120,000. A pared down version puts it at $85,000/year. That’s been proven. Second, the donation would fund the programs for 3+ years, not one, using the ACTUAL budget numbers, not your INFLATED ones. Third, the $300,000 would not delay the problem. It would fund the programs while a long term solution was finalized. Key word being solution. That aside, WHY, WHY, WHY would you not at least accept the donation and extend the programs, even if for ONE year? 7) MYTH: “We have encouraged the track and field and cross country students to join our strong intramural/club sports program that offers students competitive experiences against many highly regarded schools.” TRUTH: This is yet another condescending part you don’t seem to get. I won’t even waste my time explaining this one to you. 8) MYTH: “To our knowledge no one has explored this (intramural/club sports program) as an option. TRUTH: You know why no one has explored it? You don’t? Read #7.
Here’s an idea. Budget cuts = class cuts so cut the amount of required classes. 😛