Dartmouth Medical School will lay off 12 staff members and cut approximately 10 percent from its $237-million operating budget as part of the College-wide effort to reduce expenditures by $72 million over the next two years, DMS Dean William Green said an interview with The Dartmouth. The layoffs will go into effect on a rolling basis throughout July. No grant-funded or faculty positions will be cut, Green said.
In addition to the layoffs, 40 employees will take 5- to 50-percent reductions in hours beginning July 1, Green said.
DMS will also seek to increase revenue by $4.1 million by increasing tuition by approximately 6 percent and adding a student service fee, which will result in an 8.9-percent total increase in tuition, Green said.
A $2.5-million unrestricted contribution by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to DMS and a $500,000 contribution by DHMC to the two institutions' joint development office will also contribute to this revenue-building effort, Green said.
Salaries at DMS will be held flat for the 2010 fiscal year except for those faculty members who were already being considered for promotion which, along with compensation cuts and other similar measures, will save approximately $5 million. DMS will also slow planned building renovations and cut back on facility services, which Green said will save an estimated additional $2 million. Reductions in travel, supplies and other operational expenses will lead to further savings of more than $4.5 million.
The DMS layoff package will be identical to the package offered to the staff members laid off by the College in February, and consists of two weeks of pay for each consecutive year worked at Dartmouth, a lump sum payment towards the cost of maintaining full health benefits for three months, career counseling and consideration as internal candidates for open positions.
Of the $237-million DMS budget, $91 million comes directly from grants that are secured by individual researchers. These researchers will therefore be unaffected by the layoffs, executive vice president for finance and administration Adam Keller said. Because lab assistants are paid by grants, these individuals will also be insulated from layoffs, as eliminating these positions would reduce the school's funding with no net gain on the bottom line, Keller said.
"It can even be a negative because disrupting that research group may not allow them to apply for new funds, including stimulus funding," Green said.
DMS does not want to "push too hard" for faculty to secure grants from federal and corporate sponsors, Green said, but he said he believes the school has acted to take advantage of the available grant opportunities.
"The Office of Sponsored Projects has given us some numbers, and there has been an absolutely huge increase in the applications that have gone out and the dollar value of those applications," Green said. "Now mind you those are applications and not grants, and we have very little, if next to no, information about how they're fairing."
In the month of April, DMS researchers applied for $130 million in grant funding, particularly focusing on money from President Barack Obama's America Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Keller said.
DMS delayed announcing its budget cuts the undergraduate College announced its cuts in February partially to determine how much stimulus money might be available and what types of grant mechanisms would be in place under Obama's plan, Green said.
"We would lose [grant opportunities] if we did too many reductions in the research teams the research teams not being just the people in the laboratory, but the administrative help and the departments that help put the grants together," Green said. "We tried to find ways to keep those research teams more intact so that we could have the flexibility to take advantage of the stimulus money."
Because DMS does not know how much funding it will actually receive in federal grants, however, officials did not factor this funding into its budget-reconciliation plan, Green said.
"We don't have the awards or the feedback to know what our harvest is going to be, so we couldn't with good conscience plug in specific numbers," Green said. "That said, we are optimistic that there will be some significant windfall of funding."
Stimulus funding could reduce the amount of reserved funds, separate from the endowment, that DMS will need to draw from, Keller said.
The current budget plan leaves a $4.5-million budgetary gap, which will be filled with an undetermined combination of reserve funds and stimulus money.
"We think the uncertainty is a risk worth taking because cutting further and going immediately to a balanced budget could well prove we cut too deeply if the stimulus funding does come in a significant way," Green said
In light of the hiring freeze announced by DMS in November 2008, grants will also be used to hire new faculty to replace those who have left the medical school.
The National Institutes of Health, for example, offers P30 grants that are designated specifically for hiring faculty, Green said. Several departments and programs have already submitted grant applications to allow them to hire additional faculty, Green said.
Green said he hopes that President-elect Jim Yong Kim's connections will help secure additional funding from corporate sponsors.
"He's an energetic and well connected person when conversing about medical schools," Green said. "Although his focus will be on the undergraduate mission, certainly he brings in a dimension for the medical school. He's very enthusiastic about it and so I think there is great potential there."
