College officials anticipate that additional revenue and savings will accumulate naturally to fill the remaining $20 million of $100 million in cuts needed to close the College's budget shortfall, Senior Vice President Steven Kadish said in an interview with The Dartmouth on Sunday. The budget reductions announced in early April cuts in benefits provided to College employees and as many as 36 layoffs will contribute to the other 80 percent of the needed cuts outlined so far.
These reductions are the final budget changes that College administrators and trustees will implement to cut $100 million in fiscal years 2011 and 2010, College President Jim Yong Kim said in the interview.
"The good news is the work of the budget-cutting process is really finished," Kim said. "We've got it to where we want to go, and we simply reported back to the [Board of Trustees]."
Although College officials are confident that current proposals will close most of the budget shortfall, College officials are still evaluating over 1,300 money-saving recommendations by students, faculty and community members, Kadish said.
Administrators expect some of the current proposals to materialize into "more revenue or more savings," Kadish said, but added that officials were unwilling to conclusively declare that more savings would accumulate until they had looked into the matter further.
Although budget committees are reading and considering all submitted recommendations, Kadish said he is "hard-pressed" to release the specific details about which of these recommendations may be implemented in the future.
The Dartmouth community can expect up to 30 more layoffs through the end of the calendar year, Kadish said. These layoffs will take place primarily among positions related to information technology and finance, according to Kadish.
Despite these reductions, Dartmouth is still hiring in "key positions" to fill jobs vacated by retirements and in "areas where we want to be stronger," according to Kadish. Since last year's layoffs, the College has rehired 28 former employees into existing positions, according to Roland Adams, College director of media relations.
Kim applauded Board members and administrators for being "progressive" in making health benefit cuts and involuntary layoffs, he said.
"If you look at our budget reduction process, compared to some of our peer institutions where they're literally laying off hundreds of people, we've gone beyond the call of duty and we've worked extremely hard to try and find the savings in areas that didn't affect people and their livelihoods," Kim said.
Kim rejected criticism, leveled recently by groups like Students Stand with Staff, that the decision to lay off employees in his attempt to balance the budget reflected a "corporatization" of the College, he said.
"With every decision we've made, whether it was about benefits or layoffs or hours every decision we made we did it in a way that had the least impact on the lowest-paid workers and the most sacrifice for the highest-paid workers," Kim said.
During the April Board meeting, administrators and Board members discussed the possibility of using outside management firms to oversee the Hanover Inn in an effort to ensure the College will not lose money through the Inn, Kim said.
Dartmouth would still retain ownership of the Hanover Inn, according to the Board's Sunday press release.
"We're not selling the Hanover Inn, or giving the possibility of any firm managing the Hanover Inn in any way they want," Kim said. "We've made it clear that we value our relationship with the union and with the management firms we're talking to we've made it very clear that the union will be an important thing for us."
The new Visual Arts Center, currently under construction next to the Hopkins Center for the Arts and the Hood Museum of Art, will cost the College $10 million less than originally projected due to a strategic rebidding of construction contracts, according to the press release.
This decrease in cost, while not immediately affecting the budget cuts, will improve the overall financial standing of the College, Kadish said.
"It does show up, in terms of we need to borrow less debt," Kadish said.
