Dartmouth employees may soon receive cuts to their health and retirement benefit plans as administrators struggle to reduce the College budget, faculty committee chairs announced Monday at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting. Administrators may also change the College's sabbatical program to cope with budget constraints, the chairs announced.
The Council on Benefits has been working with the College administration since December to determine possible reductions to health care and retirement benefits as part of the budget reduction process, professor of environmental studies and committee chair Richard Howarth said at the meeting.
The recommendations will be officially announced online today, Howarth said in an interview with The Dartmouth. While faculty committees have worked with the administration to produce the recommendations, the administration will have the final say about whether to implement the changes, he said.
The College is investigating possible cuts in benefits in order to reduce the need for layoffs and furloughs, Howarth said at the meeting. Protection of the economic interests of lower-paid employees guided the Committee's recommendations, he said.
Currently, the College places more emphasis on employee benefits than other Ivy League institutions, Howarth said, adding that benefits compose 29 percent of faculty base salary at the College, compared to an average of 25 percent for faculty over the rest of the Ivy League. The College has not yet implemented higher co-payments and deductibles in its health coverage, but will consider doing so in the context of a benefits package which is still "rich," but not as expensive, Howarth said.
The updated health benefit model will be more "progressive," according to Howarth, with higherpaid employees responsible for larger insurance payments. The College will also consider reducing the amount it pays for employee-only coverage.
If the administration chooses to implement these changes, most employees would only pay slightly more for insurance, resulting in a small overall effect as a proportion of employee paychecks, Howarth said.
The College would reduce its retirement contributions for employees over 40 years old from 10 percent to 9 percent of base salary, according to Howarth. For employees ages 35-39, the College would reduce its contribution from 10 percent to 7 percent of employees' base salary, he said.
Reductions in health and retirement plans comprise part of $13 million in benefits and compensation that officials are seeking to eliminate from the budget. College administrators have been attempting to cut $100 million from Dartmouth's operating budget over the next two fiscal years.
The Committee on the Faculty has also evaluated possible changes to sabbatical policy, which would increase the number of working years required to earn a year of paid sabbatical from nine to 12 for tenured faculty, according to committee chair and biology professor Kathy Cottingham.
Sabbatical policies at peer institutions require a range of service, from six to 12 years, Dean of the Faculty and acting Provost Carol Folt said at the meeting.
The change would also reduce the need for visiting professors, Cottingham said. Instead of replacing all courses taught by professors on sabbatical, the College could replace only 30 percent of them in order to cut costs, according to Folt.
Computer science professor Scot Drysdale, chair of the Committee on Organization and Policy and the Faculty Coordinating Committee, said that although faculty members would prefer not to change the sabbatical policy, the difficulties resulting from the change could be mitigated if some of the funds the College saves could be used to increase the number of senior faculty fellowships.
The proposed changes could lead to a more important role for senior fellowship programs for faculty, Folt said at the meeting. Such programs, unlike sabbaticals, require an application that is reviewed by a faculty committee, she said. The application process gives the program independence from the College but also makes funding more competitive, according to Folt.
Existing fellowship programs allow junior faculty members to produce important work at the crucial time before their tenure evaluation, Folt said.
Other suggestions had not been pursued by the committees. Previous proposals to allow students from other universities to enroll at the College for the Summer term due to low enrollment were too complicated to make over the past three months, according to Folt. There is no way to direct such students specifically into under-enrolled classes over Summer term, and transfer students could potentially struggle with course work, Folt said, though administrators will continue to consider online programs.
The College will also likely reduce stipends for department chairs, a decision supported by the faculty committees consulted by the administration, according to Folt.
Administrators are unlikely to cut areas of departmental budgets that are unrelated to compensation, because the College has already made extensive cuts to those areas, Folt said.
During the discussion at the meeting, a number of faculty members expressed dissatisfaction with the way they were notified about the decisions. Several said they would prefer a format for FAS meetings that allowed for rather discussion, rather than numerous presentations.
