Missouri Southern State University administrators are looking wherever they can to cut costs to balance the Joplin school’s budget.

A companion objective is impacting as few employees as possible.

A.J. Anglin, vice president for academic affairs, said the balancing act involves several measures, and it’s not clear how much can be saved.

“It really has so many dimensions to it,” Anglin said. “We’ve tried to look wherever we could to find savings without impacting people.”

Emails from faculty members to university administrators earlier this year reveal faculty concerns about the impact that balancing act could have on the quality of education at Southern.    

Rob Yust, vice president for business affairs, has said he will present a balanced budget next month. That involves finding $4 million, including negating an $800,000 deficit, and overcoming an expected $1.7 million cut from the state.

Anglin said three instructors with one-year contracts have been told their contracts won’t be renewed next year. There would be no other faculty layoffs this year, he said.

Cliff Toliver, faculty senate president, said two people in the English department and one in the social sciences department were affected.

Anglin said about five tenure-track positions were not filled. The university instead offered one-year contracts to fill those positions. That will save between $10,000 and $20,000 for each position.

Anglin said resignations and retirements resulted in the vacancies of an instructor, a dean and a staff member. He said those jobs are being eliminated. The duties of the dean of graduate studies and lifelong learning will now be supervised by the director of lifelong learning. The eliminated faculty position is in the communication department.

The university conducted an unsuccessful search this year for someone to chair the art department. That position won’t be filled next year. Jim Lile Jr., chairman of the theater department, will be chairman of both departments next year.

The Joplin Globe last month made a request under Missouri’s open records law for copies of emails sent or received by Anglin and Bruce Speck, university president, between Jan. 1 and March 7 that pertained to faculty cuts, faculty cutbacks, layoffs or downsizing.

Most of the names of employees were redacted from the emails. The names of administrators were not redacted.

COST-SAVING IDEAS

Most of the emails relate to university employees providing cost-saving ideas to avoid layoffs. Yust has said those ideas will save the university $150,000 next year.

One idea relates to university-issued credit cards for the supervisory personnel to pay for procurements and some travel expenses. The idea was to reduce the number of people who have the cards or set stricter procurement policies.

That idea troubled a university recruiter. Yust forwarded the email to Speck and other vice presidents on March 5. She wrote that if she were unable to use the card for traveling expenses, she couldn’t afford to pay for her meals up front and wait for the university to reimburse her.

“Also, I cannot afford a pay cut,” she wrote. “As stated, I do not make much now and any cut would be very costly. I would not be able to pay my car payment or the mortgage.”

She wrote that increasing tuition and fees doesn’t make her recruiting job easier.

“There is great concern for students and prospective students as well,” she wrote. “If we keep increasing fees, make classrooms bigger and the like, we may be shooting ourselves in the foot. I have a hard enough time getting students from out of state to come to MSSU because of out-of-state tuition costs. Let’s don’t make it any harder by adding more and more fees.”

Yust said by phone there have been no decisions about the procurement credit cards.

Emails complained that cutting faculty would be counterproductive, including one sent to Jeff Gibson, director of budget and operations, on Feb. 28.

“I have serious concerns about the suggestions that would compromise the quality of education,” the email reads. “We will not be able to attract or retain students if the quality of education is not strong. We need to keep in mind that we are a university, not a community college or high school.

“In addition, many of the recommendations would require the faculty to share a much greater burden of the cuts than would other individuals or programs on the campus.”

Another Feb. 28 email to Gibson reads: “Some of the suggestions I know are unfortunate inevitabilities — we are going to lose faculty, and programs are going to be cut. But these should be decisions of last resort. We are an educational institution. We should be eliminating athletic programs before we cut academics.”

The writer noted that football is untouchable, but that other athletic programs were not.

ANXIOUS TIMES

A professor who served on the faculty senate’s Budget Advisory Committee wrote Anglin to say that the faculty had already paid a disproportionate price in the economic downturn.

“Attached, please find a summary of faculty cuts at MSSU,” he wrote. “Faculty remain the only class of employees to have sustained pay cuts as well as the only class of employees to decrease in numbers in the last three years.”

The attachment lists annual faculty pay cuts totaling $355,178, including $187,305 for a reduction in distance education compensation; a $126,123 reduction in pay for summer teaching; and $41,750 for elimination of writing-intensive stipends.

The professor said the university’s savings were continuing because none of the cuts had been restored, and the total didn’t include lost faculty positions or higher health insurance premiums.

Anglin responded with copies to Speck and the vice presidents. He provided faculty numbers differing from those of the professor’s list.

“In regards to the wages lost by the faculty, I wish that the recent years of financial difficulty would have prevented the university from making these difficult decisions,” Anglin wrote.

“I also wish that all the faculty and staff could have received raises over the last four years,” he wrote. “If you continue to dwell on the wages lost by the faculty, it is only fair to include the salary increases that have occurred for the faculty who have been promoted over the last four years.”

The professor this week said members of the faculty, including himself, continue to worry that they could lose their jobs.