The unkindest cuts

A year after she earned tenure, University of Nebraska professor Julia Morse received a less welcome distinction this spring: a pink slip.

So instead of fixing up her new house, Ms. Morse is packing it up - along with her office. Down the hall, the soccer-field-sized manufacturing lab where she used to teach sits idle. Her department is a casualty of a $13.7 million cut in the budget at Nebraska's four-campus university system, brought on by the state's worst fiscal crisis in decades.

Thus far, the University of Nebraska's cuts of tenured faculty and whole departments are one of the most extreme university responses to a budget crunch. But if the economy's sluggishness continues, other states may face the same dilemma as Nebraska's flagship campus in Lincoln: whether to sacrifice a few programs and professors to preserve quality overall.

The experience at the University of Nebraska's Lincoln campus has revealed some unpleasant truths: Even the biggest state universities can't do everything, and a poor economy can be the catalyst for setting priorities. But the affected students and faculty aren't the only ones reeling from this new round of cuts. Many fear long-term damage to UNL's reputation and the state's economy.

Nowhere in Nebraska have the cuts to higher education hit harder than in Lincoln, the state's second-largest city. (This in a state so sparsely populated that UNL's 74,031-seat football stadium qualifies as the third-largest city when the Huskers play at home.)

Grain silos are the tallest structures on the horizon here, a symbol of the state's continued dependence on corn and cattle two decades after an agricultural depression stalled Nebraska's economy.

Today, the state faces an even deeper budget crisis. Four times in the past two years legislators have trimmed UNL's budget. In all, the university lost $15.6 million. The cumulative 9 percent reduction is double the percentage cut during the 1980s.

UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman didn't want to repeat the university's experience during earlier recessions, when across-the-board cuts forced professors to reproduce tests on scratch paper and departments chose to disconnect their phones to save money. "That's not a way to run a university," Mr. Perlman says.

Like other public universities facing big shortfalls, UNL first shaved administrative expenses and enacted a double-digit rate of increase in tuition. The university also merged colleges and cut support for its natural-history museum, hotel, and arboretum.

But when those measures proved inadequate, Perlman opted to drop a handful of academic programs rather than spread the cuts equally among all departments.

In June he announced the targets: the department of industrial systems technology, based in Omaha, and the department of health and human performance. He also eliminated Portuguese and downsized Russian.

Those cuts directly affected a few hundred students and a couple of dozen faculty - only a fraction of UNL's 18,000 undergraduates and 1,000 professors. Compared with majors such as physics or economics, it's hard not to argue that these departments are somewhat peripheral. Only 30 students, for example, were enrolled in introductory Portuguese this coming year.

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