With jobs on the line as state funding tightens, a group of faculty members from the state’s public universities went to a Connecticut State Colleges and Universities’ Board of Regents meeting Wednesday morning, hoping to convince them to use its multimillion-dollar reserve funds to directly fund teaching in the classrooms.
But they got no guarantees, leaving them “frustrated,” “disappointed” and “overwhelmed,” they said.
The system has about $635 million in reserves, according to a presentation given to the Board of Regents’ finance committee earlier this month. About $359 million of that is already designated, leaving $276 million unassigned.
At the same time, universities are being asked to make cuts as federal coronavirus relief funds evaporate. The Connecticut State Colleges and Universities’ system is planning to reduce expenditures by $40 million next year and $37 million the following year, according to a presentation given at a Board of Regents Finance Committee Meeting in February.
The Board of Regents did vote Wednesday to implement a new policy that could reduce the amount that the colleges and university system keeps in reserves.
Lloyd Blanchard, the Chief Financial Officer for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, told members of the Board of Regents’ Finance Committee earlier this month that the reserve fund had grown over the past few years thanks to an influx of coronavirus relief funds and some cost savings.
But Blanchard said that university policies requiring the system to set aside a certain percentage of funds had contributed to the buildup. He suggested that the Board of Regents modify the policy to eliminate some of the required set-asides.
“The policies that we are proposing to change … in my opinion, have compelled us to set aside more than was necessary,” Blanchard said.
Blanchard also recommended that the board use $50 million in reserves from the System Office to offset institutional costs. About $30 million will go to paying down debt service at the four universities, and $20 million will go toward operations across the CSCU system.
Departments facing cuts to adjunct faculty ranks
The CSCU system has been attempting to shrink its budgets for the last two years. In 2023, it imposed a “deficit mitigation plan” intended to eliminate $35 million in personnel costs. Those cuts resulted in loss of tutoring, library hours and cafeteria services.
And according to a presentation made to the legislature’s appropriations committee in February, Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget allocates $43.7 million less to the state universities than the CSCU administration requested in 2026 and $37.7 million less in 2027.
Cindy Stretch, a professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University and vice president of the Connecticut State University chapter of AAUP, said the university had been asked to cut its adjunct faculty costs by $750,000 next year.
Stretch said her department has already lost about 30% of its full-time professors in the last 10 years. The department currently has 60 professors — 20 full time and 40 part time.
“There hasn’t been a one-to-one replacement in decades in the English department,” Stretch told The Connecticut Mirror.
Stretch said the cut in faculty is even more troubling this year, when Southern is expecting a large incoming first-year class. With fewer faculty, she worries, they might be forced to run bigger class sizes, which means less one-on-one work with students.
“I can’t emphasize enough how lean the [universities] have become,” said Stretch. “There is nothing else to cut without making real significant impacts on things like class sizes — and I don’t mean like nibbling around the edges, I mean like going from a 20 person class to a 35 person class.”
Wendy Wallace, a part-time faculty member in the English department at Southern, said her job is on the line.
“The fear of all of the part-time faculty is that our jobs are tenuous and we are the first ones to leave, even though we’re bearing so much of the burden of the services that students need,” said Wallace, who has taught at the university for a year.
Wallace said her students include first-generation college goers, people who are working two or three part-time jobs, and people who have suffered from mental health crises during the semester.
Wallace was one of the professors who approached Board of Regents Chair Martin Guay to ask him to commit to directing the reserves toward teaching expenses. Guay replied that he wasn’t able to make the commitment because he didn’t yet know how much money the state legislature would allocate to the colleges and universities in the state budget.
Guay told CT Mirror that the Board of Regents also needed to set a policy around how the reserves would be spent. He said that individual universities, not the Board, ultimately decided how they would spend their reserve funds.
“The reserves are by institution. Reserves don’t sit at the top. Some of them, the ones that do, we’re going to push out to the institutions,” he said.
Samantha Norton, a spokesperson for the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities, echoed Guay’s comments in an email to CT Mirror. She said the system was planning to spend $130 million from its reserves over the next two years.
“Just to be clear, any cuts made to programs or faculty are done at the individual college or university. The college or university president will also determine how their reserves are used,” she said.
Norton said the amount that each of the four universities would be asked to cut would depend on how much state funding the system received.
But professors say they are already feeling pinched.
Kelly Coleman, a professor in health and movement sciences at Southern Connecticut State University, said her department was initially asked to shave about 20% off its budget but said there could be more cuts coming. She added that the department would not have a budget to hire adjunct faculty, forcing full-time professors to advise and teach a larger number of students.
Coleman said the budget cuts have also affected her ability to purchase supplies for her classes, like tape, gauze wraps, rehabilitation equipment and syringes.
“Right now, there also is an athletic trainer shortage in the state of Connecticut. And so we have a big push through the state legislature to try to find some money to support those athletic trainers and school districts to hire them. And so if we can’t teach them because our budget is cut, that it’s going to perpetuate the problem,” she said.
Fiona Pearson, a professor of sociology at Central Connecticut State University, said her department’s budget has been reduced from $13,000 in 2017 to $6,000 in 2025.
“We basically pay for the copying and the phones, and we scramble to do any other things. Any events, any speakers, any conferences with students — all of these things are sort of nickel-and-dimed,” added Christina Barmen, also a professor in Central’s sociology department.
Pearson said that the department had gone from 11 to nine professors over the last five years. She noted that the department was also relying much more heavily on part-time faculty. With the expected increase in Southern’s enrollment, she said, her department is anticipating being short-staffed next year.