After months of speculation about layoffs and academic hatchet work, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga emerged from this year's budget process relatively unscathed.
More than 200 people will be laid off at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and at UT Martin eight people will lose their jobs.
The Chattanooga campus has announced only one layoff: the director of the UTC Children's Center.
That troubles some faculty and staff members at other UT campuses, who say the pain of budget cuts wasn't shared among the system campuses.
"It seems extremely inequitable," said Tom Anderson, president of the UT faculty and staff union United Campus Workers. "The ratio is certainly off. You would expect more at the Knoxville campus because it is bigger, but not 200 to one."
UTC administrators say even though they won't reduce staff this year, they have suffered their share of the budget crisis.
"We made the hard decisions earlier. ... If we hadn't, there would have been a lot of carnage," said Richard Brown, the university's vice chancellor of finance and operations.
Last week, UT trustees voted to eliminate three programs at UT and consolidate seven at UT Martin. UTC proposed no programs for cuts.
In meetings earlier this year, some trustees said UTC was lagging behind other campuses in identifying programs for discontinuance. UT board members and officials are concerned system campuses won't be prepared to cut $66 million when federal stimulus aid runs out in two years.
"You cautioned us about the stimulus money falling off a cliff," said Charles Anderson, a UT trustee who voiced concern at last week's board meeting about too few cuts. "I think we should be more aggressive in discontinuing programs now."
But Dr. Brown said the campus already has cut $6.1 million, its share of the $66 million budget deficit awaiting the system.
"UTC is better than prepared," he said.
Officials froze hiring on the UTC campus around the end of last year, and this year more than 90 unfilled positions have been eliminated from the budget, he said.
UTC Provost Phil Oldham said academics swallowed $3 million of the cuts this year. Nearly $2 million was saved by reorganizing the UTC Children's Center, the Challenger Center and Cadek Conservatory of Music, he said.
Another $1 million was cut from the funds to hire part-time adjunct faculty, nearly 60 percent of the adjunct budget.
Although UTC didn't cut any programs, Dr. Oldham said the school will be putting more than a dozen programs under scrutiny.
Programs that either were cut or consolidated on other UT campuses already had been identified as troublesome before the budget cycle began, Dr. Oldham said.
"(Other campuses) already had some programs on life support anyway, and that wasn't the case in Chattanooga," he said. "We have already done restructuring and combining of academic units. We have a lot of marriages of convenience for cost savings."
UT Interim President Jan Simek said employees being laid off in the system will be paid with federal stimulus money for the next two years until their jobs are eliminated. Dr. Simek said doing so will allow employees time to find other work.
Most of the people who will be affected at Knoxville will be nontenure-track lecturers or instructors, maintenance workers and administrative support staff, he said.
Dr. Simek said he will do all he can to preserve academic units and tenured faculty members.
"At the end of the stimulus period, UT will be a different university," he said. "We might be able to find a motor pool somewhere else, but we won't be able to find university education somewhere else."
Dr. Oldham said he plans to use stimulus money to hire part-time adjunct faculty members.
BY THE NUMBERS
* 1,229 -- Number of full-time employees at UTC
* 1 -- Number of layoffs
* 9,308 -- Number of full-time and part-time jobs at UT
* 200 -- Number of estimated layoffs at UT
* 768 -- Number of full-time employees at UT Martin
* 9 -- Number of layoffs at UT Martin
* 300 -- Number of estimated layoffs across the UT system
Source: University of Tennessee
