University of Alaska

In a major reversal, Gov. Mike Dunleavy announced Tuesday he’s agreed to restore roughly half of the funding he vetoed from the University of Alaska budget earlier this summer. And the cut would happen over three years instead of one. The move is one of several reversals Dunleavy has made after hearing from the public about his vetoes.

At a press conference, Dunleavy acknowledged that his initial cut was steep. He said he and university leaders have met in the middle on this new agreement.

“The three-year approach also includes understandings that the university will do certain things and my office will do certain things in support of the university’s efforts to make it a better university,” Dunleavy said.

Under the agreement signed by the governor, UA President Jim Johnsen and UA Board of Regents Chair John Davies, the University of Alaska will see a $25 million cut in funding for this budget year, which began on July 1. The next two years would see cuts of $25 million and $20 million, for a total of $70 million.

When Dunleavy vetoed University of Alaska funding from the operating budget in June, it left the university with a $135-million-sized hole in funding, representing about 40% of state support.

Davies said that the agreement should make the UA community less anxious about the university’s fiscal future.

“Most importantly, the governor’s supplemental operating budget provides much more certainty for our students, staff, faculty and the communities we serve,” Davies said. “One of the biggest problems has been the uncertainty. I think that this agreement will provide a great deal of certainty so we can begin the process of moving forward together.”

The governor’s vetoes also led the board of regents to make two major financial decisions. The first was to declare financial exigency, which makes it easier to fire faculty, including those with tenure. The second was the recommendation that the university be consolidated from three accredited universities to one.

Johnsen said that the decision to reverse the declaration of exigency is up to the regents, but he anticipates a smaller number of layoffs than previously announced. Johnsen also said that even with the reduced cuts in the compact, he still supports moving the university system to a single-university model.

“I think the university is spending too much of its share of resources, whether its — whatever the number is — on administration and administrative overhead,” Johnsen said. “I want to put a larger share of whatever money we’re allocated from the state and from our students’ tuition, from research grants and contracts, I want that money going to academics and student services and less of it going to administrative structure.”

Classes at the University of Alaska begin in two weeks on Aug. 26. The uncertainty budget cuts created for students, staff and faculty left many people unsure about whether or not they’d stay with the university.

Johnsen said while the agreement comes only days before the school year starts, the entire UA community should be optimistic.

“We’re open for business. As Regent (Mary) Hughes said in our recent meeting, ‘We’ve been here 100 years. We’re going to be here in 100 years.’ We’ve been very strong in putting as our top priority our students and the academic programs they’re in,” Johnsen said. “So I think with this three-year agreement, we’ll be able to ensure that our students all across the state have access to the programs they need.”

The next step for the University of Alaska system will be to review options for consolidating from three separate accredited universities to one. That’s set to occur at their next board of regents meeting on Sept. 12 and 13.

Amid the University of Alaska’s budget woes, targeted ads from out-of-state universities have appeared on social media, encouraging Alaska students to enroll.

Some UA students say they’re hearing more from military recruiters as well.

Leilani Oathout is about to begin her senior year at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She receives both the Alaska Performance Scholarship and an Alaska Education Grant, about $4,500 altogether each school year.

In early July, she and 12,000 other Alaska students were told the state didn’t have funds available to pay those scholarships. Oathout said in the days after she was notified, she started seeing ads on Facebook from other colleges.

“And then I randomly got an email in my inbox for recruiting for the Army,” she said. “And I didn’t think (anything) of it until I got a second email in my spam folder.”

The emails — one from the Army, another from the National Guard — touted benefits like tuition assistance and cash bonuses.

The Alaska Legislature passed a bill on Monday that would restore scholarship funding. It moves now to Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s desk. But with all the university budget uncertainty, Oathout said she understands the attention from recruiters.

“That’s pretty smart that they’re targeting students. But I also feel super bad. Like, I don’t think this is a good route the state is going down,” Oathout said.

Joey Sweet, 26, is pursuing a master’s degree in public administration at UAA. He said he’s received military recruitment emails in the past, but typically about one a year. He said he received three of them within eight days in July. He doesn’t think it’s a coincidence.

“I mean, I think the emails really speak for themselves,” Sweet said. “The one Army email straight up said in the subject line something like, ‘Hey, do you need a backup plan?'”

The subject line read: “A Back up Plan? Secondary Income? Benefits?”

Sweet said he has a lot of respect for the military and that it’s a good option for many students, but he thinks using UA’s budget crisis as a recruiting tactic is inappropriate.

The Army has seen an increase in interest in the last few weeks from Alaska high school graduates, including UA students, but James Puckett, station commander at the recruiting office in Anchorage, said the Army hasn’t changed its outreach.

“My team is not messaging any differently than it has been before,” Puckett said. “We’ve had email campaigns in the past, and we’ve targeted the same market. There’s not been an increase in our marketing or our specific targeting to these areas.”

Puckett said Army recruiters, as always, are letting students know they have options.

“Our message is pretty clear, you know. Check the Army out, and our incentives and educational opportunities,” he said.

This week, the Legislature passed a bill that would undo many of the governor’s line-item vetoes to the operating budget, returning most of what he cut from the UA system. But Dunleavy has indicated more vetoes are likely.

The UA Board of Regents met Tuesday to discuss the budget and options for restructuring.

The University of Alaska Board of Regents voted 8-3 to move towards consolidating the entire university system to a single accredited university. The board discussed several proposals for the university system well into Tuesday afternoon in Anchorage.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s budget cuts to the University of Alaska total about $136 million, or roughly 41% of state support.

The plan regents adopted is to reorganize the University of Alaska from three separate, individually-accredited universities to a single accredited university.

UA President Jim Johnsen endorsed the proposal. Johnsen said the new model would streamline curricula and student services, as well as create a single college for each major field of study throughout the university system. Johnsen said the plan saves money by eliminating a lot of administrative costs.

“I think the essential functions, especially those that are academic and student-facing … yes, they need to stay out there in close proximity to students,” Johnsen said. “But backroom functions, we don’t need three or four different approaches, processes, systems to do lots of things that really don’t add to the student experience.”

Other proposals considered

Another proposal would have established a more cooperative consortium model for the university system while retaining the three universities. The three universities would make reductions to staff and faculty, administrative services, athletics, travel and other budgetary items in order to meet those individual cuts.

The proposal was put together and endorsed by the three chancellors of the universities. Their argument was that while each university would take large cuts, they would continue to maintain their ties to each individual community.

University of Alaska Southeast Chancellor Rick Caulfield said there would be a renewed focus on collaboration between the three campuses.

“The integrated consortium model would build on retaining three separately accredited universities, and a commitment from the chancellors and all of those involved with the leadership at those universities, for dramatically enhancing the collaboration of academic programs, and student services, shared business services,” Caulfield said.

The regents and Johnsen expressed skepticism that an increase in collaboration would be as smooth as the chancellors proposed. Johnsen said the board has called for increased collaboration in the past, with little success.

A third proposal regents didn’t vote on came from the Dunleavy administration’s Office of Management and Budget. The proposal would take place over two years and make targeted cuts to all three universities, including cuts to research, athletics and the university-run Museum of the North. It would also cut university support to public radio station KUAC, which operates within the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The proposal drew criticism from UA’s accrediting body, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. The commission’s president sent a letter to the board of regents on Monday, describing the plan as an “additional and, perhaps, inappropriate strong-arm ‘guidance’ of the Alaska Governor.”

The letter says that the Dunleavy administration proposal could affect future accreditation for the University of Alaska.

Mike Barnhill, policy director for the administration’s Office of Management and Budget, told regents the proposal was a way for the state to enter the discussion on how to cut the university’s budget.

Johnsen said under any plan, it’s likely that the cuts will have a ripple effect on enrollment and research. He said both are avenues that could result in less money for the university as a whole.

A task force has been put together to determine how to move forward with the single university model.

University of Alaska students have plenty to worry about. Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s line-item vetoes made deep cuts to the system’s budget. And separately this month, some 12,000 UA students were told there’s no money for their state scholarships, unless the Alaska Legislature votes to restore funding.

With so much uncertainty, many UA students are considering their options. That’s opened the door to controversial recruiting practices from at least one other university.

Sine Anahita is a professor of sociology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the president of the UAF faculty senate. She also created and moderates a Facebook page for the University of Alaska community. She said with the current budget crisis, she’s been spending much of her time there, sharing information and trying to dispel rumors.

That’s how she saw the ad.

“I am just constantly on Facebook,” Anahita said. “So it just came across my newsfeed.”

It was a sponsored post by the State University of New York, or SUNY. A black-and-white photo shows a young woman smiling down at a laptop. The post says this:

“Worried about the future of Alaska’s universities? SUNY is accepting students now. You can bring The State University of New York home with you and complete your degree from a name you can trust, 100% online!”

Anahita said her first reaction was indignation.

“Our students are feeling very stressed right now. Students don’t know whether they can continue at the University of Alaska,” Anahita said. “There’s just lots of anxiety and fear. And it sounded to me like the SUNY people were taking advantage of our students’ fear.”

Anahita took a screenshot of the ad and shared it with UAF administration. It quickly made its way to the office of the university president.

Robbie Graham, UA’s associate vice president of public affairs, was not pleased.

“This is a very difficult time for the university, as you can appreciate,” Graham said. “And it’s really hard to see those kinds of comments and those kinds of solicitations from a fellow university during a really difficult time like this.”

Graham confirmed UA President Jim Johnsen called SUNY to express his concern. On July 19, state senator Fairbanks Democratic Sen. Scott Kawasaki shared his own screenshot of the ad, along with a short note calling it “sad” that the governor’s vetoes “have caused outside institutions to target Alaskan students.”

The original post has since been removed.

In a written statement, SUNY press secretary Holly Liapis said SUNY contacted the University of Alaska to “extend our regrets regarding the Facebook advertisement.”

The University of Alaska Board of Regents voted yesterday to declare financial exigency. That clears the way for rapid downsizing, including significant layoffs.

Kevin Maier teaches English and humanities and serves as chair of the Humanities Department at the University of Alaska Southeast. But right now, he’s on vacation. On Monday, while his family went to the pool, he stayed in. On one screen he watched the Alaska House of Representatives debate a capital budget bill, and on another he tuned into the UA Board of Regents meeting.

The House failed to pass the bill. But the regents took action: They declared financial exigency for the University of Alaska. Maier said it wasn’t a surprise.

“We’ve known that something like this was coming,” he said. “It’s still shocking when it actually happens.”

The board of regents will spend the next couple months considering paths forward. They won’t decide to cut or cut back any programs until at least September. But Maier said students are right to worry about reduced class offerings and flexibility. And while faculty layoffs are likely, he expects many of his colleagues to leave on their own, taking jobs out of state with more stability.

Maier said that’s something his family is thinking about too.

“We’re definitely having conversations about whether we stay and push back, and I think staying, unfortunately, might mean that I give up an academic career that I just spent, you know, really the last 25 years of my life both preparing for and doing,” said Maier.

While final decisions are still months away, UAS leaders have some idea already of what to keep and what to cut.

Speaking before Monday’s decision, UAS Chancellor Rick Caulfield said programs with larger enrollments are more likely to be retained. But he added that some smaller programs are valuable for other reasons.

“Alaska Native languages, the languages of the Indigenous peoples of Southeast Alaska, typically don’t have very large enrollments. And yet I see that is a very important part of our mission at UAS,” Caulfield said. “So that’s an example of an array of programs that I would not envision going away, even though the numbers are relatively small.”

Even if the Alaska Legislature restores some funding to the UA budget, big changes are likely across the system.

In a month, UAS students will move into campus housing and start heading to class. The semester must go on.

Maier said he’s not quite sure what to expect.

“I think it’ll be very strange, right? Well, on the one hand, it’ll just be business as usual. We’ll be teaching classes, students will be engaged and we’ll do those parts of our jobs that we love. But on the other hand, we’ll know that these potential cuts are looming and are there,” said Maier.

Fall classes at UAS begin Aug. 26.

The House Finance Committee raised its proposal for the permanent fund dividend to $1,600.

A new version of a House Bill 2001, which would set the dividend amount, would also restore funding for most items vetoed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy. But it would accept $89 million in vetoes, including $20 million in cuts to the University of Alaska, a $49 million cut to school bond debt reimbursement and a $20 million cut to rural school construction.

Nome Democratic Rep. Neal Foster said the bill strikes a balance.

“This was just trying to balance all of the different interests of folks who wanted more cuts, folks who wanted a higher PFD, folks who didn’t want to go into savings,” he said.

He noted that the measure relies on using all $172 million in the Statutory Budget Reserve, a piggy bank the state has largely emptied in recent years.

Wasilla Republican Rep. Colleen Sullivan-Leonard said the state should use more permanent fund earnings to pay out the full amount of dividends under the formula in a 1982 state law. That would be roughly $3,000.

“I just need to make this statement and ask how we’ve come to this decision of just not coming to the earnings reserve account to pay for a full statutory PFD?” she said. “The funds are there. The funds are there to pay for general government. They’re there to pay for the disbursement of the statutory permanent fund.”

Paying the full PFD would require the state to violate a different law that limits the amount drawn from permanent fund earnings. Members of the legislative majority caucuses in both the House and Senate have expressed concern that violating that law would set a bad precedent. They said it would threaten the long-term sustainability of dividends, state services and the Alaska economy.

If the Legislature passes the bill without the full PFD, Dunleavy could veto it. He supports full dividends.

The committee voted along caucus lines, 7-3, to advance the bill.