Budget Cut Ironies

Unless you’ve been residing under a rock, you know that the state government in Richmond recently slashed its contribution to the W&M budget by 15 percent, or around $6 million, to help address a $1.35 billion shortfall in the Commonwealth’s budget. After this latest round of cuts, the state will be providing the College with less than 14 percent of its operational budget.

As a political scientist fascinated by gamesmanship and strategy, part of me would love to see W&M play hardball with the state over this latest round of cuts. 

The politically astute strategy when someone cuts your budget is to target those reductions precisely where they are most visible and cause the most pain.  So, for purposes of illustration, if you’re Secretary of the Interior and your budget gets slashed, the smart response is not to spread those reductions across your administrative accounts, where they will be largely invisible, but instead to shut down programs that are really popular with ordinary people, generating enormous heat on the folks who cut your budget to begin with.  Threaten to close popular museums or parks or national monuments, for example, and let the public outcry convince the decision makers on Mt. High to leave you alone next time they go looking for budgets to slash.

Indeed, we probably could do something like that at W&M.  For instance, we could dramatically roll back the number of classes that we teach.  Courses would get much larger and some required classes would not be offered.  Many students might be unable to graduate in four years.  Or we could roll back any number of other programs and activities, thereby damaging the educational experience for undergraduates, angering them and their parents, and generating considerable heat in Richmond.

But, I’ve been at W&M long enough to know that we will never adopt that strategy.

For the most part, this latest round of cuts, just like the others we’ve experienced over the past few years, will be born by faculty and staff through stagnant salaries that do not keep pace with inflation, furloughs that essentially function as one-time salary reductions, and other reductions spread across the College’s most valuable resource – its personnel.  As a result, even amid daunting reductions in state support, W&M will continue to provide our students with the most personally engaging educational experience that they can receive anywhere.

The strategic “problem,” you see, is that the faculty and staff of the College are actually deeply committed to the mission of W&M. It’s not just rhetoric and spin.  I talk to a lot of professors at other universities, and I know that when higher education budgets are cut elsewhere, faculty sometimes disinvest from their institutions, reduce the effort they allocate to teaching, and focus their time more on the research projects that can get them outside job offers.  There will be precious little of that gamesmanship at W&M, however, because our people believe in the core values of the place and the central importance of students.

There is irony in these observations.  The shared commitments and values that make W&M special to begin with, and which will enable the institution to thrive even with this latest round of cuts, are exactly the attributes that also make us easy pickings for budgetary reductions when times are tight.  Still, although the Commonwealth’s treatment of W&M is deeply frustrating, those commitments and values are what matter the most.