MFA to close for fall

By TASHA WILLIAMS
UNIVERSITY JOURNAL

Trustees at their meeting on March 28 decided to cut about $100,000 from the Master of Fine Arts program at SUU, putting the program on “furlough.”
Current students will be allowed to continue in the program, said Dean O’Driscoll, assistant to the president for university relations. However, new students will not be accepted in the fall, he said.
The cut is just a portion of the $560,000 campus officials had to eliminate from the budget, O’Driscoll said. To balance the budget, at least three vacant positions won’t be filled and at least four programs will lose some portion of their funding.
O’Driscoll said he hopes students and faculty can see the big picture when considering these cuts.
“I would hope students will see this as the administration’s best efforts to meet requirements to help their services,” O’Driscoll said. “We were just trying to come up with the necessary cuts without hurting their classes.
“We can only hope employees see things the same way,” he continued. “We’re trying to protect our best asset: the students. If we don’t protect their future, we don’t have a future, none of us.”
He said there was an effort to move more money into other areas like faculty development, but those goals are unlikely to be reached now.
“We’re probably not going to have the money to do that now . . . because the trustees decided not to cut forensics, which would have put $50,000 toward that,” O’Driscoll said.
Because of the cuts, O’Driscoll said he believes it is a good thing faculty development was included in the tuition hike.
The faculty teaching in the MFA program will now do more teaching within the College of Performing & Visual Arts, O’Driscoll said.
Lydia Johnson, director of the Braithwaite Gallery, will also help teach in the college after her position at the gallery is reduced to half-time.
“Those positions and her (Johnson’s) move all benefit the students, actually, because it means there’s more faculty teaching,” O’Driscoll said.
O’Driscoll said the cut is approximately one-third of the MFA program’s total budget.
Robert Fass, director of the MFA program, couldn’t be reached for comment as of Friday afternoon.
At least three vacant positions on campus will not be filled, O’Driscoll said. Positions in the Department of Public Safety and the College of Education, in addition to an open position under Gregory Stauffer, vice president of administrative and financial services, will remain vacant.
College of Education Dean Bruce Barker said leaving the Master of Education position empty could impact enrollment because without that position not as many courses could be offered as before.
“A few courses might not be offered that had been offered before,” Barker said. “We hope that position might be restored when the economy improves.”
A secretarial position in the College of Education will also be impacted. The position will now be funded by local money instead of state-appropriated funds. Barker said the college is

working with the School of Continuing & Professional Studies to generate a revenue source to support the position. Barkersaid this “reduces the bite” from the state-allocated account.
Stauffer was approached by a couple of the directors who recommended cuts, O’Driscoll said. Of the areas he supervises, about $70,000 was cut by leaving an open position vacant and reducing funds given to the Controller’s Office and the Accounting Office.
“There’s another person, but luckily we don’t have a face attached to it,” O’Driscoll said. “So it’s easier today, but it’s not easy in the long run because we have less people doing more work.”
Stauffer denied comment as of Friday afternoon. He said he hadn’t yet received authority to speak about the cuts from President Steven D. Bennion.
Two other programs will be shifted to the School of Continuing & Professional Studies and two others will lose portions of their state-allocated funding. The Weaving Lab and the CNC Machine Office will be shifted to the School of Continuing & Professional Studies, which means both programs will be forced to generate their own revenue based on class fees. Harold Hiskey, interim dean of Continuing & Professional Studies, said it is not certain which programs will switch to continuing education. The Short Term Intensive Training program for business training is the most likely to switch, Hiskey said. Because STIT is a program that already generates revenue, it makes a likely switch for continuing education, he said.
He said no one has talked to him about the Weaving Lab and he said CNC is still up in the air.
Cynthia Wright, dean of the School of Applied Science & Technology, said she couldn’t yet speak about the cuts. Wright said she would discuss the cuts with her faculty at 3 p.m. Friday and wouldn’t have a chance to speak with the University Journal.
The Water Lab and the Center for Politics and Public Service will also lose about $7,000-$8,000 each, O’Driscoll said.
The Water Lab, which does testing for developers and small cities, already pays its own way, O’Driscoll said.
“They pay their own way already, plus some, so they’ll just be required to do more of that,” he said.
Harold Ornes, dean of the College of Science, said both the Water Lab and the regional Science Fair will be affected by the cuts. Between the two programs about $13,000 to $15,000 will be cut, Ornes said.
“It shouldn’t affect them at all, but by July we need to find a funding source for those,” Ornes said. “I think we’ve already identified another source. We’ll do it one way or another; we just don’t know which one yet.”
Ornes said the college will spend less money in some areas in order to reallocate the funds.
“It’s just one of those facts of life that are kind of hard to take,” Ornes said. “We have to live within our respective budgets. It’s one of those economic times where every area has to live within those budgets. We’ll just have to do things not the way we’re used to doing them.”
All the decisions received a unanimous vote by the Dean’s Council, O’Driscoll said.
“That’s a challenge to get all the deans to vote unanimous on anything,” he said.
Barker said the loss of the education position was a result of this discussion.
“We (at SUU) are struggling. We at least met in 20 hours of discussions to come up with scenarios we felt would be the best ways to go,” he said.