MU and UMKC lay off workers, cut salaries of hundreds due to coronavirus
The University of Missouri will lay off 49 employees and temporarily cut the salaries of almost 200 workers to make up for financial losses from COVID-19.
But they are not finished yet.
Across all four campuses in the University of Missouri System, including University of Missouri-Kansas City, salaries for another 390 employees are being cut. That includes the pay of chancellors at the Kansas City, Rolla, and St. Louis campuses, and UM System President Mun Choi.
Combined, those salary cuts will save the system only $2.3 million of a $36 million hole created when the state cut funds because of the new coronavirus pandemic. Mizzou bears the brunt of the state cut, costing the Columbia campus about $17 million.
The state cut for UMKC is slightly more than $6 million. So far UMKC has laid off two employees and furloughed 82.
And some worry that more layoffs and furloughs could force the elimination of programs.
“We are considering many concepts and actions, but no final decisions have been made yet,” said John Martellaro, UMKC spokesman.
Choi announced on Thursday that over the next few months MU will “take a closer look at our degree programs, academic units and other related entities to identify programs that can be modified, consolidated, suspended or discontinued.”
Some of those changes will happen relatively quickly — in the upcoming fall or spring semester — while others may take a year or two.
On Monday, UMKC officials said in a memo that the university “will enact a temporary, across-the-board salary reduction of 7.5% or 10% for all faculty and staff.” Student workers and other employees making less than $50,000 a year are not included.
“It is important to note that pay reductions alone will not achieve the steep cuts that are needed,” the memo said.
More campus layoffs, furloughs and other cuts are coming on each campus as departments continue squeezing their budgets by up to 12% at MU and up to 17.5% at UMKC, university officials said.
“I think we’ll see our professors doing more with less going forward,” said Brandon Henderson, UMKC’s new student body president. “Some courses may no longer be offered, and classes will probably be bigger than we’re accustomed to.”
Henderson said he was happy to see that UMKC excluded students’ pay from the cuts, “because they are the ones struggling the most,” he said. In fact, Henderson said the financial blow from COVID-19 may mean some students can’t return to campus in the fall when the universities plan to reopen with in-person classes.
A drop in enrollment could further hurt the financial state of campuses.
MU officials plan to update numbers every week and said cuts will come from every department. In the first wave of layoffs — announced on Monday — 32 of the 49 came from MU Health Care.
“As much as we would like to provide an end date to these actions, the uncertainty of the university’s primary revenue sources makes that impossible until we know more as the public health crisis unfolds and the full financial impact is known,” Choi said.
“We are faced with two major issues,” said Christian Basi, MU spokesman. In addition to the millions that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson cut from the university’s current budget, MU expects to see another $17 million cut from its budget for next year. “It could be worse or it could be better,” Basi said. “We don’t know, so we are preparing for everything.”
The impact is far more grim than just state cuts if you factor in student refunds paid out for housing and meal plans when the campuses shut down in March.
Choi estimated that in a worst case scenario, the MU System could be looking at a $180 million loss.
While MU and the other campuses are expecting some relief from the federal government as part of a $30 billion education stimulus package, MU officials said they are not including those dollars in budget reduction plans. Basi said the university has not received those dollars yet, and “we have to be sure we can operate with the resources we have on hand.”
At the University of Kansas, officials in April said the college would lose tens of millions of dollars of revenue through the end of this semester and the summer.
On April 27, KU announced a 10% cut to the salaries of nearly 40 university leaders and three Kansas Athletics leaders for the next six months. But additional cost cutting is being considered.
This story was originally published May 6, 2020 at 4:46 PM.
