Shelby Knowles for The Texas Tribune
Three months after an internal report forecast the reduction of up to 110 jobs within the University of Texas System administration, layoffs have begun, with some 65 positions cut this week and more layoffs expected in the months ahead.
About half of the 65 positions were openings that will remain unfilled, and the remainder were reductions in force, UT System Chancellor James B. Milliken said Tuesday. Over the coming months, the reductions could go further than the 110 number originally anticipated.
“We are a ways from finishing this process,” Milliken said.
Before the layoffs began, the system had about 700 full-time employees on its payroll, and had slashed its headcount 25 percent over two years.
The announcement follows the release of a report in October that called for the elimination of “top-down initiatives” and suggested the system administration should adopt a “service-provider” approach to working with its “customers,” the 14 universities and medical institutions it oversees. Former state Sen. Kevin Eltife, an outspoken critic of system-level spending, headed the task force that produced the report, and was elevated to the board’s top job, its chairman, in December.
The former chair, Sara Martinez Tucker, convened the task force but tendered her resignation shortly before it produced its report. She cited reductions already made to the system administration’s size in the note announcing her departure as chair.
Milliken, who joined the UT System in fall, was charged with implementing the report’s suggestions, told the board in November that he embraced the guidance.
About half of the administration’s workforce, some four departments, are still being reviewed to see if positions within them could be realigned or eliminated. The total number of layoffs — and the cost-savings associated — won’t be known until those reviews are completed in the next few months. “Most departments” were affected in some way by the cuts made public Tuesday, Milliken said.
The task force’s “thoughtful work,” he said Tuesday, has been “invaluable and timely to me as a new chancellor.”
“I share the goals of the Board of Regents that are reflected in the task force report — to meet our legal and fiduciary responsibilities, to provide the system level leadership and oversight necessary and appropriate, to add as much value as possible to our 14 institutions and best position them for success, and to conduct our activities with the highest level of integrity and in the most cost-effective matter,” Milliken said.
“I’ve indicated to the board that at the end of the day, through a process of eliminating some positions we’ve held open, through reductions in force and through some transfers of functions — where we think they are either better done at an institution or better done outsourced to private firms — I’m pretty confident that we will exceed the proposed reductions from the task force report,” he said.
Eltife, the board chair, said he looked forward to continuing to work with Milliken “to meet our shared goal” of operating to system administration in “a manner that is cost-effective and in the best interests of our state.”
“The more efficiently we operate our administrative functions, beginning with the system administration, the better we’ll be able to directly pass resources along to educate students and enhance the lives of patients who depend on us,” he said.
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Source: Texas Tribune Blue Left News
