A University of Wyoming (UW) provost estimates that around 160 employees at the state’s lone four-year public university could be laid off if the draft biennial budget bill becomes law in its current form.
That’s out of about 1,800 full-time faculty and staff in the Division of Academic Affairs, which includes all colleges.
In an email to faculty, staff and students on Jan. 20, UW President Ed Seidel said that the $40 million reduction to the university’s block grant could mean a roughly 15.4% cut to each academic college.
However, state lawmakers on the interim Joint Appropriations Committee (JAC) who made the cuts exempted the College of Education and the College of Agriculture, Life Sciences, and Natural Resources from any reductions. Instead, budget cuts would have to come from other colleges, like arts and sciences or business.
The nonpartisan Legislative Service Office (LSO) had yet to release the draft version of the biennial budget bill containing the JAC’s cuts to UW as of this story’s publishing.
The $40 million cut to UW equates to a $20 million reduction from the block grant per year. Anne Alexander, the interim provost of academic affairs at UW, said nearly 80%, or $16 million, of that money goes to support teacher salaries and those of other employees. UW requested almost $70 million from the state for “personnel” over the 2027-2028 biennium.
Wyoming Public Media, which is a licensee of UW, was also defunded by lawmakers to the tune of $1.69 million over two years.
In a guest column for the Powell Tribune on Jan. 22, UW Trustee Brad Bonner of Park County said that $1 million “funds about 10 people, so $16 million funds about 160 people per year.”
“That means if these budget cuts go through, it’s likely UW will lose approximately 160 talented and dedicated employees,” wrote Bonner. “In a word, it will be devastating.”
Alexander said that the wording UW leaders heard from lawmakers regarding budget cuts was that they would have to be implemented “in a fair and balanced manner across the other colleges.” She and other UW administrators understood lawmakers’ cuts to apply only to colleges, and “not from anywhere else.”
“So that's not saying kill, get rid of one college,” said Alexander. “It's saying everyone would have some share of the budget cut. And if you take that literally, it would be an equal percentage across each of the colleges.”
For now, UW is being tight-lipped about the specifics of what lawmakers’ reductions could actually mean, Alexander added, in part because coming up with emergency plans “is a good way to get your workforce a little uneasy.”
“Whatever it means, it means that we're going to have to do less things around the state,” she said. “We're going to have to provide fewer services. We're going to have to provide fewer areas of study. But what those are right now, we're not ready to talk about that just yet, because we don't know what the final number will be.”
If the draft budget bill is passed in its current iteration, Alexander explained that the UW Board of Trustees will direct university leadership to come up with a budget reduction plan.
“ There's a process for that,” she said. “And then there is another regulation that governs how we reduce, eliminate, reorganize or consolidate programs. So we would also then have to start executing on that. The metrics are TBD. The ones that we usually use are things like they’re low producing, they have very few graduates, there's not student demand, there's not employer demand, those kinds of things.”
But there’s not a lot of excess at UW to trim, she said.
“ We're at the bone, at this point,” Alexander said. “We have staff that have taken on more and more duties than they signed up for. We have faculty that are doing processes that they didn't used to have to do, just simply because business processes had to be redistributed around. So it would look a lot different this time.”
If the budget cuts go through and UW leadership selects a degree program to take to the proverbial wood chipper, Alexander said any students in the middle of studying to earn that degree would need to be “taught out.”
“ One of [the higher learning commission’s] requirements is if you do eliminate a degree, the students in that degree will be taught out,” she said. “We have to honor that obligation to them, if they entered into that program. We can offer alternative paths. We can offer all sorts of things. But if a student wants to finish that degree, they will be able to finish that degree. That's a commitment we made.”
When UW has done that in the past, they’ve temporarily hired back some employees, or hired some instructional professors to help “teach it out.”
“In one case, many years ago, I remember we also contracted with a neighboring institution to have the courses taught there. So it's not costless, but of course it wouldn't be because we have a commitment to our students.”
Wyoming Freedom Caucus members who sit on the JAC have cited some UW classes, like one on ecofeminism that Alexander said hasn’t been taught in several years, as a reason to scrutinize the land-grant university’s state funding.
“ In the founding statutes of the University of Wyoming, they talk about liberal arts. They talk about philosophy. They talk about fine arts, they talk about agriculture and engineering. They talk about commerce, they talk about military science,” she said. “But they also said, other things may emerge that you want to teach. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is just that no one is required to take those [types of] courses.”
The legislative budget session convenes on Feb. 9 at 10 a.m., at which point Gov. Mark Gordon will deliver his state of the state address to a joint session of the Legislature. The budget bill is scheduled to be examined, debated and amended by the full House and Senate starting on Feb. 12.
Editor’s Note: Wyoming Public Radio is a licensee of the University of Wyoming, but its newsroom operates independently.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
