TERRE HAUTE — When hard times hit a community — any community — the suffering tends to spread far and wide. No entity is ever immune.
Indiana State University, thanks to a disastrous decline in state revenues the past year, is suffering as much as any business or institution during the current economic downturn. Early this year, the Indiana Commission on Higher Education, acting on order from Gov. Mitch Daniels to reduce the state’s higher ed budget by 6 percent, recommended huge cuts in the budgets of all state universities.
ISU was hit harder than most. The Commission recommended that the university’s budget be cut 6.64 percent, or about $10.5 million, over the remaining 18 months of the state’s two-year budget cycle.
According to ISU’s cost-reduction plan, 108 positions will be eliminated — 78 hourly and 30 salaried. The negative impact of these losses will be significant, both on campus and throughout the community.
In addition to the lost income for communities, other services will be affected, such as the proposal to close a USPS contract postal unit in the former federal building in downtown Terre Haute. ISU now owns the building and is renovating it into the Scott College of Business. The university had intended to maintain the staffed postal retail service in the building, but elected to close it as part of the cost-cutting plan.
No one, including university officials, likes the idea of closing the only remaining downtown retail postal unit. Yet it is a reflection of just how deep these cuts must go.
It should be noted that ISU’s plan does not permanently reduce the number of tenure and tenure-track faculty positions, and it won’t affect students’ ability to enroll in classes they need or to graduate on time. Nor does the plan increase tuition costs.
With all the bad news, that is the good. In the 18 months since President Dan Bradley took the helm, ISU has made progress toward reversing the troubling enrollment trends of recent years. The university is showing signs of a strong rebound in enrollment and retention. Given impending budget cuts, maintaining momentum may be challenging, but the proposed plan seems designed to allow the university a fighting chance to do so.
ISU’s future is closely tied to this community’s future. Its successes are community successes. Its troubles are our troubles. The pain the university community is feeling over these job losses is shared throughout the city, county and west-central Indiana.
Adjustments to the plan may be proposed and approved when ISU’s board of trustees meets to review it on Friday. Perhaps some elements of the plan, such as post office closure, will be re-considered. We certainly hope college officials can find alternative ways to reach their reduction goals without making that particular cut — or at least help a non-university entity to take over the postal unit.
This will be a tough period for ISU, but the community should not lose sight of recent progress made at the university and the advances its current leadership seems destined to produce.
The state’s budgeting crisis will cause ISU to stagger a bit, but the community must remain supportive and confident that the university will continue to steadily move ahead.
