The University wastes between $250,000 and $300,000 a year on more than 60 unused phone lines, Provost Peter Lange said. These lines are just one area of inefficiency the Duke Administrative Reform Team has discovered in its effort to reduce expenses in the University's operating budget.
DART, however, will be cutting more than phone lines. Executive Vice President Tallman Trask said the University needs to eliminate about 1,000 jobs over the next two years. The cuts will come mostly from attrition and retirement incentives, he said, adding that some employees still might lose their jobs.
"This is about weathering the storm and making a stronger university," he said. "I am not naive enough to tell you it's all just going to fall into place. It's not going to be easy, and it's not going to be fun."
DART was created in February in response to the University's expected budget shortfall of $125 million this year. It has already found at least $20 million in excesses that could be eliminated from the budget, Trask said.
Lange and Trask co-chair the DART steering committee, which includes 12 other faculty and staff members. A separate team of internal analysts are assisting in processing the data the committee is reviewing.
Trask said the committee needs to have a strong sense of the cuts it wants to make by the end of the fiscal year. Still, the University will be looking at big ways to save money, Lange said, adding "this is not a paperclip reform."
DART has identified 20 areas that the committee will examine to reduce budget expenses, Trask said. These areas range from Information Technology to facilities to library processes, but he said three key University areas will not be cut.
"Faculty, students and financial aid. Those are going to be relatively protected, which is hard because... we've actually been able to hold down administrative costs pretty well," Trask said.
Eliminating excess spending will allow the University to focus on educating students, which is why areas directly affecting education will not be considered for cuts, officials said.
"It's trying to assure that we are not spending money on things that we don't need to spend money on with an eye to our core mission and to our highest priorities," Lange said.
Reducing budget expenses will ultimately involve cutting personnel, which make up almost two-thirds of the University's expenses, Trask said. The 1,000 positions that will be eliminated will be duplicate positions that could be more efficiently performed by one person, he noted.
Kyle Cavanaugh, vice president for human resources, said the University has plans to minimize the number of people it will actually have to lay off.
"I think what we're trying to do is to systematically walk up to that number," he said. "There are a number of different strategies of managing a workforce that can be utilized.... All those things, we hope, will really reduce the need for involuntary separation, but if we do get to that point we will use a systematic review, and certainly DART and the local management within each management center and each school would have involvement in any decisions that would come forward."
These strategies include controlling hiring, especially for positions that have seen attrition, Cavanaugh said. In addition to intensifying the review process for filling vacant positions-which Cavanaugh said is not a hiring freeze like many other universities have instituted-he said the University will reveal retirement incentives in the next two months.
Although incentivizing people to retire early may reduce the number of workers the University has to fire, Trask said this strategy should be approached cautiously.
"One of the things I'm saying is if you give incentives to retire, and all the people who retire do essential work, where does that get you?" he said.
Cavanaugh said he is confident DART will be successful in reducing the operating budget because the University is taking a rational approach toward a serious issue and is involving many people in the process.
"I think the level of collaboration [at Duke] is literally unparalleled, and I think part of that is why you're seeing that the campus climate is still on an optimistic and positive trend," he said. "I think there is an understanding that we're all in this together, and I think there is a great spirit of optimism that we are going to get through this. But the reality is that these are very troubling economic waters that we're trying to negotiate our way through."
Duke's projected budget shortfall is smaller than those faced by other institutions like Yale and Harvard universities, which have already announced layoffs and employee buyouts. Trask said Duke is in a slightly better position than some others because it is less reliant on its endowment, which has lost approximately one-third of its value this fiscal year.
Still, he said Duke's measured approach to the economic downturn may be giving some people a false sense of security.
"We didn't grab people by the throat and shake them like other institutions, so I think people are a little slow to understand how serious this is," Trask said. "The general size of our problem is somewhat less than a lot of other institutions, but not a lot."
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