Despite a longer-than-
expected recovery, UNM President David Schmidly is healthy and ready to tackle looming budget cuts.
In a Jan. 7 interview with the Daily Lobo, Schmidly said his energy has returned. He said he is prepared to face the upcoming legislative session, possible tuition hikes and campus construction. He said balancing the budget is his top priority.
“I really think that for the spring term, the budget and all the decisions around the budget is going to dominate almost everything,” he said.
Schmidly spent the fall semester on extended medical leave following an Aug. 27 operation on a slow-growing abdominal tumor. The UNM president hoped to be back at the beginning of October, but he spent several weeks in the hospital. Schmidly said spending nearly nine weeks in the hospital while recovering was frustrating because it prolonged his absence from the University.
“You have no idea how much I’ve enjoyed this week and getting back to work and feeling good,” he said. “I’m finally getting back on my feet to where I’m energized. It was a long semester in the fall.”
A slimmed-down Schmidly, dressed comfortably in “casual
Friday” jeans and an orange tee, spoke about his fragile health and stormy recovery.
“I had these tubes in me, and I could only sleep in one position,” he said. “It was difficult. I lost 45 pounds, but … in December I started to turn a real corner, and now I feel fine.”
Health no longer an issue, Schmidly said the transition back to full-time University president has been smooth, and he began working on the budget. In addition to the “Presidential Strategic Advisory Team” he established last spring, Schmidly established a cost-containment task force and a tuition group with hopes of including faculty, staff and students in decisions about the budget.
“The idea is to complete all of this work in January and hopefully get it posted to where students, faculty, staff, alums can look at it in February and provide us feedback,” he said.
“Then we can begin to approach the regents with recommendations in March, and we have to get a budget approved in April.”
Schmidly said he supports former Acting President Paul Roth’s statement about avoiding across-the-board budget cuts.
“I don’t know where the cuts will be, but they will not be across the board, and the priority will be the academic mission,” he said. “We have to keep students to where they can get their classes, graduate on time, and we can continue to have the right number of faculty so that the degree programs can work properly.”
Final decisions have not been made, Schmidly said, but the University will make reductions to administrative costs, and Schmidly got recommendations about merging and cutting higher administration positions.
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Schmidly said decisions made at the upcoming legislative session could also impact the University’s budget, the biggest of which involves tuition credit.
“When we get a tuition credit, we have to charge you tuition, but we don’t get to keep that money,” he said. “It’s like a tax on students, and we’re trying to eliminate the tuition credit.”
Schmidly also hopes to address the distribution of cuts made to higher education, citing UNM’s research mission as something to be considered. He said other issues including Education Retirement Board changes, facility issues and on-campus housing are priorities as well, though they also boil down to a lack of funding.
“We believe that over the last few years we’ve taken disproportionately high reductions,” he said. “We are lobbying the legislature that if we’re going to get cut let’s make the cuts proportionate and fair.”
Schmidly said he will work on improving confidence in UNM’s administration by increasing communication and transparency.
“These are not easy times in higher education,” he said. “Anytime you have large budget reductions, there’s always controversy about how the decisions are made, what the priorities are, and who’s in charge of the decisions, and that has led to conflict between faculty and administration.”
Schmidly said he plans to pick up where Roth left off by meeting with faculty, staff and student groups to continue building confidence.
“You never know when you can have a setback … but I fully anticipate being able to attend to all of my duties without any problem,” he said.
