By Neil Offen
noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646
DURHAM -- Duke University now needs to trim 20 percent less from its budget, and the university is more than halfway to that goal, university President Richard Brodhead said Tuesday.
"We think we've solved more than half the problem in a third of the time we thought we'd need," Brodhead told campus employees during a one-hour "prime time" discussion. "There are still significant challenges to come, but we think we're on the right path."
The university announced almost a year ago that because of the economic crunch -- which has included a big hit to Duke's endowment and reduced gifts to the school -- it needed to trim its budget by $125 million over the next three years.
But Brodhead said Tuesday that, thanks to a series of belt-tightening moves that have included retirement buyout packages for some 400 employees as well as other economies, the university budget-cutting goal "may now be in the range of $100 million rather than $125 million."
That makes achieving the goal a little easier, Broadhead said, and "the dimension of the challenge we face has gotten a little better."
The university, he said, already has managed to trim $50 million to $60 million, but speaking to a sparse crowd at Page Auditorium and to an online audience as well, Brodhead made it clear that Duke was still not out of the fiscal woods.
He refused to rule out future layoffs.
"I can say with fair confidence that we have avoided the need for large-scale layoffs," Brodhead said, noting that several peer institutions have had to do that. "But I cannot say there will be no layoffs at all [in the future] at this university."
In fact, in response to a question, Brodhead strongly denied a rumor that 2,000 to 3,000 employees would be laid off in March.
"That rumor is absolutely and categorically false," he said. "We [still] have to reduce our work force, but certainly not that way."
Brodhead also was hesitant to say whether employees would get raises this year. As part of the belt-tightening, no raises were given in 2009 for any employees making more than $50,000 per year.
"The final decision has not been made about that yet," he said, indicating that could happen within a month or six weeks.
But noting that there may be the possibility of "some modest, calculated increases," Brodhead cautioned the audience about expecting too much.
"If we give out big raises this year, we only compound the problems we already have," he said.
